Editor's Introduction

Abstract:

In this issue,

Norman Geras offers his notion of “the ideal of multivious care” to the discussion of utopian aspirations and arrangements that is so central to the Marxian tradition. Originally delivered in the opening plenary session “(Re)Claiming Utopia” at the Marxism2000 conference (here extended with an Afterword on the “mood” of his presentation compared to that of J. K. Gibson-Graham in the same plenary), Geras’s article calls for a “minimalist” program for a type of society “whose members enjoy the basic material necessities and political and civic rights requisite to a tolerably contented existence.” In elaborating this program, he is reacting both to the “contract of mutual indifference,” which represents the dominant moral culture today, and to the retreat from “egalitarian aspiration,” whereby capitalism has become the only horizon for much of the intellectual left. More controversially, while Geras credits various forms of “radical non-universalism” with identifying the limitations of a “one-sided, too abstract universalism”–in overlooking the claims and identities of many marginalized and oppressed social groups–he argues that, when they become forms of “sectionalism,” they serve to block out the socialist concern with “material and resource inequalities.” It is out of such a concern that Geras wants to reclaim the idea of utopia and to develop it in the form of multivious care: an expansive network of relationships and procedures whereby people “care about” and “take care of” one another so that an appropriate level of well-being is provided for all. Major League Baseball’s2002 season is in full swing but no one would argue that professional baseball in the United States represents a utopia. Multimillion-dollar annual salaries for star players (like Derek Jeter) and skyrocketing revenues for “major market” clubs (such as the New York Yankees) reinforce the image of an industry bent on carving out and keeping for itself as large a share as possible of the nation’s income. Yet, as Ross Weiner explains, the economic distancing of players and owners from the larger population has become possible, ironically, by providing increased access to baseball games through radio and especially television

broadcasting. According to Weiner, professional baseball captures higher rights fees than it otherwise might because broadcasting is structured as a “sequential monopoly,” with the clubs at the top (which have monopoly ownership to sell national and local rights to broadcast games), capitalist enterprises and media networks (who buy and sell advertising spots) in the middle, and consumers at the bottom (who are forced to listen to or watch the advertisements along with the games). Of particular interest is the advent of cable television, which has fundamentally altered the broadcasting of baseball games–by transforming them into commodities (because viewers now need to purchase cable access), increasing the revenues to clubs (by widening the competition for broadcast rights), and hurting viewers (especially those who don't have the money to purchase cable, and thus cannot view local, cable-only games). In Weiner’s view, baseball’s capitalist success may be its own undoing, as the revenues accumulated by some MLB clubs make the outcome of the competitive play with other clubs less uncertain–and, ultimately, less attractive to broadcast viewers.

The text version of Ursula Biemann’s video-essay “Performing the Border” returns to the set of issues concerning the problems and prospects created by power imbalances, gendered bodies, and much else initially raised by Lisa Lowe in an earlier issue of RM (13/2, Summer2001). Here, again, the site is the border zone between the United States and Mexico, a gendered space where “everyone is being transformed into transnational subjects.” What Biemann discovers, and illustrates so carefully and dramatically with her text and video stills, is that the bodies of the female workers in and around the maquiladora industries are both marginalized and strictly regulated through a complex hierarchy of economic and social–gender, class, racial, sexual, and national–languages and identities. At the same time, the mechanisms of control are never complete; the “transgressive identities,” such as that of Concha, that take shape in the “fissures and cracks” in the border point in the direction of alternative trajectories and desires. So, in Biemann’s representation, the border becomes a dramatic scene located on the fringe of the national body, where post-Fordist forms of production, the spectacular violence of serial killers, and the emergence of new “road subjectivities” are all staged.

David Bernans enjoins the now-famous debate between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser that was initiated at the December 1996 conference sponsored by RM and later continued in the pages of our fellow left-wing journals New Left Review and Social Text, on the relationship between economic and cultural–class versus racial and sexual–identities and political struggles. In Bernans’s view, while the outcome was a “stalemate,” as each was justified in her basic assertion, the impasse can only be superseded by changing perspective and posing a new question: how can we conceive class politics in a way that is not “merely economic”? His answer is that capitalist class exploitation is never simply economic but also, and necessarily, cultural: because racism and (hetero)sexism intercede in the constitution of social classes, such as the proletariat and the “reserve army”; because they participate in determining the value of labor power (indeed, the very existence of labor power as a commodity); and so on. At the same time, Bernans wants to maintain a distinction between economic and cultural structures and struggles based on the idea that the existence of the capitalist form of surplus-labor extraction entails “a certain degree of uncoupling of the economic sphere from the cultural and political spheres.” This is not, for Bernans, a distinction between distribution and recognition: workers are “misrecognized as mere bearers of the labor power commodity.” However, contra Fraser, Bernans argues that no amount of redistribution can redress this class injury–which is what makes it qualitatively different, contra Butler, from the other forms of misrecognition. Bernans thus concludes that, while the anticapitalist struggle cannot simply appropriate struggles against other forms of oppression, “it does require the rejection of their appropriation by bourgeois cultural forms.”

