Abstract:

In this issue we continue the publication of the noteworthy papers delivered in the plenary sessions of the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference. Yahya Madra and Stephen Healy organized the session on "rethinking communism," held on Saturday evening, with the participation of Susan Buck-Morss, Stephen Cullenberg, Kojin Karatani, and hundreds of audience members. The session was not only inspired by the long line of essays on the topic of communism published over the years in RM (which are listed on the conference section of the RM web site); it also reflected the recent "remarkable revival of interest in communism, both at practical and theoretical levels." Thus, the goal of this particular plenary session was to stage an encounter between, on one hand, concrete developments - in both the South and the North - that can be seen as containing "fragments of communism" and, on the other hand, the renewed theoretical concern - philosophical but also political, economic, sociological, psychoanalytical, and artistic - in the "signifier 'communism'." Buck-Morss (in a slightly revised version of her actual talk) sets out to convince Marxists that sovereign right is an important, "perhaps the most important," issue for both Marxist theory and the development of a global left politics in the world today. She begins her "critical theory of the present" by locating the problem of sovereign right, which she defines as the "power to name the enemy," in a series of recent problems: the attacks of 9/11 - in al-Qaida's post-national concept of sovereignty (which, she observes, is shared by both multinational corporations and antiglobalization activists) and the U.S. response to its national sovereign power being defied; the history of really existing communism - where there was a clear distinction between sovereign power (the Communist Party) and state power (the Soviet state), a difference which is occluded by Max Weber's definition of sovereignty as the exclusive property of the nation state; and the current globalization debate - in which both Marxists and theorists of international political economy, in locating a gap between state boundaries and global economic power, fail to identify an alternative source of sovereign legitimacy. Buck-Morss turns to Carl Schmitt's writings, especially his treatment of nomos, as a way of moving beyond the idea that the state wields power and makes laws, to see the state as a sovereign state, which is power, which embodies the Law that makes laws legal. Her view is that the operation of sovereignty within the current global order is founded on forgetting its nomic origins: of sovereign territorial nation states in the pre-Westphalian sanctioning of European civilizational superiority, and of the separation of economy from political power in the eighteenth-century treatises of political economy. Buck-Morss argues that Marx also treated the economy as a separate force and was therefore blind to the "priority of the political over the economy." In her rethinking, the current discrepancy between the political order of the nation state and the global economic order involves a crumbling of nomos from within, which can only be redressed by imagining and intervening to create a new form of sovereignty, one that "articulates principles of democracy on a global level." If in the current state of emergency the sovereignty of the nation state is being called into question, it still serves to create national identities - and a class of people who are stateless. They live outside their place of birth. They migrate from one country to another. They work, pay taxes, hold credit cards, and marry. They often live illegally and are subject to human rights abuses. They are alternately enlisted as a necessary work force and threatened with barriers to entry. But they are not entirely anonymous, especially when they are subjected to sovereign state power and laws. In fact, the interdisciplinary art team of Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam) discovered that even the unrecognized state of Taiwan has a mug-shot archive of photographs of those who are forced to apply for official state recognition - for residency cards, work permits, and so on. Their multimedia piece serves to document the existence of such stateless persons - and thus allow us to rethink the violent operations of sovereign power that render these people both invisible, as faceless entities caught within the bureaucratic machinery through which that power is exercised, and visible, when they are discussed and debated in terms of the anonymous identities into which they have been categorized. Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Louis Althusser's life will know that he was a manic-depressive who killed his wife. And while that episode, together with the publication of his autobiography, generated considerable commentary (only some of which rose above the mean-spirited, facile attempts to make the link between his psychological disorder and his contributions to the rethinking of Marxian theory), Roland Boer sets out to explore another dimension of Althusser's life and work, which he believes has been met with "embarrassed silence": his early Catholicism and theological texts. Boer focuses his attention on four key texts (written between 1946 and 1951) in which he finds evidence of Althusser's "increasingly despairing efforts" to forge an alliance between progressive Catholicism and Marxism. In Boer's view, while Althusser did eventually join the French Communist Party and break from the Church, there are both formal elements of and specific examples from his theological writings that reappear in some of Althusser's Marxian texts. For example, Boer notes that references to the Church play a central role in Althusser's discussion of ideological state apparatuses (in that schooling comes to occupy the position in mid-twentieth-century bourgeois society akin to the influence of the Church in medieval society) and in his critique of idealism (in counterposing materialist science and idealist religion as warring parties within the theoretical class struggle of philosophy). But beyond these references, Boer argues that theological thought is even more decisive for Althusser, especially in his theory of ideology: the narrative of the interpellation section of the famous essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)" passes through - in Boer's view, it seeks its "breakthrough and depth" in - the Christian form of ideology, which allows him to consider all forms of ideology as both universal and eternal. It is this "Catholic blind spot" that, in Boer's account, can help to explain Althusser's universalist interpretation of Marxism. Religion also occupies a central position in Creston Davis's reexamination of the Marxist conception of revolution and his attempt to produce a model that unites materialism and idealism (and avoids the pitfalls often attributed to each). For Davis, a theological notion of revelation, as embodied in the revolutionary figure of Charles Peguy's Joan of Arc, can serve to open "new ways of thinking and enacting a politics of difference in the world." He begins by distinguishing revolution - defined as a violent act within the social world that confirms the truth of a better world which class conflict serves to mask - and revelation - a form of knowledge that is manifest from outside the social world, by a divine force. In order to salvage the transcendent power of religion for revolutionary ends, Davis needs both to distance his approach from that in which religion is captured by a lust for worldly power (his example is George W. Bush) and to challenge the static, oppositional relationship between revolution/materialism and revelation/idealism. In order to accomplish the latter, he establishes a theological structure that incorporates, at one and the same time, the mystery of life that "gives birth to a design for truth and the enactment of justice and liberation in the world" and a "robust materialist politics." Davis draws his example of the revolutionary/revelatory intertwining of idealism and materialism from Peguy's drama, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc. For Davis, Joan is able to avoid both proletarian false consciousness and bourgeois acceptance in order to bring about a revolt, a willingness to act that "cannot be disjoined from revelation." Davis's concern, however, is that appeals to divine revelation can produce unchecked violence, a totalitarian danger that needs to be neutralized by "drawing on an ontological liberating power that cannot be owned or possessed by anyone nor used to justify violence in the name of ideology." Baruch de Spinoza's work has served as an important source for rethinking and extending Marxist philosophy, especially in relation to Louis Althusser's writings, as has been well documented in the pages of RM (see, for examples, the essays by Montag [2/3 and 10/3], Surin [7/2], Goldstein [16/3], Fourtounis [17/1], and Sharp [17/4]). Here, Jason Read finds in Pierre Macherey's "turn to Spinoza" a solution to what Read considers to be the pitfalls in Althusser's concept of theoretical practice, and thus a way of formulating a properly materialist understanding of philosophy for Marxism. Althusser originally invented the idea of theoretical practice not in order to glorify theoretical work but to challenge the autonomy of thinking and to investigate "the work that thinking does, its limitations and effects." In Read's view, Althusser's notion suffered from two problems: theoreticism (the claim to have unconditioned knowledge of the conditions of all knowledge) and determinism (the reduction of thought to politics, to the class struggle). What he finds in Macherey's reading of Spinoza is a conception of theoretical practice that avoids these pitfalls and yet succeeds in conceptualizing the material effectivity, the productive dimension, of thought. The key to formulating a connection between production and ideas is causality - specifically, that ideas are determined by other ideas that they, in turn, affect and determine. Ideas and things are conceived to have not a parallel connection but the same connection, which is a necessary causal relation. This common order doesn't make thought and matter identical but it is what allows Spinoza (as interpreted by Macherey) to speak of thought as a kind of production, "as something which produces knowledge from given concepts and experiences." As Read puts it, thinking is overdetermined by both the causality of logic and ideas and by the causality of affects and experiences. It is this complex causality that accounts for the