DOCSLIB.ORG

The Proletariat*

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Proletariat* Trans-Scripts 3 (2013) The Proletariat* Nathan Brown** A political slogan always takes place, articulated in a context, at the crux of theory and praxis. A slogan, especially when it takes the form of a chant, conjoins the thinking of a situation to action within it. A slogan or chant manifests the inscription of political thought within the political action of bodies. Likewise, it manifests the inscription of acting bodies within the thinking they articulate. As everyone knows who participates in political action, this is what lends the practice of chanting during a march, a picket, or an occupation the peculiar quality of being at once discomfiting and exhilarating: the surrender of one’s thinking body, situated at the crux of theory and praxis, to the declarative speaking of formulations that are not necessarily or essentially one’s own. Participation in the collective articulation of political situations opens individuals to both the joy and the anxiety of being spoken through, ventriloquized by the collective. Indeed, often one finds oneself repeating formulations with which one does not agree at all; and this is part of the requisite humiliation of political action, the frequent necessity of allowing our participation in what happens to overcome our proud attachment to the consistency of what we think we are. So—what are we, when we occupy this curious interstice between the tenuous and temporary consistency of the collective (a common cry, for instance) and the inconsistency of what we think we are? It’s with this question in mind that I want to reflect on one particular chant that was taken up in a particular context during the political sequence called Occupy Oakland. The context was the Anti-Capitalist March on the day of the General Strike, Nov. 2, 2011. The chant was “We, Are, The Proletariat.” __________________________ * This text was presented as the keynote lecture at the 15 March 2013 graduate student conference in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, titled, The Laboring Body. ** Nathan Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. His works include “The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier” (forthcoming), “Origin and Extinction, Mourning and Melancholia: On Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life and Lars von Trier's Melancholia” (2012), “Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Alain Badiou and Théorie Communiste in the Age of Riots” (2012), “Red Years: Althusser’s Lesson, Rancière's Error, and the Real Movement of History” (2011), and “Absent Blue Wax (Rationalist Empiricism)” (2010). 61 Nathan Brown What would such a slogan have meant in the context of its articulation? Most immediately, we can say that it functions as a displacement of another slogan: “We Are the 99%.” Both of these slogans configure the political terrain as that of class struggle, but the class analysis implied by each is quite different. The opposition of the 99% to the 1% thinks class in terms of income levels, pointing to the inequality and injustice of income distribution. The category of the proletariat, on the other hand, is premised upon a structural analysis of property and the wage relation. But it isn’t necessary to view “We Are the Proletariat” as a polemical slogan, in the context of that march, rejecting the liberalism of “We Are the 99%” as ideological or incorrect. Rather, it simply points to something like the condition of possibility for the opposition between 99% and 1%: namely, to the exploitation of the wage relation as the structural and historical cause of economic inequality under capitalism. But of course, to determine the constitution of the proletariat through reference to the wage relation is immediately to provoke objections which will indeed prove essential: objections that bear upon the conditions of possibility for the wage relation itself. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx is categorical: “the proletariat is the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.”1 But in Capital, as Aaron Benanav and Endnotes point out in an essential article on surplus populations, Marx is more inclined to define the proletariat as what they call “a class in transition.”2 “Proletarian,” Marx writes in a footnote to Chapter 25, “must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than ‘wage-labourer,’ the man who produces and valorises ‘capital,’ and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorisation.”3 Here, the proletariat is best considered that class which, by working, tends to produce its exclusion from work. What Marx calls “the general law of capitalist accumulation”4 is that “the working population...produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.”5 1 Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 33. 2 Aaron Benanav and Endotes, “Misery and Debt: On The Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital” in Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 20-51. 3 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 764. 4 Ibid., 798. 5 Ibid., 783. 