Volume 27 Issue 1 January 2015
We open the first issue of volume 27 with a meticulous reading by Georg H. Fromm of a classic text of Marxism, entitled ‘Empiricism, Science, and Philosophy in The German Ideology.’ Fromm challenges the traditional interpretations of this important text as a statement of Marx and Engels’s adoption of an empiricist/positivist standpoint, as being fundamentally misguided, part of the context of which, the author claims, is the ‘unsurpassable’ divide between ‘philosophy’ detached from reality, and science, as the expression of the concrete and the real. Fromm invites us to remember two points which are often forgotten: that The German Ideology is an unrefined text, underdeveloped and not published, and more importantly that it is a polemical text the purpose of which is essentially to refute the point of view of its adversaries, hence cannot be expected to be a balanced exposition of the perspective of its own authors. Through a reading of selective paragraphs, Fromm shows that the militant insistence on a seemingly empiricist point of view, does not make the totality of their point of view. Fromm reminds us that when interpreting the text in question, we need to remember that Marx and Engels were responding to the Hegelian tradition, which also had been decisively formative on their thinking. Through a close reading of parts of the text in the controversy-ridden philosophical context of the time, Fromm reveals to us a much more nuanced conceptualization on the part of our polemicists. According to this reading, Marx and Engels in fact were critical of the empiricism of the time. They did not regard ‘facts’ as ‘speaking for themselves,’ but that they are made to speak through ‘appropriate interpretation.’ This position, not only does not accept the idea of theory being an ‘external’ factor, which distorts otherwise unadulterated facts, pushes the point that theory is in fact, a ‘decisive element’ in making ‘facts’ understandable. Thus, facts are always and inevitably rooted in particular theoretical perspectives, which in turn, are part of body of knowledge, which is already established. Fromm emphasizes that, Marx and Engels do not only target the empiricists in their famous text, but also the speculative idealists for ignoring altogether ‘empirical evidence’ and producing arbitrary conceptualizations of reality.
Fromm, through his detailed reading of The German Ideology arrives at the important concept of exposition (dastellung) drawn from the work of Hegel, which conceptualizes historical reality as an organic totality, structured in a complex and dialectical manner, which distances Marx and Engels’s understanding of society as being distant from both empiricist and idealist ways of thinking. Fromm’s analysis of The German Ideology with special references to Hegel and Ranke is an impressive reminder of how hermeneutic traditions are always necessary in any system of thinking: texts that become important to different traditions have to be situated in their historical, social, political and philosophical context. Abstracted from these conditions, they become sterile readings, the meaning of which cannot be complete in the best scenario, and, perhaps even dangerous in the worst.
Jean Paul Sartre, was one of the key figures of the post-World War II European philosophy. However, his philosophical legacy in which he directly and indirectly engaged with Marxism, has not been associated with any analysis of the economy. Yet, in an analysis entitled ‘Towards a Sartrean Economics” Michel Kail and Richard Sobel, excavate a notion of the economy implicit in the work of the philosopher. Using the central concept of scarcity, and extending the fundamental critique, which began in the work of Karl Polanyi, the authors argue that in the work of Sartre, there is a certain conceptualization of the economy, which transgresses crude forms of economism and formal economics. According to Kail and Sobel, we can find in Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics, but more importantly, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an important connection between the ways in which economics is defined and the notion of scarcity, which the notion of labour occupying secondary status. They claim that though Sartre makes no explicit reference to instrumental rationality, his analysis centres on the ‘exercise’ of this rationality. Karl Polanyi, whose work has defined a seminal moment in the history of modern social sciences, proposed two definitions of the economy. In what is called the substantive definition, reference is made to a domain of prouduction, distribution and consumption of resources that exists in all societies. This domain, which is socially ‘embedded’ and which became an object of study in the eighteenth century, with the rise of political economy, is therefore constantly constituted and reconstituted by the existing social relations. According to Kail and Sobel, in the formal definition of economics, however, the reference is not to a social domain but to a ‘behavioural system,’ which can be noted, when ‘we qualify an individual as “thrifty.”’ This implies a calculation, which, depending on its ends, relates to the most efficient use of the resources in the context of ‘scarcity.’ In this way, the authors argue, a conceptualization emerges, which can evaluate any human activity from an economic point of view, independently of its history and substance, and analyzed in terms of its ends and means, of the ahistorical –‘timeless’- instrumental rationality, a practive most of modern mainstream economics is familiar with. Sartre argues that the whole of human history comprises ‘a fierce struggle against scarcity.’ Kail and Sobel claim that in Sartre’s use, universality of scarcity is neither the consequence of necessity, nor the hubris of humanity, or the violence of nature. It is both contingent and universal. The authors claim that Startre subordinates necessity to contingency in his work, and in this way, he testifies to a definition of the human being as ‘that which-is-to-be.’ While being inspired by Marxism, Sartre also wanted to criticise it, arguing that human beings do not only struggle against nature, their social environment, and against one another, but also aginst their own actions ‘as it becomes other,’ which is the alienation that becomes the foundation of all other forms of alienation. Scarcity, in this view becomes the basis of human history. It imposes a ‘negative unity,’ shapes a totalization on the multiplicity of human beings; human existence becomes impossible without struggle. In Sartre’s view, the source of inhumanity does not lie in human nature, but results from relations among fellow humans. Kail and Sobel argue that, Sartre’s notion of scarcity, which the authors claim, can only be imparted a meaning in this ‘world’ breaks with especially the Engelsian and Stalinist interpretations of Marxism, which, with its productivist basis and its ‘naturalist’ bias foresaw a future where scarcity will be transcended through progress. This form of crude dialectics has the objective of transcending history, something contrary to Sartre’s notion of history.
Matthew Smetona’s reading of Marx’s work, in important ways, follows the call by Fromm for a hermeneutic textual analysis, with an embedded criticism of the positivist readings of Marxism. In “Marx’s Normative Understanding of the Capitalist System,” Matthew J. Smetona establishes a distinction between Marx’s normative critique of capitalism and his normative understanding of it. The point of this distinction, as Smetona argues, is not merely if Marx believed capitalism to be a just or unjust system, but to understand the ways in which Marx understood capitalism in normative terms. The common interpretation in Anglophone scholarship highlighting Marx normative critique over his normative understanding, Smetona argues, is facilitated by the way in which the German gilt as is often translated into English as “is” rather than as “counts as”, obscuring the ways in Marx’s descriptions of social relations, particularly in Capital, contain normative statuses which are dependent upon the acknowledgement and social recognition of such relations. In this sense, the author argues, that Marx, following Kant and Hegel, viewed all practical activity in normative terms and that Marx thus could not conceive of capitalism in nonnormative terms. In addition to revealing the phenomenological characteristics of Marx’s social theory, Smetona’s explication reveals the essentially “political” aspect of Marxian political economy, in that all modes of production constitute normative systems, each forming the basis of social being, recognition, and the material relations of production and reproduction. Thus, the radical implication of the normative of understanding of capitalism is that it, like all normative relations, is not natural and is mediated by its social recognition, which in turns means that it can be transformed through the material transformation of society and the formation of alternative norms.
Perhaps certain struggles aiming at social change derived their normative principles from what they deemed to be a scientific interpretation of the capitalist system, a tradition, which Fromm analyzes and criticizes in his essay. It can argued that in the last decade or so, we began to observe an increasing number of protest movements which identify themselves in almost exclusively normative terms, as, among other things, the very names chosen by these groups indicate. One very vivid case in point is the Indignados movement in Spain. The essay by Sam Friedman, Diana Rossi and Gonzalo Ralón entitled ‘Dignity-denial and social conflicts’ is a theorization, an attempt at conceptualizing the roots of dignity-denial and its expressions in a specifically capitalist society. The starting point of their article is the argument that although the essential aspects of capitalism attack dignity, Marxist theory is lacking in its ability to theorize dignity, which ultimately leads to weakening of our ability to understand the place of dignity in the contemporary world and to reorganize social relations in alternative ways to capitalism. Using the definition of dignity as the ability to establish ‘a sense of self-worth,’ Friedman et al argue that the specific nature of capitalism renders as a system that inherently attacks dignity. Following Marx’s analysis, in a system where, forces push commodities from being sold at their values, and where, labour-power becomes a commodity, the authors claim that there are two fundamental kinds of attacks on dignity: one is due to our inability to sell our labour power, and the other, more controversially, they believe, is due to the provision of labour power for others. They then showcase concrete cases of assaults on dignity from education, work, situations of very poorly-paid jobs, and unemployment. Under capitalism, attacks on dignity and the stigmatizing that always accompany them are not confined to workers only; hence the authors extend their discussion to include examples of drug-users ad sex workers based on original field work. The authors conclude their work with examples of struggles organized by diferent groups based on their recognition of their situations as one defined by constant digity-denial. Understanding such situations, the authors believe, will improve our capacity and ability to defy our situation on a daily basis and more effectively, thus enhance the possibilities for social change.
