Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.¹

If we are interested in thinking about capitalism and its overcoming, Marx’s work, and especially his description and critique of the capitalist mode of production, would seem an essential theoretical reference point — a foundation. Yet if we look at the record of Marxism in power, from social democracy, through the USSR, China, and other nations, we see that Marxism has by and large been a force for the development of capitalism rather than one for its overcoming. How might one separate Marx and Marxism from this history?

Starting in the late 1980s in journals such as Common Sense and in a series of books,² Richard Gunn, Werner Bonefeld, John Holloway, and others took up the term “open Marxism”. They adopted this expression from Johannes Agnoli, who in a debate with Ernest Mandel³ suggested the term for a Marxism open to the “heresy of reality”. Gunn, Bonefeld, and others took this up in a similar sense, not to specify a particular school or kind of Marxism, but rather as a useful label to capture the living (and revolutionary) thread that various heterodox Marxisms — council communism, the Frankfurt School, the German New Marx Reading, Operaismo, and Autonomist Marxism — had in common against the more dogmatic varieties.

At a time of a perceived crisis of Marxism, in the face of a capitalist restructuring and “bosses’ offensive”,⁴ their move was an intervention in the name of Marxism’s critical, revolutionary, and destructive purpose — not just against the then retreating forms of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, but also against the sociological and positivist forms of Marxism that had become dominant in academia. Instead of responding to the perceived crisis with a fundamentalist assertion of orthodoxy, they argued that the principle of doubt and the dissolution of false certainty was essential to an open Marxism:

Despite Marxism’s allegedly final exhaustion... Marxism is not in crisis as long as it provokes and produces crises of historically developed ‘schools’ or of Marxists themselves. Metaphorically, Marxism is the theoretical concept of practice and the practical concept of theory which provokes crises of itself as a matter of its inherent strength and validity.⁵

Of course, it might be asked whether one needs to defend something like “Marxism” at all? One might, as the SI did, reject all “isms” as ideologically fixed forms of thought.⁶ One might reserve the term “Marxism” for the ideology based on Marx’s ideas, which is to be distinguished from their revolutionary or communist use.⁷ Yet even if one was to take this route, there would remain the question of how to distinguish, other than by fiat, one’s own “authentic” communist use of Marx from an ideological Marxist one. The impulse behind identifying an open Marxism or, like the SI, being “(not a) Marxist… in the same way as Marx”,⁸ are the same. The point is not whether one adopts or resists the label Marxist, but how to develop thinking that is adequate to the raw material of reality.

How do we avoid filtering existence to fit our preconceived ideas, simply asserting our limited perspective as the truth? More specifically, how can one grasp one’s experience through Marx’s categories without dogmatically reading reality through their prism? Do we have or need a philosophy or a method? Do we have principles of some sort that we apply? How do we deal with arguments from people who do not share the categories that we use? How do we conceive of the unity of theory and practice? If the point is “to change it” does this mean we pick up and discard theory based on how useful it is in struggles? Can theory be seen as a kind of weapon used in the fight, or as Moss suggested, is its first purpose to “seek the truth of the situation”?

One idea from open Marxism that has consistently informed how we see ourselves and what we are doing is the notion articulated by Richard Gunn of the “good conversation”. This notion is key to our self-understanding of how thinking occurs and how theory is developed.

The idea of the conversation grasps in a very concrete way the sociality of human thinking. As Bakhtin and Volishinov have persuasively made clear, even that thinking which we do “inside our heads” is part of a conversational chain. We are always taking up thoughts started by others, agreeing or disagreeing, responding to critics and interlocutors, and anticipating what may be said in response.⁹ Thought is social through and through. However, such sociality applies as much to ideology as to theory, as much to the way we reproduce ideas that conform to the existing social order as to developing a thinking which points beyond it. If we are interested in the latter, we need a more nuanced conception of the conversation. Just as not all of what people consider as thinking is really thinking,¹⁰ not all conversation, on our own or with others, is good conversation. We are also aware of the way that appeals to dialogue and conversation — and to “free speech” — are commonplace calls that can perform very ideological functions, including that of diverting us from necessary action.¹¹ Even within milieus that see themselves as antagonistic to this society, there are forms of bad conversation, such as preaching to the converted, dialogues of the deaf, endless discussions with no consequences. It is thus necessary to specify what we mean by good conversation. What kind of conversation is to be aimed at?¹²

