Why Political Strategy Needs Karl Marx
In recent years, the grand questions of strategy that once animated the Left have found a new home in the world of business and management. But strategy is an essential component of political activity, and it needs a Marxist analysis at its core.
Demonstrators march during a national strike against pension reform in Toulouse, France, March 7. (Matthieu Rondel / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Most of the academic left has long been silent on the topic of strategy. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy marked a watershed moment for strategic thinking in the post-Marxist tradition upon its publication in 1985. The book, long a mainstay in many a graduate theory seminar, breaks with what Laclau and Mouffe regard as Karl Marx’s fundamental essentialisms, particularly on class, and theorizes the practical formation of a pluralistic “radical democracy” in the context of hegemony. It was big in its day. But lately strategy has had few champions.
One crucial exception was leftist political scientist Leo Panitch. Panitch’s 2010 book Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination calls for the cultivation of what he calls a “socialist imagination” and a recuperation of revolutionary politics from the New Right. As Vivek Chibber wrote of him in a 2020 obituary for Jacobin, “Leo was forced to keep his feet on the ground, to think about practical strategy, a real road to working-class revival.”
But Panitch was mostly alone among leftist theorists in his granular focus. It is, rather, in the business world where strategy is flourishing today. Business strategy, or “strategic management,” as it is more often called, has been around since the 1950s but has exploded in recent decades. Books like Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works and Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy promise silver bullets for corporate success. McKinsey & Company and other consulting firms have thrived in part because they are seen as offering an edge in business strategy, and strategy, consequently, has become one of the hottest specializations in B-school.
In the recent Communism and Strategy: Rethinking Political Mediations, philosopher and Marx scholar Isabelle Garo strives to recover a conception of strategy for the Left. A work devoted to theorizing the viability of the “communist question” in a period of political stagnation, Garo employs a reading of Marx to make a case for a practical, grounded radicalism, “reactivating a blocked dialectic and rethinking . . . the possibility of a revolutionary politics in our time.”
In this project, Communism and Strategy joins Garo with a retinue of contemporary critics — Søren Mau, Kohei Saito, and the late Daniel Bensaïd — in rejecting the abstractions of much of post-Marxism and returning to Marxian political economy as a means to rethink the present crisis. Garo, deeply critical of the diminished project of post-Marxist theory, marks a refreshing return to Marx as a resource for practical action. Working to reanimate strategy and dialectical approaches for the twenty-first-century left, Garo makes a convincing case for the abandonment of the socialist compromise and the pursuit of a future that is unequivocally communist.
The Question of Communism
The early chapters of the book offer a systematic survey of the anti-capitalist thought of the major figures of contemporary post-Marxism. Departing with the long-standing tendency among prominent leftist thinkers to cavil at minutiae in Marx, only to break more or less entirely with political economic inquiry, Garo illuminates the failures of a theoretical tradition that has largely severed itself from practical matters.
Garo is generally laudatory of philosopher Alain Badiou — an “unrepentant” Maoist — for his “robust, incisive philosophy that perseveres in maintaining the momentum of the revolution in its very absence.” She is, however, censorious of the usual suspects of late twentieth-century leftist thought, Laclau in particular, for retreating from analyzing the concrete conditions of capitalism and, indeed, from theorizing strategy.
Of Laclau, the Argentine philosopher and political theorist largely known for his work on populism, Garo contends that he rejects “totalizing analysis” and “issues of work and production.” Laclau, she argues, extracts notions of class and strategy itself from material conditions, positing capitalism as “merely a conceptual construct” rather than a material operator. Following such abstractions, Laclau’s strategic work, per Garo, becomes a counter-hegemonic discursive task divorced from a substantive political economic critique. Laclau’s populism, she contends, risks “being nothing but a magical formula for a hyper-politics cut off from the reality of exploitation, social injustice and all forms of domination.” She accordingly concludes that Laclau’s theorization of socialism has little to offer the contemporary left about the conditions of capitalism.
