1 Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History 2.1. The
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From: Handbook of Historical Sociology Edited by Gerard Delanty and Engin Isin Sage: London, 2003
From: Handbook of Historical Sociology edited by Gerard Delanty and Engin Isin Sage: London, 2003 (Please cite from published version.) 7. Historical Materialist Sociology and Revolutions George C. Comninel One of the fundamental issues of historical sociology since its origins in historical social theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been that of a transition between medieval and modern forms of society. There have, indeed, been so many variations on this basic theme that it would scarcely be possible to enumerate them all. What all have in common is the delineation of two contrasting historical social epochs, comprising specific sets of social characteristics as distinctive forms of society, accompanied by some conception of systematic social change from one to the other. The older form of society may not be conceived specifically in relation to the European middle ages, but such a fundamental transition is in every case identified as culminating in, coinciding with, or occurring in the course of a European modern period that opened roughly five hundred years ago. The social forms involved in this transition have been variously described in terms of such as oppositions as ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, ‘feudal’ and ‘capitalist’, ‘agrarian’ and ‘commercial’, ‘simple’ and ‘complex’, and ‘aristocratic’ and ‘bourgeois’. The historical process of change itself has been identified with increased rationalization, desacralization, urbanization, and/or commercialization; development of the division of labour; the rise of a bourgeois class; the growth of capitalism; or some broad amalgam of these and related processes conceived simply as ‘modernization’. This transition has most typically been understood as part of a larger historical process of ‘progress’, a protean concept that has underpinned much social thought during the modern era [Comninel, 1987: 61-74; Wood, 1995: 6-8; Meek, 1976; Butterfield, 1931]. -
Critical Theory, Historical Materialism, and the Ostensible End of Marxism: the Poverty of Theory Revisited
Critical Theory, Historical Materialism, and the Ostensible End of Marxism: The Poverty of Theory Revisited BRYAN D. PALMER Summary: This essay notes the extent to which poststructuralism/postmodernism have generally espoused hostility to historical materialism, surveys some representative examples of historical writing that have gravitated toward the new critical theory in opposition to Marxism, and closes with a discussion of the ironic evolution of a poststructurally inclined, anti-Marxist historiography. Counter to the prevailing ideological consensus that Marxism has been brought to its interpretive knees by a series of analytic challenges and the political collapse of the world's ostensibly "socialist" states, this essay argues that historical materialism has lost neither its power to interpret the past nor its relevance to the contemporary intellectual terrain. It is now a decade-and-one-half since Edward Thompson penned The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors, and ten times as many years have passed since the publication of Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy.1 Whatever one may think about the advances in knowledge associated with historical materialism and Marxism, particularly in terms of the practice of historical writing, there is no denying that this sesquicentennial has been a problematic period in the making of communist society; the last fifteen years, moreover, are associated with the bleak end of socialism and the passing of Marxism as an intellectual force. Indeed, it is a curious conjuncture of our times that the -
The Significance and Shortcomings of Karl Marx
Class, Race and Corporate Power Volume 6 Issue 2 Article 3 2018 The Significance and Shortcomings of Karl Marx Chris Wright Hunter College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Wright, Chris (2018) "The Significance and Shortcomings of Karl Marx," Class, Race and Corporate Power: Vol. 6 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. DOI: 10.25148/CRCP.6.2.008310 Available at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol6/iss2/3 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts, Sciences & Education at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Class, Race and Corporate Power by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Significance and Shortcomings of Karl Marx Abstract In this essay I explain both why Karl Marx remains an important thinker and why he is in some respects inadequate. I focus on the central issue of 'materialism vs. idealism,' and briefly explore ways in which contemporary intellectuals still haven't assimilated the insights of historical materialism. In the last section of the paper I examine the greatest weakness of Marxism, its theory of proletarian revolution, and propose an alternative conceptualization that both updates the theory for the twenty-first century and is more faithful to historical materialism than Marx's own conception was. Keywords Karl Marx, Marxism, socialism Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This article is available in Class, Race and Corporate Power: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/ classracecorporatepower/vol6/iss2/3 I often have occasion to think that, as an “intellectual,” I’m very lucky to be alive at this time in history, at the end of the long evolution from Herodotus and the pre-Socratic philosophers to Chomsky and modern science. -