differences and connections between knowledge and superstition, truth and error, and so on. It is also key, argues Read, to understanding the effectivity of thought, the manner in which it transforms its conditions - not by virtue of its being true but in terms of its causal connections with other ideas. In other words, Spinoza conceives knowledge to be in this world, and to be engaged in a constant struggle, a never-ending practice, to extend its power within a community that reinforces it. Spinoza's materialism, like Marx's, is thus not a description of the ultimate nature of reality (for example, of matter over ideas) but, instead, a recognition that philosophy is one particular practice, with determinate limits and effects, situated by other practices. Such a materialist philosophical practice does not seek true principles through purity and distance from the world; it is rather an operation, "acting within determinate conditions in order to become autonomous, to produce effects of freedom" and thereby to transform the world. The relationship between politics and philosophy is also the main theme of the interview with Jean-Luc Nancy that we publish here for the first time in English. We want to thank both our friends at the Paris-based journal Vacarme for graciously giving us permission to include the interview in the pages of RM and Jason Smith for, once again, producing an elegant translation of a difficult text. Vacarme, now in its tenth year of publication, developed out of a set of political and philosophical preoccupations that, while not the same as those that initially inspired RM, share a concern that traditional ways of posing theoretical and political questions no longer apply and that new forms of thought - new concepts, new imaginaries, new ways of understanding the pasts of Marxism and of charting its futures - are required. During the course of the interview with Nancy, two editors of the journal, Mathieu Potte-Bronvile and Stanley Grelet, describe the "dysfunctional state of things" in which they found (and continue to find) themselves and how they think Nancy's work represents a response to these circumstances. They mention, in particular, the problems associated with the political status of philosophy, the absence of collective work, the link between philosophy and community, the "irruption of the communist exigency" in the events surrounding the first Gulf War, and the difficulty of forming political commitments in a world transformed by globalization. Nancy, for his part, expresses a belief that we are living through a "shift in history," comparable to the transition from antiquity to the modern world, which can be experienced as a loss but also as a beginning. What is lost is a certain vision of the political as the realization of an essence (which involved both the expansion of the state and a vision of the withering away of the state), a "death of God" that requires us to redefine the relationship between the political and democracy, the idea of secularization, and so on. Nancy seeks to distance himself from the idea that "everything is political" and to criticize one of his own formulations, the idea that community, being-in-common, is coextensive with the political. He also believes it is necessary to take up once again the issue of Capital, confirming its worldwide expansion as envisioned by Marx but also its "unhinged" and "anxious" state in the form of neoliberalism. Continuing with his discussion of Marx, and linking it to his understanding of communism, Nancy focuses on two issues: First, Marx's notion of the social production of human beings corresponds to an ontology of being-in-common, and thus an idea of communism as not opposed to or superimposed on the individual but as constitutive of the individual. Second, exploitation involves the confiscation of the absolute value created by human beings, their dignity, which is masked as commodity value. So, communism does not involve the overcoming of alienation to return to a given human nature - value and humanity "such as they are in themselves" - but the production and creation of that which is "absolutely human." In order to move in this direction, Nancy argues that it is not sufficient to put the economy in question in the name of the ethical or political but to follow up on Marx's "deepest inspiration" and to renew the ontological question of the economic itself. Finally, Nancy discusses the new senses of the world created by globalization (in reality, "as old as capitalism itself") including a Westernization of the world (which he sees as both a moment of uncontested domination by the West and an "unsettling disidentification" of the West), a combination of expansion and shrinking (which, for him, means that what is in the world is all that now exists), and technological transformations (which enable both new possibilities of control and new forms of resistance). Thus, we are confronted by the "naked obviousness of bare existence" that brings with it new ideas and "plenty of tasks for thought." And, for Nancy, there is nothing apolitical in the intellectual work that takes up these questions. For Marxists, one of the important intellectual tasks is to identify and make sense of the new "ontological realities for labor" in their broadest context. Richard McIntyre and Michael Hillard set out to do just that in their Remarx essay, focusing their Marxist approach to industrial relations on rethinking the working class in terms of changes in the labor process and the links between households and capitalist workplaces. What they want to avoid are attempts to "go back to the future," which they identify with the work of such authors as Beverly Silver and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Their own approach involves taking reproduction seriously and, as a consequence, decentering the labor process as the only site of resistance to capitalism. In their view, both capitalist enterprises and households are social sites where work is done and surplus labor is produced, appropriated, and distributed, in other words, where class processes exist. However, the two sites are constituted in different ways - economically, culturally, and politically - and therefore the struggles that take place within them, and the ways such struggles affect one another, are crucial to understanding from a class perspective the changing nature of labor since 1980. McIntyre and Hillard note, for example, there has been recent blurring of home and work and that the industrialization of family time has created tensions that have been displaced onto such social enemies as gay marriage and illegal immigrants. Even more, the "economic turbulence and ideological shifts" of the past thirty years, which led to a lowering of the value of labor power, have also created new tensions within already fragile households, sending them into crisis. And while the disintegration of household class structures has imposed enormous costs on people, McIntyre and Hillard believe that new political opportunities (which traditional scholars in industrial relations and labor studies refuse to recognize or analyze) are being opened up. Their view is that making the link between the crisis in households and the effects of increased exploitation in capitalist enterprises can provide "the basis for a new socialist politics in the United States." A pair of book reviews completes this issue. In the first, Enda Brophy examines two recent volumes edited by Timothy Murphy on autonomist Marxism: a collection of Antonio Negri's writings from the 1970s and, with Abdul-Karim Mustapha, a set of essays that deal with Negri's older writings and show how his insights can be applied in the current conjuncture. Brophy finds the reading of the five essays by Negri himself to be, at this distance, "an invariably demanding and productive experience." Demanding, because they refer to a world that has long passed on; productive, because they provide insight into the movement of Italian autonomist Marxism and the role that Negri himself played in giving voice to and in shaping that movement. She also notes that the collection is enhanced by a glossary of key terms and by translations that are clear and create consistency across texts. For Bro phy, the Murphy and Mustapha volume is a "useful companion" in that some of the authors succeed in contextualizing Negri's texts (such as their reception inside and outside Italy) and the autonomist movement (including the numerous splits) while others show how the ideas of autonomist Marxism can be utilized today (for example, in relation to the refusal of work and in conjunction with indigenous struggles). While Brophy notes both limits to Negri's thought at the time and gaps in the latter collection, she does recommend both volumes (as well as Murphy's translation of Negri's Subversive Spinoza) to those who want a "deepened engagement with the thought of Antonio Negri and the broader tradition from which he emerges." Robert Pollin's Contours of Descent is the object of the second review. Asatar Bair notes that he uses Pollin's book as a text in his introductory macroeconomics course and that Pollin manages to demolish - in an "evenhanded and reasonable" manner - conservative arguments about the ideal economy of the 1990s. Pollin structures his critique of unregulated market capitalism around the ideas of three central figures: Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Karl Polanyi. Bair's view is that, while Pollin is on "solid ground" in summarizing the key arguments of Keynes (concerning the role of uncertainty and finance) and Polanyi (on the unfairness of outcomes produced by disembedded markets), he "falters" when it comes to Marx. Bair's concern is that the "Marx problem" is confined to workers having less power than employers in bargaining for wages and that other important dimensions of Marx's critique of capitalism - exploitation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, dialectical materialism, and so on - are simply overlooked. Thus, Bair recommends the volume as a "solid liberal critique" of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism but he suggests that readers look elsewhere for a perspective that "could perhaps revitalize popular movements across the globe." After a brief hiatus occasioned by our change of publishers, RM is once again available in bookstores. If your favorite bookstore does not have recent copies of RM in the journals section, please let us know and we will make sure to inform the distributor. And, of course, if you have any comments on the journal itself, or on our redesigned web site (rethinkingmarxism.org), please don't hesitate to contact us.

