0 The_Editors 2007 Rethinking Marxism 19 3 291-297 <p>In this issue we begin the publication of the series of remarkable papers that were delivered in the plenary sessions that took place during the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference. All three main sessions were attended by many hundreds of scholars, students, and activists, who were treated to provocative new ideas and an engaging set of debates among the speakers and with the audience.</p> <p>On Friday evening, the topic was "imperialism and the fantasies of democracy" and the session, which was coordinated by Vincent Lyon-Callo and Maliha Safri (building on and extending the long line of articles on the issue of imperialism published over the years in RM, which are listed on the conference section of the web site), included presentations by Antonio Callari, Ernesto Laclau, and Ella Shohat. The goal of the session was to chart a path beyond simple critiques of imperialism by recognizing the role that democratic discourse plays both in constituting today's imperial visions and in mobilizing the growing reactions to imperialism around the world.</p> <p>Shohat, in an essay excerpted from a forthcoming book coauthored with Robert Stam, approaches the issue of the relationship between imperialism and democracy by focusing on the question of exceptionalism, a relational form of "national narcissism" in and through which the idealized "we" of the imagined national family attempts to exalt itself vis-&#xe0;-vis other nations. The particular form of narcissism that most concerns them is American exceptionalism, which in their view can best be considered in a historicized, relational, and transnational frame. Thus, for example, the grounds of the belief in the exceptional status of the United States have changed over time, from the "city on the hill" of uniquely democratic institutions and the exercise of benevolent power in the world through the "American dream" of upwardly mobile prosperity and the "Washington Consensus" of free markets and smaller government to the neoconservative "will to power." From the beginning these have been conjoined with various forms of self-delusion, universalism, and the myth of innocence. The "perverse new twist" to American exceptionalism is the idea that the United States makes exceptions for itself when it comes to international law and human rights. But, according to Shohat and Stam, some Marxists misunderstand the nature of American exceptionalism, reducing it to a Protestant cultural essence and treating it as entirely without precedent. They cite the examples of French exceptionalism, which was consolidating republican democracy under the Third Republic as it was exercising imperial autocracy abroad, and of Brazilian attempts to reconcile liberal enlightenment principles of democracy and inequality with racialized injustice - not to mention the imperial projects of Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain. Shohat and Stam encourage us to recognize both the lethal menace that U.S. hyperpower represents in the world today and the ways postcolonial Europe, notwithstanding its questioning of the U.S. war in Iraq, remains implicated in "institutional racism, neocolonialism, and top-down globalization."</p> <p>The spatial dimensions of globalization have been considered from two different perspectives, those that emphasize the homogenization of space and those that focus on the renewed importance of regional economies and local development. For Giuseppe Cocco, the apparent opposition between these approaches can be overcome by examining the conflicts inherent in the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization associated with the "new quality of labor" created by the shift to post-Fordism. Utilizing concepts drawn from three different sources - the geophilosophy of Gilles Deleuze and F&#xe9;lix Guattari, the microphysics of power outlined by Michel Foucault, and the political economy of migration in Yann Moulier-Boutang's recent work - Cocco sets out to comprehend the new spaces of post-Fordist labor. On one hand, labor is being deterritorialized, outside the striated space defined by industry and "beyond the juridical barriers placed by the Nation-States," thus provoking capital to become both decentralized and global; on the other hand, labor has become reterritorialized through "networks of interaction," creating an identity between "the public and the common," which capital attempts to privatize, leading to the creation of new xenophobic regionalisms. Cocco credits Paul Krugman with grasping exactly this combination of deterritorialization/reterritorialization characteristic of postindustrial cities like Los Angeles, which can be understood in terms of the complementary and conflicting axes relating to two key shifts: from the disciplinary space of dead labor to the living labor of the territories (and thus to biopower) and from discipline to the biopolitical control of the territories. The set of antagonisms within these new "nomadic" territories can also be seen in the decision to locate a new Volkswagen plant in the city of Resende in Brazil: for Cocco, this factory represents the end of the forms of discipline and control associated with the factory paradigm, and therefore another step in the "deterritorialization and dematerialization of labor," accompanied by the attempt on the part of capital to control global productive networks, thus creating a new society of control over life within territories. In Cocco's view, the new approach that is required should focus not on the opposition between mobility and lack of mobility across territories but, rather, on the conflicts that arise between two different forms of mobility within territories: the striated local and global spaces constituted by the dead labor of capital versus the smooth, nomadic space of living labor that draws its power from interaction and cooperation.