Volume 27 Issue 4 October 2015
The role of technology in shaping contemporary capitalism is the theme of a growing literature in which the discussion has extended to questions about the changing nature of labor with the deployment of modern technology, its effect on subjectivity, and its transformative political potential. We open this issue of Rethinking Marxism with an article that explores the changing political horizons within capitalism and possibly beyond it, drawing from the work of György Lukács.
In his article entitled “Lukács's Theory of Reification and Contemporary Social Movements,” Andrew Feenberg argues that the concepts of reification and dereification as social practice can be used to analyze technical practices and their potential for creating a socialist society based on Lukács's seminal History and Class Consciousness. Reification is the illusion of taking social relations for institutions, while dereification is the breaking of this illusion. The former provides structure by stabilizing and reproducing institutions while the latter transforms existing structures and practices. Feenberg argues that, for Lukács, reification under capitalism specifically takes the form of the becoming of a social world, which resembles a second nature where individuals’ relations mirror their relations to natural objects. Reification depends on fragmentation, on an autonomization in which individuals and institutions alike are separated from one another as independent things, a conception that forms the background of Marx's critique of political economy and that was later generalized by Lukács to the whole of capitalist society. Reification under capitalism constitutes a “form of objectivity” whose reified forms—such as corporations, profits, wages, laws, and so on—are social phenomena whose contents are living human beings. For Lukács these forms interact with social subjects and objects but fail to “fully embrace their human content,” which then results in class struggle and crisis, out of which arises class consciousness: that which is reduced to a quantity, such as wages or profits, appears to workers as the qualitative determinants of their existence, but once this is realized, workers stop being atomized individuals and become capable of forming solidarity. So the dynamic of revolution arises out of the process of dereification in capitalist society.
Feenberg then takes on the objection raised by some scholars against the idea of the revolutionary potential unleashed by dereification practices regarding contemporary technology. Unlike thinkers such as Jodi Dean, who argues that the participatory forms of modern technology result in a communicative capitalism that co-opts what seems to be dereification, Feenberg borrows Marcuse's concept of objective ambivalence to indicate the possibility of transcendence even at the moment of co-optation, arguing that while it is true that co-optation is still very powerful and central to the survival of capitalism, it has also transformed capitalism itself. In the remainder of the article, Feenberg traces moments within U.S. history that supply examples of how dereification within technology has played vital and transformative roles, such as feminism transforming medical practices and technology and recent forms of hacking that have uncovered unknown potential within technology. Feenberg concludes that micropolitics of this kind lead to the “democratic rationalization” of society. While these forms of resistance do not change the capitalist nature of the system, they are significant, argues Feenberg, in heralding the possibilities in a technologically advanced society. For what he calls “deep democracy,” such participatory practices of dereification are crucial in challenging bureaucratization, technical control, and the commercial capture of “scientific-technical authority.”
While Feenberg searches for alternatives to capitalism in the contradictions of modern technology, the next contribution focuses on the transformation of the welfare state in advanced capitalist societies as the site to concentrate on in the search for possible paths to building a noncapitalist society. In “Globalization, Welfare States, and Socialism's Future,” John F. Manley explores the contradictory relation between the welfare state and capitalism in Marx's writings. As Manley argues, Marx was fully aware of the state's role in stabilizing the class contradictions of capitalism and thereby averting the development of revolutionary alternatives. With examples from the nineteenth century through twentieth-century Keynesianism, Manley highlights the role of welfare state reforms in undermining the working class's revolutionary potential. Yet the rollback of the welfare state accompanied the advent of global capitalism and the ascendancy of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first, ushering in downward pressure on wages and decreasing benefits from social programs. In the absence of systemic alternatives, the state is no longer compelled to stabilize capitalism's contradictions and in fact has supported fiscal austerity, privatization, and market liberalization, benefiting the few at the expense of the many. With these heightened contradictions, Manley argues that globalized capitalism without welfare-state stabilization provides more opportunities than ever for a systemic alternative to capitalism to arise.