While Fromm’s call to return to a classical text of Marxism is to critisize the claim that Marx was a positivist, in their article “From territorial to non-territorial capitalist imperialism: Lenin and the possibility of a Marxist theory of imperialism,” Spyros Sakellaropoulos and Panagiotis Sotiris return to Lenin’s writings to formulate a Marxist understanding of imperialism in order to provide an alternative to the idealist and realist territorial conceptions of imperialism found in traditional international relations theory, as well as in Marxist variations of “new imperialism” and empire. Lenin’s writings, as Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris show, contain at least two possible theories of imperialism. The common (mis)reading asserts that Lenin presents a theory of imperialism similar to classical notions of empire-building growing of out of capitalist stagnation and overproduction, which are resolved through colonial expansion. Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris lay out a range of reasons that can lead one to arrive this (mis)reading, but their point is to show that Lenin placed analytical priority of internal class relations over inter-state relations. That is, imperialism is not simply the manifestation of the drive for territorial expansion, but rather the result of the expansion of capitalist social relations, such as the extraction of relative surplus value, the subsumption of labor to capital, and the centralization of capital, on a global scale. In this sense, imperialism represents the internationalization of capitalist socialist relations, which are accompanied with new realms of political and military antagonism. For Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris, this reading of Lenin presents a point of entry to rethink conceptions of political power. Following Poulantzas’ notion of the political, they endorse a Marxist conception of power as the “capacity of a social class to realize its specific objective interests.” (Poulantzas 1978, 104), which they connect to a complex notion of hegemony, derived from Gramsci, encompassing political direction, the building of class alliances, ideological leadership, and military prowess. This approach, as they show, provides critical insights into understanding the uneven nature of the imperialist chain, moving beyond non-Marxist territorial, functionalist and teleological theorizations of modern imperialism, while also offering ways to envision the combining of struggles against imperialism and capitalism.
Philip Drake’s article “Marxism and the Nonhuman Turn: Animating Nonhumans, Exploitation and Politics with ANT and Animal Studies” brings together actor-network theory (ANT), animal studies, and Marxian theory to suggest ways in which the three bodies of theory extend the insights of the other. Drake observes the ways in which Marxism politicizes the central concepts of human and nonhuman actors in ANT—bringing into focus the political nature of socio-technical and mechanical transformations of labor. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s work, particularly his well known idiom that “we have never been human,” Drake connects the symmetry of human and nonhuman actors of ANT with insights of the posthumanist elaborations of Marxism, conceiving humans as well as tools, machines, animals, etc. as determined and determining of “social-natural” hybrids. Drake examines the ways in which the Marxian concepts of alienation and exploitation can be applied to animal studies, while also demonstrating the ways in which anthropocentric conceptions of nature produce hierarchies between humans and nonhumans as well as providing the basis to rationalize social hierarchies and domination. Through a synthesis of these approaches, Drake demonstrates their insights with an examination of Marx’s considerations of labor, technology, and machinery. Focussing on Marx’s chapter on factory machinery in Capital, Drake highlights the fact that the relationship of human labor with technology and machinery becomes a nonhuman force, which through connections and networks becomes, in Marx’s words, a “mechanical monster” that transforms the physical and intellectual demands of labor, prolongs the hours of work, and intensifies output and efficiency. This analysis highlights the biopolitical aspects of capitalism in which the minds and bodies of workers are transformed by mechanized nonhuman forces. Coupled with anthropocentric conceptions of nature and biological hierarchy, Western notions of technological superiority, as Drake argues, provide a context for rationalizing and reinforcing ideologies of racial and male superiority, along with justifications for the “civilizing missions” colonialism. The implications of Drake’s exposition suggests that overcoming of such conditions requires a critical understanding of the contingency of human subjectivity and praxis.