Base, Superstructure, and Dialectical Totality 43 Seán Mitchell
Base, superstructure, and dialectical totality 43 Seán Mitchell n recent years it became something of a custom to a prognosis that capitalism no longer faced a viable sys- begin any contemporary discussion of historical temic alternative. materialism with a nod to the briefly dominant ax- Much of this pessimism was in fact shared by Fuku- iom that humanity had reached its veritable termi- yama himself, who was ambivalent if not altogether Inus. Capitalism had triumphed over socialism, Francis gloomy about the new world order he heralded, warn- Fukuyama insisted, and the ‘end of history’ was upon ing that ‘the end of history will be a very sad time’ when us. Fukuyama’s bold declaration of historical finality ‘worldwide ideological struggle…will be replaced by could be read in hindsight as little more than neoliberal economic calculation, the endless solving of technical triumphalism, proffered in 1989 as philosophical sus- problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfac- tenance to a U.S. elite then looking forward to carving tion of sophisticated consumer demands.’4 Few on the out a ‘new American century’ in the years ahead. The left were moved by this morose vision of the future, but political trajectory of the author of The End of History too many adopted a kind of inverted pessimism from and the Last Man would arguably confirm that apprais- Fukuyama: if the ‘history of all hitherto existing society al, with Fukuyama collaborating for much of the 1990s is the history of class struggle’, and the working class with an assortment of neo-cons who rose to prominence had been definitively defeated in that epic battle, then around the presidency of George W. -
The Discontents of Marxism
Munich Personal RePEc Archive The discontents of Marxism Freeman, Alan London Metropolitan University 30 December 2007 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/48635/ MPRA Paper No. 48635, posted 27 Jul 2013 14:16 UTC The discontents of Marxism Alan Freeman London Metropolitan University Abstract This is a pre-publication version of a full-length review of Kuhn, R. (2007) Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. Urbana and U of Illinois. Please cite as Freeman, A. 2008. ‘The Discontents of Marxism’. Debatte, 16 (1), April 2008 pp. 122-131 Keywords: Economics, Marxism, Value Theory, Marxist political economy, Marxist Economics, Kondratieff, Grossman JEL Codes: B14, B31, B51 2008j Grossman Review for MPRA.doc Page 1 of 9 Alan Freeman The discontents of Marxism Review of Kuhn, R. (2007) Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism By Alan Freeman, London Metropolitan University In 1977, volumes 2 and 3 of Capital and Class, journal of the seven-year old Conference of Socialist Economists, carried Pete Burgess’s translation of Henryk Grossman’s 1941 review article Marx, Classical Political Economy and the Problem of Dynamics. Of this Kuhn (p190) justly remarks ‘It was and remains one of the most impressive critiques of the methodological underpinnings of the body of ideas known as economics in most universities and the media’. The second part of this article offers a devastating dissection of the approach known as ‘general equilibrium’, which now dominates not only orthodox but ‘Marxist’ economics. Had the participants in the next thirty years of debate around Marx’s economic theories treated this article with even normal professional diligence, most of what passes for ‘theory’ in this field would probably never have been written. -
Marx, Historical Materialism and the Asiatic Wde Of
MARX, HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND THE ASIATIC WDE OF PRODUCTION BY Joseph Bensdict Huang Tan B.A. (Honors) Simon Fraser University 1994 THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN THE SCHOOL OF COMMUN ICATION @Joseph B. Tan 2000 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY July 2000 Al1 rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. uisitions and Acguiiiet raphii Senrices senrices bibiiihiques The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Li'brary of Canada to BibIiothèque nationale du Canada de reproduceYloan, distriiute or sel1 reproduireyprêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microh, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous papa or electronic formats. la fome de micro fi ch el^ de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author tetains ownership of the L'auîeur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis*Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts iÏom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT Historical materialism (HM), the theory of history originally developed by Marx and Engels is most comrnonly interpreted as a unilinear model, which dictates that al1 societies must pass through definite and universally similar stages on the route to communism. This simplistic interpretation existed long before Stalin and has persisted long after the process of de-Stalinization and into the present. -