For Gunn, as we shall see, good conversation is defined by mutual recognition, practical reflexivity, and immanent critique.¹³ In more recent texts, Gunn and Adrian Wilding argue that notions of mutual recognition and the conversation are nothing less than a key to revolutionary action and to communism itself.¹⁴ The idea that the small “willed group” aiming to understand capitalism and its overcoming, and the spontaneous revolutionary crowd and mass action that will actually produce that overcoming, have an underlying coherence through the notion of mutual recognition is an idea that is fascinating for us, and we will try to unpack it in detail.

Marxism and Philosophy

The initial reason for Gunn’s essay “Marxism and Philosophy”¹⁵ was to respond to Roy Bhaskar’s offer of Critical Realism as a philosophy for Marxism and “the Left”. In his response, Gunn notes that before one decides whether or not Marxism needs a Critical Realist philosophy, one needs to ask whether it needs a philosophy at all. We are not interested in Gunn’s text for what it says about Bhaskar but in its attempt to “sketch in contrast to Critical Realism an alternative understanding of the conceptual status of Marxist thought”.¹⁶

Gunn argues that in offering a philosophy for the Left, Bhaskar accepted the bourgeois separation of second-order metatheory — theory about categories — from first-order theory about the world. Gunn argues that this separation is a product of bourgeois enlightenment, which reached its apogee in the 20th century when philosophy reduced itself to the handmaiden of science.¹⁷ He argues that Marx, and Hegel before him, rejected this separation.¹⁸ This is not, however, because Marxism is a positivist or scientistic discourse “uninterested in categorical questions”,¹⁹ nor because it returns to the old cosmological unity that prevailed before the rise of capitalism, but rather because it has integrated what are seen as philosophical questions in a unitary form of self-reflexive theorising about the world.

Gunn argues that Marxism doesn’t need a philosophy or metatheory to back up its theory of the social world because Marxian discourse such as Capital, like Hegel’s Phenomenology before it, moves between first-order theory about the world, and second-order theory about the categories with which it grasps the world, in a single movement of totalisation.²⁰ If such totalisation is at once “practically reflexive”, “immanently critical”, and based on mutual recognition, then it constitutes “good conversation”.

Though Gunn writes at a fairly high level of sophistication and abstraction, the thrust of his argument is to locate:

a capacity to address issues of categorial validity (a capacity, in other words, for ‘critical theory’) within the first-order experience and self-awareness of, so to say, everyman rather than in the privileged meta-awareness of a philosophical elite.²¹

Gunn argues that theory or truth is produced in a good (not necessarily polite) conversation in which all participants put their views of the world, the categories with which they grasp the world, and indeed all aspects of themselves at stake.²²

Such conversation is based on or moves in the direction of mutual recognition. Gunn suggests that, outside of conditions of social revolution and struggle, mutual recognition only exists in a contradictory form, and thus, moments of such conversation are relatively rare and perhaps only to be approximated imperfectly.

It is sometimes said that a defining aspect of the kind of conversation we want is a particular orientation to practice. In his famous “Theses on Feuerbach” Marx suggested an orientation to changing the world. But it is important that this not be understood in the rather facile and normative way in which theory and practice are imagined as separate realms that need to be brought together in an activist way.²³ The bringing together of theory and practice suggests an external relation between the two.²⁴ Rather, as Gunn suggests, we can conceive of the unity of theory and practice in terms of practical reflexivity.

Gunn argues that the relation of theory and practice is internal, not external: they mutually constitute each other. Practical reflexivity is a theorising that recognises itself and its categories as part of the contradictory social practice that it tries to make sense of. The categories it uses are not guaranteed by a separate philosophy or methodology. Rather, in a process of immanent critique, theorising that is practically reflexive takes up and critically interrogates the meaning of the categories found in its social world. Such categories are part of the way capitalist society spontaneously presents itself to all its participants; they occur in everyday common sense as much as in systematic theorisations by philosophers and ideologists.