“Talk shows of the grotesque,” such as The Jerry Springer Show and Sally Jesse Raphael, are the vehicle that Rebecca Kukla utilizes to investigate the implications of recent developments in Marxist theories of ideology. Concerned especially to undercut the seductive–but ultimately conservative–position of the “voyeuristic cynic,” Kukla begins by critically examining the work of Louis Althusser, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler as contributions to a Marxist theory of the ideological constitution of subjectivity. She then shows how the various mechanisms of this ideological process (interpellation, misrecognition, and so on) operate through the four levels of participants in the talk shows: the host, the guests, the studio audience, and the home television audience. It is the last level, particularly those watchers who are “too clever” to fall into the ideological hands of the shows, that Kukla finds of special interest. What she discovers is that, when they participate in “laughing at the spectacle of culture,” these viewers participate in a process whereby irony and parody are themselves coopted by ideology. The distance that appears to be inherent in the position of voyeuristic cynic becomes a myth, a type of “bad faith.” Therefore, the possibility of resistance must be sought elsewhere.

We resume the Globalization Under Interrogation series with an important contribution from Bob Jessop. In this essay, Jessop reclaims the significance of time and temporality in investigating the multiple forms and causes of capitalist globalization. Arguing against the “spatial turn” in social theory, he builds on the “discovery of time” in the work of David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Castells in order to focus on a series of “spatio-temporal contradictions” in contemporary capitalism–ecological, existential, and economic. These contradictions, he notes, are not inherent in globalization but they become more severe with the emphasis on “speed, acceleration, and turnover time” as the circuits of capital become more globalized. Jessop focuses particular attention on the tension between the decline in the effectiveness of the postwar national state, “because specific powers and capacities have become less relevant,” and the need for the nation-state to compress political time in responding to the quickened pace of capital. For Jessop, an alternative strategy is to redraw the “spatio-temporal matrices” within which capital operates by adopting measures (such as the Tobin Tax) to slow the circuits of capital and by promoting “new temporal horizons and new forms of temporal flexibility” in order to modify and control the pace of capitalist globalization.

Alan Greenspan has proclaimed the U.S. recession over–and Bush-administration officials and right-wing pundits have been quick to jump on the bandwagon, declaring that the recession was short-lived or, incredibly, never even occurred. So, as they see it, it’s back to business as usual. Richard Wolff, in the first Remarx essay, returns to the scene of the economic crime, with a Marxist analysis of the “boom” of the 1990s and the social costs of the instability that capitalism simply “cannot prevent.” He first shows that the era of prosperity meant might staggering profits for a small minority and stagnant wages for most others, leading U.S. families to take on higher levels of consumer debt and to send more families out to work additional hours and jobs. So, consumption levels were (and continue to be) maintained at the expense of personal and social exhaustion. And the boom itself was the product of unique, temporary circumstance that, sooner or later, would lead to a bursting of the bubble. The alternative? Wolff argues that it is necessary to reject the repeated oscillations between more private and more state-oriented forms of capitalism and imagine the possibility of creating noncapitalist forms of production and distribution.

In the second Remarx essay, Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg prepare the ground for a critical encounter between antiessentialist Marxism (of the sort that RM has long championed) and the governmentality approach inspired by the work of Michel Foucault. Governmentality studies, in brief, represent an attempt to shift the focus of political theory from questions of sovereignty to government: the effort to direct human conduct (which includes, but is not limited to, actions of the state), especially within liberal-democratic societies. For Milchman and Rosenberg, an examination of the “mechanisms, instruments, procedures, and techniques, through which governance is achieved” and the genealogical procedure of “describing the historically contingent conditions that have produced. . .our prevailing regimes of practices of government” should be of interest to antiessentialist Marxists precisely because they illuminate “elements of power and rule in modern society that, until now, Marxism has failed to grasp.

Georg LukGGcs’s Tailism and the Dialectic, a newly discovered text originally written in 1925 or 1926, represents a defense of his earlier History and Class Consciousness that had been condemned by the official Communist movement. Costas Panayotakis explains that, in this slim volume, LukGGcs responded to his critics by, first, attacking mechanistic conceptions of class-consciousness and, then, by recognizing the historicity of the dialectic. The result, according to Panayotakis, is that LukGGcs, instead of recanting, actually points beyond some of the fundamental assumptions of his earlier work, “towards a redefinition of emancipatory politics as the appropriation of open-ended contradictions” rather then the carrying out of tasks simply dictated by history.

Finally, we want to offer our best wishes for a speedy recovery to Helen, our managing editor, and to thank Jackie Southern for graciously and gracefully stepping into the breach.

The Editors

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