Studies of subjectivity have been a constant thread in the pages of Rethinking Marxism. The next contribution adds a different dimension to existing analyses by looking at the issue of intersectionality in relation to “passing” in the context of race, gender, and sexuality as mediated through class. In “Passing Class Notes,” Jack Jackson considers the ways in which literary representations and acts of “passing” across boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality are inextricably entwined with the material conditions of class identity. The idea of subordinate social groups “passing” social boundaries is historically associated with race, such as in cases of blacks passing as whites in spaces of racial exclusion. Contemporary queer theory has drawn from the rich literature on racial passing to illustrate the ways in which gays and lesbians are compelled to pass as straight. Acknowledging that class often remains in the margins of intersectional analyses of racism and sexism through a close reading of Nella Larsen's novel Passing, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, and the documentary film The Brandon Teena Story, Jackson illustrates how class intercuts with racial passing in the early twentieth century and with gender and sexual passing in the latter twentieth century. Jackson's reading of class into queer politics, connecting class with existing work in critical race theory and queer studies through a meditation on passing, opens possibilities for rethinking the logic of class within intersectional theory and contemporary queer politics.
In the age of neoliberalism, very few themes have inspired controversy as much as globalization and empire. While some within this very rich debate have argued that U.S. hegemony continued after World War II, others insist that the world has been transformed by economic and political multipolarity. Radhika Desai's book challenges large strands of thinking on globalization and empire and attempts to revitalize the Marxist concept of uneven and combined development (UCD), reminding us with Manley of the relevance of analyses of the state for the political projects of the Left.
The symposium on Radhika Desai's Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire starts with comments from Richard D. Wolff. Wolff praises Desai for creatively deploying the theory of uneven and combined development to yield new insights that bring the social role of the state back into the center of analysis, as well as problematizing the hegemonic role of U.S. capitalism and drawing parallels with Gibson-Graham's critique of capitalocentrism. His main criticisms focus on the absence of a clear definition of class as well as of any discussion of the interaction of capitalist with noncapitalist class structures, which place competing demands on the state. He ends his discussion by suggesting an alternative direction for Desai to consider: the trajectory of modern capitalism in the West has taken shape in a way that has led to an increasingly disenfranchised working class as capital searches for more lucrative alternatives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and Wolff wonders if the working classes of the West will accept such a fate.
David Kristjanson-Gural, in his contribution entitled “Value and Method in Desai's Geopolitical Economy,” commends the book for the insightful and engaging ways in which UCD has been used to shed light on U.S. and British geopolitical involvement. He finds the outcome to be an original reconceptualization of international political economy as geopolitical economy (GE). Kristjanson-Gural's criticism of the book is threefold. He argues that in providing an account of Western Marxism Desai leaves out important contributions that could assist her theoretical framework, resulting in a reinforcement of the view that Marxism is still not suited to understanding the economic foundations of global capitalism. He states that Desai's insistence on a theory of crisis based on underconsumption ultimately requires an engagement with the current debates around value theory. And for Kristjanson-Gural, it is precisely Desai's insistence on underconsumption as the cause of crisis in her analysis that is also the source of what he calls the methodological essentialism that pervades the book, and he finds a parallel essentialism in what he calls the book's “epistemological essentialism.” He ends his commentary by asking Desai the following question: if political and cultural influences both shape theories, why should GE be exempt from such influences? If it is exempt, he claims that Desai should provide a basis on which she can convince others as to why her account is preferable to others. In doing neither, argues Kristjanson-Gural, Desai undermines her own criticism of others.
In “Combined Development and the Critique of International Political Economy,” Richard McIntyre joins the previous authors in praising Desai's critique of international relations theory, her critical survey of recent international economic history, and her synthesis of classical Marxism, Keynesianism, and the work of Polanyi. He believes, like the previous two commentators, that the book further develops UCD theory. One of his main criticisms of the book is Desai's argument about the failure of American elite strategies. McIntyre suggests that in substantiating a claim about the success or failure of such strategies, we need to look inter alia into competing claims on the surplus value that has definitely increased since the 1980s, which then may give clues about stagnating corporate profits in manufacturing. For example, during the Reagan years the reduction of labor costs through increased rates of productivity and exploitation did work for its proponents: the neoliberal “restoration,” says McIntyre, has been a success for those who engineered it. Just as he questions her arguments about the failure of the U.S. elite, McIntyre also questions Desai's arguments about U.S. imperial failure, and he ends his commentary on a methodological point about the documentation the author relies on.