An example that Gunn takes up from Marx is the moment in Capital where Marx determines that the key prerequisite for capital, “M-C-M”, is the buying and selling of labour power and what this involves. When Marx says that the sphere of exchange within which labour power is bought and sold is a realm of “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham”,²⁵ he points to the fact that everyday social practice includes theoretical categories as part of its reproduction, that the very notion we have of the individual — the kind of subjects we are, how we understand ourselves, how we think and act — is constituted by such social practice.²⁶ For example, the categories of individuality and rational self interest that Bentham reflects in his utilitarianism appear self-evident and self-explanatory to agents in bourgeois society. However, such obviousness is socially and historically constituted through a process of alienation, atomisation, and separation. Practically reflexive theorising refuses the “obviousness” of those categories by asking how such obviousness is socially constructed. Practical reflexivity — recognition of the social constitution of oneself and one’s categories — is required if one is to grasp the mystificatory, partial, and thus false nature of these appearances/ideologies, that is to say the way they are a necessary, functional mediation of other processes (exploitation, alienation, domination) which they at the same time systematically conceal.²⁷ Thus the critique of capitalist social relations involves at the same time a critique of ourselves and the categories with which we understand ourselves and vice versa — to question ourselves and our categories is tantamount to the critique of capitalist social relations.

Another example of the simultaneity of first- and second-order theorising is Marx’s statement in Capital that individuals are treated only in terms of their “character-masks”, as “the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests”.²⁸ This is generally taken as a methodological (second-order) point. But as Gunn and Wilding suggest, this point is at the same moment a very first-order critique of the reductivism, experiential impoverishment, discomfort, and oversimplification of the life-world which he is describing.²⁹

What makes for good conversation?

To critically examine one’s own experience and categories, one must be open to the other experiences and theories found in one’s social world. This means not simply criticising other experiences and theories from one’s own position, but being open to their criticism, “since a critique that is merely external and third-person would omit the moment of ‘in-the-course-of’ self-risk”.³⁰ Thus Gunn suggests that practical reflexivity and immanent critique are essentially a conversation. A practically reflexive, immanent critique of capitalist society and the everyday ideas and theories which justify it is not a critique from a superior worldview or from an already assumed political position of opposition. It is rather an open encounter with other viewpoints and experiences.

This suggests an answer to the crucial question of how it is possible for a conversation between those who don’t share the same categories to nonetheless come to compelling conclusions.³¹ Because we share the same social and practical world — in a way we did not before the dominance of the capitalist mode of production — the fundamental question we address each other within conversation is: “It’s like this, isn’t it?”. Each statement of how things are always invites response from others along the lines of “no, it’s like this” or “yes, but also”. In a dynamic relation with others we constantly describe and redescribe the world. The phenomenological³² aspect of this — the appeal to experience — means for Gunn that no prior agreement on method or categories is necessary for the conversation. The object itself can “play a (partial) role in determining how, validly, it may be categorically known”.³³ In such a conversation, every aspect of each participant’s view must be able to be brought into play: “theoretical and metatheoretical dimensions” as well as considerations of where, practically, each participant is coming from. But this does not mean one can simply dismiss, monologically, the other as, say, a bourgeois apologist, an academic, a militant or of the wrong identity category. One must draw out the limitations of the other’s argument with regards to its own contradictions and inadequacy to the world which it claims to explain. It is only reasonable to question the other’s viewpoint along the lines of “you would think that because you… ” if one is open to both hear how the other responds to this claim, and to have similar questions directed toward oneself.

The idea of a rigorous open conversation in which each participant challenges the other on the basis that they too are open to such challenge can be a regulative idea. Gunn merely makes explicit something that people already try to do — through discussions, reading, meetings, critiques, publications — and offers a prophylactic against the way notions of philosophy or method can detract from such openness.

Conversation, of course, happens all the time, and this cannot in itself play the role Gunn suggests. Crucial here is the difference between “good” conversation and disappointing conversation. Gunn does not valorise “conversation” per se, but “good conversation”, which he says is relatively rare. The difference between “good” and “disappointing” conversation is an experience we all have and to which we can refer to make sense of what Gunn is getting at.