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Abstract:

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.

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.

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-à-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."

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 Félix 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.

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."

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 not 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."

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 Paper Voices) 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, Attalia, 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.

Jacques Bidet has long argued that Marx's Capital 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 Capital 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."

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 María, both maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juárez - 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 María.) 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 María.

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 Logic, 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."

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 very sense of themselves 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?"

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.

The Editors

Notes:

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.

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In this issue we continue with our series of thematic symposia - this one, on the Gramscian notion of hegemony. As Charles Hawksley explains in the special editor's preface, "Hegemony: Explorations into Consensus, Coercion, and Culture" is a collection of seven papers whose authors elaborate their understanding of the concept of hegemony first developed by Antonio Gramsci (along with other key concepts, such as subalternity and civil society) and then investigate the actual functioning of capitalist hegemony through a variety of concrete historical case studies. Readers will find in this symposium from "down under" further evidence - on top of the many original essays on Gramsci's work published over the years in RM (see the appendix to David F. Ruccio's essay in the January 2006 issue for a complete list) - of the richness of Gramsci's contributions to Marxian theory and of their relevance for economic, cultural, and social analysis.

Alistair Davidson opens the symposium by situating the papers in the context of Australian history and scholarship - in terms of the effects of Gramsci's politics and writings in Australia and of the later Australian academic literature on Gramsci and hegemony. Davidson traces Gramsci's influence beginning with the generation of Italian refugees from fascism who began to arrive in Australia in the 1920s and continuing into the 1960s and 1970s within and around the Communist Party of Australia. Davidson's own work (especially Antonio Gramsci, the Man, His Ideas, published in 1968) inaugurated a new debate in Australia, focused on Gramsci and his role in developing and extending Marxian theory. Davidson identifies the scholars, students, and activists who made up what he considers to be the "first generation of 'gramscians'" and discusses the controversies provoked by the resurgence of interest in Gramsci's ideas among a second generation of Australian Marxist theorists. Lamenting both that a "lively debate of international significance" has been largely overlooked outside Australia and that by the 1990s Gramsci studies had "sunk into the doldrums" within Australia, Davidson is heartened by the signs of a recent revival of interest among a third generation of Gramsci scholars in Australia. In his view, what is significant about the work of this new group, exemplified by the papers in the RM symposium, is that it signfies a shift in focus, from an investigation into Gramsci's history and philosophy to the application of Gramsci's theory of hegemony "to a region of the world that he himself neglected."

One of the effects of utilizing Gramsci's notions of hegemony and the subaltern is to recover the history of social groups that fall outside, and are made invisible by an exclusive concern with, the institutions and culture of organized labor. In the case of late-nineteenth-century Australia, the "larrikins," working-class youth who were much maligned in Sydney because of their "blatant disregard for respectable society and respectable leisure activities," are one such group. Kylie Smith draws on ideas borrowed from both psychoanalytic theory and Gramsci to argue that, contrary to the established history, "larrikinism" can be understood not as an expression of a working-class "false consciousness" (an antiauthoritarianism born out of convictism) but, rather, as a type of subjectivity that opposed the "rhetoric and practices of respectability and discipline" through which industrial capitalism sought to create new workers and new human beings. In a Freudian sense, larrikinism was a way of dealing with the repression of "animalistic instincts" required by the new forms of work; from a Gramscian perspective, it was a subaltern threat to the new industrial capitalist hegemony, which in turn provoked the coercive tendency in that hegemony. For Smith, both the activities of the larrikins and the use of the state to attempt to discipline and punish them reveal the psychological and social forces at work in the constitution of capitalist hegemony.

Gramsci's approach can also be adapted to the colonial context. Drawing from Gramsci's discussion of the "Southern Question," and refusing what he considers to be the formulaic contrast between consent and coercion utilized by others (such as Subaltern Studies scholar Ranajit Guha), Andrew Wells examines the violent imposition of capitalist hegemony - coercion plus consent - in India and Indochina. What is important for Wells is that, prior to colonial rule, the commodity form, with respect to land ownership, the production of goods and services, and labor regimes, was "limited and subordinate" to noncapitalist relations. Subsequent changes in labor relations and forms of labor exploitation did not occur "by magic or from a deep-seated desire to embrace capitalism" but, instead, were initiated and carried out by colonial states. According to Wells, the state first sought to eradicate communal and nontransferable land ownership in both regions through a variety of measures, from the creation of monetary tax systems (and associated land surveys and increases in tax rates) and transfers of property (to the state and to new private landowners) to the regulation of key crop prices and the formation of a large "unwieldy and corrupt" public service to administer the system. This transformation was accompanied by new forms of commodity production (in both agriculture and mining) and new modes of labor control ("somewhere between slavery and free wage labor"). In contrast, racial distinctions and cultural traditions were not transformed but, instead, were used to justify the new forms of bondage and the denial of citizenship to colonized peoples. Capitalism in the colonies was thus limited to property, products, and labor - a capitalist economy but not a capitalist society. Wells's conclusion is that "colonialism created a very effective mode of coercion over the indigenous subjects, but failed to create a self-sustaining form of imperial hegemony."

Charles Hawksley examines another example of the construction of hegemony through colonial rule - in the case of Papua New Guinea. Hawksley follows Gramsci in arguing that colonialism can be morally justified when coercion gives way to consent and both are utilized in service of the goal of "bringing people to modernity." With respect to Australian rule during the postwar period in the eastern highlands of Papua and New Guinea, Hawksley finds evidence that early measures of coercive "pacification" and the institution of the rule of law were followed by new private and public initiatives to create consent: settlement by former colonial administrators, road-building, labor contracts for young men, the promotion of new commercial agricultural products, and the provision of educational and health services. For Hawksley, the "colonial tradeoff" meant a willingness to accede to administrative control in exchange for the general promise of economic and social development. In this manner, Eastern Highlanders came to accept Australian rule and to participate in the capitalist transformation of their society. The construction of capitalist colonial hegemony thus encouraged them to move, in Hawksley's view, "from the common sense of the old ways to the good sense of the new."

In Anthony Ashbolt's essay, attention shifts to the metropolitan centers in the 1960s, a period ironically characterized both by a flourishing of interest in Gramsci's notion of hegemony and as the battleground for current attempts to construct a neoconservative hegemony. Ashbolt expresses his disagreement with those on the Left who view the Sixties as leading more or less directly to consumer capitalism and neoliberal reforms. While he finds some merit in the argument that the counterculture created opportunities for marketing new lifestyles and modes of consumption, such an argument is "eclipsed by faulty reasoning" in the sense that it is based on a simple and linear view of history. Ashbolt's own analysis points to the conclusion that Sixties cultural radicals formulated potent critiques of and alternatives to bourgeois society. What Ashbolt finds particularly interesting from a Gramscian perspective are the attempts during the 1960s to create counter-institutions - alternative communities, the underground press, other "free spaces" - which can been as "concrete elements in a somewhat underdeveloped war of position" and a breeding ground for activists in a variety of liberation movements. Thus, while certain forms of cultural radicalism from that period may have been susceptible, because of their internal contradictions, both to cooptation and mischaracterization, they also developed dreams of the good society. Recovering these dreams can, in Ashbolt's view, serve to combat the current pessimism of the will.

Damien Cahill suggests that another urgent task for left thinkers and activists is to analyze contemporary neoliberalism - the forces that underpin its success, its likely future trajectories, and its points of weakness - in order to form the basis of an alternative political strategy. Before focusing his critique on the contours of neoliberal hegemony in Australia, Cahill reminds us that actual neoliberal policies do not necessarily correspond to the theories or ideal models of neoliberalism. For example, attempts to dismantle the welfare state and to deregulate markets have been accompanied by new for ms of state intervention and the imposition of a new set of regulations. Thus, Cahill views neoliberalism not as a retreat of the state or a freeing up of society but as a "regulatory logic" driven by particular class interests. In the specific case of Australia, finance, resources, and pastoral capital allied with large, export-oriented transnational capital have led the attack on organized labor. Cahill examines the neoliberal changes in such diverse spheres as work organization and the organization of production, consumption, and social geography that have resulted in the individualization of labor, the explosion of debt-financed consumption, and the disruption of working-class communities. And yet, while Cahill sees the neoliberal state project as both coherent and well-organized, he also finds evidence of the deep unpopularity of elements of neoliberalism within the Australian working class. Thus, the neoliberal project in Australia remains precarious, having failed to colonize common sense and creating "structures of feeling which might yet be channeled against neoliberalism itself."

Finally, what is the relationship between Gramsci's conception of hegemony and contemporary postmarxism? Richard Howson notes that while the postmarxist writings of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and others are often criticized for remaining a purely speculative theory, incapable of engaging actual processes of sociopolitical change, they are clearly indebted to Gramsci. And it is only by ensuring a "clear and strong grounding in Gramsci's theory of hegemony" that, according to Howson, postmarxism can have any real social and political efficacy. Of particular interest to Howson is Gramsci's critique of the determinism in the Marxian base-superstructure model, which led him to conceive of hegemony in terms of an "ethico-political historical bloc" that is able to achieve moral and intellectual leadership and thus to produce a "national-popular" consciousness. Postmarxists, of course, follow Gramsci in rejecting economic and political determinism. Howson further credits them with elaborating the ethico-political aspect of hegemony by moving beyond identity politics, a "system of alliances between differentially related identities," to emphasize the chain of equivalences among anti-system antagonisms. The key here is that the particular antagonisms need to be transformed through an equivalential logic so that a collective will or universality can emerge. For Howson, the proliferation of antagonisms and the tensions they produce is a "real issue for people located very much in the concrete world." His recommendation, as a first step for the postmarxist project, is to recognize the existence of all antagonisms as legitimate, in order to then "find strategies or wars of position" to "challenge the system in an organic movement."