62 Nathan Brown So this is one limit through which we need to think the category of the proletariat: the transformation of the working class into a class which is not working. And we need to conceive of this transitional character of the class as internal to its class constitution, by conceiving of the class historically. Importantly, this is a limit we encounter under conditions of real subsumption that obtain relatively late in the history of capitalism, through technological and managerial innovations that tendentially render living labor relatively superfluous. Much earlier, however, in the very process of its initial constitution, the category of the proletariat is already riven by internal contradictions. Marx describes the process of primitive accumulation as that of divorcing “the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour...of divorcing the producer from the means of production,” a process through which “immediate producers are turned into wage laborers.”6 The gradual formation of the capital-relation through expropriation is punctuated by “moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”7 Here we can think through the limits of Marx’s definition by turning to counter- histories of primitive accumulation offered by Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation, as well as by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. The essential formal point that I want to draw from Federici’s study is that, as she puts it, primitive accumulation...was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.8 While Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation focuses upon the production of landless wage laborers through expropriation, Federici focuses upon the conditions of possibility for the production and reproduction of labor power itself, and thus upon the subjugation of women’s labor and women’s reproductive function that was essential to the formation and maintenance of the so-called “working class.” Of course, this subjugation involved the exclusion of women from waged work, and 6 Ibid., 874-875. 7 Ibid., 876. 8 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 63-64. 63 Nathan Brown thus the construction of a new patriarchal order based upon the mediation of access to the wage through men. In particular, Federici shows that the construction of this new patriarchy was heavily predicated upon the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries: the brutal disciplining of women’s bodies and forms of collective life that was necessary to enforce a new sexual division of labor and confine women to reproductive work.9 Thus, Federici treats gender as a specification of class relations, arguing that the term “women” “signifies not just a hidden history that needs to be made visible; but a particular form of exploitation and, therefore, a unique perspective from which to reconsider the history of capitalist relations.”10 The point I want to hold onto here is that the process of primitive accumulation produces different forms of exploitation, in a technical sense: not only exploitation through the direct extraction of surplus value from wage labor, but also the dependency of wage labor in general upon the unwaged exploitation of reproductive labor in the home, as well as the unwaged exploitation of slave labor. Any consideration of the laboring body thus has to account for Federici’s central claim: that “if capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat.”11 What this means is that the proletariat is constitutively divided, in the first instance:
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Fictitious Capital and the Elusive Quest in Understanding Its Implications: Illusions and Paradoxes*
    CADMUS, Volume 2, No.3, October 2014, 55-65 Fictitious Capital and the Elusive Quest in Understanding its Implications: Illusions and Paradoxes* Joanílio Rodolpho Teixeira Fellow, World Academy of Art & Science; Emeritus Professor, University of Brasilia, Brazil Paula Felix Ferreira Post-graduate Student, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain Abstract This paper deals with the interaction between fictitious capital and the neoliberal model of growth and distribution, inspired by the classical economic tradition. Our renewed interest in this literature has a close connection with the recent international crisis in the capitalist economy. However, this discussion takes as its point of departure the fact that standard eco- nomic theory teaches that financial capital, in this world of increasing globalization, leads to new investment opportunities which improve levels of growth, employment, income distribu- tion, and equilibrium. Accordingly, it is said that such financial resources expand the welfare of people and countries worldwide. Here we examine some illusions and paradoxes of such a paradigm. We show some theoretical and empirical consequences of this vision, which are quite different and have harmful constraints. 1. Introduction There is an extensive controversy concerning traditional models of economic equi- librium and new development paradigms based on an interdisciplinary, broader study of economics. When faced with the harmful effects of misguided directives in an economic and global sense, theorists have the obligation not only to explain their causes, but also to offer a practical solution or alternate thinking. After all, consistent levels of poverty, unemploy- ment and low growth are results which were not expected in orthodox economic models of equilibrium and should be dealt with instead of being thrown aside as a politically restricted issue.
