The fourth debate in the series "Europe talks to Europe", co-hosted by Eurozine and literary journal Host (Brno) in cooperation with the ERSTE Foundation, took place at the House of Arts in Brno, Czech Republic, on 18 May. Jirí Pehe, Director of New York University in Prague, met writer and filmmaker Benedict Seymour to discuss Marxism as "critical divide" between eastern and western Europe. Pehe, former advisor to Vaclav Havel and journalist at Radio Free Europe, fled Czechoslovakia in 1981. Seymour is contributing editor of Mute magazine (London), one of the most highly regarded publications on today's new Left. The discussion promised to be intriguing.

Kicking off, moderator Marek Seckar (Host) recalled that as an environmentalist in the 1990s, "the Left" seemed to him impossible as a political identity. Today, as Left and Right converge on the centre, it may be possible to re-approach the dilemma. At any rate, understanding, not conflict, was the aim.

He need not have worried, since it soon became clear that neither speaker was interested in re-stating entrenched positions. Seymour spoke of a "rendezvous with Marxism as it was not in the 'communist' countries", while Pehe agreed that contemporary capitalism indeed revealed a "cannibalistic" hunger to consume its own resources. Nevertheless, for Seymour "capitalism with a human face", or a re-invigorated social democracy, was not the logical consequence of the inherent flaws of real existing socialism. Thatcher's comment that "there is no alternative" is now true, he added, but in reverse: there is now no alternative to something other than capitalism.

Pehe remarked that global capitalism was intimately connected to the spread of democracy. However as capitalism changes, so too do liberal democracies: rapidly increasing privatization threatens liberal democratic forms of organization. True: there can be no capitalism with a human face. But the alternative is surely not a return to Marxism.

In the former Czechoslovakia, continued Pehe, communism discredited the Left wholesale. This left a gap in the public discourse for twenty years. While it was possible to criticize capitalism "from within", the country was left without any intellectuals like Zizek in Slovenia able to criticize "the system" as such. The problem was confounded by a confusion of terms: conservative with neo-conservative, liberal with neo-liberal. Plusses were turned to minuses in a manner recalling the communist instrumentalization of language.

Was communism, asked Seckar, a Romantic ideal or a rational system? Seymour responded by describing capitalism as "scrupulously and narrowly rational". As the crisis of capitalism advances, it rehearses its deeply romantic myths of the nation-state, at the same time tabooing all alternatives as "extremist". Pehe objected: a revival of Marxism is impossible, he said. Any attempts to improve the future under the communist banner are doomed.

It isn't necessary to "re-invent the ensemble of communism", replied Seymour. Marx never specified the ideological affirmation of labour: the self-abolition of the working class is an as-yet unrealized proposition. It was Marx's interpreters that created a "Marxian metaphysics" – what social democrats cartoon as the "route to totalitarianism". The bottom line is that today people won't go for Stalinism or the rhetoric of the proletarian revolution.

So what's the alternative? The twentieth century was a century full of programmes, said Seymour; the last thing he was suggesting was a return to the "bourgeois habit of projected utopias". Marxism is an anti-utopia, Capital a satire on capitalist "progress". Instead, "we need to start with what we have and then negate it." People are beginning to act without a party leader or a vanguard. You don't need to have read Marx to reject capitalism. Marxism and Marxists can only provide a sharpening of the analysis.

Marx's language of class is outdated, countered Pehe. New technologies are altering the nature of work; where manufacturing is robotized, there is no working class as such. Marx's thought, said Pehe, must be seen in the context of its time. The main aim is to contain the system called global capitalism. "Global civil society" could save liberal democracy against capitalism.

To Seymour's ears, that sounded very much like twentieth-century socialism. The fact is, he said, that class is not disappearing but becoming ever more pronounced. What could be a more powerful validation of Marx than the polarization of the world into rich and poor? Capitalism will not roll over and die but will continue to create work and a working class. "The proletarian class exists and needs to stop existing".

A critical divide: yes. What was less easy to conclude from the debate was whether it still runs between East and West.

A full text based on the discussion will appear in Eurozine soon.

More on the series Europe talks to Europe, a collaboration with the ERSTE Foundation

Published 2010-05-20