Theory in Weberian Marxism: Patterns of Critical Social
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Reichman on Linden, 'Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: a Survey of Critial Theories and Debates Since 1917'
H-Russia Reichman on Linden, 'Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critial Theories and Debates since 1917' Review published on Monday, November 10, 2008 Marcel van der Linden. Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critial Theories and Debates since 1917. Leiden: Brill, 2007. ix + 380 pp. $139.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-15875-7. Reviewed by Henry Reichman Published on H-Russia (November, 2008) Commissioned by Nellie H. Ohr A Fading Tradition This is a revised, corrected, updated, and expanded version of a work that began as a PhD dissertation and was originally published in Dutch in 1989 and again in German in 1992. Marcel van der Linden, a labor historian at Amsterdam University and executive editor of theInternational Review of Social History, summarizes an extraordinarily broad range of Western Marxist thinkers in an effort to understand how Marxists who were politically independent of the Soviet Union "theoretically interpreted developments in the Soviet Union" (p. 4). Noting that "in the history of ideas Marxist theories have not received the attention they deserve" (p. 2) and that "the 'Russian Question' was an absolutely central problem for Marxism in the twentieth century" (p. 1), van der Linden seeks simultaneously to shed light on both the Soviet experience and "the historical development of Marxist thought" (p. 1), succeeding perhaps more in the latter goal than the former. The book opens with a brief introduction, which postulates that the development of Western Marxist thinking about the Soviet Union was shaped by three "contextual clusters:" 1) "The general theory of the forms of society (modes of production) and their succession" adopted by differing Marxist thinkers; 2) the changing "perception of stability and dynamism of Western capitalism"; and 3) the various ways "in which the stability and dynamism of Soviet society was perceived" (pp. -
The Radical Infatuation with Western Marxism Or La Belle Dame Sans Merci?
Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale , Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall/Automne, 1982) . THE RADICAL INFATUATION WITH WESTERN MARXISM OR LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI? Rosaire Langlois Russell Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. X+202 One of the more striking characteristics of the re-orientation of social and political theory during the past fifteen years or so, has been the resurgence of interest in various types of Marxist theory.' Old theorists were rehabilitated- among them Lukacs and Gramsci-and new thinkers were embraced-notably, Althusser and Habermas . The old faith took on new trappings . This second coming of Marxism bore little resemblance to the old-fashioned version. The very foundations of classical Marxism-for example, the stress on the role of the economy and technology on the organization of social life-were cast aside with a corresponding exaltation of the role of the autonomous human subject . Innocent bystanders could be forgiven for wondering whether the uniqueness and perhaps even the coherence of Marxism had not been compromised altogether . The latest work of Russell Jacoby, while not intended as an encyclopaedic survey of all the theorists and issues within the "Western Marxist" tradition, attempts a partial stocktaking and affords an opportunity for a tentative assessment of the approach .z Jacoby writes as both scholar and passionate partisan. Not all, however, will share his continued enthusiasm. The Dialectic ofDefeat is, at one level, a work of intellectual history. As such, it is a quite interesting and significant effort . -
Volume 33, Numbers 1-2, Fall 2019-Spring 2020 • Realism Published Twice Yearly, Mediations Is the Journal of the Marxist Literary Group
Volume 33, Numbers 1-2, Fall 2019-Spring 2020 • Realism Published twice yearly, Mediations is the journal of the Marxist Literary Group. We publish dossiers of translated material on special topics and peer-reviewed general issues, usually in alternation. General inquiries and submissions should be directed to [email protected]. We invite scholarly contributions across disciplines on any topic that engages seriously with the Marxist tradition. Manuscripts received will be taken to be original, unpublished work not under consideration elsewhere. Articles should be submitted electronically in a widely-used format. Manuscripts should not exceed reasonable article length, and should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 300 words, including six keywords. Articles will be published in MLA endnote format, and should be submitted with the author’s name and affiliation on a separate cover page to facilitate blind peer review. Photographs, tables, and figures should be sent as separate files in a widely- used format. Written permission to reproduce copyright-protected material must be obtained by the author before submission. Books for review should be sent to: Mediations Department of English (MC 162) 601 South Morgan Street University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago IL 60607-7120 USA Articles published in Mediations may be reproduced for scholarly purposes without express permission, provided the reproduction is accompanied by full citation information. For archives and further information, visit http://www.mediationsjournal.org Cover -
