Edward Said's Marxism by Timothy Brennan

It is reasonable to agree with the Irish poet Seamus Deane that Said was not a Marxist, but only if we recognize the wildly different degrees to which one can be ‘not a Marxist.’ Like other opponents of U.S. foreign policy, Said was at times libeled as a sympathizer with ‘Soviet totalitarianism.’ The charge was absurd, yet it should not go unnoted that many of the intellectuals to whom he was drawn supported the Soviet Union for much of their lives. These included E. P. Thompson, Emile Habibi,  J. D. Bernal, Sadik Al-Azm, and, of course, Gramsci and Lukacs. Even more apt, given his professional interests, was the generation of third world authors who got their start as writing fellows in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of the Soviet bloc. These included his ally and correspondent Ranajit Guha, a historian of South Asia, the Kenyan author and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Palestinian poet laureate and close friend Mahmoud Darwish.

Said had always been clear about rejecting membership in communist organizations for both practical and political reasons. But Soviet realpolitik in the Middle East, although a mixed blessing, inspired communist groups within Arab nationalism generally. It was so interwoven with the politics of everyday life that from a Palestinian perspective it was simply part of the landscape and not at all an alien intrusion. At other times, he pretended incomprehension, implausibly turning down a request to be on the board of a left political organization with which she was affiliated on the grounds that ‘I am most unknowledgeable about Soviet history, and more particularly, the history of Marxism; I would therefore feel like a complete idiot.’

From as early as 1969, Said’s self-positioning vis-à-vis Marxism and his conditional praise for Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East was openly stated. He repeatedly questioned, though, whether a Marxism devised in the West could ever be relevant outside it: ‘I have yet to see –to my mind- a satisfactory translation of Marxism into Arab or Third World terms.’ For all of Arab nationalism’s heroism and rectitude, he once describe it as borrowed and inauthentic and for that reason too ‘inexpensive.’ Arriving already completed elsewhere, it could never feel the impress of a genuinely Arab stamp. So too communism. In the United States, the organizational Left was so bogged down in debates about whether racism or class struggle was more important that it had little to offer the Palestinian struggle, which is one of the chief reasons he never considered formally joining its ranks.

Apart from a brief visit to Poland on his Guggenheim Fellowship in Beirut, he never set foot in a Soviet bloc country, even at the height of his fame, although invitations were extended. On the other hand, he provoked Hitches in a revealing moment of anger: ‘Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publically criticized the Soviet Union  .  .  . The Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.’ For all the media outcry against ‘tenured radicals’ and Marxist indoctrination in the university, most of the academic Left distanced itself from Marxism or turned it into a docile lifestyle transgression.  Said was scrupulous about never doing either.

Marxism for Said, at any rate, was always something larger and older than its twentieth-century Soviet and Middle Eastern forms. At its most honorable, it was part of a tradition of the Left that reached back to a time before Marx. His investment in Vico, one could say, was precisely to resurrect an earlier counter-tradition based on giving dignity back to human labor, to the agency of ordinary people making history, to the class struggles that created the first republics, and to the spirit of humanist breadth rejecting narrow specialization and, like Marx, boldly weighing in on political theory and economics in a poetic spirit. In that light, he delightfully invoked the medieval reformer Cola di Rienzo as one of the founders of humanist thought. Rienzo, the son of a washerwoman and a tavern keeper, an avenger of the abuses of noblemen, and a denouncer of aristocrats, was a brilliant rabble-rouser, having steeped himself in the work of the Latin poets and orators in order to use their rhetorical techniques to unify Italy.

Said alluded to other moments of the historical left by way of Rabelais Abbaye Theleme, an anti-authoritarian idyll described in Gargantua and Pantagruel ( 1532), a place where one was able to achieve intellectual and physical fulfilment, free from drudgery and submission to authority. Apart from show the prehistory of Marx’s criticism from below, Said was looking to take humanism out of the hands of self-righteous cultural warriors. He had in mind, among others, Hilton Kramer’s neoconservative journal The New Criterion, for example, whose contributors were busy pontificating about these same classics of ‘Western Civilization” as he was, but for the very different purpose of calling those who exposed the crimes of imperial culture barbarians.