Antagonisms are also at the center of "Take Me Off Your Database," a segment of visuals from a project by Visible Collective and Naaem Mohaiemen recently installed at the Queens Museum of Art: the growing list of names of immigrant men detained in the United States after 9/11, documented by the Migration Policy Institute; the concerns of one man who found his name in the art installation and initially wanted it removed; creating political art and installing it in the public sphere, at the risk of outright censorship and market forces; charges of ethnic absolutism in the world of international art; the assertion of oneness in the context of racial and class differences. Each antagonism creates a tension that requires further clarification, establishes new connections, and creates the possibility of further conversations about the effects of both art and government policy.

Richard Greeman uses the medium of a Remarx essay to introduce readers to Victor Serge (1880-1947), a "respected French novelist and a notorious Russian revolutionary," whose archives are now available for scholarly study in the Yale University Library but whose life and work mostly languish in obscurity. Greeman sets out to rectify this situation, describing Serge's trajectory from finding ways to survive in the poor streets of Brussels and Paris through his participation in the civil war in Petrograd and the founding of the Comintern to his subsequent imprisonment and exile in Paris and Mexico, and his many novels, including those he considers to be Serge's "most enduring work," Memoirs of a Revolutionary, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Years Without Forgiveness. What Greeman consideres to be particularly exemplary about Serge's activities and writings is his commitment to the militant's "double duty" - to defend the revolution from both its external and its inner enemies - which led him to work closely with the Bolsheviks and to criticize Stalin's system of trials and his economic programs of forced industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. In Greeman's view, Serge's "antitotalitarian socialist politics" and his commitment to both Marxist revolution and artistic creation help explain why his reputation as a novelist may have suffered. But they have also served as the impetus to form the Victor Serge Public Library and the Praxis Research and Study Center in Moscow, where contemporary Russians have access to revolutionary ideas.

Four recent books relevant to Marxist scholars, students, and activists are reviewed in the pages below. Valerie Holliday writes approvingly not only of the "lucidity and accessibilty" of The Resurgence of East Asia, edited by Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden, but also of its being a "necessary and inevitable contribution to the study of world economics." Read as the appropriate sequel to Arrighi's earlier book, The Long Twentieth Century, the new volume emphasizes the need to rethink globalization by including the regionalizing of areas of the global economy. For Holliday, the authors' methodology - departing from world-systems theory, and according to which East Asia is as much a political and cultural entity as an economic one - serves both to redefine the region's historical reality and to view the interaction of the East Asian region with Western regions, especially the United States, in a new light.

Sener Akturk is much less positive about another sequel: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude. Akturk identifies two conceptual problems with Hardt and Negri's treatment of the counter-hegemonic force that arises in reaction to the system they wrote about in Empire: the conceptualization of biopower, and the way the multitude emerges as a by-product of imperial practices. On the first point, Akturk believes that Hardt and Negri incorrectly juxtapose the biopolitics of the ruling class to the biopower that the multitude possesses instead of seeing them as "mutually constituting and reinforcing." On the second point, the formation of a self-conscious, oppositional multitude, Akturk is concerned that Hardt and Negri exclude from consideration billions of people who are neither exploited nor agents in anti-globalization social movements - the "people who are unemployed, the people who do not have representative institutions to respond to and to renovate, the people who do not have the welfare state to begin with but who are subjected to the war-making capacities of the Euro-American states at the core of global capitalism." In other words, Akturk sees the multitude as reproducing "the exclusionary logic of Empire" itself.

A quite different approach to radical social change is presented by Cynthia Kaufman in her Ideas for Action, which Andrew Stevens finds to be a "useful primer for social movement literature." While Stevens finds Kaufman's approach to be "over-individualistic, voluntaristic, and utopian," leaving it to readers to develop their own vision of alternatives, he does see the book as providing a rewarding starting point for analysis on a wide variety of topics: the meaning of liberation, intellectual traditions (stemming from such diverse thinkers as Karl Marx and Emma Goldman to bell hooks and Judith Butler), historical and contemporary movements (from socialism and anarchism to civil rights and sexual politics), the history of capitalism, forms of oppression (including race, colonialism, gender/sex, and class), and approaches to forming organizations and creating alternatives. What Stevens believes to be the most fruitful aspect of the text is the author's "constant commitment to organizing, and how this theme is related to the various struggles presented."

Michael Lebowitz's Beyond Capital is based on the premise that Marx's magnum opus is a rich but ultimately one-sided treatment of capitalism, in which the role of workers is inadequately developed. Andriana Vlachou finds this particular argument to be somewhat of an exaggeration, although she expresses her appreciation for the centrality of Marx's method, including the stress on dialectics, in Lebowitz's treatment. During the course of her thorough, chapter-by-chapter review, Vlachou focuses particular attention on the author's argument that the totality presented in Capital remains incomplete, because the reproduction of capital requires something outside of capital, the reproduction of the working class. Thus, on Lebowitz's understanding, what needs to be developed is an analysis of the other side of the capitalist totality, the "worker' s own need for development." This project requires an analysis of, among other things, the changing value of labor power, the different forms of struggle that need to be fought from the standpoint of labor, the role of workers as both wage laborers and non-wage laborers, the differences among workers based on age, gender, race, and many other "concrete determinations," and the potential alliances between workers and new social actors. And while Vlachou believes that Marxists need to pay more attention than does Lebowitz to the aspects of "exhaustion, fear, and disappointment experienced within the course of class struggles," she expresses her agreement with Lebowitz's suggestion that it is "essential to resurrect the vision of the society of associated producers" in order to move beyond capital.

By all accounts, Rethinking Marxism 2006 was a great success. Over the course of three days at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, more than 750 people from across the United States and around the globe participated in a wide variety of panels, plenary sessions, workshops, and artistic events. The ideas presented and debated in the sessions, as well as those taken up and discussed in informal conversations among the conference participants, serve as reminders that Marxian critiques of economics, culture, and society continue to play a vital role in intellectual and social struggles throughout the world today.

The members of the RM06 conference committee labored long and hard to organize that extraordinary event. We therefore wish to publicly acknowledge and thank Jack Amariglio, Vincent Lyon-Callo, Yahya Madra, John Roche, and the many other people - including Enid Arvidson, Jason Borenstein, Rob Burns, Graham Cassano, Stephen Cullenberg, George DeMartino, Kenan Erçel, Bilge Erten, Stephen Healy, Susan Jahoda, Jesal Kapadia, Philip Kozel, Claude Misukiewicz, Jackie Morse, Ceren Özselçuk, Elizabeth Ramey, Cecilia Rio, David F. Ruccio, Maliha Safri, Peter Tamas, and the members of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis and the Amherst Coordinating Committee - for the remarkable time and effort they volunteered over the course of more than two years of preparing for RM06 and making it such a tremendous success.

The Editors

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In this issue assembled for publication as we put the finishing touches on preparations for the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference in Amherst, we are pleased to present the final symposium that was originally rehearsed at our preceding conference, "Marxism and the World Stage." This symposium, the product once again of the patient and unstinting labor of former editor and current editorial board member Jack Amariglio, comprises a set of commentaries on the categories and critical modes of analysis elaborated in Transition and Development in India by Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg.

S. Charusheela opens the conversation by first identifying what she considers to be the theoretical advances contained in Chakrabarti and Cullenberg's unique critique of the long history of Marxist debates concerning development and transition as well as their formulation of an alternative conception of development, then argues that the authors' approach based on "class sets" ultimately overlooks a key issue - that of subaltern subjectivity. Charusheela explains how, on the plus side, Chakrabarti and Cullenberg utilize the lessons learned from poststructuralism and postcolonialism to deconstruct traditional Marxist approaches to agrarian development and the transition to capitalism in India. She credits, for example, the authors with dismantling and moving beyond the "determinism, essentialism, teleology, and Eurocentrism" that have served as the basis for the ongoing debates, and thus with opening the space for a different way of thinking about causality, transition, and development. She continues by showing how, in rejecting developmentalism but attempting to retain some notion of development, the authors present a disaggregated conception of "class sets" in order to formulate an innovative notion of an ideal society, "expanded communism," which combines due attention to both material needs and social relations. Still, Charusheela expresses her concern that - notwithstanding, and perhaps even because of, the strengths of the authors' conceptual approach (including their distancing from the problematic category of feudalism, which "continues to map Europe's history onto the Third World") - Chakrabarti and Cullenberg fall short of developing an alternative conception of non-Western or subaltern subjectivity.