Garo is similarly disparaging of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, coauthors of the megahit Empire (2000), for similar abstractions. As she contends, the two disastrously break with Marx’s labor theory of value in figuring labor as “pure subversive energy.” Such a transformation supports their now notorious position that labor has become immaterial, cognitive, and knowledge-based, a claim shared by Yann Moulier Boutang. McKenzie Wark notably makes a similar claim in Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, contending that we no longer live under capitalism as such but an economy where “the dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information.”
Such assertions, Garo rightly notes, ignore the “concrete complexity” of contemporary material conditions. Garo additionally goes after another noted duo, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, authors of 2017’s The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, and their rejection of socialism and communism in favor of third way, institute politics that unilaterally, and unrealistically, rejects institutions and states as such.
Such a critique has become increasingly prominent among contemporary leftist critics. Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora offer such an assessment in The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution, characterizing the philosopher’s later work on governmentality and the self as in fact laudatory of neoliberalism. It’s worth pointing out that this was also the conclusion of the CIA, which has credited “reformed Marxists,” Michel Foucault in particular, with helping to bury the legacy of Marx.
Having dispensed with the abstractions of the post-Marxists, Garo embarks on the core work of the book, a return to Marx to seek “a new political reception” of communism. Communism and Strategy’s middle section offers a reading of Marx that, per Garo, plumbs “the history of the radical contestation of capitalism.” Garo reads Marx as a comprehensively revolutionary thinker, and a strategic one at that, whose work, at times obliquely, seeks to both theorize and realize communism. For scholars of Marx, these chapters offer a comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis of his body of work that traces his development from the young Hegelian period through to the Critique of the Gotha Program.
In this examination, Garo’s core interest, like that of William Clare Roberts, is to read Marx as a comprehensively revolutionary thinker. Capital, along with Marx’s other political economic writing, Garo contends, works both to detail and capsize capitalism’s logic, “inaugurating a new kind of knowledge, inseparable from its active social and political dimensions.” Garo offers an incisive reading of many of Marx’s core political ideas — commodity fetishism, surplus value, and labor power, for example — as intrinsically, if not explicitly, revolutionary. Not merely descriptive of capitalist conditions, such concepts, she argues, work to capacitate the proletariat.
Vive la Commune!
Garo concludes the book with a compelling discussion of practical strategy that looks to revive “not a doctrinaire Marxist politics” but a critical and strategic Marxism calibrated to the contemporary era. This discussion explicitly foregrounds the utility of targeting mediations, a term that, for Marx, refers to the reconciliation of opposing social forces. For Garo, this amounts to challenging and destabilizing the sites within contemporary capitalism where contradictory elements have been reconciled or domesticated under neoliberalism.
Ecology, for Garo, is a paradigmatic example. Under contemporary invocations of “ecology,” the conflict between capitalism’s absolution desolation of the Earth and the imperative of a livable planet has been mediated through such risible conceits as “green capitalism.” Through Marx, Garo is after a “radical alternative” to challenge such mediations that conceal and sustain capitalism’s harm.
This argument is a persuasive one and, indeed, represents the book’s most effective contribution to what Garo calls “the communist question.” And yet Garo’s claim indexes the underlying problem that marks the academic left’s diminishing engagement with strategy. At a time when theoretical discourse seems more remote from political life than it did in Negri’s heyday, how can theoretical approaches to strategy such as Garo’s hope to inform the material and practical quotidian work of political change? How do books of theory inform concrete practice?
Philosopher Søren Mau provides an answer to this question in Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (2023). Theory, he writes, can “develop concepts which can be employed on lower levels of abstraction” and, in turn, drive political change. Yet such theorization, he contends, is always at a remove from the material. “Theories developed on high levels of abstractions,” he continues, cannot and should not provide us with answers to the question of what must be done.” Crucially, however, he observes that this does not mean that we ought to throw out theory. Theory, at least for Mau, can develop concepts that are valuable, if not directly applicable, to the political terrain.
Accordingly, against potential critics who might see Garo’s approach as too abstract from the practicalities of political strategy — even as she attempts to clear away the cobwebs of abstraction — her strident recuperation of Marx as a thinker of communist strategy offers a way forward for a Left that, as some might say, has lost its taste for revolutionary politics.
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