THE PRESENT AS THEORY¹

Two watershed events in recent history -- symbolized by the dates 1989-1991, and September 11, 2001 -- have created a new situation, for the world and for the collective effort to change the world. Both events are tragic. The terror attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. engendered multiple tragedies, for everyone except the hard core of Islamic fanatics and the capitalist rulers who have taken the offensive following the attacks: the horrendous loss of life on 9/11, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the tightening grip of poverty, destabilization and loss of secular development (and hope) in the poorest regions of the world; the assault against civil liberties and social protections in the United States and other capitalist countries; and the consolidation of the power of an extreme right-wing sector of capitalist political rule, with its contradictory combination of mindless patriotism, brutal oppression and neoliberal "free market" rhetoric.

The crisis and demise of the socialist regimes, a decade earlier, is the second prong of the current tragic transition. This, of course, is more controversial. I include as supportive of this generalization the great majority of the left, including those who would apply the term "socialist" to the Soviet Union and its allied states with or without quotation marks, and also many who would not use that term at all; perhaps everyone except the most recalcitrant adherents of the "third camp" position.² The twin tragedies are, of course, closely related. The socialist states were the main support of secular and developmental forces, both democratic and otherwise, throughout Central Asia, and their disappearance left those forces exposed and isolated. The vacuum created by this shift was filled by warlords and religious fanatics; both of these elements, with deep roots in the precapitalist realities that dominate the region, were financed and encouraged by the CIA and other imperialist agencies as weapons against the Soviet Union and its allies. There is a direct link running from U. S. imperial counterrevolution to September 11, and it cannot be entirely described in terms of innocent "unintended consequences."

The two related crises, of socialism and of capitalism, thus pose, for re-examination, the fundamental question: how mature is world capitalism? If we are to use the opportunity afforded by the twin tragedies to grasp more fully the nature of the present moment, this long-standing issue must be faced.³ An answer to this question would enable us to grasp what is possible in the present, and therefore to act effectively. We must avoid "feel-good" answers and wishful thinking. Marxists have tended to telescope capitalism's trajectory, a deficiency of vision that goes back to the founding generation and is also present at later high points of Marxist thought; think, for example, of the enthusiasm for the impending victory of the proletariat in the minds of the young Marx and Engels in 1848, or Lenin's "highest and last stage" formulation in 1915. While time is not linear, and developmental achievements can be condensed in fairly rapid moments of synthesis, the starting point must be a systematic study of the objective whole, with a willingness to accept whatever answers emerge.

The next point follows immediately. There is simply no way to know how mature capitalism is at present without a clear grasp of capitalism in its essentials -- in other words, without theory. The irony is this: to grasp the present moment, we must escape from the present moment, and accept the injunction to think abstractly, about the most foundational elements in our understanding of social structure and evolution. In these postmodern times we are of course sensitive to the overconfidence with which earlier Marxist generations proposed to launch "scientific" analyses; witness the name of this journal! Perhaps the "recovery of confidence" on the left, after the initial shockwaves from 1989-91, can be qualified as a "provisional" or "modified" recovery. The ambitious project that I am proposing here -- to make nothing less than a new assault on the fundamentals of Marxist theory in order to lay more secure foundations for the politics of the present -- should incorporate the flexibility and healthy skepticism that we can recuperate from the relativizing and sophisticating doubt that characterized "Western Marxism" (this term essentially means non-Communist Marxism) in the period of Communist ascendancy.

But the key is the proposition that the present moment, and capitalism in general, must be theorized, if we are ever to grasp either. Is this "theoreticism"? Perhaps! Again, many strains of postmodern thought warn against hyperextension of the theoretical. We should listen carefully to this critique, and respond to its specifics, as they emerge. Theoreticism, however, is hardly the most pressing problem on the left; the much more prevalent tendency is toward empiricism and sensualism -- the overwhelming of thought by the impress of current events and moods. The intensity of the present moment, in the shock waves generated by 89-91 and 9/11, is an obstacle to clear -- theoretical -- thinking, even as it provides the motivation and opportunity to make a decisive advance toward a new, theorized comprehension of the present.

In thinking broadly (even grandly) about the position of capitalism in the world today, one reasonably looks to all fields of study within the Marxist tradition. A project on this scale must presumably draw upon everything: political economy, the theory of precapitalist formations, state theory, and the study of the territorial/cultural/ideological/linguistic unities addressed in what once was called "the national question." One feature of 20th-century Marxism was its increasing location in the academy, where it came under the spell of academic disciplinary boundaries. These boundaries themselves, so foreign to classical bourgeois thought, may even be, to some extent, a functional outcome of the need to prevent and derail synthesis: comprehensive thinking about the human condition. Thus, some Marxists "feel comfortable" in working on the political economy of crisis, conceived as a moment in the process of accumulation within a given capitalist "economy"; they have never "gotten around to" questions of international relations or imperialism, and have no distinctive opinions on those subjects.⁴ Others write on the state, with little or no input from political economy. Still others work on the present-day global economy, without much attention to the formation of nations, as though one can grasp the international -- let alone the transnational -- without first knowing what a nation is. Students of the "national question," in turn, work on conflict and conflict resolution within multinational contexts, and on programmatic issues surrounding the "right of nations to self-determination," without having first addressed the roots of modern nationhood as such, and its distinctiveness in relation to various other kinds of territorial/cultural unities throughout history. This is like studying competition among capitals without first having developed the theory of capital-in-general.

I would like to propose a working hypothesis (of the sort that cannot be validated except in the fulfillment of the implied promise): decisive progress will not occur in any of the areas of Marxist research until and unless they are brought together, into full interactive mutual determination. It becomes obvious that this project is far bigger than any one individual, or school. I would like to suggest, for the present, two lines of thought that appear to emerge from the contemplation of this vast theoretical enterprise.

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1. With apologies to Paul Sweezy; see his The Present as History (Monthly Review, 1953.

2. I remember a session of a left professional organization, in 1992, at which a representative of Solidarity, a decidedly third-camp group, was extolling the marvelous victory for the workers of the world afforded by the fall of Soviet bureaucratic collectivism and state capitalism. Most of the audience consisted of people who were deeply suspicious of the "socialist" characterization and doubtful about many aspects of Soviet reality; virtually all would have pointed to the dearth of civil liberties there and would insist upon the centrality of personal and intellectual freedoms to the socialist project. Nevertheless, they sat huddled together entirely unable to savor the "victory"represented by the Soviet demise, sharing instead a deep sense of loss. Even in wider political circles, it suffices to ask, rhetorically of course, whether the world is better off now that the USSR and its Eastern European allied states are no longer present.

3. SCIENCE & SOCIETY is planning a Special Issue, "The Deep Structure of the Present Moment"; see the Call for Papers in our Summer 2003 issue. Inquiries should go to the Guest Editor for that issue, Dr. Renate Bridenthal (rbriden1@juno.com). The tension -- dialectic, if you will -- between "deep structure" and "present moment" is entirely intended.

4. Lest the use of quotation marks in the above appear as a sarcastic comment on others, I should quickly note that I place myself in this category; see my Value, Technical Change and Crisis (M.E. Sharpe, 1992).

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