We see extensions of Drake’s reflections on the changing relations between labour and technology in the context of capitalism and the implications thereof on the meaning of ‘being human’ in the following article. Kologlugil’s analysis focusses on a sector of the modern capitalist economies, which is growing in significance in varied and very complex ways: the digital economy. His work is also one that reflects on the relations between In his article, “Digitizing Karl Marx: The New Political Economy of General Intellect and Immaterial Labor,” Serhat Kologlugil provides a contribution to rethinking Marxian political economy to analyze the digital economy. The development of the digital economy, as Kologlugil points out, has not produced a new socio-economic system with a clear separation between material and digital modes of production, yet the participatory productive aspects of the digital economy often fall outside the labor-capital relation characteristic of industrial capitalism. Specifically, Koluglugil is interested in examining the creation of digital use values, which are produced collectively outside of typical capitalist relations of production, in which the producers own/control the means of digital production and distribute their products for free for general consumption. Drawing from Marx’s notion of the “general intellect” from the Grundrisse, Kologlugil argues that the increasing availability of personal computers and the Internet provides the conditions for producers of digital use values to self-organize independently from the direction and control of capital. Free/open source software (F/OSS), such as GNU and Linux, open collaborative efforts, such as Wikipedia, and peer-to-peer networks are manifestations of the online “general intellect” in which individuals voluntarily contribute their labor to the production of non-commodified digital use values that are freely and openly shared. However, in other instances, capital has developed innovative strategies to utilize these forms of cooperation to generate profit. IBM and Oracle, for instance, have utilized F/OSS software platforms to build and sell proprietary software. Capital-owned Web 2.0 sites, such as YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook, profit from the “free” labor of millions of users who generate content for the websites that then provide the basis for the sites to generate advertising revenues. Thus, as Kologlugil argues, though the Internet provides space for individuals to act autonomously outside the control capital, capital has developed strategies to exploit the participatory and collaborative aspects of those spaces by incorporating them under its control. Ultimately, according to Kologlugil, the analysis of such strategies and relationships is necessary to envision counter strategies against the capitalist domination of the digital economy.
Kologlugil’s analysis about the significance of the digital economy and its presence as yet another area of conquest by capital finds its echos in the book reviewed in this issue. The commercialization and commodification of the digital economy represents one of many growing characteristics of late capitalism in which the practical aspects of our daily lives, including sleep, and are threaten by the encroachment of the demands and values of capital. In his review of Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Devan Bailey highlights the ways in which sleep is continually disrupted in contemporary society. Globalized neoliberal economies have restructured people’s personal lives and identities according to the value of market efficiency in the form of uninterrupted operations and information networks. Sleep, as Crary argues, presents a barrier to capital’s demand for uninterrupted 24/7 efficiency. At a time when more and more aspects of our lives are commodified and financialized, actual sleep remains, at least for the moment, uncolonizable and uninterruptable from marketization. Thus, as Bailey argues, as long as literal sleep remains insulated from market interruption, particularly advertising, the prevention of sleep presents a challenge to capital, and technology has facilitated this end. Technological advancement presented a narrative of increased leisure time, yet technology has presented numerous ways for us to be robbed of sleep, along with mediating our social interactions, from the demands of work to social media infused with advertising and 24-hour shopping. To understand the dynamics of the cultivation of the “sleepless economy,” according to Bailey, Crary’s 24/7 is essential reading.
The socio-political developments of the last three decades, in the form of various kinds of neoliberalism throughout the world, had a profound impact on all aspects of life across the world. Education was not an exception. Pauline Lipman’s The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City, reviewed by Elsa Wiehe, is a complex analysis, of restructuring the educational system impacting also the racial relations of the city under the new regime of capital accumulation under neoliberalism. Using such tools as the dismantling of public schools in poor communities of colour under the rationale of accountability, efficiency and rankings; of policies of mixed-income and mixed-housing, and of involvement of corporate venture philanthropy, Wiehe argues that Lipman gives a powerful account of the increasing centralization of the education system, along with increased uprootedness of communities, and lowering of grass-roots initiatives. Wiehe is impressed with Lipman’s Gramscian analysis of how the failure of the Civil Rights promises in education prepared the grounds for the rise of the market logic of ‘choice.’ The analysis offered by Lipman and commended by Wiehe, resonates with so many of us who work in education and have witnessed the rise and rise of corporate ideology whereby our classes became ‘products’, students ‘customers’ and our vocations ‘careers.’