Maliha Safri, like Charusheela, believes that Chakrabarti and Cullenberg have succeeded in pushing beyond an "unfruitful deadlock" concerning the relationship between capitalism and its noncapitalist other. In her view, their work also leads in two new directions: to a new dialogue between subaltern studies and postmodern Marxism, and to a new theorization of the social surplus. On the first point, Safri explains that "these two agendas need each other": subaltern studies would benefit by incorporating the decentered class analysis formulated by Chakrabarti and Cullenberg; at the same time, the kind of "detailed thinking about power" that is central to subaltern studies has the potential of enriching Marxian class analysis. As for the surplus, Safri argues that the approach adopted by the authors overlaps with the work of others (such as J. K. Gibson-Graham, David Ruccio, and George DeMartino) that has appeared in RM. More than that, Chakrabarti and Cullenberg elaborate an ethics of the social surplus, which connects the producers, appropriators, and distributors of surplus in one class site to other social fields. On this view, a communist relation to the surplus finds no parallel in bourgeois rights but involves "a qualitatively different type of ethics, politics, and subjectivity."

Stephen Resnick, for his part, recognizes the originality of Chakrabarti and Cullenberg's book in providing a way of achieving two different needs - alleviating poverty and eliminating class exploitation - while, at the same time, "recognizing and elaborating the contradictions and potential conflicts their relationship presents." Thus, Resnick reads the title of the authors' book as signifying both a transition to a society without class exploitation and the development of wealth to satisfy the needs of the poor. But, for Resnick, their approach raises additional questions. First, if each and every site in society is conceived to be always already in transition, how is it possible to identify the transition from one kind of society to another? Presumably, only by choosing and prioritizing a subset of social processes - such as changes in surplus appropriation and wealth distribution. Second, if some distributions of the surplus (e.g., for satisfying basic needs or engaging in extravagant consumption) jeopardize the very existence of the surplus, is it not the case that the desired class structures (and thus the sources of the surplus) may be quite fragile? The third issue concerns the authors' critique of essentialism in both historical materialism and subaltern studies. In Resnick's view, categories such as the "peasantry" retain little if any meaning after Chakrabarti and Cullenberg produce their critical review of the Indian modes of production debate. Finally, Resnick applauds the authors' analysis of India's new economic policy, since they reject the arguments both for and against free trade, and thus the shared terrain of "too many" neoclassical and radical economists.

In their response, Chakrabarti and Cullenberg begin by explaining both the context of their initial exploring of the "Marxist-postcolonial lineage" and what their project means to them in retrospect. They then take up the issues raised by each commentator. In regard to Safri, they express their fundamental agreement with the importance of analyzing the mutually constitutive relations of power and class, but reiterate their view that there is no "one-to-one correspondence" between these relations; they therefore continue to reject what they consider to be the "power theory of class" elaborated within subaltern studies. On the issue of the social surplus, Chakrabarti and Cullenberg explain that their approach attempts to bridge the gap between needs-based distributions of the surplus and the mode of appropriating that surplus, which the idea of expanded communism is intended to capture. As for subjectivity, the authors express their agreement with both Safri and Charusheela: on one hand, they aimed to make subjectivity an open question; on the other hand, they sought to relate the problem of subject formation to expanded communism. In later work, they expand this approach by producing an alternative representation of the colonial subject of the Third World, which they name the "world of the third." Chakrabarti and Cullenberg conclude their response by focusing on the intersection of poverty, ethics, and subjectivity: only an expanded communism that represents an "intolerance to poverty" constitutes the appropriate goal of transition and development, in India and around the world.

Slavoj iek adopts a fundamentally different view of the surplus: for him, collective appropriation (as opposed to private, capitalist appropriation) remains inscribed within the logic of capital. Therefore, iek concludes, the search for revolutionary potential needs to abandon the Marxian proletariat and move, instead, to the slums of the world's megalopolises where the signs of the "new forms of social awareness" can be found. This stance puts him at odds not only with the political options associated with traditional Marxism and the class analysis of postmodern Marxism but also with the notion of the multitude that serves as the model for resistance to global capitalism in the recent work of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. In fact, iek notes what he considers to be the perhaps ironic coincidence between the visions set forth by Marx and by Hardt and Negri: in both cases, capitalism contains the seeds of its own demise and supersession. The question iek poses to both projects - proletariat and multitude, socialization of the surplus and absolute democracy - is whether their conceptions of resistance and the alternatives they put forward are not, in the end, expressions of the "ultimate capitalist fantasy." iek is similarly critical of two other contemporary projects, outlined in the work of Giorgio Agamben and of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which, while seemingly opposed, both presuppose a "Utopian point." But it is exactly a notion of Utopia that is missing from recent protests, such as the riots in France. For iek, there was no program in the burning Paris suburbs, nothing comparable to May '68, just an attempt to gain "visibility" and a demand for "recognition." If in iek's view Hardt and Negri's framework cannot effectively explain events like the Paris riots, it is because they are still too close to traditional Marxism, too reliant on the "Marxist scheme of historical progress," including the tension between the relations of production and the productive forces. Therefore, iek chooses to look beyond the proletariat and the multitude to locate the equivalent of the "universal individual" - or, with Alain Badiou, today's authentic "evental sites" - in the slums of Lagos and across the Third World.

Young Min Moon presents and critically interrogates the meanings - the work at play, and the play at work - in two example s of the recent cultural performances of Korean artist Seung Wook Koh. The series of images from "Playing in the Vacant Lot" and "For Elise" show Koh alternatively excavating and sitting in a hole in the frozen landscape of Seoul and pulling, with lines attached to his ears, a platform on which a female pianist is playing the popular Beethoven composition. For Moon, Koh's bodily interventions represent an "anticonceptual" engagement with the cultural memories of contemporary Koreans, especially those associated with the military dictatorships: injunctions to work and to avoid the evils of rest and playing; the drive to obtain Westernized, "sophisticated and cultured" standards of living; the attraction to and ultimate perversion of Far Eastern spiritual traditions; and much more. He also sees Koh's active involvement in the everyday as challenging not only the commodification of creative practices but also the extent to which those practices are inscribed within accepted artistic norms. So, what is it in the desires felt or expressed by Koreans that Koh succeeds in capturing and revealing in his performances? And what is it in his performances - composed of various dimensions and levels of the mundane and the grotesque - that turns his labors into an effective critique of Korean society?

Does Utopia have a role to play in contemporary socialist and left praxis? Anna L. Peterson states up front that she sides with those (such as David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Norman Geras) who believe both that Utopianism "still has a vital place and that it requires substantial revision." And, in her view, the project of reviving and revising Utopian thinking can fruitfully be carried out by engaging the resources that religious Utopianism - "especially Christian images of and reflections about the reign of God" - have to offer. The concrete source of Peterson's reflections can be found in the contributions of the Catholic left in Central America, with respect to such movements as the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation and the Sandinista Front for National Liberation. What Peterson finds is that, in addition to traditional left concerns (e.g., concerning national independence, agrarian reform, and the improvement of basic services), Catholicism has contributed an emphasis on "solidarity" (emphasizing democracy, freedom from repression, and equality), which defines the "promised land" that participants in Central American revolutionary movements imagined and struggled for. While acknowledging the clear obstacles - that the Central American national liberation movements did not (or have not yet) achieved their ultimate goals, that the reign of God serves as a "detailed guide to life in the world" for a small minority within Christian history, and that Christian thinkers such as Jean Bethke Elshtain criticize all Utopian visions in the name of realistic politics - Peterson believes that radical Utopian thinking can serve to counter so-called neoliberal and pro-war realists and serve as a resource that "teaches us to desire better: to understand what is wrong about the status quo and to envision and work for better alternatives."

The damaging effects of the corporatization of North American universities have been extensively discussed and well documented. Jeffrey T. Nealon intervenes in this debate neither to affirm nor to condemn the "corporate university" but to identify the lessons academics might learn from the process of corporatization itself. In particular, Nealon notes that, while new corporate strategies have led to a shrinking of the ranks of middle management and the creation of a flexible command structure, the corporatization of the academy has "bloated itself on rigid layers of paper-shuffling administration" and increased the amount of casualized, part-time labor. What, then, is to be done? Nealon's view is that, instead of scapegoating university faculty (either for generally ignoring administrative responsibilities or, among the elite faculty, for creating a Faustian bargain to decrease their own teaching loads at the expense of part-time faculty) or rejecting a standard of excellence (since that's how many left professors have acquired and retained their positions), faculty and students should take a page from corporate economic discourse itself and seek to "cut the fat" of university administration. In other words, he believes that the "corporate university isn't corporate enough," that the corporate university has adopted an anachronistic model of management-driven corporatization. Therefore, instead of siding with cultural conservatives (to defend "true higher learning"), Nealon looks elsewhere, to economic conservatives, whose strategy would be to "unlock shareholder value" by trimming the administrative bureaucracy, investing that excess cash into the "core business" of the university, and turning the university back to the true shareholders: the faculty and students.

