György Márkus,75% mensch: On the occasion of the publication of the English version of How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible?

Abstract

In this article I give an overall interpretation of the development of the Budapest School in Australia as political emigres, who initially worked and wrote in Melbourne and Sydney until the final years when Heller and Feher moved on to New York in the mid-1980s and then back to Budapest in 1993. The translation of How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? has allowed us to better grasp the motivations and theoretical innovations of the Budapest School, to appreciate their internal disputes and to recognise fundamental continuities and difference in these two key thinkers. This book was a gallant retrieval of democratic potentials in Marx. It excavated Marx’s own appreciation of needs produced by, and critical of, the alienations of the capitalist system. Ultimately, this early work was unable to realise its ambition to educate the diverse progressive movements of the times. I will show later that the retrieval of progressive potentials took a more social democratic form in the work of Maria Márkus on needs as she encountered them later in the Hawke Labor Government of Australia from 1983. Introducing the world media to the Budapest School in The Times Literary Supplement on 15 February 1971, Lukács described Márkus as ‘75% mensch’. When Lukács first met him, George already had his own philosophical interests, which he would bring with him when he became a key figure in ‘the Budapest School’. Márkus had studied in Moscow where he wrote his dissertation on the topic History and Consciousness and met his Polish wife, Maria. George used to modestly say that he was an expert only on the works of Karl Marx. That was despite that he had taught the history of modern philosophy at Eotvös Loránd University to Hungary’s most promising philosophers for a decade and later to philosophy students at Sydney University for the next 20 years. In the early 1970s, George invited Janos Kis and György Bence to work on his next project that would become the Hungarian version of Überhaupt, which was to become How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? The new English translation published by Brill this year opens this important rethinking of the work of Marx to an international readership.

Part 1: Kis’s reflections on the contemporary significance of the original How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible?

In his Preface to the translation, Janos Kis explains that its original critical intentions were a response to a combination of the political and cultural aspiration of the New Left in the West in the late 1960s and the Prague Spring in Eastern Europe. The authors believed that the aspirations of both movements could be reconciled. Kis states ruefully that these hopes were refuted by the following years. Despite such disappointments, Kis maintains that the book transcends its immediate historical origins and has some current economic and political interest (Márkus et al., 2022).

From the 1960s, critical Marxists began to challenge the idea of historical necessity and the idea that each society must follow the same path of historical evolution. Inspired by the philosophical works of the young Marx, history was now seen as a socially mediated human biological process where symbolic culture was finally given due acknowledgement. ¹ On this account, humans made themselves and this implied that the ‘good life’ was now considered as ‘all are equally free’; certainly, this norm had never yet been fully realised in previous history (Márkus et al., 2022: xii). The historically produced capitalist society was one of ‘alienation’ and ‘reification’. On such an account, communism becomes the goal of history, the ‘working class’ understood as its practical agent and its engine (Márkus et al., 2022: xiii).

Since Lukács’s groundbreaking History and Class Consciousness in 1923 (Lukács, 1967), a critical Marxist tradition had rejected some of the mature Marx’s unilinear, evolutionist views in favour of a richer contemporary social and cultural anthropology. For the authors, this could also be found in the early Economic and Philosophical Writings of the Young Marx (Marx, 1975: 279–400), which had not been published until the late 1930s and also in the late Marx’s so-called ‘anthropological’ writings, written after Kapital. On this account, Marx’s economic writings are not an alternative ‘bourgeois’ economic theory, rather communist thought transcends the purely economic point of view. Márkus, Kis and Bence were seeking a shift from this earlier philosophical criticism of economics to a philosophically guided economic theory; the authors were unwilling to ignore the specific economic content of Kapital. Unlike the ‘unorthodox’ Marxists, they wanted to recognise the philosophical aspects of the critique of political economy; however, they wanted to acknowledge the significance of the specific economic content of Kapital. The critical dimension of Kapital was that it went beyond the internal perspective of the capitalist or the worker and its inexorable laws of the capitalist economy. It suggests that a critical economic theory cannot simply dismiss the capitalist market but must also excavate its complex potentialities.

