Note as of November 2020: This essay and its sequel were written around the time I started a PhD at the University of Minnesota. I was Muslim at the time and wrestling with the shortcomings in Marxist thought that I was coming up against. It doesn’t reflect my current thought very well, but these ideas were important in my intellectual formation.
Marxism is, at its base, a theory of liberation into self-actualization. The whole point is to do away with alienation and restore the capacity of the workers to “actualize” themselves and lead fulfilling lives. This, I think, is something about Marxist theory that would be uncontroversial to anyone whose reading of Marx has spanned multiple points in the thinker’s corpus. Questions of rights and the operations of capital are ancillary to answering the question of how to improve worker’s lives.
The controversy emerges in defining the endpoint, or even general direction of this liberation. “Young” Marx, which I admittedly know much more intimately than “Mature” Marx (if we even accept the spurious distinction), tackles this question from an angle that has been described as “humanist.” I’m not sure that humanism as an analytic category holds much water on closer scrutiny, but I think the general thrust of this characterization is as follows: Marx’s critique of capitalism and its later development into communist theory attempt to free the worker to realize an inner potential that is essential to their status as a human being.
But what is the nature of this inner, essential potential? Marx and several of his interlocutors seem to assume that unleashing this potential by doing away with wage labor allows the worker to choose (‘choose’ being the operative word I’ll pick up on in a moment) how to utilize their time. In the milieu of choice feminism, this word ‘choose’ has striking resonances with contemporary liberalism. And I’m not accusing Marx of being a Liberal™ in any wholesale way. But I think it’s worth thinking about the ways in which Marx may fail to escape the matrix of liberalism/modernity in his formulation of an alternative to capitalism.
On this topic, poststructuralist critiques of Marxist thought are pertinent. The general beef that poststructuralist thinkers tend to have with [Young] Marx is that he fails to break out of the grasp of one of modernity’s central tenets: that sovereignty is situated in the human (generally) / the individual (more particularly). Freed from the dominating capitalist social relations, humanity becomes its own master, empowered to dictate its own direction, whether collectively or individually. This ruffles the feathers of poststructuralists thinkers, who demand a deeper critique of how we think about humanity: breaking down concepts of individual sovereignty and autonomy—essentially contesting the idea that ‘choice’ exists.
Even though I take issue with many aspects of poststructuralist thought (though, full disclosure: I’m a recovering poststructuralist fanboy), I think the kernel of this critique is valuable. It amounts to a de-centering of the human individual (in Young Marx) and humanity as a whole (in Mature Marx). It challenges the primacy of human agency, the idea that the noblest political goal is to optimize humans’ autonomy. I think this is a vital mission. But I wonder if there aren’t better ways of going about it than the path taken by poststructuralism.
Common complaints about poststructuralist thought tend to fall into two (albeit related) veins: (1) it’s unnecessarily abstruse, coiled into unreadable sentences that reference near-incoherent theories; (2) it insists on maintaining contingency, which for all its aesthetic allure, hamstrings its ability to generate a political ethic. Basically, it’s great for academic analysis of literature and politics, but it doesn’t do diddlysquat for helping us figure out how to live our political lives “on the ground.” Some of this is inescapable, I think. Critique is a necessarily abstract process that has to be painstakingly crafted if it’s to make any sense. But it doesn’t have to draw on language and ideas that are only intelligible to those with formal training in continental philosophy. I think this critique can be more effectively made and deployed if we look to a tradition of thought that has existed for centuries in local parishes: mystic spirituality.
Some clarification. (1) Mysticism is not necessarily publically accessible. In every religious tradition, there seem to be two currents of mystical thought and practice: (a) the treatises written by scholars expounding on mystical theology & (b) the day-to-day practice and discussion of the mystic experience that happens in the parishes, masjids, and temples. These are connected, but I’m looking more to the latter for the tools to critique Marx’s humanism. (2) I’ll try to be as ecumenical as possible in this series of explorations, but I’m writing this as someone anchored in the Islamic tradition, and Twelver Shi’ism more specifically. I’ve read into various strains of Hindu, Jewish, and Christian mysticism, but that’s all intellectual knowledge largely unaccompanied by practice.
With this ecumenical aspiration in mind, it would help to distill the shared characteristics of mystic traditions that I hope to use as a base of critique. What exactly do I see in mysticism that has bearing on Marx(ism)? I see mysticism as divergent from both conventional understandings of religion (which has been dissected ad nauseam by the last couple centuries of academic thought) and humanistic Marxism (which I’m hoping to juxtapose it against). To be clear, I’m attempted to distill mysticism as a disposition or tendency, not to divorce specific mystical traditions from their religious contexts.
