James Aune. Rhetoric and Marxism. Boulder: Westview, 1994.

In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation...
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It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved. (Looking Backward: 2000-1887, 193)

Although there's something bizarre about opening one's writing by citing one work and immediately quoting from another, there's a strange appropriateness to doing so in this post. Jim Aune's claim in Rhetoric and Marxism is that if we try to identify Marxism's own "nuclear contradiction" (Aune takes the term from Alvin Gouldner), we can see the absence of rhetoric – its understanding of audience, appeals, and persuasion – as the fundamental cause. This isn't a surprising absence, given Marxism's emergence in an antirhetorical historical moment, but its result was "an implicit theory of language and communication that was an unstable mixture of romantic expressionism and a positivist dream of perfectly transparent communication" (143). And thus if we want to learn something about Marxism's failures (note that the book is haunted by the events of 1989), we need to take note of its lacunae, specifically its traditional refusal to adequately theorize mediation. The problem of alienation thoroughly troubles Marxist theory – consider workers' separation from the product of their labor, the human alienation from her species being, the very denial of the centrality of this "humanist" element in the division between the early and late Marx (or between Marxism and Humanism), the gap between theory and praxis, and what Aune cleverly terms the contradiction between "struggle and structure" (i.e., where's the place for agency if history is more or less determined?). Mediation is thus the need – and rhetoric just the remedy.

So: I've mediated my response with an example from Edward Bellamy. In recounting the fall of capitalism and a market economy, Bellamy's Leete describes the "red flag party" as having had no role because the party didn't understand persuasion – it didn't understand how to win over an audience, in part because it didn't understand the importance of including in its audience anyone other than the working class. For Bellamy, it's important that the revolution be not hostile, but rather more or less universally supported. (There's likely a rhetorical explanation for this, considering Bellamy's audience.) So he imagines the work of a message so tremendously appealing that everyone felt its sway. The only problem is, orthodox Marxism couldn't make that appeal.

And this is essentially the approach of Eduard Bernstein, who Aune examines (alongside Lenin, Lukács, and Gramsci) for having posited some unfortunately insufficient role for mediation. For Bernstein, a party that includes all classes in the struggle is more effective because of its numbers. And insofar as Bernstein understands the limited value of alienating potential allies, Aune praises his "ethics of controversy" (53). On the other hand, Bernstein fails to see the impossibility of overcoming capitalism's negative mediation, "the way in which the ruling class blocks change" (74). Put another way, how is one likely to convince the dominant class to give up its dominance, much less to work to do so? The same problem would have no doubt obviated Bellamy's utopia, but of course his idea of anticapitalism isn't quite Marxist anyway.

If Bernstein fails to properly account for negative forms of mediation, even if his theory of positive mediation isn't worthless, Lenin basically offers both a vision of positive mediation ("the revolutionary activity of the vanguard party as mediator both of theory and practice and between intellectuals and the working class" [63]) and an understanding that capitalism has "depraved and corrupted" the very people needed "to build socialism" (qtd. at 61), but he doesn't theorize how capitalism has done so, nor does he explain how the vanguard party might undo the negative effects of capitalism's ruin. Similarly, Lukács's notion of reification and Gramsci's hegemony are forms of negative mediation that don't offer positive alternatives, in particular because they don't speak to ways of converting audience. For example, in Gramsci's case, "the actual moment when hegemony becomes counter-hegemonic is undertheorized" (73).

Aune essentially proceeds with this analysis at a more thorough level when it comes to Marcuse, Raymond Williams, and Habermas. And in conclusion, he notes "seven key enduring moments in the argument against Marxism" (145); not surprisingly, rhetoric offers a way not of dismissing these arguments, but of addressing them and improving the argument for Marxism as a result. But one way of thinking the consistent concerns of Aune throughout is as the need for Marxism to move from diagnosis to having a program. So when he notes that literature departments are the one place where Marxist reading has continued to enjoy some currency over the past couple of decades, he may simply be revealing that the domain of literary studies – reading cultural artifacts – limits the discipline's potential to move into an ethical position and say "what is to be done." At least one former English professor thinks we should limit our teaching to proper subjects – that is, to our literary objects of study or to the topics we are "trained for" and "paid to perform." It's easy to see how with those criteria literature professors will quickly be considered unqualified to speak on texts that aren't part of our past, our cultural tradition (a word that signals the conservative function we are, in some cases, expected to perform). Hence, we're unqualified to convert our is's to ought's. But happily Aune's discipline of communication studies offers the possibility of studying persuasion for purposes of learning how one ought to use rhetoric to persuade future audiences.