by Alberto Oliart
There is a current in academic thought which attributes to Marx a eurocentric and teleological view of history. From this premise, it is understood that there are conceptual limits to Marxism which must be addressed, and a broader conceptual framework that sheds the remnants of eurocentrism must be adopted. Such a framework would take into consideration multiple axes of oppression, and a focus on “discourses” which articulate power in order to critique “totalizing narratives”. The category of class must be understood as only one of several through which oppression can be enforced/experienced, creating a sort of matrix of identities/oppression. Since this current gives prevalence to the study of culture, representation, ideology and identity, it has become popular in the discipline of media studies. One example is the book “Unlearning Eurocentrism”, by Shohat and Stam.
The book largely focuses on questions of representation in media, especially in movies, and makes heavy use of the above described framework to discuss them. Along the way, it makes several statements about the nature of Marxism, the contesting of which is the purpose of this essay. In line with post-structuralism, it considers Marxist materialism to be too rigid and dogmatic to properly address the variety of oppressions and systems of power that permeate society, attributing to it an economism that treats “superstructural” questions as secondary, and rejects the importance of categories such as race, gender and sexuality to focus solely on class. The “broader” theoretical framework is thus more complete, as it is capable of perceiving the full network of power relations, thus “class and nation do not completely disappear from view, they lose their privileged position, being both supplemented and challenged by categories such as race, gender, and sexuality.”
It’s the main contention of this essay that this is not only an incorrect understanding of society and the power relations within it, but that it has severe consequences in the nature and effectiveness of popular struggle. By losing from sight the core relations and institutions of power in capitalist society, which define and articulate all others, political struggle is perceived everywhere as counter-hegemonic discourse, which weakens the necessary specificity of strategic considerations in the struggle against capitalism－and against racial, gender and ethnic oppression. To illustrate the point, a comparison will be made between the militant nature of Fernando Solanas’ manifesto with the focus on re-presentation in film as a central arena of political struggle taken by Shohat and Stam.
Hegemony
There is a mention of Antonio Gramsci in “Unlearning Eurocentrism”, in which his thought is presented as a break from Leninism. As Augusto C. Buonicore explains (Buonicore, 2006), this understanding of Gramsci is a distortion of his thought, which has had the consequence of stripping it from its revolutionary goals, and paving the way to an abandonment of Marxism, or as Gramsci would call it, “philosophy of praxis”. The continuity between Lenin and Gramsci is crucial to understand the latter, and it sheds light on the way in which an abandonment of Marxism impoverishes the analysis. Shohat and Stam, for instance, state:
The idea of a vanguardist takeover of the state and the economy, associated with the politics of Lenin, has long since given way to the resistance to hegemony associated with Gramsci. Substantive nouns like “revolution” and “liberation” transmute into a largely adjectival opposition: “counter-hegemonic,” “subversive,” “adversarial.” Instead of a macro-narrative of revolution, the focus is now on a de-centered multiplicity of localized struggles. (338)
The problem with this assertion is the counterposition of “hegemony” and “revolution”, when for both Gramsci and Lenin the problem of hegemony was integral to the revolutionary program. Gramsci understands hegemony to mean the ability of a social class (such as the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry, etc.) to shape society－its institutions and the historically specific manifestation of the mode of production－according to its own interests through the conformation of alliances and consensus between classes, chiefly by organizing society to allow the interests of other classes to be furthered, at least to a certain extent, alongside those of the dominant class. Hegemony includes considerations of culture and ideology, but it is chiefly a material and political question. The concept becomes important in the revolutionary struggle as the proletariat attempts to build its own hegemony before and after the revolution, forming an alliance with the peasantry and other classes to overthrow the bourgeoisie and build a new society. For Gramsci, therefore, the question of hegemony is primarily one of the development of the revolutionary worker-peasant alliance－organized, of course, into a revolutionary vanguard party－not one of a patchwork of cultural counter-hegemonic practices that constitute “resistance” manifested as a “de-centered multiplicity of localized struggles”. This is not to say that this resistance does not exist or is irrelevant, but to clarify that the struggle for human emancipation requires a consolidation and organization of the struggle into a revolutionary movement.
Only by understanding hegemony as an articulation of the relations between classes through such means as the State and institutions of civil society in the interest of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) and for the reproduction of its mode of production (capitalism) can we begin to grasp the full depth of ideological and cultural tools in the process of domination, including racialization, hegemonic notions of sexuality, gender and family, etc. In this way we can also understand the way in which all power in society flows from class status. It therefore does not constitute an overcoming of Marxism to focus solely on discourses, ideologies, and cultural representation－Shohat and Stam call it going “beyond political economy per se”－but an abandonment of the theoretical foundations of a militant philosophy of praxis oriented toward human emancipation.