If this focus on talk or ideas seems too “idealist”, let us note that a reference to experience and practice constantly feeds into this conversation, and if it sounds too polite or democratic, Gunn notes: “nothing is less polite than rigorous conversation pursued to its end. [...] no-one can say in advance where (into what issues of life-and-death struggle) good conversation may lead”.³⁴

As Gunn’s comments about the tedium of philosophy and the positivism of the sciences indicate,³⁵ in the area of bourgeois society apparently reserved for free and disinterested truth-oriented conversation, the specialities of academia work against the totalisation that good conversation needs. His fundamental point, though, is that inside or outside of academia, good conversation cannot occur where the theory/metatheory distinction is respected (whether as academic specialty or as an unreflected limitation on thinking) nor where people relate through social roles including those of lecturer and student, leader and led, represented and representative, or as property owners. These latter considerations lead him to the position that the true site of good conversation in capitalism is the revolutionary crowd.

So far, we have addressed Gunn’s ideas in terms of their relevance for the kind of interactions between and within individuals and small groups oriented to theory production — that is to say, in Henri Simon’s terms, more on the willed pole than the spontaneous pole. It is notable, though, that Gunn, along with Adrian Wilding, in a recent series of texts, has returned to such ideas in the context of the large-scale social movements and struggles since the 2008 crisis. In these more recent texts they argue that the idea of mutual recognition and the conversation is central not just to small-scale interaction with texts and other people in the social production of truth and theory, but also that it is at the heart of recent struggles, of the revolutionary process in general, and of communism itself.

The Unbearable Openness of Communism

Gunn and Wilding argue that mutual recognition as it was identified and described by Hegel in the Phenomenology is at the core of Marx’s critique of capitalism and conception of communism.³⁶ The heart of mutual recognition is that individuals “enjoy freedom through interaction with one another”.³⁷ Mutual recognition involves the recognition of the other’s freedom. Recognition only counts as recognition when it is freely given, and freedom is only freedom when it is recognised. Their argument is that capitalism undermines mutual recognition. It does so not in the way that the relations of direct domination of pre-capitalism did, but through the structuring of social interaction by social institutions and definitional roles, such as those of private property, politics, educational institutions, the mass media, etc., a kind of structuring that stands over individuals.

It might be objected that capitalism is precisely defined by the mutual recognition of commodity owners, where each recognises the other as the owner of either commodity or money and obtains what the other has only by a freely entered exchange. This aspect of capitalism is affirmed by Hegel as Abstract Right. It was an essential contribution of Marx to grasp how, when one moves from the sphere of exchange to that of production, this system of equality and freedom turns out to be a system of inequality and unfreedom.³⁸ The formal recognition of freedom and equality continually reproduces relations of capital and labour, that is, of inequality, exploitation, and domination. This is accepted by Gunn and Wilding, but their argument is that what this means is that in capitalism we are dealing with a contradictory form of mutual recognition, contradicted by the existence of these role definitions and social institutions, most pronouncedly the social institution of property.³⁹ The relation between wage workers and their bosses is a free contract where each is recognised, but behind this is the fact that employers represent a world of absolute property and workers’ propertylessness, a relation that is constantly reproduced. As such, “reciprocity falls short of unconstrained interaction and freedom is limited to what the role definitions concerned permit”.⁴⁰ Property in its various forms — commodities, markets, and the power of money — stands over and against the individuals who, in order to survive, must relate to each other as proprietors. As Gunn and Wilding argue:

When property (not just this or that species of property, but property per se) is dispensed with, individuality ceases to be monological and possessive; freedom ceases to exist in spite of other individuals. Once property is transcended, freedom exists in and through interaction with others and individuals risk their identity in mutual recognition’s flow.⁴¹

For Gunn and Wilding, Marx’s view of proletarian revolution is nothing less than a break from one-sided and/or role-definitional recognition, into uncontradicted mutual recognition which respects no pre-given structures but on the basis of an unrestricted and thus free interaction, following only those goals which it has set for itself.⁴²