His appraisal of the Left was careful to avoid the balancing act of George Orwell and other self-styled ‘socialists’ whose art was  to elude middlebrow censure by denouncing leftist gods – a formula Said knew well from the late journalism of Hitchens and the writing of Leszek Kolakowski, Conor Cruise O’Brian, and others with whom  he fought bitterly over the years. In piece after piece, we see him running interference for the Left, humanizing communists and Marxist intellectuals by getting others to see them as full members of a collective intellectual  endeavor. Doling out strategic praise for authors he wanted others to read, he promoted a list of broadly social democratic exposes of U.S. foreign policy and the domestic surveillance state. He particularly loved on-the-ground studies of institutional complicity, citing on more than one occasion Frances Stoner Saunders on the cultural Cold War, Nadia Abu el-Haj on the fictions of Israeli archeology, or Carol Gruber’s Mars and Minerva, a study of the ways that universities turned themselves into instruments of the War Department during World War I.

“Traveling Theory,’ one of his most quoted essays, was all about the sapping of intellectual vigor as Marxist concepts like ‘totality’ and ‘reification’ moved away from revolutionary commitments in the actual struggle of parties and movements towards a decontextualized serenity. There are, of course, many instances when Said articulates explicitly liberal rather than Marxist political perspective, not only casting suspicion on abusive governments but finding in the very logic of institutions the threat of a new tyranny. The classically liberal model of the fragile individual pitted against organizations can be seen in “Secular Criticism’ when he singles out the unlikely trio of T. S. Eliot’s Anglican mandarinate, Lukac’s vanguard party, and Freud’s psychoanalytic community for sharing ‘vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order’- that is, for losing all reason and fairness when dealing with those outside its ideological ‘family.’ As in liberal thought generally, the private individual is portrayed as inevitably threatened by the hierarchy of groups, parties, and parliaments.

Hints of this same centrism can be found in his enthusiasm for Gramsci’s contemporary Piero Gobetti, who even inspires a slogan in Culture and Imperialism: ‘the Gobetti factor.’  As a passionate, young literary intellectual, Gobetti represented for Said a detached philosophical erudition placed in the service of mass mobilization. Gobetti, like Gramsci, was a student at the University of Turin whose outlook changed forever after he witnessed the young Gramsci’s skillful role in the Turin labor movement. More than anyone in his generation, Gobetti grasped Gramsci’s lesson that it was vital to connect the South, ‘whose poverty and vast labor pool,’ Said wrote, ‘are inertly vulnerable to northern economic policies and power, with the North that is dependent upon it.’ But, again like Said, he was less radical than Gramsci, in solidarity with the Italian Communist Party but never a member of it. During the fascist period Gobetti found that the only consistent and effective defenders of liberal ideals were the organized Left. In that regard, Said implied, aligning himself with the Left only reluctantly and pragmatically, he was the Gobetti of his time.

Yet this too appeared to be another Comradian mask, for there were many counterexamples. In a sardonic aside he once commented that ‘we liberals’ call a situation complex as ‘a rhetorical signal .  .  .before a lie is to be pronounced or when a grave and immoral complicity with injustice is about to be covered up.’ Although he conceded the influence of Will Rogers-like boldness and clarity of the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, for instance, he was not impressed by his ‘peremptory liberalism’ and hated his America-first politics. Because of his distaste for liberal hypocrisy, close colleagues judged Said ‘basically Marxist,’ although of course not a communist.