It is necessary to clarify that the claim that all power flows from class status does not imply that systems of racial, gender, sexual and ethnic power do not exist, are not important, or do not articulate distinct political subjects with legitimate struggles and demands. But it’s imperative to understand that the matrix of oppressions that Shohat and Stam insist on is not one that weighs the same on every side, but has a center of gravity. As Jaime Osorio explains,
The network of relations of power that extends throughout the entire body of social relations presents hierarchies of concentration, the State being the fundamental one. By not establishing this distinction, Foucault ends up losing sight of the nuclei that sustain the ensemble of the fabric of domination in society and toward which－in the last instance－all resistances gestated in the diversity of social domains will end up converging. In this way he gives prevalence to an atomized understanding of power, against which it’s impossible to establish a determined strategy of opposition (Osorio, 107).
According to Osorio, the State is configured principally as an organ of class domination:
[…] we understand that the State is much more than class domination. But it is essentially class domination. The State is much more than a concentration of the relations of power, but fundamentally it is the principle condensation of the relations of power (Osorio, 1).
When we talk, therefore, as Shohat and Stam do, about “a wide spectrum of complex relationalities of domination, subordination, and collaboration” we must recognize that this spectrum has a center. The center is the State, which is primarily defined by its class character that corresponds to the mode of production (relations of production, i.e. class relations) that it’s engaged in reproducing. Within a mode of production, an individual’s class status is an objective relationship to the means of production that has little to do with their concept of themselves and, while potentially given a specific concrete character by other forms of oppression, defines for them a position in society that maintains the same fundamental function regardless of the variability of identity and ideology. A black and a white minimum wage worker perform the same role in the reproduction of capitalist society, even if the black worker suffers an oppression that the white worker doesn’t. The same can be said for black and white district managers, shop owners, peasants, CEOs, etc. Of course, progressive levels of concreteness reveal concrete distinctions: the role of a shop owner in a Mexican urban suburb has similarities and differences from one in 5th Avenue in New York City. Nevertheless, these distinctions further clarify, rather than confuse, the centrality of class in the analysis of power in global capitalism. Shohat and Stam reject this understanding of class, time and again situating it as one in a list of identities or axes of oppression.
This is why discussions about oppressions based on identity that are not grounded in class can become theoretically messy, without clear defining parameters. Shohat and Stam acknowledge this:
Speaking for oneself, by the same token, is not a simple act but a complex process, especially since women, minoritarian, and Third World peoples speak today in a theoretical context where the notion of a coherent subject identity, let alone a community identity, seems epistemologically suspect. (We find here the same process of poststructuralist dissolution that we found in relation to other categories such as “narrative” and “truth”) (Shohat & Stam, 345).
They go on to cite Debra P. Armory:
Doesn’t it seem funny that at the very point when women and people of color are ready to sit down at the bargaining table with the white boys, that the table disappears? That is, suddenly there are no grounds for claims to truth and knowledge anymore and here we are, standing in the conference room making all sorts of claims to knowledge and truth but suddenly without a table upon which to put our papers and coffee cups, let alone to bang our fists (Shohat & Stam, 345).
The table that has disappeared is the scaffolding of Marxism: the scientific analysis of class society that clarifies objective social relations, the dreaded totalizing narrative that is capable of distinguishing between an ideological discourse and the relations of production that it obfuscates－the building blocks of a conceptualization of capitalist society (and class society in general) which allow the richest possible understanding of racial, gender and ethnic oppression.
Eurocentrism
Another important claim－separate, but related－is that Marx maintained eurocentric prejudices, which include Orientalism (a claim made famous by Edward Said), and a teleological, progressivist understanding of history. This claim has been disputed by Marxists in Latin America, for which a main concern is combatting eurocentrism in the revolutionary movement. The need to combat it implies, of course, that eurocentrism does in fact exist in the Marxist tradition. However, while it’s true that many Marxist thinkers have held eurocentric views, it is the case that Marx himself progressively moved away from them, concluding in what Néstor Kohan calls a “multilinear materialist conception of history”. Kohan explains that, after writing his journalistic texts about India in 1953, in which he puts forth the idea that the British colonization of India ultimately constitutes a kind of historical progress－articles which constitute the basis for Said’s accusation of eurocentrism－Marx immersed himself in the study of both the histories of the colonized peoples and the question of colonialism.
Through an analysis of Marx’s notebooks (especially the Kovalevsky notebook) as well as his correspondence, Kohan explains that Marx expanded his epistemological paradigm in five ways:
- That the history of Europe does not constitute the center of the history of humanity.
- An interest in social formations prior to large class societies or “civilizations”.
- A reframing of what he previously called the “Asiatic mode of production”, focusing this time not only on the functions of the State bureaucracy, but on the coexistence of various forms of collective property and ways of relating to land, which constitutes the basis of his solidarity with the struggle of colonized peoples.
- An interest in the coexistence of different forms of property, including collective, and ways of relating to land even within capitalist societies.
- Marx criticizes the application of the concept of Feudalism in societies other than the European.