Here we can see the radical difference between the revolutionary recognition appealed to by Gunn and Wilding and that evoked by other left liberal theorists of recognition such as Taylor and Honneth. Those figures draw on the “reconciled” Hegel of the Philosophy of Right and thus accept the separate spheres and institutions of capitalist society, which means a recognition of social roles, and relating through role definitions. Gunn and Wilding draw on the Phenomenology, which is inspired by the “wild” recognition of the French Revolution where social institutions — what Hegel calls spiritual masses — are dissolved.⁴³ Only in such a revolutionary situation is an uncontradicted mutual recognition possible, one where there is an “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’”⁴⁴ and in which “each, undivided by the whole, always does everything, and what appears to be done by the whole is the direct and conscious deed of each”.⁴⁵ For the late Hegel of The Philosophy of Right this possibility is confined to the religious community. This expresses the shift of the historical moment from the immediate, post-revolutionary one of the Phenomenology to the conservative post-restoration climate of the 1820s. Gunn and Wilding’s argument is that the kind of thinking suggested by Hegel in the Phenomenology, while now appearing esoteric and requiring deep effort to grasp, would have been in everyone’s grasp in the revolutionary situation — the sunlight of the French revolution — that produced it.⁴⁶ At that time this science would have met a mutually recognitive audience “ripe to receive ‘truth’”⁴⁷ that is one that could have “learned and appropriated in a questioning and evaluative (rather than a merely passive and accepting) way”.⁴⁸

Thus the principle of conversation that communist theory invokes is very different from that which is sometimes called up in capitalist politics and civil society. We can say that where uncontradicted (i.e., revolutionary) interaction is denied, good conversation is rare and under pressure at all times. Much of the “difficulty” and “complexity” of communist theory is related to this situation. Communist conversation in a revolution or situation of intense struggle erupts everywhere;⁴⁹ at other times it is not easy.

There is an objection, that Gunn and Wilding are aware of, that their suggestion of the centrality of conversation and mutual recognition to the revolutionary process makes such a process sound “too genteel”. Here the links they make between such conversation and the revolutionary crowd and its form of violence are important. In a situation of role definitions and separation of spheres, violence can be a necessary part of establishing the conversation — a form of communication that tends toward mutual recognition. The pre-established channels, social roles, and institutions that distort or contradict mutual recognition are cleared away in the revolutionary situation which allows an “unconstrained interaction — ... interaction which is open to all comers and where any issue whatever may be raised”.⁵⁰

A revolutionary process with society polarising into a party of anarchy and party of order advances by drawing more and more people into the conversation. Mutual recognition is arrived at in and through conflict with those who would deny it, and indeed, when confronted with the active enemies of mutual recognition — for example the police — violence and force is the way the party of order enters into the conversation. In the example of the French Revolution, it was the perceived threat of the army that created the “fused group” which stormed the Bastille.⁵¹ Writing in the aftermath of the 1990 poll tax riots, Gunn turns around the normal distinction between “violence” and “force” — it is not the instrumental violence of the state that is acceptable but the communicative violence of the crowd.⁵² Gunn argues that a consistent and genuine pacifist position may “have to celebrate the (participatory or communicative) violence which liberals count horrendous, and deplore the (instrumental and statist) violence which liberals reluctantly defend”.⁵³

In a strikingly spiky passage, Gunn suggests that the violence of revolution involves:

a rise and fall of factions so swift that none can claim legitimacy and so contingent that we can never declare an allegiance to one or other of them — opens a space for political conversation of the best sort. Over our last glass of wine, at the end of the evening, our conversation is likely to be sharpened if neither of us knows which of us may be unlocking the guillotine blade tomorrow.⁵⁴

Humanism?