I’ve gestured to the way that Marx, in step with modernity, locates sovereignty in the human. Or at least, the goal is to have sovereignty located in the human. On the other hand, religion, as understood by a secular critique seemingly inspired by a high school student’s grasp of Nietzsche, locates sovereignty in the Divine Other, distinct from and dominant over the human. It’s tempting to say that mysticism lies between these two poles. But I think more aptly, mysticism sidesteps the question of sovereignty by eroding the distinction between Divine and human. Islamic Sufi traditions speak of the Divine as quintessential Existence from which all reality (including humans) emanates in gradations of distance from the Divine. Conceptions like this attempt to decenter human sovereignty, not by centering an external sovereign, but by questioning the very necessity of a sovereign.
This resonates with poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida, who writes of “the Heading” as the sovereign. The Heading’s undoing is not “the Other Heading” or “the Heading of the Other” but “the Other of the Heading.” More simply/less enigmatically, the hegemony of a sovereign center can’t be undone by putting the center elsewhere; you have to do away with the idea of a sovereign center altogether. But whereas Derrida presents this idea through wordplay and inscrutable sentences that require both knowledge of French and an exceptionally discerning eye to read, mystical traditions like Hinduism’s Advaita Vedanta have tried to capture this dynamic by using the religious vernacular: an intimate relationship between a Divine and a human that aren’t actually separate. The Hindu aphorism “Tat tvam asi” or “That you are” contains the idea that the Ultimate Reality (the Divine) is synonymous with the particular reality (the soul). The journey of the soul back into the Divine gives directionality without sovereignty or “a Heading.”
Okay. So, mystic spirituality had been getting at this stuff for millennia before Derrida came along. That’s not actually surprising to anyone who has thought critically about the charade of Western academia. But what’s the comparative advantage of thinking about sovereignty and autonomy in mystical language rather than the jargon of continental philosophy? After all, 21st century America isn’t exactly steeped in mysticism, Christian or otherwise. Maybe so. But whereas Derrida’s articulation of “the Other of the Heading” meets the end of its political rope in questioning authority and then giving a vague shrug, mysticism has, from its outset, concerned itself with developing practices based on this understanding.
In Orthodox Christianity, for example, mystic strains of thought have led to the doctrine of theosis or deification. The worshipper, by cultivating a life of devotional practices like prayer, merges their will and experience with the Divine, in this case, reflected in the figure of Christ. Similarly, in Shi’i mystical doctrine, through direct communication with God embodied in the act of prayer, the worshipper’s entire being is realigned to reflect the Divine. This is not a synthesis by exertion of a Divine juridical sovereignty on a subject, but rather a dynamic resolution through cooperative synergy. Humanity is not liberated from service to God or into service to God. Humanity is liberated into God through service.
This presents a radically different (I want to say ‘new,’ but this stuff has been around for millennia) approach to liberation and gives us a new vocabulary for articulating an alternative to capitalism. We can think beyond emancipating humanity from capitalism into choice, which doesn’t actually correspond to any political ethic or vision (a fact which I think explains the Left’s ‘sectarianism’). The alternative to capitalism doesn’t need to mean human sovereignty. It can mean a kind of political theosis. The implementation of political ethics/practices to gradually transmute humanity into something beyond sovereignty.
I see mystical thought as a fertile field for rethinking an emancipatory politics, but a couple things stick out to me as urgently needing elucidating. The first is the question of the Higher Power. Theosis is predicated on a journey out of sovereignty into something greater. In Christianity and most other religions, this is described as God. For many leftists who actively participate in faith traditions, this framing will be something between tolerable and welcome. But the Left also has strong currents of anti-religious sentiment. So, care needs to be taken in formulating a Higher Power or a Grand Principle in service to which the ethics of political theosis may operate. I personally think the literature of 12 Step Programs may be a worthwhile starting point for formulating this idea, but there are undoubtedly many ways to approach the construction of a Higher Power that is not necessarily theistic.
The second is the question of what practices of a political spirituality look like. What does an emancipatory political ethic look like? A preliminary thought I have on this front is that liberation through political spirituality requires a move away from political programs and “isms” and towards political orientations or dispositions. I plan to write more on this general question and on a particular disposition (living martyrdom or shahadat) that I find especially profound. But that’s best left for another time.