Kohan thus concludes that
Only by paying the huge and onerous cost of ignoring or deliberately concealing that immense mass of materials and texts (from the Grundrisse and the letter to the Newspaper Annals of the Fatherland to the Kovalevsky notebook and the correspondence－including the drafts－with Vera Zasulich) is it possible to continue to banally attribute modernist, unilinear, occidentalist, ethno and eurocentric positions to Marx (Kohan, 61).
This is not a minor litigation, as much of the Decolonial school in Latin America takes Marx as its foundation, the most important thinker in that tendency being Enrique Dussel, perhaps one of the most dedicated investigators of Marx’s work in history. It’s important to note this, because a lack of understanding of the distinction between the multilinear materialist conception of history and the philosophy of praxis on the one hand, and the mechanistic－and, yes, eurocentric－conception of dialectical materialism immortalized in the Stalinist guides of Marxism, is one of the reasons for the abandonment of Marxism in favor of post-structuralism.
Representation and Re-presentation
These considerations are important when it comes to the political character of media, and particularly film, as they provide a relevant backdrop to understand the political orientation of discussions of representation. Because “Unlearning Eurocentrism” gives prevalence to discourses as the main manifestations of power to be dealt with, representation in media as a political act is understood in terms of－in the words of Spivak－portrait, rather than proxy. Spivak, through her analysis of Marx’s quote from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that “the peasantry cannot represent themselves. They must be represented,” distinguishes between “representation, as ‘speaking for’, as in politics [proxy], and ‘re-presentation’ as in art and philosophy [portrait]” (Spivak, 70). Shohat and Stam begin to make this distinction at the beginning of the chapter “The Burden of Representation”, but whereas Spivak considers the two categories to be “related, but irreducibly discontinuous”, Shohat and Stam quickly make a connection between the two and virtually abandon the first category. The collapse of the two is evident when Shohat and Stam state that “Unlike the peasantry for Marx, first peoples are now capable of representing themselves” (Shohat & Stam, 413), where the representation that Marx addresses (which in the conext of the quote is best embodied by the Kayapo’s use of film) is equated with the re-presentation in film that they go on to describe. Their political analysis of films thus obviates the specificity of the political possibilities and consequences of film, and tends to reduce them to contestations of hegemonic ideologies, stereotypes, etc.
This perspective differs greatly from that put forth by Getino and Solanas in “Toward a Third Cinema”. Rather than understanding the political substance of the resistance of oppressed groups in the media as a question of the more or less accurate, more or less insightful, or more or less groundbreaking “re-presentation” of their reality, oppression, identity, etc., Getino and Solanas examine the possibilities of film as a form of representation of a struggle, that is, as a tool for the intentional organization of the struggle, and therefore as a constitutive element of the process of concretizing and defining the group in struggle (Here, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire is again useful in its distinction between a class as constituted by its economic role, and a class as constituted by its relations of community as defined by class struggle). For Getino and Solanas, re-presentation is not a political end in itself. Rather, they conceive of their activity as film-makers as part of the initial steps of a revolution:
[…] the revolution does not begin with the taking of political power from imperialism and the bourgeoisie, but rather begins at the moment when the masses sense the need for change and their intellectual vanguards begin to study and carry out this change through activities on different fronts. (Getino & Solanas, 109).
Whereas Shohat and Stam focus on the re-presentation of the political realm, Getino and Solanas focus on the political realm of representation. The former, both as an artistic practice and as a framework of analysis, is not an idle endeavor. Political struggle for human emancipation is not the only valid form of human experience, and practices of re-presentation are fundamental sources of knowledge and debate, and possess the ability to critically examine and deconstruct hegemonic ideologies. They are, in fact, valid ends in themselves. Nevertheless, in order for the emancipation of all of the oppressed to become a reality, the hierarchies of power in class society must not be collapsed, and neither must the distinction between re-presentation and representation. Rather than the proliferation of de-centered, localized struggles, the conscious organization of a revolutionary movement against the class power of the bourgeoisie concentrated in the State must be the order of the day.
Bibliography
-Buonicore, Augusto C. “Gramsci, Lenin y la cuestión de la hegemonía.” Rebelión, 9 Mar. 2006, https://rebelion.org/gramsci-lenin-y-la-cuestion-de-la-hegemonia/.
-Getino, Octavio and Fernando Solanas. “Toward a Third Cinema”. Tricontinental, N.14, La Habana, October 1969, pp. 107-132.
-Néstor, Kohan. “El Marx tardío y la concepción multilineal de la historia.” Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, vol. 25, no. 89, 1 Jan. 2020, pp. 55–67.
-Osorio, Jaime. “El Estado En El Centro de La Mundialización.” Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica Biblioteca Digital UCSH, 2014.
-Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. “Unthinking Eurocentrism Multiculturalism and the Media”. Routledge, 2014.
-Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1988, pp. 66–111.