Editor's Introduction

Abstract:

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

• Tagged
• XML
• BibTex