</p> <p>Marxist aesthetics and cultural studies are replete with debates concerning the commodification of art - how it operates, what effect it has on aesthetic value, what consequences it has for the possibility of political contestation or critique, and so on. What happens, though, when the system of commodity exchange and debt is interrupted by bankruptcy, and when the person declaring bankruptcy is an artist whose work is considered to be a potential asset? Jeremy Boyle found himself in exactly that circumstance, and his account of the experience documents both the mundane and extraordinary dimensions of the event. On one hand, the settling of accounts in bankruptcy court is a routine matter in that it involves millions of individuals every year across the United States (including the 40 who were present when Boyle appeared with his lawyer before the judge). But it is an extraordinary event for most of the individuals who are forced to file, made even stranger by the Trustee's concern that someone who regularly engages in the activity of performing labor and producing objects might not be motivated solely by "economic return." Why the concern that he might be attempting to subvert the system of commodity exchange? Is he more or less of an artist - or, for that matter, a person, a commodity-owning subject - because his art does not have higher market value? After this brief moment of questioning, when the conventions defining the system appear to be suspended, normality is quickly restored by the Trustee: Boyle's is declared a "no-asset case."</p> <p>Capitalism is the only game in town - or so it seems for many of our students, colleagues, and fellow citizens. Marxists, of course, notwithstanding their many theoretical and political differences, hold a different view: that capitalism is <i>not</i> the only way of organizing the economy and society, that another - collective or communal - world is both necessary and possible. But do we have a good set of arguments to make this case? Richard Wolff sets out to explain why he, from a Marxist perspective, prefers communism to capitalism. He begins by defining capitalist exploitation, in terms of the social relationship whereby capitalists are able to appropriate surplus value from workers who receive in the form of wages only part of the value they create. Capitalists then distribute this surplus to themselves and others (such as supervisors and government officials) who create the economic and social conditions within which capitalism continues to exist. Wolff argues that capitalist exploitation should be viewed in a negative light - for moral and ethical reasons (in the sense that it introduces inequality as well as "opposition, conflict, tension, and potential explosiveness" into the community of interdependent workers) and in terms of its social effects (ranging from an "unequal development of human skills, aptitudes, and attitudes" and impoverished forms of democracy to the passive consumption of cultural commodities and a hardening of the distinction between so-called high and low culture). Communism, on the other hand, is defined as a form of production in which workers collectively appropriate and distribute the surplus. In Wolff's view, while the communist class process cannot be expected to introduce social harmony (since he expects that tensions and struggles over such issues as the distribution of the surplus, the interdependence among enterprises, and collective and individual forms of consumption would exist), it does involve the elimination of capitalist exploitation and an expansion of "the social issues subject to democratic decision-making." For these reasons, and against the neoliberal equation of capitalism and freedom, "comm unism remains as both utopian vision and impetus for concrete social analyses and anticapitalist social action."</p> <p>Media coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between Hamas and Fateh and rarely mentions the Palestinian Communist Party (later renamed the People's Party). Orayb Aref Najjar seeks to fill this absence by examining the documents and press of the People's Party (utilizing a methodology borrowed from Stuart Hall's <i>Paper Voices</i>) to determine how the Party has understood and played out its role in Palestinian politics after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, later, with the rise of the Islamists. Historically, Najjar explains, the Palestinian Communist Party was forced to negotiate a tangled web involving the Communist Party of Israel, the anticommunist politics of Jordan, the Soviet position on the partition of Palestine, the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (which the Party eventually joined in 1987), and the involvement of the Islamic movement in the uprising against the Israeli occupation. After the renaming of the Party in 1991, Najjar argues that it moved to embrace the human rights and democracy movement in the occupied territories as a way of creating a "common language" with the world. The Party's weekly newspaper, <i>Attalia</i>, included a running debate on the meaning of democracy as well as a strong defense of a "pluralistic society that respects religion but is not dominated by it." But the Party itself fell into a deep crisis - which was financial (forcing it to slash its publishing budget), organizational (losing badly in local and national elections), and ideological (having distanced itself from its own past achievements and current roles within various nongovernmental organizations). Najjar finds evidence, however, suggesting that the Party has now "come full circle" by embracing its Marxist past and attempting to enter into negotiations with Hamas and the new government. Discussions at the Party's upcoming fourth conference will determine how it redefines its mission and its political program to create a progressive alternative amidst increasingly bleak conditions in the occupied territories.