Whether there is a pathway to a fully communal life under the control of the proletariat is not given by the philosophy of history, it is an argument to be made based on the social sciences. There are many hints in Kapital about the path from capitalism to communism. However, the idea of siding with the interests of universal principles is not sufficient to guarantee scientific objectivity. The practical commitment to the economic lacks truth aptness in respect to the objective facts.

Marx’s critical economic theory possesses some attractive and fruitful insights into the fundamental dynamics of modern capitalism. However, for these authors there was also some major shortcomings that seemed to threaten the adequacy of the critical economic theory as a whole. Márkus found a fundamental ambiguity in Marx’s account of use-value as developed in Kapital Volume Two (Marx, 1975: IX). On the one hand, Marx’s use-value is a socially loaded concept. For a thing to be a use-value, it must be an object of technical and cultural norms that define its point of use and its ways of use. Often these are relativised to different social statuses of various people and groups. On the other hand, Marx’s insistence that the use-value represents a direct, natural relation between a thing and a human individual in need played a systemic role in his theoretical conception. Marx views the economy as a social system described in purely naturalistic terms. It was expected to cater for the human needs of subjects that have particular use-values. He attributed a further function to the economy: distributing the available resources across the sectors of production to enable society to produce a fixed set of goods at the least cost or the largest set of goods at a given cost. In Marx’s view, the goods to be produced by the economy and the costs of production can be determined in purely naturalistic terms. He believed that the social systems whose economic subsystems is properly separated from the other subsystems would draw a sharp (Marx, 1975: XX) dividing line, between purely naturalistic relations of human individuals and things characteristic of the economy, and social relations linking human individuals to each other that were regulated by the non-economic subsystems. However, Marx was clear that that no social system in human history carried through this separation fully and consistently. In the pre-capitalist epoch, the economy remained embedded in other social systems serving non-economic purposes. Capitalism was the first system, according to Marx, that achieved some sort of divorce between economy and society but did not carry out the separation without alienating consequences. It is left to the market to control production and to allocate subjective and social needs. Consequently, the workers do not identify human needs directly, distribution relies on the proxy of effective demand (Marx, 1975: XX). One major conclusion of the analysis was that no socialist economy can do without a market. For Marx, the market is the only mechanism that can allocate use-values to social subjects.

While the general Marxian project was attractive and fruitful, the authors found that Marx’s substantive critical economic theory was deeply problematic. Their critique centred on an assessment of its failure to break with capitalism’s abstract fiction of the labour theory of value. After all, the diagnosis of systematic exploitation as the expropriation of surplus labour time rested on the supposition that all labour could be reduced to a universal equivalent. This fiction remained a crucial axiom of the centrally planned economies. To challenge it was to contest the communist orthodoxy at that time. Unlike the Frankfurt School’s preservation of Marx’s critique of capitalism while abandoning his revolutionary goal, the authors sought new manifestations of radical needs embedded in capitalist society that could sustain deeply critical practices and attempted to address new social agents moved by them. In this fashion, they could uphold the continuity of Marx’s thinking with a critical theory that rejected those abstract Marxist theses that proved untenable in the present (Marx, 1975: XVI).

Kis concludes his Introduction to the English translation by acknowledging that their early hopes had proven to be naive. The New Left fell into demise and the idea of democratic market Socialism in Eastern Europe collapsed. The authors’ position was sympathetic to the new feminism, sexual revolution and the early ecological movements but its enthusiastic support of economic growth proved to be deeply problematic and in need of refinement (Marx, 1975: XXVI).

Márkus reiterates the conclusions of the book in Chapter 8 on the ‘Association of Free Producers’, stressing that this idea is incompatible with the elimination of the market. He goes on to say that he agrees with Marx, that technological and economic optimisation can increase humanisation and the reduction of alienation but argues that Marx’s version of this reconciliation was unacceptable (Marx, 1975: 189). The essential historical dynamism of the ‘Association of the Free Producers’ requires the need for constant praxis (Marx, 1975: 190). The limitations of the idea of the ‘Free Association of the Producers’ must have the capacity to confront and constrain the tendencies of alienation growing out of the same society. The new answer is a regulated market economy (Marx, 1975: 190). Márkus critiques the clear division between technique and social interests at the level of the business ‘Plan’ or collective (Marx, 1975: 217). The struggle must also continue in the changing patterns of everyday life and democratic debate (Marx, 1975: 200). Obviously, such changing patterns of everyday life will spill beyond the borders of Europe to the rest of the world (Marx, 1975: 334).