While noting with some approval the contemporary "returns to Lenin" (via, for example, the work of iek and of Hardt and Negri), Michael Marder expresses his concern that the failure to address Lenin's insights on the subject of usability itself - what Marder calls the prepragmatic domain - has limited our understanding of Lenin's usefulness in the current conjuncture. Marder offers a different, Derridean reading of Lenin's texts (based, in turn, on Marder's own translations), particularly State and Revolution and What Is to Be Done? that seeks to find in Lenin's words a direct, unmediated application to the present political conjuncture. Instead, Marder focuses on a series of thematic clusters - work before work, the complexity of the present, the importance of attunement to and attunement of a given situation, and the lifting of quotation marks - that, in his view, "enunciate the most pressing lessons of Leninism today." Work before work: without any predetermined succession of stages, devoid of any teleology and marked by a double delay, work (whether in the theoretical, political, or economic spheres) is neither purely destructive nor is it productive of something other than more work. The present: the temporality of the revolutionary movement requires both strict vigilance with respect to the given possibilities of the moment and intervening to create the necessary conditions within the present moment. Attunement to, in the sense of hearing and seeing the "transposition and modulations" of the current situation, and attunement of, by adjusting the party's mood with respect to that situation. And, finally, the lifting of quotation marks: for example, around the state, so that its role in mediating class conflict is laid bare, thereby presaging a "withering away of the state." For Marder, these four modalities are Lenin's way of positing the "self-erasure of the present that diverges from itself and, thereby, creates a space for revolutionary subjectivity."

In the first of the two essays that comprise the Remarx section, Ross Weiner demonstrates that, contra the discourse of privatization and free markets in the United States, there is a burgeoning public sector made up of state capitalist enterprises. The origin of these "public authorities" can be traced back to the New Deal, in that they represented a way of carrying out publicly funded projects by borrowing funds outside the usual limitations placed on the debt burden carried by cities and states. This also allows public authorities to utilize both debt and the surplus they extract from their workers in the production of commodities - utilities, healthcare, mass transit, and so on - in ways that are not directly accountable to the public. In Weiner's view, the only major difference between these state capitalist entities and private capitalist enterprises is the way the board of directors is composed. The result is that public authorities "have brought a (not so) little of the former USSR into the American heartland."

Paul Magee's Remarx essay is a paean to boredom - of Utopian literature and architecture, the Nullarbor desert in Australia, of unemployment. Taking Fredric Jameson's analysis of the politics of Utopian literature as his guide, Magee sees the boredom that has been attributed to texts such as Thomas More's Utopia - where everyone dresses the same, where both pain and pleasure are absent - not as a drawback, an unfortunate experience or a waste of time, but, rather, as an opening to difference. For Magee, that's what makes boredom political: it signals the process of learning; it announces the presence of a way of being "we do not, indeed cannot, know." In other words, the encounter with boredom opens our eyes to the possibility that we and the world in which we live could be "completely and utterly different."

Critical reviews of four recent books complete this issue of RM. According to John Conley, George Snedeker's The Politics of Cultural Theory is a valuable attempt to reinvigorate the critical potential of sociology: by introducing readers to the work of key thinkers - such as Georg Lukács, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, and Oliver C. Cox - and demonstrating the "necessity of literary criticism for any sociology worth the name." While Conley believes the book should have included a more sustained discussion of literary theory, he sees it as a useful introduction to "some of the key exemplars" of the kind of transgressive methodology that is central to Snedeker's work and to the revitalization of critical sociology. Steve Sherman is less positive about Devesh Vijay's Writing Politics: Left Discourse in Contemporary India. While he recognizes Vijay's effort to clarify the concepts employed by a wide range of writers on the Indian left, Sherman finds the treatment ultimately superficial, failing to discuss the political context and implications of those concepts. As for Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, Richard Wolff lauds Pierre Bourdieu's insights into the "hypocrisies and ruses of multinational capital," as well as his call for a radically different form of globalization and the need for collective action. Wolff, however, laments Bourdieu's distancing of his arguments from communism and Marxism, in a manner that misses many of the contradictions of neoliberalism and how an oppositional politics might exploit them. Finally, James J. Brittain offers his views on Bernard-Henri Lévy's War, Evil, and the End of History: although the writing is "exquisite, masterful and intriguing," the argument is "much less satisfying." Brittain faults Lévy with offering a postmodern discourse on contemporary geopolitics and yet doing so "without concrete evidence, a loaded political-theoretical position, and an openly anti-Marxist tone." The result is that, in Brittain's view, Lévy neither advances postmodern analysis nor does he explain why conflict continues to exist in the modern world.

The program for Rethinking Marxism 2006 is now complete: more than 460 people are scheduled to present their work in over 150 different panels, plenary sessions, and artistic events. And we expect hundreds more scholars, students, and activists from around the United States and across the globe will arrive in Amherst to participate in this event. Clearly, while Bush's war in Iraq continues to exact its miserable toll, and U.S. midterm electoral campaigns are demonstrating the weak opposition offered by official politicians, RM06 demonstrates that Marxism and other forms of critical thought continue to play a vital role in the world today. Readers of RM will encounter selected papers from the conference in future issues.
The Editors

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In this issue as part of the run-up to the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference to be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we devote a special section to "Setting in Motion," the art exhibit curated by Susan Jahoda and Jesal Kapadia for RM06. The exhibit itself will set in motion a provocative variety of individual and collaborative projects from across the United States and around the world, utilizing a wide range of media - including film, animation, video, and texts. The goal, drawing on the recent work of Jacques Rancière, is not to occupy the space created by the apparent weakening of "real" politics - not to substitute art for politics - but to relocate, redefine, and reshape that space. Here, using capsule summaries and a selection of poetry, stills, and images from fourteen distinct projects, Jahoda and Kapadia undertake to represent on the printed page how the works in the exhibit enact new ways of sensing and sense-making, of combining heterogeneous elements and different politics of sensibility, of making visible what has been rendered invisible, allowing new objects and new subjects to appear, disclosing hidden possibilities - in short, how they become "critical art" by creating and sustaining scenes of conflict, collision, and dissensus.

Yahya M. Madra, in his contribution to the art/iculations series, also confronts the issues surrounding the political aesthetics of contemporary critical art. Utilizing the Marxian critique of political economy in a subtle and creative manner, Madra contextualizes and interrogates the latest in the long series of Venice Biennials (the Venice Biennial being one among a burgeoning number of art biennials worldwide). Given the current penchant for combining national exhibition halls and curated multinational exhibits, Madra locates the Venice and other such international biennials within a "transitional conjuncture" in the mode of appropriating art: from art as a "sublimated object that functions as the representative of the national identity" to a new institutional form, one that seeks to combine the contradictory tendencies of, on the one hand, radicalized and pluralized art practices and, on the other hand, transnational corporate funding. What roles do these proliferating art biennials play? In Madra's view, they impose and create transnational aesthetic standards; they have become the new art market, in which the practices of selected artists are valorized; and they are part of the "festivalization of the arts" conducted and coordinated by global-city governments, transnational corporations, and internationally renowned curators. What then of the "critical art" that is exhibited in these biennials, which seeks to resist the commodity form by offering strong political perspectives and by assuming forms (such as performances and installations) that are difficult to market? The problem is that much of the art Madra encountered in Venice was often formulaic, sterile, and "reformist" - "not only despite but because of the political nature" of the works. As he explains, the art works were reformist to the extent that they represented an acceptance of, and then an attempt to navigate within, the formal structure of the biennial. The alternative outlined by Madra is to extend the questioning of the "material and institutional conditions of the imperial/national mode of appropriation of art" (by, for example, Hans Haacke in 1993 and Daniel Knorr in 2005) to critically engage the "new transnational mode of appropriating art qua spectacle."