Slavery, Capitalism, and the “Proletariat”
1 1 The Slave-Machine: Slavery, Capital- ism, and the “Proletariat” in The Black Jacobins and Capital Nick Nesbitt This essay argues that C. L. R. James’s Marxist humanism is inherently inade- quate for describing the distinction and transition between slavery and capitalism. To do so, the essay interrogates James’s famous claim in The Black Jacobins (1938) that the slaves of St. Domingue were “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time,” by comparing James’s understand- ing of the concept of proletariat—there and in World Revolution (1937)—with Marx’s various developments of the concept across the three volumes of Capital. This analysis distinguishes James’s political and historicist deployment of the term from Marx’s analytical usage of the notion in his categorial critique of capitalism.In contrast with James’s linear, Marxist-humanist understanding of the passage from slavery to capitalism, Marx himself demarcates a well-defined delineation between these two basic categories, understood in Capital as analytically (as opposed to historically) distinct modes of production.The essay thus concludes by analyzing Marx’s conceptual differentiation of slavery and industrial capitalism in Capital, drawing on Etienne Balibar’s analysis of the concepts of mode of production and transition in Reading Capital (1965). The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement. -
The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations Of
THE SURVIVAL OF CAPITALISM Henri Lefebvre THE SURVIVAL OF CAPITALISM Reproduction of the Relations of Production Translated by Frank Bryant St. Martin's Press, New York. Copyright © 1973 by Editions Anthropos Translation copyright © 1976 by Allison & Busby All rights reserved. For information, write: StMartin's Press. Inc.• 175 Fifth Avenue. New York. N.Y. 10010 Printed in Great Britain Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-32932 First published in the United States of America in 1976 AFFILIATED PUBLISHERS: Macmillan Limited. London also at Bombay. Calcutta, Madras and Melbourne CONTENTS 1. The discovery 7 2. Reproduction of the relations of production 42 3. Is the working class revolutionary? 92 4. Ideologies of growth 102 5. Alternatives 120 Index 128 1 THE DISCOVERY I The reproduction of the relations of production, both as a con cept and as a reality, has not been "discovered": it has revealed itself. Neither the adventurer in knowledge nor the mere recorder of facts can sight this "continent" before actually exploring it. If it exists, it rose from the waves like a reef, together with the ocean itself and the spray. The metaphor "continent" stands for capitalism as a mode of production, a totality which has never been systematised or achieved, is never "over and done with", and is still being realised. It has taken a considerable period of work to say exactly what it is that is revealing itself. Before the question could be accurately formulated a whole constellation of concepts had to be elaborated through a series of approximations: "the everyday", "the urban", "the repetitive" and "the differential"; "strategies". -
The Critique of Real Abstraction: from the Critical Theory of Society to the Critique of Political Economy and Back Again
The Critique of Real Abstraction: from the Critical Theory of Society to the Critique of Political Economy and Back Again Chris O’Kane John Jay, CUNY [email protected] There has been a renewed engagement with the idea of real abstraction in recent years. Scholars associated with the New Reading of Marx, such as Moishe Postone, Chris Arthur, Michael Heinrich, Patrick Murray, Riccardo Bellofiore and others,1 have employed the idea in their important reconstructions of Marx’s critique of political economy. Alberto Toscano, Endnotes, Jason W. Moore and others have utilized and extended these theorizations to concieve of race, gender, and nature as real abstractions. Both the New Reading and these new theories of real abstraction have provided invaluable work; the former in systematizing Marx’s inconsistent and unfinished theory of value as a theory of the abstract social domination of capital accumulation and reproduction; the latter in supplementing such a theory. Yet their exclusive focus on real abstraction in relation to the critique of political economy means that the critical marxian theories of real abstraction -- developed by Alfred Sohn- Rethel, Theodor W. Adorno and Henri Lefebvre -- have been mostly bypassed by the latter and have largely served as the object of trenchant criticism for their insufficient grasp of Marx’s theory of value by the former. Consequently these new readings and new theories of real abstraction elide important aspects of Sohn-Rethel, Adorno and Lefebvre’s critiques of real abstraction; which sought to develop Marx’s critique of political economy into objective-subjective critical theories of the reproduction of capitalist society.2 However, two recent works by 1 Moishe Postone’s interpretation of real abstraction will be discussed below. -
