JEREMY GILBERT & ALEX WILLIAMS
For much of the twentieth century it was a truism that political behaviour was motivated by material interests. Then, from about the 1970s, this idea began to be displaced by an understanding of politics as a set of struggles over ‘values’, ‘recognition’ or ‘identities’. Why did this concept of interests decline? First, it was criticised by humanist Marxists such as E. P. Thompson for the scientistic, ahistorical and reductionist way in which it was often used. Second, the rising militancy of new social movements – for Black freedom, women’s liberation, queer emancipation – challenged the notion that all political struggles could be explained in terms of class interest alone. Third, the restoration of liberal hegemony in the academy created a fertile environment for individualistic, psychologistic and idealist interpretations. Within radical thought, this confluence – sometimes referred to as the ‘cultural turn’ – led many theorists to sideline class and materialist explanations.
The last decade has seen a salutary course correction of this theoretical drift. Marxists have sought to defend class analysis and to revive the explanatory power and political salience of material interests. Yet this new tendency is not without its flaws. In a recent article for Sidecar, Dylan Riley, echoing Thompson’s original critique, argues that the backlash against the idealism of the cultural turn has succumbed to an unwitting idealism of its own. Riley characterises this ‘new Marxist culture’ as propounding a metaphysics which renders the idea of material interests an abstraction, endowed with causal power over living individuals. A prominent example here may be the work of Vivek Chibber, whose book The Class Matrix (2022) lays out the case for a renewed emphasis on class interests as the decisive determinant of political behaviour. Although a valuable corrective, in certain respects The Class Matrix risks bending the stick too far the other way, overlooking the genuine issues raised by feminists, anti-racists and the New Left.
In our book Hegemony Now (2022), we attempt to find a way out of this impasse. Our conception of material interests begins from the premise that two things can simultaneously be true: the political and theoretical questions posed by the movements of the 1960s and 1970s remain valid; reactivating the concept of material interests need not entail returning to forms of orthodox Marxism that never took those questions seriously to begin with. Our model attempts to retain the idea of material interests in a manner that acknowledges the advances of the last half-century.
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