The question explored in this book of ‘becoming Marxist’ has little to do with how Karl Marx himself ‘became a Marxist’ – although this is doubtless an important biographical and historical question.1 Rather, herein lies a philosophical question: how to do philosophy as a Marxist and, at the same time, keep this emancipatory tradition alive by borrowing concepts that arise outside of Marxism itself. How to ‘become Marxist’ is a question that I have personally pondered ever since I encountered the writings of Gilles Deleuze in the 1980s. In 1991 I sent Deleuze a copy of my first serious publication, ‘A Marxist Encounter with the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’, and he kindly replied with a brief note (which I have transcribed from the following page):2
Cher Ted Stolze,
Merci de m’ avoir envoyé votre texte. Je l’ ai trouvé trés interessant, allant à l’ éssentiel, donnant toute sa porteé au theme du dévenir. Je suis comme vous, et je me suis jamais senti autant ‘marxiste’ que dans le triomphe actuel du capitalisme – triomphe, il est vrai, fondé sur la froid exclusion de ¾ de l’ humanité.
Bien à vous,
Gilles Deleuze
I had once hoped to write a book devoted exclusively to Deleuze and Marx, and bearing the title Becoming Marxist. However, I have not worked on Deleuze’s philosophy for many years. This has been largely because after my dissertation proposal in the mid-nineties on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire was rejected, I turned instead to reading Spinoza in earnest. So this is not the book I had hoped to write, but its title indicates my continued love for Deleuze’s philosophy. It has especially been through, and because of, Anti-Oedipus,3 Deleuze’s great work with Félix Guattari, that I became interested in the potent combination of Spinoza and Marx – but not only of Spinoza and Marx. Through its proliferation of references to authors and texts I had not yet read, Anti-Oedipus became a kind of militant philosophical manual to me for many years to come.
I should say a word about the essays comprising this collection. Because they reflect the peculiarities and ‘aberrant movements’4 of my political and philosophical development over the last thirty years, I have resisted the temptation to add much to them (especially the two early pieces on Deleuze). Rather, I have altered them primarily by embroidering along their edges and by updating bibliographical references.
If these studies have a common theme, or guiding thread, it is the question of how to persist, how to keep faith as a critically engaged Marxist through hard economic, political, and intellectual times. What haunts this book is an image of philosophers as mediators between the pursuit of general claims regarding the nature of reality and the concrete needs of humanity and other species on our planet during this historical conjuncture.5 Another way of putting this would be to add a seventh ‘type’ of philosopher to Justin Smith’s recent sixfold classification6 of the ‘curiosa’, or inquirer into the natural world, the ‘sage’, the ‘gadfly’, the ‘ascetic’, the ‘mandarin’, and the ‘courtier’: what we could call the militant philosopher.
A ‘militant’, in my view, is not someone who is especially ‘angry’ or ‘impatient’ but instead someone who pursues a course similar to the one identified by Paul of Tarsus, who movingly wrote in his letter to the assembly of Jesus loyalists in the Roman colony of Philippi in northern Greece that ‘this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize’.7 Not surprisingly, the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States reclaimed this image of keeping your ‘eyes on the prize’ of social justice.8
Although during my youth there were many compelling militant figures – among whom I would like to pay personal tribute to Jean-Paul Sartre, Hal Draper, Herbert Marcuse, Rudi Dutschke, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X (Malik el-Shabazz), James Baldwin, Ella Baker, Robert Moses, Fanny Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Mario Savio, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – the one who especially speaks to me in middle age is Daniel Berrigan, who gave a talk at my college in the mid-1970s, not long after he had been released from prison for his participation in draft resistance.9 I shall never forget Berrigan’s soft-spokenness and calm demeanour on the stage, for he was utterly different from other speakers at campus events I had attended. Before us stood a Jesuit priest, and a convicted felon, now wearing a plaid shirt and corduroy trousers with a very large grease stain on the front leg. I suddenly realised that what ‘lies beyond … lies within’, as Berrigan succinctly expresses in a poem.10 Again, if there is a common theme running through these studies, it is surely Berrigan’s dialectic between inner and outer struggles for a more just world.
Finally, I should note that in this book – in the spirit of militant philosophy – there are no formulae, recipes, or advice for all those movement and party organisers who continue to do the hard work of building alternatives to global capitalist exploitation, alienation, and ecological devastation. I only hope to provide such organisers with a few concepts and arguments that may be useful as ‘weapons’ in the class struggle.11 This is the task of philosophers in the service of radical social transformation.
The unsurpassed account of Marx’s intellectual and political development remains Hal Draper’s multivolume series (Draper 1977–1990). Although Marx famously rejected the appellation ‘Marxist’, his point was to insist on the open-ended, non-dogmatic nature of his analysis of capitalism, not to reject the analysis itself.
‘Thank you for having sent me your text. I have found it very interesting, going to the essential, giving all its stress to the theme of becoming. I am like you, and I have never sensed myself as much ‘marxist’ as in the current triumph of capitalism – a triumph, it is true, based on the cold exclusion of ¾ of humanity’.
Deleuze and Guattari 2009, which was originally published in French as Deleuze and Guattari 1972.
See Lapoujade 2017.
Or – to use Jürgen Habermas’s expression – one could say that philosophy serves as a ‘stand-in’ (Platzhalter) and ‘interpreter’ as opposed to its historically ‘problematic roles’ of ‘usher’ (Platzanweiser) and ‘judge’ (Habermas 1990, p. 4).
See Smith 2016.
Phil 3.13–14. By ‘prize’ and ‘goal’ Paul alludes to Greek popular sports competitions (especially in Philippi), namely, foot races, their finishing posts, and their awarded prizes. For all of its shortcomings (some of which I discuss in Chapter 2 below), this is the merit of Alain Badiou’s book on Paul, namely, to reclaim Paul as a model for what he calls a ‘new militant figure’ (Badiou 2003, p. 2).
Indeed, ‘Keep Your Eyes on the Prize’ was the title of a popular ‘movement song’ of that era.
On Berrigan’s involvement with the actions of the ‘Catonsville Nine’, see the stirring work by Shawn Francis Peters (Peters 2012).
The poem is ‘Beyond’ and may be found in Berrigan 1998, p. 397.
On ‘philosophy as a revolutionary weapon’, see Althusser 2001, pp. 1–11.