    [Show full text]
  • Theory As Critique Historical Materialism Book Series
    Theory as Critique Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Sébastien Budgen (Paris) David Broder (Rome) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London) volume 161 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm Theory as Critique Essays on Capital By Paul Mattick LEIDEN | BOSTON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mattick, Paul, 1944- author. Title: Theory as critique : essays on Capital / by Paul Mattick. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2018] | Series: Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570-1522 ; Volume 161 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018015156 (print) | LCCN 2018015903 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004366572 (e-book) | ISBN 9789004366565 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Marxian economics. | Capitalism. | Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. Kapital. Classification: LCC HB97.5 (ebook) | LCC HB97.5 .M353 2018 (print) | DDC 335.4/12–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015156 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN 978-90-04-36656-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-36657-2 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
    [Show full text]
  • Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas's Theory of the State
    Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas's Theory of the State Simon Clarke 1 Introduction Political developments in the last ten years have led to a very considerable re- newal of interest in Marxist economic and political analysis, and to a concerted attempt to reinvigorate Marxist theory as a revolutionary force. The focus of this movement is the attempt to develop a Marxist critique of Stalinist dogma- tism and of post-Stalinist revisionism. Its material conditions are the end of the long wave of post-war capitalist expansion and the reappearance of capitalist crisis, on the one hand, and the development of working class resistance to the domination of capital independently of the orthodox Communist Parties, on the other. This Marxist renaissance is taking place in conditions which make it ex- tremely vulnerable to absorption into the frame of reference of bourgeois ideol- ogy. Since 1930 Marxist theory has been positively or negatively dominated by the official Marxism of the orthodox Communist Parties (which I shall refer to as `dogmatism'). Those Marxists who were not prepared to subordinate themselves to dogmatism were not able to challenge it either. The period of cold war and the absence of independent working class resistance to capital meant that there was no basis on which such a challenge could be mounted. The independence of such Marxism was maintained by its diversion of attention from political and economic concerns. It was dominated by the attempt to explain the ap- parent solidity of bourgeois domination by reference to specific superstructural features which varied from one country to another, thus constituting various na- tional schools of `Western Marxism', which borrowed heavily from the dominant bourgeois cultural theories in the various countries.
    [Show full text]
  • SCIENCE and SOCIETY -In Contrast to Producers Goods Prices Which Can Assist in the Optimum Allocation of Resources Even Under Co
    108 SCIENCE AND SOCIETY -in contrast to producers goods prices which can assist in the optimum allocation of resources even under communism-withers away as commu­ nism is approached. Each year the volume of communal consumption grows more rapidly than the output of priced consumers goods. It is interesting to note that Professor Denis, himself, has only re­ cently come around to an acceptance of the relevance of the marginal school, largely as a consequence of the Soviet controversy. While most Western economists still seem to feel that a conflict exists between the Marxist labor theory of value and marginal theories of resource alloca­ tion, we can see some signs of a growing appreciation and reexamination of Marx. In his latest edition of Economics, Paul Samuelson now speaks approvingly of the Ricardo-Marx-Solow models of capital accumulation and the possibility of a falling profit rate as capital deepens. In a forth­ coming issue of Soviet Studies, Professor Howard Sherman takes serious issue with the prevailing view that there is a necessary conflict between Marxism and modern planning theory based on neo-classical concepts of marginal allocation. Over thirty years ago Paul Sweezy wrote: The fact is that Marxian economics and "capitalist" economics have entirely different spheres of application. The former offers us a theory of economic development, the latter a theory of economic equilibrium. They are complementary and not mutually exclusive. Each is supreme in its own field. This is a point of absolutely first rate importance and strangely enough it is recognized by neither school of thought. ('Eco­ nomics and the Crisis of Capitalism," Economic Forum, Vol.