A. Kiarina Kordela's goal in "Capital: At Least It Kills Time" is to formulate a theory of temporality and historicity appropriate to secular capitalist modernity. She then uses this theory to enter into a critical dialogue with several thinkers whose work plays an important role in redefining contemporary Marxist thought. Kordela is concerned, in particular, with theories of capitalist stage development (as utilized, for example, by Fredric Jameson), the so-called Neo-Spinozist Left (associated, in different ways, with both Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and deconstruction (especially Jacques Derrida). What is at stake, for Kordela, is a conception of history as a set of "synchronic blocks," each with its own formal logic, that makes it possible to understand the formal conditions of the existing block that need to be changed and to move to a "really other historical block." The key concepts Kordela deploys come from Marx and Lacan, who in her view shared the goal of carrying out a "transcendental critique" of value (both economic and linguistic), and Spinoza, who conceptualized the transcendent as both cause and effect of the historical. The resulting "pantheism of value" is the synchronic temporality of capital, and the emergence of a different historical block - in the here and now and not in some diachronic future - depends not on objective knowledge but, in Lacanian terms, on "surplus-enjoyment." The problem with Jameson's stages theory is that it adjoins the fantasmic surplus to objective knowledge (involving either the perpetuation of capitalism or its inevitable collapse). As for the "Neo-Spinozists," they either collapse the object of desire and the time of capital or construct desire as the necessary endpoint of some diachronic trajectory. Finally, for the deconstructionist left, there is no otherness, since the future is eternally deferred. For Kordela it is important to understand that capital has already killed the linear sequence of time, and that the "so-called 'future' is another present, yet unrealized block whose structure can be articulated only through its formal difference from the given past and present blocks."

The first essay in the Remarx section also focuses on the issue of time and history - in this case, to confront the problem of white working-class conservatism in the United States - but with an approach quite different from that of Kordela. Like Kordela, Geoff Mann argues that it is important to take the "temporal orientation" of politics seriously. However, he wants to distinguish the anti-futural "interest" articulated in and by the conservative, proto-fascist politics of the Bush regime with an "interest in the future" heralded by the Left. This, by way of moving beyond the given (Weberian or other) interests often imputed to the working class, and the resulting false-consciousness analysis (of writers like Thomas Frank), in order to explain "what makes capitalism so bearable, even welcome, despite its 'unbearability'?" Mann believes it is important to recognize that interests are neither natural nor universal, not grounded in some set of underlying needs or psychic processes. His own suggestion is that interests "represent, or are a product of, a struggle-search for political subjectivity or agency" that is necessarily oriented toward the future even when it is haunted by the past. The challenge for critical intellectuals is to help radicalize this struggle-search, by acknowledging and investigating the "depth of mourning of what used to be" and discovering ways to celebrate a working-class past "without snickering."

Wolfgang Fritz Haug, in the second Remarx essay, takes issues with those "neo-Hegelian" readings of Marx according to which, after the Grundrisse, Marx attempted to popularize his theory and, as a result, moved away from the Hegelian dialectical method, thereby impoverishing his work. For Haug, in contrast, the changes Marx made - for example, in preparing the second edition of the first volume of Capital, in revising the French translation of the first volume, and composing the Marginal Notes on Wagner - attest to the fact that Marx's writings were a "work in progress." Perhaps even more important, they make the Marxian critique of political economy vital and open-ended and thus relevant to the "theoretical understanding of the emerging high-tech capitalism" of our time. Haug's careful scholarship (paying particular attention to what Marx does and less to what Marx says he does) describes the "improvements" Marx makes - in relating his concept of surplus labor to the everyday language of unpaid labor, in avoiding a relapse into speculative dialectics by referring to the determinate commodity, in explaining that his starting point was not the value-concept but the concrete commodity - as a reworking of his basic concepts "in the bright daylight of his workshop." Rather than the betrayal of a fixed method (that of Hegelian dialectics), what Haug sees in Marx's later texts is evidence of Marx's learning process: a "historical materialist rethinking of dialectics."

In the first of the three reviews that complete this issue, Chizu Sato enthusiastically endorses Suzanne Bergeron's critique of the key role a naturalized "national economy" has played in discussions of economic development, the state, and women in the post-World War II period. Sato focuses particular attention on three aspects of Bergeron's analysis: her challenging of the tendency of experts (from both mainstream and radical strands of development economics) to blame others for not knowing how to manage national economies instead of seeing their own unwillingness to relinquish the status of detached, rational observers ; her ability to see the "contradictory and heterogeneous processes" that make it difficult to conceive of the nation as a monolithic economic entity; and her intervention into feminist debates on globalization that continue to presume that capitalism is monolithic and singularly powerful. Sato concludes her review by suggesting that Bergeron's powerful critique would be complemented and extended by considering such issues as the diversity of class processes, the role governmentality plays for women in the global South, and how the rethinking of expertise might lead to the emergence of new, collaborative relationships with the very subjects of development.

Richard Wolff, for his part, expresses an appreciation for Stanley's Aronowitz's latest book not only because it is "smoothly written and readily accessible" but also because it achieves "an important current political intervention." Wolff credits Aronowitz with exposing how, within U.S. capitalism from the "Reagan Revolution" on, higher profits have come at the expense of fewer and worse jobs and that the deteriorating employment situation is neither a sign of efficiency nor a temporary aberration. In other words, Aronowitz successfully documents the "sustained assault on the U.S. working class" over the course of the last thirty years. Still, Wolff believes that two other issues deserve additional attention: the fact that real wages have suffered a sustained decline for the first time since the beginning of the nineteenth century, with deleterious effects on the working class and U.S. society as a whole; and the idea that neoliberalism is merely one form of capitalism (as against, for example, more state-led forms of capitalist development), thus challenging the Left to direct its opposition to capitalism across all its phases.

In the third and final review, of Peter Hitchcock's Imaginary States, Maria Markantonatou notes that Hitchcock uses the tools of cultural studies, sociology, and literary criticism, and takes up a wide range of both theoretical debates and Caribbean literary texts, to conduct an intricate, instructive, and truly interdisciplinary analysis of "cultural transnationalism." According to Markantonatou, Hitchcock refuses mainstream views of both economic globalization and global multiculturalism and, instead, explores the ways in which literature can be seen as reacting both to the formation of national identities and to the new "postcolonial exploitative forms" associated with contemporary global capitalism. For Markantonatou, one of Hitchcock's most important arguments is that posing a global culture alone as "decisive blow to global modes of economic exploitation" is both idealist and misleading. It remains necessary, therefore, to carefully examine the ways political identity and aesthetic representation continue to be imagined and reimagined in terms of the formation of the Nation.

For readers who are not able to attend RM06 (and for those participants who wish to recapture the moment), the conference web site (www.rethinkingmarxism2006.org) will soon include an archive of texts and photos from the sessions, cultural showings and exhibits, and many other stimulating events that are going to be staged in Amherst. In future issues of RM, we will publish presentations from the plenary sessions as well as book symposia and selected papers from panels and workshops on the extraordinary array of topics that will be taken up by the hundreds of students, scholars, and activists participating in RM06.

The Editors

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In this issue Antonio Negri's philosophical reflections on the liberating effects of exile are elicited and engaged in an interview with Francesca Cadel (translated into English by Carin McLain). Negri and Cadel begin by distinguishing the condition of exile in the "interstitial, postmodern sense of the nomadism and métissage of the third millenium" from the linear terms of political exile of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (as experienced by, among others, Karl Marx and Giuseppe Mazzini). Negri's view is that, after 1968 - as a result of the decentering of production, and the consequent reconfiguring of the conditions of culture and identity - exile no longer means "stepping outside in order to return" but, rather, the "formation of bodies that are ontologically cosmopolitan." (The role of the United States, according to Negri, is that it refuses to accept this new reality and is engaged in a "parasitic will to dominance" over this global "non-place.") Negri interprets the post-68 condition of exile as a liberating journey based on an economy of excess and a desire for richness and fullness, leading to ethical actions - without utopia - that are capable of creating a new world. (And when Cadel reminds him of the many bodies that die in exile, Negri responds by seeing such murders as attempts to reconstruct a sense of place, which should be overcome by making the non-place produced by capitalism into a "positive force, a constructive power.") For Negri, a revolutionary process in the contemporary world needs to operate "beyond measure," beyond the boundaries of emancipation, in the sense that it creates conditions that allow the possibility of freedom for all. Taking a page from Spinoza's geometry, Negri explains that, within the current conjuncture, this revolutionary potential derives from recognizing and deploying three fundamental factors - poverty, love, and the will to cooperate - to restructure systems of organization on a global scale. Finally, when Cadel asks him to reflect on his return to Italy after 14 years of exile in France, Negri characterizes his earlier period of political activity as a radical attempt to "invent a future" and describes himself now as being neither optimistic nor pessimistic but joyful: "a joyful democracy is what we want."