Part 2: The history of European and post-World War integration

Márkus, Kis and Bence were interested in challenging the parochial ideologies wound into Marx’s own evolutionism. They thought the ‘anthropological’ works of the later Marx went beyond the circumscribed historical choices given to the ‘associated producers’ in Kapital. At this point it is instructive and sobering to introduce some of Johann P Arnason’s reflections on the historical evolution of the European Union. Here I show that Arnason, sharing Márkus’s sociological perspective and methods, arrives at a much more pessimistic view that rates the chances of a project invested in critical needs very low. These potentials have been assimilated into the project of contemporary Eastern European integration that is too constraining of other European nations for whom they appear even anti-democratic. However, Márkus and Heller hold firm and their later political perspectives are aligned with the current policies of the European Union, which they viewed as the bearer of progressive politics in contemporary Europe.

Let us briefly consider Arnason’s view of the historical options available to the future of the Economic Union and Europe. This history suggests that the current head government ‘imposed integration’ has yielded ‘intertwined counter-trends’ that do not necessarily yield a raft of progressive potentials (Arnason, 2019). The imposed historical integration emerged from two divergent, but interconnected histories, West Christian and Byzantine. The dominance of the former was a long drawn out one (Arnason, 2019: 2). The historical frame of reference is the European experience of and interpretative patterns of modernity. However, the origins of these processes appeared in various parts of Eurasia. The ‘longue durée’ of the European historical path is connected to global civilisation and to the plurality or cultural worlds and historical trajectories. Clearly this narrative also involves a critique of Eurocentrism (Arnason, 2019: 2).

Eurocentrism is not to be understood though merely as Europe against the rest but lies coiled within the European Union’s own self-understanding. Two centuries of war and conflict had problematised the unifying philosophical principle of autonomy that equates modernity with emphatic Kantian precepts. Arnason insists that autonomy as a civilisatory horizon is not reducible to a higher degree of rationality nor to the aspiration to self-determination. This image is entangled with the exclusions of new and inherently expanding ways of accumulating wealth and power. Ideological elaborations of autonomy have inevitably become conflict prone (Arnason, 2019: 40).

European versions of modernity are too multifarious and their paths too diverse to be adequately grasped by polar grids or schemas of class and nation (Arnason, 2019: 43). The relationship between modern capitalism and modern democracy is best understood as a troubled co-habitation rather than as a perfectible harmony or fundamental conflict (Arnason, 2019: 47). The Soviet collapse in 1989 built a case for the superiority of the western version of modernity and this paved the way to the neo-liberal hubris that culminated in the great recession and financial crash in 2010 (Arnason, 2019: 57).

The powerful and influential theories of European integration were clearly inspired by an imposed concept of social progress. Nevertheless, the complexity of the task has meant that institutional structures have been left deliberately open-ended and, Arnason (2019: 53) observes, can make themselves available to inputs from all manner of local concerns.

Acknowledging that the terms of integration might still admit excluded histories, Arnason’s assessment of contemporary sociological evidence makes him profoundly sceptical. By contrast, Agnes Heller at the time of the US response to 9/11 was seduced by the image of ineluctable historical progress that clung to her early theory of radical needs. In some of her formulations, radical needs appeared more as a philosophical commitment and less as a line of sociological enquiry into the critical potentials of our frustrated hopes. Heller was the first to popularise the revolutionary democratic hopes that invested in needs that transcended the subjective structures of individuals in existing capitalist society (Heller, 1976). For her, the idea of radical needs provided necessary orientation to the critical politics in the contemporary New Left cultural explosion in western societies. In the case of Heller at least, the investment in radical needs was charged with faith in the idea of contemporary progress and it turned out that this could bunker down with some strange allies. Teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York at the time of 9/11, like many of her friends and colleagues, Heller supported the US invasion of Iraq. She upheld the ideology behind the critique of the idea of ‘Old Europe’ and its US vision of a ‘democratised world’ in the Middle East.