Hegemony and Democracy in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
Hegemony and Democracy in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks Dylan Riley Antonio Gramsci is once again moving to the center of debates in contemporary social theory. Sociologists have taken up the concepts of hegemony and civil society to analyze regimes and social movements (Riley 2010; Tugal 2009). Political theorists have used Gramsci as an inspiration for developing the idea of radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Scholars of international relations have found Gramsci’s focus on global processes useful for analyzing neo-liberalism (Morton 2004, 125-127). Gramsci’s work has also been central in the attempt to elaborate a “sociological Marxism” that moves beyond both the statist and economistic biases of more traditional forms of Second and Third International historical materialism (Burawoy 2003; Wright 2010). But despite this outpouring of recent interest, many of the key elements of Gramsci’s political theory remain obscure. In this context, this essay returns to the Prison Notebooks1 to ask a specific question: “How did Gramsci conceive of the connection between democracy and hegemony?” This question has already generated a substantial body of scholarship. But most of it can be placed into one of two positions. One interpretation views hegemony as a theory of revolutionary dictatorship: a “Leninism” for the West (Galli della Loggia 1977, 69; Salvadori 1977, 40-41). These writers tend to be highly critical of the various attempts by the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, PCI) to use Gramsci as a symbolic justification -
Reification in the Modern World
University of Mary Washington Eagle Scholar Student Research Submissions Spring 5-3-2020 Reification in the Modern orldW Tommy F. White Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation White, Tommy F., "Reification in the Modern orld"W (2020). Student Research Submissions. 337. https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/337 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by Eagle Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Student Research Submissions by an authorized administrator of Eagle Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. White 1 Reification in the Modern World Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in Philosophy University of Mary Washington Fredericksburg, Virginia Tommy F. White Philosophy 485 4/26/2020 Supervised by Professor Craig Vasey White 2 REIFICATION IN THE MODERN WORLD TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction: 3 II. Reification: 8 III. Heidegger and Lukács: 18 IV. Marcuse and Leisure Time: 26 V. Conclusion: 31 Special Thanks to Dr. Craig Vasey, Dr. Michael Reno, Dr. Jason Hayob-Matzke, and Dr. David Ambuel for all the help and discussions over the last four years. White 3 I. In this paper, I will discuss a couple of ways that our experiences as individuals are affected by the capitalist structures of the society we live in. Mainly, I will focus on the process of reification, and whether it can help us understand society. There is reason to believe that by living in the late-capitalist society that is the United States, we are expediting our process of dying. -
Georg' Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”
Georg Lukacs History & Class Consciousness Written: 1923; Source: History & Class Consciousness; Publisher: Merlin Press, 1967; Transcribed: Andy Blunden; HTML Markup: Andy Blunden. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. For man, however, the root is man himself. Marx: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. Of course the problem can only be discussed with this degree of generality if it achieves the depth and breadth to be found in Marx’s own analyses. That is to say, the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them. I: The Phenomenon of Reification 1 The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation be- tween people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fun- damental nature: the relation between people. -
Queer Marx John Andrews CUNY Graduate Center