In “Contours of a Multipolar Century,” Paul Kellogg along with the other three commentators commends Desai for revitalizing UCD, showing the limits of hegemonic stability theory, engaging with Keynes's insights, and sketching out the emergence of a multipolar world. Kellogg, in his empirically detailed work, produces a confirmation of Desai's analysis and further supports her by adding a discussion of China's emerging high-technology sector. At the end of his commentary, he raises some questions about Desai's association of UCD with the Bolsheviks as a whole rather than with Leon Trotsky specifically and about her belief in the anticolonial role of the former USSR, but such queries do not undermine his overall agreement with Desai's book.
In “Marxist Engagements with Geopolitical Economy: Author's Response,” Radhika Desai takes on the different criticisms raised by the commentators. Taking up Wolff's commentary on the relation of capitalism to its others, she states that debates over modes of production have taken too much of Marxists’ energies, especially since Marx's argument was lost on those who took part in the debate: he claimed this “strange and unnatural form” of society could never be found in its “pure” form, even in those places where it first developed. Desai emphasizes that the question of the relation of capitalism to its others can best be approached by understanding how capitalist states emerge and how they sustain the rule of the capitalist class; what she calls the “materiality” of nations means that nations are as much a product of capitalism as are classes. She finally questions Wolff's idea that Western capitalism is leaving its working classes and moving elsewhere, arguing that the foreign direct investment (FDI) flows outside the developed world is very small to start with and that the bulk of FDI doesn't seem to follow low wages but rather moves among advanced countries themselves.
Desai argues that Kristjanson-Gural's criticism of the Marxist literature she engages with fails to understand the severity of her criticism directed toward Marxist economics as a whole. On the matter of the paucity of demand as the cause of crisis in capitalism, she claims that while there are indications in Marx's works that seem to favor this, there is no theoretical reason to prioritize this mechanism of crisis over several others, and the resolution of this question is more a matter of historical record than theoretical.
As for McIntyre's criticism, Desai claims that the former's argument exaggerates U.S. productivity growth, adding that while the neoliberal project of reducing labor costs largely succeeded, the key question to ask is what was done with this success. Rather than productive investment, profits have been used in ever-growing financial hoarding. Desai claims that this had more to do with increased exploitation rates than capitalists’ reliance on the state to impose the consequences of their strategy in a class-based pecking order whereby losses were imposed more on the poor and less on investors. She argues that the seeming resistance in McIntyre's and others’ reactions to criticisms of the idea of U.S. hegemony has more to do with yardsticks in the long debate over global hegemony having been steadily moved in order to resist the idea of a multipolar international economy.
Desai notes Kellogg's engagement with Panitch and Gindin, where she sees the emphasis on high technology as yet another example of moving goalposts within discussions about global hegemony. She insists that UCD was developed by classical Marxism, of which both the Bolsheviks and Trotsky were part. And as for the matter of the imperial nature of the former USSR, Desai believes that the claim needs to be located in the dynamics of the Soviet economy.
One of the most potent challenges to the reign of neoliberalism in Europe has come from Podemos in Spain. The next contribution traces one of the most important intellectual roots of this movement, though little known to the English-speaking world. In the Remarx essay entitled “Miguel Romero (1945–2014): A Political and Intellectual Portrait,” Josep Maria Antentas introduces Anglophone audiences to the ideas of one of the most prominent figures of Spain's revolutionary Left. As Antentas explains, Romero's militancy originated in the anti-Franco student movement of the 1960s and continued through the dawn of the alter-globalization movement and the emergence of the 15M and Indignados movements. Antentas provides an overview of Romero's writings (which largely remain unavailable in English) on international politics, the post-Franco Transition, the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish Revolution, the relationship between politics and social movements, and strategic affairs. Toward the end of his life, Romero became increasingly skeptical of the possibilities of revolution. Reminiscent of Žižek, Romero was deeply concerned with neoliberalism's dominance over words and over our conceptions of the world. The meaning of revolution, according to Romero, needed to be recovered and reconceived given neoliberalism's trivialization of its meaning in advertising and technology. For Romero, revolution in radical discourse cannot be reduced to obtaining state power; it requires the formation of self-management and self-organization among an “objective-aware” social majority, both horizontally and downward into the roots of society. Revolution, he writes, constitutes a complex process that is “always an exceptional event, the possibility of which originates from the confluence of fleeting, unstable and extraordinary circumstances.” Critically aware of the ways in which the Left conceived of “winning,” he ultimately viewed the task of revolution as the process of producing an alternative to capitalism.