The unashamed embrace of Hegel in this kind of argumentation may be uncomfortable to those steeled in the anti-humanism of recent French thought. Gunn and Wilding address this issue directly. Noting that “humanism” can mean several things, only some of which are objectionable, they argue that Marx and Hegel reject a humanism based on a scenario of history involving a pre-existing human essence waiting to be realised. Thus they state: “If the notion of humanism turns on the idea of self-realisation, Marx is (we may agree with Althusser) a theoretical anti-humanist.”⁵⁵ But so they would contend was Hegel. Their claim is that neither Marx “nor the Hegel of the Phenomenology” has a teleological view of history in which “‘humanity’ is seen as a grand totaliser or global subject, and history as that subject’s expression or self-realisation”.⁵⁶ They acknowledge that they have placed the idea of “uncontradicted recognition” in a similar conceptual place to the idea of such a subject. However, they point out that uncontradicted recognition is not a fixed and determinate entity, self, or subject that can realize itself. It is rather “an endless process”, because while such recognition is a situation “where freedom (understood as self-determination) and an unfolding of human capacities obtains”, it is at the same time “the polar opposite of fixity and determination”. Thus Gunn and Wilding assert “the ghost of ‘humanism’ is laid”.⁵⁷

However, Gunn and Wilding recognise that laying to rest the ghost of humanism, and ending the mystification it entails, involves a cost. Compared to the comforting humanist vision of self-realisation of the historic subject, Gunn and Wilding emphasise that revolution conceived as mutual recognition has dark or less-than-comforting aspects. The world of social institutions that Hegel called “spiritual masses” [geistige Massen] implies something quasi-natural that stands over individuals. Revolutionary recognition overthrows these institutions.⁵⁸ At the same moment, this quasi-natural aspect of social institutions provides — for most people, most of the time — a certain reliability and security. Human society reproduces itself behind people’s backs; it appears to follow natural laws. This is at the same time alienating and reassuring. One knows where one is with money; it can reliably command the labour of others, and relatedly one can rely on people acting out of role definitions because their private attitude is essentially irrelevant. By contrast, relations of mutual recognition make more demands upon us. They are based at all times on personal relations, and one has to assess if the speech or action is made in good faith. Mutual recognition involves a relinquishment of the “beguiling and bewitching” security afforded by institutions and social roles. A condition based on mutual recognition is, as Gunn and Wilding put it, more “artificial” and less “natural” — or, strictly speaking, less “quasi-natural” — than a condition of alienation.⁵⁹ Freedom is exposed or, as Gunn and Wilding say, “excoriated”. They write:

Communism knows no natural or quasi-natural inertia: although it is humane, there is no question of man’s (or humanity’s) realising its “true essence” — or “true nature”. Lacking quasi-natural security, communism lacks the stability that inertia brings. At each stage in a communist society’s existence, a relapse into what Hegel terms history and what Marx terms “hitherto existing society” remains a possibility. No guarantees against a relapse are conceivable. More than this: what may be termed ontological insecurity and communism are inseparable. In the margins of a text describing communist existence, hints of existential horror appear.⁶⁰

The idea that communism involves the achievement of good conversation is similar to the way some groups, like Théorie Communiste and the Invisible Committee, have taken up the traditional African idea of the palabre. ⁶¹ Speculating about communism, Bernard Lyon states:

The central element of praxis is the palabre, which is at the same time antecedent, concomitant and subsequent to all action. The palabre is the mode of decision, of control and rectification of all acts; it has no end. It includes all activities, and for all activities we take the time to go right to the (provisional) end of the palabre. The palabre is knowledge of the real, conscious action. Conscious history means that we come to an agreement! The quest for the best possible decision, for the maximum possible points of view, for an action that can be changed, or even canceled, not weighing down the future, is the constant concern of the palabre in and between the networks. Conflicts are never conflicts of interest because there is no situation to reproduce in which the conflicts are insoluble.⁶²

Communism will be the achievement and maintenance of “good conversation” through the overthrow of existing social institutions. In the absence of such an overthrow, the achievement of mutual recognition in good conversation can only be approximated and is always at risk. It is possible for two people or a small group to maintain a good conversation, but it is difficult. The maintenance of good conversation in a group oriented to communist revolution is thus a challenging endeavour, which can only be approximated. The cases with which we started this text provide examples of the kind of tensions that may interfere or destroy mutual recognition in a group and cause the conversation to fail. How can we make sense of such occurrences?