Theory of History in Which the Proletariat Inevitably End up the Dominant Order; This Has Proven Historically to Be False
9/24/07 Marxism • Marxism is many different kinds of theories at once: • theory of history in which the proletariat inevitably end up the dominant order; this has proven historically to be false. • a critique of capitalism. This body of theory can be relevant to literature, but we’re not going to get into it explicitly. Barry and Richter give some sense of this; for the midterm, I’ll have you learn some terms so that you’ll be at least somewhat conversant with this kind of thinking if you run into it again. • a sort-of-literary theory. I say “sort of” because what Marx and others theorize is larger than literature: “consciousness and its expressions,” which would include not only literature but all of the arts, religion, politics, law, and so on. This is the part of Marxist theory we’re going to center on, because it raises a really huge problem for post-NC Theory in general, or least for all political theories (and we know that, as Barry says, “politics is pervasive” in post-NC theory, so ALL Theory is political according to this view). • Starting point: 410: “In the social production…determines their consciousness.” Some things to point out: • base/superstructure. “Relations of production”--economic system, more or less. At the most fundamental level, people have to survive, and the way we do that as a species is to produce stuff. But we don’t do that on our own; we do it as part of some kind of economic system that we are born into. -
The Dangerous Class: the Concept of the Lumpenproletariat
Review The dangerous class: The concept of the lumpenproletariat Clyde W. Barrow, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2020, xii+196pp., ISBN: 978-0472132249 Contemporary Political Theory (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00487-9 An oft-cited description of the lumpenproletariat comes from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Parisian lumpenproletariat that Louis Bonaparte recruited during the French class struggles of 1848–1851 in order to defeat the proletariat and ultimately to seize state power consisted of the following: Alongside decayed roue´s with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, ma- quereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohe`me (1963: 75). As self-interested hustlers whose services are for sale to the highest bidder, the lumpenproletariat – a term Marx and Engels created – is typically co-opted, as Bonaparte demonstrates, by reactionary movements. However, Marx’s taxonomy indicates the difficulty of locating a synthesized and explanatory definition for a term presented here as an ‘indefinite’ alterity with no clear framework of composition. The term has seemed, to some commentators, incoherent or reflective of scorn toward the disreputable or poor (Bussard, 1987; Draper, 1972; Hardt and Negri, 2004). Others – typically literary and cultural critics (Stallybrass, 1990; Mills, 2017) – have approached it as the discursive trace of a complex social scene that escapes full schematization by class relations. -
Race, Rights and Reterritorialization
RACE, RIGHTS AND RETERRITORIALIZATION Gil Gott * Critical race and neo-Marxist perspectives treat rights or “rights discourse” with a somewhat similar and complex ambivalence, but with distinctly different weightings and emphases in how they theorize rights functioning within systems of liberal democracy and racialized capitalism. On the one hand, both approaches identify a subject formation function1 of liberal rights discourse that may be informed by dominant ideology— racialized in the case of critical race theory (CRT) and disciplinary or abstract universalist2 in the case of neo-Marxism. On the other hand, this scholarship acknowledges a politically progressive or liberatory subject-formation and equalizing/ redistributive function by which rights discourse may potentially * Associate Professor of International Studies, DePaul University. I would like to thank Anthony Paul Farley for his encouragement in this project. My interest in Marxist legal theory was refreshed after reading Anthony’s inspiring article: Anthony P. Farley, Accumulation, 11 MICH J. RACE & L. 51 (2005). For my family, Sumi, Maia and Quin. 1 The notion of “subject formation” suggests the importance of power and social processes, including law, in effecting human subjects and subjectivity. See, e.g., ALAN HUNT AND GARY WICKHAM, FOUCAULT AND LAW: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF LAW AS GOVERNANCE 28-29 (1994) (explaining the claim that social processes “give rise to subjectivity,” which results from a combination of individual agency and “outside” power). 2 Abstract universalist conceptions of rights may be thought of as those that propound an imaginary equality under law as a universal condition of citizenship in liberal democratic states. Critics view such conceptions as abstracting from the material inequality and exclusions of civil society.