Heller did not believe that she had betrayed the radical democratic orientation of her critical theory when she fully supported Republican US foreign policy that led to the invasion of Afghanistan. The idea of radical needs, however, did not provide the necessary self-critique against her long held ‘hawkish’ support for the efforts of the US policy. It appeared, to her, that historical progress had a definite shape and an unexpected champion.

Márkus and Kis were much more sceptical. Márkus never had any lingering faith in progressive trajectories, opting instead for the idea of our rational ‘wager’ that the best potentials of the present might guide the future. Unlike Agnes, he had no real emotional attachment to Israel and had a more forensic analysis of contemporary US foreign policy. Arnason too repudiated mere faith in progressive trajectories and shared Márkus’s scepticism about US foreign policy. He was more dubious about the tensions in the integrative hopes of the European Union. However, to the end of his life, Márkus continued to invest in the progressive tendencies of the European Union. Like Habermas, he remained within the camp of ‘Old Europe’ and opposed to US military adventurism.

Arnason’s conviction that the European Union has expunged Europe’s own diverse and rich histories rests on a nuanced portrait of reform attempts in the Ottoman Empire and their outcomes in terms of a historical sociology of entangled civilisations. He adds a second layer of observations on western ‘interventionist and exploitative’ strategies in the Middle East, which have ‘lasting effect… on historical processes that are still unfolding’ (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 110–112). This can be seen as a normative argument for collective self-determination, as Arnason further emphasises that it was the USA that ‘put an end to the Iranian experiments with constitutional democracy’ (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 110) and, in general, was not usually ‘in the business of exporting democracy’. While Arnason does see a combination of the quest for knowledge, state building and institutionalisation of technological progress as the ‘infrastructure of modernity’ (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 112), he underlines the openness of this combination to interpretation and rejects the imperial US model as a ‘paradigm of modernity’. Arnason’s critique of the ‘informal empire’ of the USA is that it has taken a ‘regressive turn’ (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 112) and he views the USA as the core promoter of neoliberal capitalism. For him, it is crucial to develop a ‘civilisational perspectives on capitalism’ as a total socio-historical phenomenon (Arnason, 2005).

As Arnason has underlined, there is an ‘elective affinity of absolutised individual freedom and the promise of absolute wealth’, which is underpinned by the interpretation of the supposedly self-evident commitment of modernity (Arnason, 2005: 17–36) to autonomy as a pledge to individual freedom. In contrast, the necessary ‘turn away from neoliberalism’ is more fruitfully supported by a ‘rehabilitation of collective autonomy’ (Arnason, 2018). These observations on Arnason’s normative commitments may suffice. They situate him clearly on the ‘left’, in proximity to most of the scholars who contributed to the critique and/or reconstruction of historical materialism. Even more precisely, they identify him as someone who aims at institutional reconstruction through shifts in the interpretation of key political concepts. We may call this leftist reformism and find confirmation in at least one statement in which Arnason distinguishes forms of politically leftist commitments today. For him, ‘It is difficult to come up with any positive perspectives.’ The reformist left is everywhere on the defensive, if it exists at all; the global left is a fantasy; the ‘revolutionary’ left is irrelevant and sometimes off the planet’ (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 186).

As we have foreshadowed, towards the end of their lives, Heller did finally move closer to Márkus. She later supported social democratic reformism in the light or resurgent rising contemporary authoritarianism. Márkus shared Arnason’s scepticism regarding the project of European integration and his anxieties at its parochial counter tendencies. However, Márkus and Heller still felt that the project might be radically democratised and must be championed to regain its stature as a great opponent of current right-wing populism, the Brexit spirit and 20th-century totalitarianism.

Maria Márkus’s version of ‘radical needs’

Ever since How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? (1971–72), the topic of needs was a sort of signature concept for the Budapest ‘School’, underscoring Heller’s 1976 book and informing the critical relation to the politics of ‘really existing’ socialism in the jointly authored Dictatorship over Needs (1983). Agnes never explicitly repudiated her 1976 book, however, How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible? was able to articulate another version of critical needs that uncoupled itself from philosophical faith in progress and was more in keeping with open-ended social democratic ambitions. In the mid-1990s Maria Márkus published ‘Civil society and the politicisation of needs’, in my view, still the best and most enduring of the Budapest School’s reflections upon critical needs (Grumley, 2019).