For Paul Buhle, comics are one of the key places to look for an artistic expression of the radical sensibilities of young North Americans today. Buhle, in his contribution to the art/iculations series, notes an upsurge in the work of radical animators and graphic novelists in the United States, after a hiatus ushered in by the demise of Underground Comix in the mid-1970s (examples of which can be found in the Moore Collection of Underground Comix at California Polytechnic State University). Cable television programs like Trippin' the Rift (which built on the earlier success of such hits as Who Killed Roger Rabbit? and The Simpsons), and most recently Minoriteam, have revived a tradition of radical animation that had all but collapsed in the wake of Hollywood blacklisting it in the 1950s. Buhle locates the roots of contemporary radical comics in an even earlier period, in the cartoons created by the Wobblies, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, in the early twentieth century. While there is dearth of scholarship concerning the visual art that Joe Hill and others produced for IWW publications, Buhle notes that these radical cartoonists seem to have been inspired by and to have borrowed from the work going on around them - mainstream comics, editorial cartoons, and modern art. One of the results was the cartoon strip "Mr. Block," drawn by Ernest Riebe. The struggle to develop a "new popular art" has continued, in fits and starts, through projects like Rocky and His Friends, Corporate Crime Comics, Zap Comix, and World War 3 Illustrated. Buhle himself has been involved in two such endeavors: Radical America Komiks and, most recently, Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. He sees the collection of artists whose work is included in the recently published Wobblies! as "actively rethinking Marxism, or at least intuitively reconceptualizing what a radical, class-based but also deeply vernacular art would be."

Throughout its history, Marxism has been challenged and enriched by other radical theoretical and political traditions - and they, in turn, have been transformed by their engagement with Marxism. In our own day, scholars and activists have been actively involved in rethinking the connections between Marxism and such varied movements as feminism, antiracism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. The contributors to the symposium on Marxian sexual politics, originally organized by Marcia Klotz and Kevin Floyd as a panel for the Cultural Studies Association, focus their attention on the multiple intersections of Marxism and queer theory. As Klotz explains in her introduction, while the authors of the three essays included here invoke different understandings of sexuality, they share both an interest in the writings of the so-called "young Marx" and in the idea that "a Marxist approach to sexuality is quite compatible with that taken by queer theory."

Rosemary Hennessy begins her contribution on social reproduction by noting that, with few exceptions (such as Alexandra Kollantai and Herbert Marcuse), Marxism has largely ignored issues of sexuality. And despite capitalism's increasing colonization of the body and affect, Marxists who are actively engaged in thinking critically about sexuality are still "few and far between." The opposite is true of cultural studies, where queer theory has blossomed since the 1990s, especially in relation to studies of consumption. What Hennessy finds particularly interesting are recent texts that address sexuality in relation to the history of racialized imperialism, changing labor relations, and contemporary neoliberalism. She seeks to build on this literature by showing how, drawing from Marx's discussion in "On the Jewish Question," the reproduction of capitalist economic relations is based in important ways on culture, including ideologies of gender and economies of desire. Thus, for example, capital has traditionally been able to use the "second skin of femininity" to lower the value of labor power - of both men and women - in the maquiladora industries on Mexico's northern border. More recently, as the hiring of openly gay and lesbian workers has increased in these industries, new configurations of the relation between surplus value and sexual value have created difficult obstacles to labor organizing, as homophobia is used by capital to discipline workers. But it has also created new opportunities, as workers involved in such organizing efforts "disclose in what has been offered as the way things are an alternative story of how they can be."

Kevin Floyd's queer reading of one of the key texts of Marxist humanism - Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness - reveals both Lukács's indebtedness to Immanuel Kant's approach to morality and the distance that separates his work from Marx's 1844 Manuscripts. Drawing from Eric Clarke's pioneering interrogation of the heteronormativity of Kant's "sexual humanism," Floyd argues that Lukács, notwithstanding his extended critique of Kant's epistemology, ends up adopting a moral position with sexual implications similar to that of Kant. The problem arises because Lukács, in attempting to overcome the unbridgeable gap Kant posits between the subject and object of knowledge, reconceptualizes the Kantian "things-in-themselves" as the alienated objects of the subject's activity. He then uses this identification of objects and commodities both to condemn all forms of objectification as dehumanizing and to posit private property as central to the definition of what it means to be human. Floyd views Lukács's approach as heteronormative not necessarily on its own terms (since Lukács offers little in the way of a sustained discussion of sexuality) but, rather, from the perspective of a contemporary queer politics "that insists on the legitimacy, within antiheteronormative spaces, of the sexual objectification of bodies." Marx, in contrast to Lukács, is credited with a quite different understanding of the body, according to which human faculties, capacities, needs, and desires are created and recreated by an ongoing objectification through collective labor. Thus, Floyd concludes that the humanism set forth by Marx would "include an expansion of sexual practice, including the development of discourses.. .organized around the legitimacy of sexual pleasure as an end in itself."

The 1844 Manuscripts are also central to Marcia Klotz's attempt to think through the exchange between queer theory and Marxism. She finds that, in his critique of alienation, Marx not only invokes eroticism - in the image of the sexual procurer, both the sycophantic eunuch and the conniving pimp - but he does so with respect to commodities, money, and human relations. Thus, contra the marginalist thesis of Lawrence Birken, Marx focuses his sexual tropes on the realm of consumption not on production or reproduction. And, for Klotz, this is "precisely the place where a contemporary analysis of sexual alienation within the modern capitalist soci al order ought to begin." She then seeks to establish the relation between Marx's critique of alienation and, somewhat ironically, both Catherine MacKinnon's analysis of the expropriation of sexuality and the celebration of sexuality championed by queer politics and sex-positive feminism. Klotz applauds MacKinnon's analogy between sexuality and labor but criticizes her for limiting the alienation of sexuality to women. Similarly, the work of queer and other sex-positive activists to create spaces "where the creative power of sex can be celebrated on its own terms" needs to be extended, in turn, to take on the "alienating power of capitalism itself." Finally, Klotz views as central to any attempt to define a Marxian sexual politics the recognition that Marx's use of the term "human" is more nuanced than allowed for in Louis Althusser's critique of "humanist ideology" in the manuscripts of the young Marx. Insofar as Marx manages to attach "the most basic modes of bodily experience" to intersubjectivity, his work remains open to a radical sexual politics that, according to Klotz - who can "hardly think of a better place to start" - encourages us to challenge and imagine an alternative to the deep structure of capitalist ideology.

While Negri (in the interview with Cadel) argues that "Empire must be organized in a democratic manner," Mehmet Odekon directly criticizes the effectiveness of local democratizing movements in combating the effects of capitalist globalization and calls, instead, for a revitalization of the global trade union movement as the only way of freeing the working classes from the hegemony of capital. Odekon begins by noting that interest in globalization, on the part of both scholars and activists, has waned in recent years. Furthermore, in his view, the upsurge of local social movements, grouped together in such entities as the World Social Forum and the International Forum on Globalization, and oriented toward new forms of democracy and subsidiarity, has actually weakened the anti-globalization movement. Odekon believes it is possible to revise Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory to account for such new dimensions as inter-imperialist rivalry, the imperial hegemony of the United States, and the institutional infrastrucure of globalization and neoliberalism. He then argues that "unorganized people" cannot, by themselves, effectively challenge the power of global capital and the only alternative is a "working class organized by trade unions." Odekon sees the labor-based social movements of the "semi-periphery" - from Brazil to South Africa - as providing the leadership for a global labor movement which, under the aegis of the International Labor Organization and with a focus on restructuring at the level of the nation-state, will be able to challenge the increasing hegemony of capital.

Odekon's essay is the latest essay in the "Globalization under Interrogation" series that we launched in 2000 (in volume 12, number 4), under the editorship of Yahya Madra and Jack Amariglio. The goal of the series, as they explained in their introduction, was to interrogate the existing representations of globalization (on the Right and, especially, on the Left) and to begin the task of formulating novel theoretical and political strategies to "frontally engage with globalization." We want to thank Yahya and Jack for the energy and acumen with which they have worked with authors as diverse as Arif Dirlik, Lisa Lowe, Bob Jessop, R. Radakrishnan, J.K. Gibson-Graham, and David F. Ruccio over the past six years to push forward the rethinking of globalization. We also want to welcome Kenan Erçel, who has agreed to assume editorial responsibility for the series, and to encourage writers and artists to continue to demonstrate the vitality of Marxism in analyzing the conditions and consequences of capitalist globalization and in formulating noncapitalist alternatives.

Extending her critique of what she considers to be Jürgen Habermas's "conciliatory position towards the market economy and the paternalistic welfare state," Deborah Cook contrasts Habermas's approach with Theodor Adorno's "far more global and Marxist perspective." The divergence between their interpretations of life under late capitalism turns on their different understandings of the role of reason in self-preservation. For Habermas, preserving the self is functionally rational, in the sense that reproduction of the lifeworld - both materially, through markets and the state, and symbolically, through the conditions of communicative action among lifeworld members - has been effect