On the other hand, while acknowledging Said’s regard for twentieth-century Marxist philosophers, Al-Azm thought ‘the fundamental structures of his analysis .  .  .never Marxist,’ and his Marxism ‘cosmetic.’ Chomsky shared this assessment, challenging anyone to show him where, at any point in Said’s work, Marxism enters as a serious analytic principle. Deirdre Bergson, a close friend who earlier in life had been active in the Trotskyist movements in South Africa, delighted in Said’s confession in his Haverford College commencement speech that he should have studied economics more seriously, but she complained (very inaccurately, it turns out) that he never said a word in any of his works about class.

The attack on Marx in Orientalism seemed for many to settle the issue of Said’s real sympathies. There, in a move that scholars rightly censured, he corralled Marx into the camp of John Stewart Mill as a man convinced of the inferiority of Indians. And yet one had only to look at Said’s alert and prolonged close readings of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  in ‘On Repetition’ to get the opposite impression. And in the very months that he was writing Orientalism, his support for the German communist was stalwart, and even a little defensive:

It’s been said about Marx that he saw this struggle as something exclusively economic; that’s a serious falsification .  .  . He was perfectly aware that the struggle was materially expressed and economically characterizable, but he was, I think, enormously sensitive to the shaping dialectic, to the intangible but very real figurations, to the internal unisons  and dissonances the struggle produced. That is the difference between him and Hobbes, who saw life as nasty, brutish, and short.

 

Here, at any rate, Said was clearly accusing bourgeois thought (in the person of Hobbes) of a crude materialism and saying that Marx himself was, among other things, a very early and invaluable cultural critic. What reservations he had seemed designed to encourage third-world intellectuals to free themselves from European icons, no matter how liberatory. And he was eager to show he wanted nothing to do with ‘solidarity before criticism,’ a phrase he often used to express how dangerous it was when allies keep silent about each other’s mistakes in the name of a common cause. Even Marx, he was implying, a giant of liberation and ethical integrity, could not entirely escape Eurocentrism.

His critique of Marxists, interestingly, was frequently from the left. He complained that professors had diminished the revolutionary force of Marxism by turning it into ‘principally a reading technique.’ He was also protective, even agitated, when the core of Marx’s writings were treated ineptly or gutted by the politically enfranchised. In a reader’s report on Geoffrey Hartman’s Criticism in the Wilderness in 1976, for example, he found it unforgivable that the author had ‘swept the whole matter of Marxism and its relationship to Hegelian philosophy out of the room.’ Samuel Huntington’s tribalist creed The Clash of Civilizations (1996) conducted its arguments without any attention to ‘the globalization of capital.’ He quoted Oscar Wilde’s Soul of Man Under Socialism – ‘no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering’ – adding that for that reason agitators are needed to bring it to consciousness.

Especially in Said’s writings on Palestine do the calculations of political economy and the dilemmas of class tensions associated with Marxism play a prominent role. In ‘The Future of Palestine: A Palestinian View,’ he laid out what he flatly called ‘the class role of the intellectual.” Again and again, he zeroes on the weakness of the ‘Arab bourgeoisie,’ which had been unable to create civil society, and so yielded to its intolerable alternative, the ‘national security state’ while assaulting the Arab free marketeers in his late writing for the Middle East newspapers.

It is reasonable to say, then, that Al-Azm and Chomsky were incorrect to think that the economic and sociological tenets of Marxism were never integral to Said’s  analysis. They are, on the contrary, particularly evident in his study on the ground of the Arab private sector in The End of the Peace Process, but not only there. Aghast at the low level of organization and theoretical awareness among the militants in Beirut in 1972, he gave a structural, rather than personal or partisan, explanation of the morass:

 

[We find] the mode of production and mode of distribution to be respectively, immediate consumption and dispersion. I mean something like this: since the society is essentially a surface, an exterior, it has no memory, no sense of dimension .  .  .This production, paradoxically, is consumption .  .  . You product an idea, a product, a movement, only to have it happen- it lasts only for the consumption .  .  . There is no history.

While engaging its modes of thought and conceptual apparatus, he did, it is true, resist Marxism a well,, but for one reason alone: its partisans had not creatively adapted it.