Criticism Volume 52 Issue 2 Honoring Eve: A Special Issue on the Work of Article 22 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 2010 Queer Marx John Andrews CUNY Graduate Center Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Andrews, John (2010) "Queer Marx," Criticism: Vol. 52: Iss. 2, Article 22. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol52/iss2/22 QUeer Marx In the introduction to his collection of essays For Marx (1965), Louis John andrews althusser tells us that one of Marx- ian philosophy’s unique assets—and one of its ongoing challenges—is The Reification of Desire: Toward its ability to account for itself, “to a Queer Marxism by Kevin Floyd. take itself as its own object.”1 Cer- Minneapolis: University of Minne- tainly, Marxism’s historical reflex- sota Press, 2009. Pp. 304, 4 black- ivity has propelled its enduring and-white photos. $75.00 cloth, power to describe and explain the $25.00 paper. fallouts and reinventions of capi- talism. Yet this power has in recent decades been eclipsed by critiques of its tendency to reduce all of social relations to relations of economic production, relegating particularities such as race or sex “in the final instance” (asa lthusser might say) to class. One of the most trenchant of these critiques has come from queer theory, a field whose own critical efficacy has also been called into question in recent years. The wholesale “queering” of any fixed epistemological category alongside the “homonormaliza- tion” of LGBT politics prompted the editors of a special volume of Social Text to ask “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?”2 The issue of Marxism’s and queer theo- ry’s ongoing critical power—and their seeming incommensurabil- ity—sets the backdrop for Kevin Floyd’s ambitious and careful book The Reification of Desire. -
Hegemony and Democracy in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
Peer Reviewed Title: Hegemony, Democracy, and Passive Revolution in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks Journal Issue: California Italian Studies, 2(2) Author: Riley, Dylan J., University of California - Berkeley Publication Date: 2011 Publication Info: California Italian Studies, Italian Studies Multicampus Research Group, UC Office of the President Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5x48f0mz Author Bio: Dylan J. Riley is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His work uses comparative and historical methods to challenge a set of key conceptual oppositions in classical sociological theory: authoritarianism and democracy, revolution and counter-revolution, and state and society. His first monograph The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 was published in 2010 by Johns Hopkins University Press. His current book project is entitled Knowledge Production or Construction?: A Comparative Analysis of Census Taking in the West (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed) and is forthcoming in the Rose Monograph Series of the American Sociological Association. Keywords: Gramsci, Hegemony, Social Theory Local Identifier: ismrg_cisj_8962 Abstract: What is the relationship between democracy and hegemony in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks? Salvadori and Galli della Loggia argue that hegemony is best understood as a theory of dictatorship and is therefore incompatible with democracy. Vacca argues that hegemony is inconceivable in the absence of democracy. I bridge these divergent readings by making two arguments. First, hegemony is a form of rationalized intellectual and moral leadership, and therefore depends on liberal democratic institutions. Second, hegemony is established through revolution. Gramsci thus paradoxically combines a deep appreciation for liberal democracy with a basically Leninist conception of politics. -
A Phenomenological Take on the Problem of Reification
A Phenomenological take on the Problem of Reification Wade A Bell Jr University of Gothenburg Abstract This article attempts to provide a new look at an old idea within Marxist discourse. Reification, as first imagined by Marx and later Lukacs, describes a process by which capitalism transforms human beings and social relations into things. Although the concept has been subjected to much abstraction and reinvention over the years, this article attempts to address a foundational problem that has remained unsolved since its inception: Close analysis reveals that the concept of reification has never been developed to include an example of an alternative or non-reified state of being. To solve this foundational problem, I look beyond Marxism and to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is our primary vehicle for being-in-the-world, but what makes his philosophy unique is his emphasis on embodied subjectivity, as well as his dialectical conception of corporeality and being-in-the- world. From this view, the social and material worlds can best be understood as dynamic realms of intersubjectivity, while sentient beings always exist as subjects prior to the reifying effects of capitalism. Building upon an ongoing dialectic between the ideas of Marx, Lukacs, Merleau- Ponty and others, I will ultimately reframe the concept of reification as a objectifying tendency, precipitating from capitalism’s ability to obscure the lived experience of the phenomenal body. Keywords: Reification; Phenomenology; Marxism; Georg Lukacs; Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1. Introduction Perhaps no other concept in Marxist discourse has been subjected to as much conjecture, abstraction, and rethinking as reification. -
Reification-Thingification and Alienation ̶ Basic Concepts of Marxʼs Critique of Political Economy and Practical Materialsm ̶
Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies 49 (2018), pp.1-28. Ⓒ Hitotsubashi University REIFICATION-THINGIFICATION AND ALIENATION ̶ BASIC CONCEPTS OF MARXʼS CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND PRACTICAL MATERIALSM ̶ * TOMONAGA TAIRAKO Marxist scholars and researchers of the last half of the twentieth century failed to develop Marxʼs theory of alienation to go beyond achievements of the 1960s. Althusser played an important role in discrediting Marxʼs concept of alienation as presupposing humanistic essentialism and at the same time contaminated with Hegelian idealism, which had profoundly influenced the young Marx. According to Althusser, giving up the concept of alienation is a necessary step towards the scientific Marx that culminates in Capital. Since the 1970s, the dominance of “postmodern” thinking had almost completely swept away any sincere attempts to deal withMarx ʼs concept of alienation in a philosophical and scientific way. Under the sway of postmodernism, any serious philosophical projects to introduce the subject (or subject-object relations) as a key concept for comprehending human society and history were simply ignored or treated as contaminated with an obsolete “modern” way of thinking. In Japan, Wataru Hiromatsu, much influenced by Althusser, criticized the idea of alienation in the young Marx and characterized the development of Marxʼs thoughts as a transformation from the theory of alienation to that of reification. Withthistransformation hypothesis, he contributed to the propagation of the interpretation among Marxist scholars that the theory of alienation and that of reification are incompatible. This paper is based upon the paper: Versachlichung and Verdinglichung ‒ Basic Categories of Marxʼs Theory of Reification and Their Logical Construction, published in Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. -
The Fromm-Marcuse Debate Revisited
351 The Fromm-Marcuse debate revisited JOHN RICKERT Department of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin Erich Fromm has long been out of fashion.' Although Fromm was a lifelong critic of capitalist society as well as the figure chiefly responsible for the Frankfurt Institute's integration of Marx and Freud, few studies of Western Marxism examine his work in any detail;2 articles about his writings rarely appear in the leading journals of the left;3 and his death in 1980 has, as far as I know, brought forth few attempts by scholars in this country to examine what his legacy might be.4 The neglect of Fromm's contribution is due in part5 to the interpreta- tion placed on his work by his former colleagues at the Institute of Social Research - most notably, Herbert Marcuse.6 In his famous "Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism," Marcuse argued that although Fromm's early work is indeed radical, his later psychology is essentially conform- ist in character. In rejecting Freud's libido theory and certain elements of his metapsychology, Fromm, H. S. Sullivan, and Karen Homey, Mar- cuse wrote, had deprived psychoanalysis of its most critical concepts, stripped it of a "conceptual basis outside the established system" (Eros and Civilization,7 hereafter cited as EC, p. 6), and in its place offered an idealistic ethic that preached adaptation to the status quo. Since the renaissance of critical theory in the 1960s, Marcuse's essay has set the tone for the left's reading of Fromm's work. The aim of the pres- ent article is to challenge this interpretation by arguing that it fundamen- tally distorts both the general tenor and specific content of Fromm's thought. -
Marxism, Ecology, and Contemporary Architectural Theory
humanities Article Is Green the New Red? Marxism, Ecology, and Contemporary Architectural Theory Curtis Swope Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Trinity University, 1 Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200, USA; [email protected] Abstract: This essay examines the role of Marxist concepts in recent architectural theories of ecology using two architecture firms, Estudio Teddy Cruz and Sauerbruch Hutton (SH), as case studies. In their writings, Cruz and SH mobilize the critique of capital, a dialectical materialist understanding of history, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of functionalist culture for the theorization of sustainable design. Their work has two vital ramifications for current sustainability discourses in two different fields which this essay seeks to bridge. For Marxist theorists concerned about ecology but averse to Western Marxism because of its supposed idealism, Cruz and SH show anew the importance of aesthetic concerns to conceptions of the environment. For design scholars accustomed to thinking of Marxism as having been absorbed into broader debates about cultural studies, the architects’ theories have the potential to recentralize the left-wing inheritance through its adaptation to concerns of ecology. In addition, in the essay’s conclusion, I reflect briefly, as a suggestion for further research, on how Cruz’s and SH’s architectural practice and theories might productively be analyzed in light of the terms of the Adorno-Benjamin debate of the 1930s over the political status of the cultural products of capital. Can eighty-year old discussions of the potentially revolutionary and retrograde qualities of mass cultural objects be relevant to radical thought in the age of climate change.