While, as Kologlugil, Lipman, Crary argue, capital’s insatiable and invasive characteristics may find their way in every realm of life, including sleep and education, they often meet with resistance and create contradictions. As the neoliberal economic policies were unleashed with full force onto the population in the US under the presidency of Reagan, one economics department, flourised throughout those years as a stronghold of varied criticisms of these policies in particular and of capitalism, in general. While the The Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst has a unique place among all such departments in the US. Known as a ‘radical department’ for most of 1980s, an oasis for sure, the UMass Economics department, was the place, for many of us who wanted to learn not only the mainstream, but also the much larger spectrum of perspectives. From the time of its inception in the early 1970s as an alternative department, UMass, Amhers became a decisive intellectual influence on generations of academics, scholars and activists. That Rethinking Marxism was born at this university was by no means a coincidence, but a coming together of many circumstances.
In a review entitled ‘From Radicalism to heterodoxy: Don Katzner’s At the Edge of Camelot,’ Ric McIntyre, one of the graduates of this department, gives us a very personal review of Donald Katzner’s At The Edge of Camelot. McIntyre gives special emphasis to Katzner’s discussion of the conditions which made this department possible: the continuation from the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1960s which also found their way to parts of the academia; the appointment of a dean, Dean Alfange, with a vision made possible the original hiring of a group of radical academics, Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis, Rick Wolff and Steve Resnick. In addition, Leonard Rapping, a former Chicago-style economist, who had a ‘change of heart’ and mind, hired his student Jim Crotty. Together with the radical labour economist, Rick Edwards and Mike Best, the ‘notorious’ economics department was born. McIntyre is impressed with Kaztner’s discussion of the genesis of the department, but believes that the discussions between the proponents of the different perspectives among the radical faculty needed more space in the book. The author’s discussion of the later transformation of the faculty from its ‘radical’ identification to one of ‘heterodox’ is also commended by McIntyre, a transformation which was, no doubt, a reflection of the broader changes within the discipline. Mc Intyre takes issue with the name of Camelot in the title of the book, as he believes, the time period starting in the late 1970s would better be described as ‘revolutionary’ in the Kuhnian sense of the word, when scientists try to change economics, adding that they mostly failed. He does end on a more optimistic note considering the possibility that the department still tries to encourage provocative and reflective work pointing at, among other things, the interesting and important work on ethical issues by people such as Gerry Epstein (together with Jessica Carrick-Hagenbath), and DeMartino.
The backcover photograph chosen for this issue of Rethinking Marxism is from a part of the world which is currently experiencing deep social convulsions the significance of which is not merely regional, but also global. While the current military confrontation in the region and the refugee crisis attract more attention, what remains less known is the revolutionary character of the democratic social experiments taking place in the area through the establishment of popular assemblies, the election of councils that respect the multi-ethnic character of the area, the existence of a vibrant feminist movement in civilian as well as military forms, and an ecological sensitivity through a commitment to sustainable development. The military and civilian resistance in the canton of Kobanê is also a protection of this new vision throughout the autonomous region of Rojava, which offers alternatives in class, gender and ethnic relations. The ‘human shield’ around Kobanê is porous: one, at one and the same time that protects and one that enables, as the local population, the largest element protecting the revolutionary change, is joined by their Kurdish kin and people just across from the current national borders and by organizations and movements beyond. The situation is reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War, a point not lost on some observers, not only because of the fierce defense of the democratic social structures by the same people who created them, but also because of the presence of groups (such as Women’s Initiative for Peace), coming from outside the immediate region and joining this human shield out of a sense of solidarity, and of others of diverse backgrounds, who have joined the military struggle.
What is happening in Kobanê, as deeply saddening as it is, is also profoundly inspiring. Over the years, Rethinking Marxism, among others, fostered a vision, which saw the possibilities of revolutions not only as situations to come, but of processes already in place. In that sense, Kobanê epitomizes the view that the future is here, a future in the present, for the continuation of which, some have already tragically lost their lives.
—The Editors |