One of the most impressive aspects of Maria’s contribution is the finesse with which she adapts the previous readings of the concept ‘radical needs’ to fit the social democratic political climate of her new home in Australia. In Heller’s (1976) early reading ‘radical needs’ were immanent to capitalism and their satisfaction would signify the transcendence of this society. For Heller, the real political potential of radical needs lay in the fact they put in jeopardy capitalism’s essentially quantitative structure of needs. This quantitative structure tied to market and exchange values had emancipated the bourgeois individual, leading to a proliferation of new needs for freedom, free time, artistic work and personal development that could not be satisfied within the existing quantitative structure and pointed beyond it to an entirely new structure of needs. By the mid-1990s, the enthusiasms and hopes of New Left politics had subsided and Maria turned her attention to the democratisation of social democratic institutions by processes she termed the ‘politicisation of needs’. This sober, domesticated version was more in keeping with the guarded investment in the critical potentials of working-class needs outlined in How Is Critical Economic Theory Possible?

While Maria does not dispute Heller’s distinction between quantitative wants and the need for qualitative autonomy, the focus of her own analysis was on the repudiation of all objectivist and paternalist efforts to manipulate and hijack what must ultimately always be a normatively conceived symbolic structure of democratic need interpretation. From the outset, Maria understands the critical potential of the concept of needs in respect not just to ‘really existing socialism’ but also to the welfare states of western liberal democracies (Grumley, 2019). However, to fully operationalise this potential in the new environment, the project of democratisation had to be reconfigured by linking the self-interpretation of needs, existing civil society and the new social movements, which, at that time, were being registered by western sociologists. Maria believed that the crisis of the welfare state diagnosed by Habermas and others signalled the need for a paradigm change. The previously hegemonic framework of rights and obligations had to give way to a discourse on the interpretation and politicisation of needs (Grumley, 2019). To contest the monopoly of need interpretation exercised by market and welfare bureaucrats, a new structure of social self-organisation based in horizontal dialogue and new structures of solidarity was required. In this configuration, the theoretical emphasis drifts away from the question of the existence or otherwise of transcending radical needs to fall on the issue of politicising existing needs, of making them the subject of public discourse and contestation. The division between needs catered for privately and those under the provision of the state must be open to constant contestation and revision. This involves not just questioning which needs are to be allocated to each side of the division but the very mode of such a subdivision and hierarchisation of needs (Grumley, 2019). This can only be ensured when mechanisms are in place to allow need interpretation to become a continuous process of self-reflection in which the autonomy of both particular and collective subjects is expressed through their participation.

Conclusion

Márkus is the great historicist who also learnt real rigor from his interest in analytical philosophy. He was a perfectionist who continued to read and refine his ideas to the end of his life, despite its publication. I encouraged him, and with the support of his wife Maria, we were able to convince him to publish one of his papers ² and a large collection of his late essays that was published in 2011 before he died. ³ His combination gave his works an almost incomparable richness of philosophical vision. After he died Maria Márkus said to me that George will never be forgotten. The great historicist could not have agreed to this opinion. However, it remains remarkable that his philosophical works remain vitally contemporary after almost a decade after his death. Perhaps the best example is a lecture he gave to New York on the few occasions that the tragic accidence to his eldest son Gyuri in 1986 had rended him and invalid that had to be cared for both his parents. This lecture to an audience of Habermas and Marxist scholars was entitled ⁴ Labour, Instrumental Action and the Ways of Human Existence: Towards an “Ecological” Reconstruction of Historical Materialism. In this lecture Markus employed the late works of the historian Marx to critique both the works of Habermas including those after the shift to the paradigm of communicative action, and the mature works of Markus up the das Kapital and the Grundrisse for there technicist and over rationalising tendencies. In this lecture, Markus places ecological concerns and crisis as the key contemporary political issues that were not sufficiently discussed at that time. In a contemporary political and social context this issue has become even more urgent. In this respect, Markus's writings remain, almost a decade after his death, remain relevant.