The search for alternative social imaginaries, which directly or indirectly motivates all the contributions to this issue, is also the main theme of Martin Danyluk's Art/iculations essay. In “Dreaming Other Worlds: Commodity Culture, Mass Desire, and the Ideology of Inception,” Danyluk presents a critical reading of the 2010 science-fiction film, Inception. He situates the film within the broader context of mass cultural products that offer utopian or transformative promises that cannot be realized through the consumption of commodities. Today's movie audiences are presented with fantastical worlds that present alternative realities of the past, present, and future, yet alternative political imaginaries that transcend the bounds of racism, patriarchy, and exploitation are rarely explored. Hollywood, Danyluk argues, consistently draws on science and technology to present new visions of reality, yet on questions of politics and society it reinforces the status quo. Inception is no different. The film's plot is premised on the use of declassified military technology that allows Leonardo DiCaprio's character—Dom Cobb, a professional “dream thief”—to enter, survey, and alter the subconscious minds of his sleeping targets. This technology presents the opportunity to radically transform the spatial and temporal landscape of the dream world as well as the subconscious. Yet Cobb uses the technology to extract valuable information for corporate clients—in this specific instance, to maintain competitive markets—rather than to transform society altogether. In this sense the film's presentation of possibilities for radically transforming space, time, and the subconscious do not extend to social relations. Drawing from Žižek, Danyluk suggests that contemporary Western culture occludes our capacity for dreaming and reinforces our lack of vocabulary for understanding our conditions and envisioning new ones. But through his analysis of Inception, Danyluk argues that the utopian moments in mainstream cultural products can be used by the Left to draw attention to struggles for social transformation.
The transformation of contemporary capitalism by digital technology is a topic that is of growing importance in modern Marxism. As noted by Feenberg in this issue as well as by others whose works have appeared in previous ones, the impact of digital technology in shaping our material and inner lives is at the center of a flourishing literature. In our Reviews section, Zoe Sherman examines Yann Moulier Boutang's Cognitive Capitalism and Christian's Fuchs's Digital Labor and Karl Marx. In the former work, which Sherman finds unstructured and unfocused, the two ideas that she deems discernible are that the production of knowledge and networks in the current capitalist order is real production, which the labor theory of value is incapable of explaining, and that the production of value is no longer under the control of the capitalists. Fuchs—in contrast with Boutang, writes Sherman—argues that Marxist theory provides us with the best tools for conceptualizing the increasing importance of information in modern-day capitalism. Sherman is impressed by Fuchs's discussion of the decline in fin de siècle Marxism. One reason for this decline, Fuchs thinks, is postmodernism, but this “gap” in Fuchs's work is for Sherman something exciting, as she sees much in the author's work that is kindred to postmodern Marxism—to those analyses that have shaped and nurtured this very journal—and thus, much that invites conversation.
On the 20th of July 2015, at the time of writing of this Editors’ Introduction, a human bomb went off at a news conference taking place in the garden of Amara Culture Centre in Suruç, Turkey, killing thirty-four and wounding over a hundred people, members of the Federation of Youth Association (SGDF), the youth branch of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP). These young people had gone to Suruç to build a nursery and a children’s playground, all part of an effort of rebuilding Kobanê, a place which has become a living example and a symbol of an alternative social imaginary to that offered by capitalism, drawing different social horizons cognizant of unequal gender and ethnic relations. While we ponder on this horrendous tragedy, we are reminded yet again that alternative social imaginaries are met with resistance at all times and that the opposition they face is not merely theoretical but, frequently, murderously violent. As we reflect on the violence of what has happened, one of the many questions we ask ourselves is not only that of how to continue the effort of building different social forms but also how we communicate the idea(s) of a different world to others all the while respecting alterity.
—The Editors |