</p> <p>Jacques Bidet has long argued that Marx's <i>Capital</i> is an indispensable source for analyzing the "pathologies" - the inequalities and forms of exclusion - inherent in contemporary society, which needs to be explained to a new generation of thinkers and activists. But he also believes that Marx's approach needs to be reconstructed, in order to overcome the "epistemological and political obstacles classical Marxism came up against" and to provide a "more realistic" conception of contemporary global capitalism. The results of this project of explanation and reconstruction (initially published as a book by the same title in France) are summarized here for the first time in English. Bidet identifies Marx's approach as starting from one pole, the market; his key "correction" to <i>Capital</i> is to add a second pole, organization. On the basis of this "more complex beginning," Bidet proceeds to elaborate what he considers to be the "general question of the capitalist form of society" as well to redefine key Marxian concepts (such as class and world-system) and to introduce new concepts (such as multitude and world state). At the root of Bidet's scheme is the idea that the "metastructure" (the presupposed structure) of modern society comprises both market and organization, each of which presumes a certain "face" or rational understanding: the economic (which implies individual contract) and the juridico-political (based on central or social contract). Whereas Marx describes a historical sequence from market to organization, Bidet sees the two poles in terms of a "structural complementarity" within modernity from its very beginning. From this starting point, Bidet elaborates a new conception of the capitalist class structure (with a dominant class founded on both economic capital and cultural/organizational capital and an exploited class defined by market relations, organizational relations, and a combination of the two) and a distinctive view of politics (comprising three positions - the two complementary and antagonist poles of the dominant class, e.g., Republicans and Democrats, plus a third position "from below"). Bidet thus interprets the objective of socialism not in terms of abolishing completely market and organization but, rather, as eliminating the roles both poles play in producing and reproducing classes. His goal is to carry out this reconstruction at various levels, from the nation-state through the world-system, where he glimpses the "gestation of a Global State" governed by the law of capital and, facing it, a global civic movement, which is demanding "another sort of globalization."</p> <p>There is a now a large, and largely critical, literature concerning the general oppression of women within the Mexican maquiladora sector. But James Hamm notices a recent shift in this literature, in an attempt to understand the gender dimensions of maquiladora workers' lives being "produced in multitudinous variations." His own case study introduces class into this discussion, with the goal of examining the "unpredictable, constantly challenged, and frequently renegotiated" dynamic between capitalist enterprises and their workers, which at least in the case of one married couple - Pablo and Mar&#xed;a, both maquiladora workers in Ciudad Ju&#xe1;rez - has led to a more egalitarian household and to their participation in noncapitalist relations. Prior to migrating from Oaxaca, Pablo was a self-employed furniture-maker, who appropriated his own surplus labor individually in the shop and, together with his wife, collectively in their communal household. (But, Hamm notes, there was nothing fixed about the household relationship. At some times, it became a feudal relationship, with Pablo appropriating the surplus labor performed by Mar&#xed;a.) After moving to the border, their lives changed in dramatic fashion. Inside the household, the performance and appropriation of surplus labor became more communal (although Hamm does recognize the possibility of seeing their labor differently, as independent producers). In the factory, both became exploited laborers within the capitalist class process. Their plans, however, are for Pablo to become an independent furniture-maker again, which depends on a whole host of conditions, from their ability to accumulate savings and renegotiate household responsibilities to the opportunities afforded by his moving in and out of maquiladora employment. In a more general sense, Hamm sees his use of Marxian class analysis in ethnographic investigation as undoing the conception that the "people a globalization approach holds to be passive both have agency and affect globalization in the process of being affected by it." It also raises questions about the meanings of such terms as exploitation and oppression, both in households and in factories. As an anthropologist, Hamm believes it is necessary to tell a "variety of stories," amongst which lingering contradictions "must be allowed to exist," in order to convey the complexity of the lived relations of people like Pablo and Mar&#xed;a.