    [Show full text]
  • Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society
    STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE Tai, Van der Steen & Van Dongen (eds) Dongen & Van Steen der Van Tai, Edited by Chaokang Tai, Bart van der Steen, and Jeroen van Dongen Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society Ways of Viewing ScienceWays and Society Anton Pannekoek: Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society Studies in the History of Knowledge This book series publishes leading volumes that study the history of knowledge in its cultural context. It aspires to offer accounts that cut across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, while being sensitive to how institutional circumstances and different scales of time shape the making of knowledge. Series Editors Klaas van Berkel, University of Groningen Jeroen van Dongen, University of Amsterdam Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society Edited by Chaokang Tai, Bart van der Steen, and Jeroen van Dongen Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: (Background) Fisheye lens photo of the Zeiss Planetarium Projector of Artis Amsterdam Royal Zoo in action. (Foreground) Fisheye lens photo of a portrait of Anton Pannekoek displayed in the common room of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy. Source: Jeronimo Voss Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 434 9 e-isbn 978 90 4853 500 2 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462984349 nur 686 Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0) The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).
    [Show full text]
  • Sobre O Significado Da Experiência De Autogoverno Zapatista
    Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Centro de Ciências Sociais Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos Cassio Cunha Soares Sobre o significado da experiência de autogoverno zapatista Rio de Janeiro 2012 Cassio Cunha Soares Sobre o significado da experiência de autogoverno zapatista Tese apresentada, como requisito parcial para a obtenção do título de Doutor, ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Área de concentração: Sociologia Orientador: Prof. Dr. César Guimarães Rio de Janeiro 2012 Cassio Cunha Soares Sobre o significado da experiência de autogoverno zapatista Tese apresentada, como requisito para a obtenção do título de Doutor ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Sociologia da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Área de concentração: Sociologia Aprovado em 11 de Maio de 2012 Banca Examinadora: ____________________________________ Prof. Dr. César Guimarães (Orientador) Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos - UERJ ___________________________________ Prof. Dr. Breno Bringel Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos - UERJ ______________________________________________ Prof. Dr. João Trajano de Lima Sento-Sé Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Sociais - UERJ _________________________________________ Profª Drª Ingrid Piera Andersen Sarti Universidade da Integração Latinoamericana ___________________________________________ Prof. Dr. André Videira de Figueiredo Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro 2012 CATALOGAÇÃO NA FONTE UERJ/REDE SIRIUS/BIBLIOTECA IESP S676 Soares, Cassio Cunha. Sobre o significado da experiência de governo zapatista / Cassio Cunha Soares. – 2012. 363 f. Orientador : Cesar Guimarães. Tese (doutorado) – Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos. 1. Autonomia – Teses. 2. Sociabilidades – Teses. 3. Zapata, Emiliano, 1879-1919 – Teses.
    [Show full text]
  • Crítica De La Modernidad Capitalista
    Antología BOLÍVAR ECHEVERRÍA Crítica de la modernidad capitalista La Paz – Bolivia Antología BOLÍVAR ECHEVERRÍA Crítica de la modernidad capitalista La Paz – Bolivia Antología BOLÍVAR ECHEVERRÍA Crítica de la modernidad capitalista © Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia Jach’a Marka Sullka Irpataña Utt’a Taqi Markana Kamachi Wakichana Tantachawi Utt’a Ñawra Kawsaypura Suyuta Sullk’a Kamana Rimanakuy Umallina Suyu Kamana Tëtat guasu Juvicha Ja†kuerigua Jembiapoa Tëtaguasuiñomboat Juvicha Jembiapoa Calle Ayacucho esq. Mercado N° 308 Tel. (591) (2) 2142000 – Fax (591) (2) 2201211 Casilla: 7056 Con el apoyo de OXFAM Coordinación, organización y edición: Gonzalo Gosalvez Apoyo en el armado: Gabriel Limache Diseño y diagramación: Martín Moreira Coordinación fuentes: Bety Marquez Yaskara Miranda Transcripciones: Julio Janco Doris Luna Domingo Tito Boris Miranda Traducción artículo La modernidad múltiple: Mariela Padilla Diagramas: Mauricio Céspedes Depósito legal: 4 - 1 - 57 - 11 P.O. DISTRIBUCIÓN GRATUITA EN BOLIVIA Impreso en Bolivia Marzo de 2011 Indice 11 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Presentación 19 -------------------------------------------------------------- En torno a las raíces del pensamiento crítco de BOLÍVAR ECHEVERRÍA CAPÍTULO I: 65 ---------------------------------------------------------------Crítica de la modernidad capitalista 67 --------------------------------Modernidad y capitalismo: 15 tesis sobre la modernidad 117 --------------------------------------------------------------------------Un
    [Show full text]
  • Transformations in Capital Accumulation
    Transformations in capital accumulation: From the national production of an universal labourer to the international fragmentation of the productive subjectivity of the working-class Juan Iñigo Carrera Buenos Aires, 2002 CICP CENTRO para la INVESTIGACION como CRITICA PRACTICA [email protected] Transformations in capital accumulation: From the national production of an universal labourer to the international fragmentation of the productive subjectivity of the working-class Juan Iñigo Carrera 1. The starting point The revolutionary action of the working-class needs to organise itself through the awareness of its concrete determinations. Since we are focusing on a process characterised by international integration and fragmentation, it could seem that the most concrete approach is that circumscribed to the economic policies that prevailed in the different national processes of capital accumulation involved.1 Still, this approach ends up by bringing down all historically-specific necessity to the immediate action of those that personify capital. Thus, apologetics of capitalism presents national capitalists and state-bureaucrats as the social subjects whose abstract will rules the historical movement. Opposite to this sterility it could seem that the starting point lies in capitalism’s global unity, once this unity is represented as the movement of accumulation regimes, their rise, ‘failure’ and fall. Still, then, the subject of historical change seems to have vanished, as if this were ‘a process without a subject’.2 Once again, abstraction has displaced the concrete. It could seem, then, that the answer lies on circumscribing the global unity of accumulation to its concrete manifestation: class struggle. Still, considered in itself, class struggle comes down to a series of confrontations in which, now the working-class prevails and advances, now it is defeated and retreats, at the rhythm imposed by the development of working-class consciousness.
    [Show full text]
  • Politics (June 1944).Pdf
    politics 25# a copy Edited by Dwight Macdonald June C o m m e n t ................................................... 129 Our Golden Age, by Dwight Macdonald..144 Odin, a poem by Isabella Fey ................. 133 The Revolution at Dead-End (1926- JIM CROW IN UNIFORM 1928), by Victor Serge ............................ 147 Croce and Italian Liberalism, by Nicola Jjojo SswAalionaL PERIODICALS ..........................................151 C h ia ro m o n te ..............................................134 ( D n a i m o n h u BOOKS "I Was a Seabee", by Isaac G. McNatt..l37 Reviews by Louis Clair, Frank Freidel, Nancy Macdonald, Paul Mattick and The Story of the 477th Bombardment ‘1 Was a Seabee” Irving Kristol ..........................................153 Group, by "Bombardier" ........................ I4 l T H E IN T E L L IG E N C E OF F I C E ....................158 Mr. Joseph Stalin's Revolution in Eco­ The Story of the 477th nomic Science, by Peter Meyer ............... 143 CONTRIBUTORS ...................................... 160 Comment kindly words about Spain.” “The word ‘Empire’ is per­ mitted to be used, which may be a great shock to a cer­ tain strain of intellectual opinion.” One can almost hear the sarcastic growl, see the ironical sideglance at the Labor The Shape ol Things to Come benches that accompanied such words. The key sentence in the speech was: “As this war has HURCHILL’s speech in the House of Commons on progressed, it has become less ideological in character, in May 25 was refreshingly outspoken. It provoked m y opinion.” (Almost simultaneously, Archibald MacLeish, C the usual moans and protestations from the liblabs. a reliable liberalistic weathervane, showed he too under­ Even the N.
    [Show full text]
  • 'The New Paternalism' (Review Article), Radical
    REVIEWS Hegelian Leninism today! Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds, Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence. Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, Continuum, London and New York, 2011. 256 pp., £60.00 hb., 978 1 44115 790 4. Michael J. Thompson, ed., Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics, Continuum, London and New York, 2011. 272 pp., £70.00 hb., 978 1 44110 876 0. They are like buses. You wait twenty years for a Association with Stalinism also limits the interest substantive critical book on Lukács, then along come of Lukács as the single most important and founding two at once, and both from the same publisher. In ÀJXUH RI :HVWHUQ 0DU[LVP 7KHVH WZR ERRNV PDNH these two hardback books priced for library sales VWURQJ FDVHV IRU UHVWDWLQJ WKH VLJQLÀFDQFH RI /XNiFV rather than student activists, Continuum offer nearly for critical thought. With the possible exception of 500 pages of new material on and by Lukács. Anyone /XFLHQ*ROGPDQQ·VFODLPWKDW/XNiFVZDVDQLQÁXHQFH interested in Lukács will need to read both volumes. on Heidegger, Lukács has scarcely been of interest to There are some differences of orientation and some philosophers outside the traditions of Marxism. The common ground: Andrew Feenberg, Michael Löwy prospect of a group of Oxford analytical philosophers and Timothy Hall offer substantial essays in both VLWWLQJ GRZQ ZLWK VRPH 0,7 VSHFLDOLVWV LQ DUWLÀ- volumes. Anyone approaching these two books might cial intelligence to work through History and Class wonder why they were not combined into one large Consciousness is about as plausible as imagining the volume.
    [Show full text]
  • A Note on Communism As Real Movement Coghnorti / 2011
    On the Blaumachen presentation for the ‘communismos’ conference: a note on communism as real movement coghnorti / 2011 * In fact, the internal obstacles seem almost greater than external difficulties. For even though the question “whence?” presents no problems, the question “whither?” is a rich source of confusion. Not only has universal anarchy broken out among the reformers, but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old. –Marx to Ruge, September 1843. * It would be rather naïve to think that today we face the same situation. Our ‘whence’ includes not only two more centuries of capitalist rule, but also successive defeats of the practical (and therefore, also theoretical) aspect of that then new tendency, that wanted to discover the new world through the critique of the old. Therefore it isn’t just the ‘whither’ that breeds opposing opinions but also the interpretation and analysis of our ‘whence’. This development complicates matters even more, not only in regard to what ought to happen, but also in regard to the actual relation that we can have to what ought to happen. Therefore it shouldn’t come off as a surprise that there are comrades who, through a laborious examination of the struggles of previous periods, conclude that we should close our accounts with the past,
    [Show full text]
  • Towards a Unified Theory Analysing Workplace Ideologies: Marxism And
    Marxism and Racial Oppression: Towards a Unified Theory Charles Post (City University of New York) Half a century ago, the revival of the womens movementsecond wave feminismforced the revolutionary left and Marxist theory to revisit the Womens Question. As historical materialists in the 1960s and 1970s grappled with the relationship between capitalism, class and gender, two fundamental positions emerged. The dominant response was dual systems theory. Beginning with the historically correct observation that male domination predates the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, these theorists argued that contemporary gender oppression could only be comprehended as the result of the interaction of two separate systemsa patriarchal system of gender domination and the capitalist mode of production. The alternative approach emerged from the debates on domestic labor and the predominantly privatized character of the social reproduction of labor-power under capitalism. In 1979, Lise Vogel synthesized an alternative unitary approach that rooted gender oppression in the tensions between the increasingly socialized character of (most) commodity production and the essentially privatized character of the social reproduction of labor-power. Today, dual-systems theory has morphed into intersectionality where distinct systems of class, gender, sexuality and race interact to shape oppression, exploitation and identity. This paper attempts to begin the construction of an outline of a unified theory of race and capitalism. The paper begins by critically examining two Marxian approaches. On one side are those like Ellen Meiksins Wood who argued that capitalism is essentially color-blind and can reproduce itself without racial or gender oppression. On the other are those like David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch who argue that only an intersectional analysis can allow historical materialists to grasp the relationship of capitalism and racial oppression.
    [Show full text]