</p> <p>The first Remarx essay is devoted to a critique of traditional Marxist conceptions of wage-labor. In comparing capitalism and slavery, Marxists have long insisted on both the radical difference between them (capitalist wage-labor coinciding with negative ownership rights in the means of production and formal marketplace freedom, the freedom to sell one's ability to perform labor) and a fundamental similarity (based on the unfreedom associated with exploitation, referring to wage-labor as a form of wage-slavery). For Rakesh Bhandari, however, Marx and latter-day Marxists have mistakenly taken many instances of labor performed under the conditions of plantation slavery to be fundamentally different from and historically prior to capitalist wage-labor. Bhandari's own view is that wage-labor has long existed in the "disguised forms" of serfs, bonded labor, and slaves and that Marxists have been guilty of relying on metaphysical, Orientalist, and technological assumptions to deny the extensive role of wage-labor in early capitalism. The metaphysical mistake derives from an uncritical reliance on the dialectics of Hegel's <i>Logic</i>, such that history is seen as the unfolding of stages, for example, from precapitalist relations of personal dependence to capitalist relations of personal independence based on objective dependence. What Bhandari considers to be the Eurocentrism or Orientalism in Marx's conception of capitalist wage-labor stems from a particular conception of the trajectory of freedom, such that "wage-labor is specified as free and incompatible with formally unfree labor relations." Bhandari highlights Marx's debt to the work of Richard Jones, especially the latter's analysis of the forms in which surplus labor had been appropriated from precapitalist producers and of the capitalist labor fund, to devise a theory of ground rent, according to which capitalist wage-labor is identified with a freedom that uniquely emerged within Western history. While Bhandari does believe that the concept of the Asiatic mode of production may have served a useful purpose for Marx (emphasizing, in contrast, the degree of interdependence among enterprises within the capitalist totality), in the Marxist lit erature itself the East came to be represent "in fantastic form" the use of coercion that distinguishes the treatment of exploited direct producers before capitalism from that of wage-laborers. Finally, Bhandari points out that both Marx and contemporary Marxists (like G. A. Cohen) rely on problematic technological arguments in opposing slavery and wage-labor - in presuming that the formal subsumption of labor and the continuous reorganization of the labor process can only be based on free wage-labor. Bhandari's alternative explanation is that slavery may not have fettered mechanization (e.g., in the U.S. South) but, instead, that there were limited possibilities for mechanizing agricultural production. In the end, Bhandari argues that, when wage-labor is appropriately reconceptualized not in terms of formal freedom but as a form of enslavement - in the sense that the class of wage-laborers is enslaved to the capitalist class - the Marxist theory of history needs to be radically rethought: "wage-labor can take the form of slavery and that capitalism could have rested on slavery for centuries."</p> <p>In the second Remarx essay, Craig Prichard proposes a closer connection and a new engagement between the fields of postmodern class analysis and critical management studies. From Prichard's perspective, those (like Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff) who utilize a postmodern class analysis to criticize contemporary capitalism argue that exploitation is perpetuated by a lack of conscious understanding that a class "theft" is taking place; what is missing, however, is an analysis of how this seeming lack of consciousness is orchestrated in and around the workplace. And this is exactly one of the key areas on which the critical management literature has focused, on the ways in which identities are constituted - in a far from straightforward manner - through work practices and organizationally legitimate forms of knowledge. Prichard offers the example of the ethnographic research in accounting firms carried out by Mark Covaleski and his colleagues, who show how the processes of mentoring and so-called management-by-objectives produce corporate clones "whose <i>very sense of themselves</i> is tied to organizational objectives and control." What this means for Prichard is that employees have little room for maneuver in confronting class relations and that they are actively engaged in their own exploitation. But the potential contribution moves in the other direction, too. The concept of class defined in terms of surplus labor (as against other, e.g., Weberian, notions of class) can be integrated into critical management studies with the aim of analyzing such phenomena as multiple class positions, the effects of political and cultural processes on the performance of surplus labor, the relationship between capitalist and noncapitalist class processes, and much more. Prichard sees both fields grappling with similar questions: how do people ignore or put aside knowledge of existing forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination, and "what should be done about it?"</p> <p>Finally, we are pleased to announce that we have just signed a new five-year contract extension with Routledge (carrying us through to the end of 2012). Clearly, RM has benefitted from the publishing resources and international reach of such an organization. We have also had the great fortune of collaborating with the very capable staff at Routledge (especially the people with whom we have worked most closely, Tracy Roberts, Katherine Burton, Rebecca Vickerstaff, and Joel Phipps) and our own (Julie Graham, Jackie Southern, James Ford, and Peter Tamas) to edit, produce, promote, and distribute this journal - and we look forward to continuing our collaboration for many years to come.<br /> <br /> <i>The Editors</i></p> In this issue we begin the publication of the series of remarkable papers that were delivered in the plenary sessions that took place during the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference. All three main sessions were attended by many hundreds of scholars, students, and activists, who were treated to provocative new ideas and an engaging set of debates among the speakers and with the audience.