Volume 26 Issue 4 October 2014
From the time of its inception in 1988, Rethinking Marxism has been committed to providing a broad forum for the critical discussion of Marxian theory and analysis. The journal has consistently encouraged the questioning, the development, and the spread of the many threads of Marxism, in constant engagement with non-Marxist and multidisciplinary perspectives. In the final issue of volume 26, we display again a wide spectrum of Marxist perspectives on a range of issues, drawing inspiration from a number of disciplines.
In his contribution entitled “Wolff, Althusser, and Hegel: Outlining an Aleatory Materialist Epistemology,” Nick Hardy argues that, while he agrees with the reflexive Marxism in Richard Wolff's work, the insertion by Wolff of Hegelian philosophy into Marxism is problematic. As an alternative to the Hegelianism in Wolff's work, Hardy proposes an aleatory materialism, which he believes produces a firmer ontological basis for Marxist theory. Aleatory materialism, according to Hardy, also supports epistemological diversity because the ontology underlying it holds that knowledge is situated within a historical context and that this knowledge is subject to change. Without this ontology, arguments for epistemological diversity deteriorate into Hegelian teleology. Hardy develops his argument by discussing the Althusserian notion of overdetermination used by Wolff as a remedy to essentialist theorizing. Wolff, he claims, returns to Hegel in order not to reject social inquiry altogether (a rejection rendered possible through overdetermination): any form of explanation contains a moment of essentialism—for instance, through the use of the concept of entry point—but overdetermination implies that this essentialism is negated. In every iteration an explanation is exposed to a contradiction in the form of a factor not yet incorporated. So contradiction is exactly the way that knowledge progresses.
Yet this kind of progression raises the inevitable question: Where does an explanation stop? Wolff argues for the displacement of the word “resolution” with “intervention” or “story” in order to avoid a descent into the “abyss of infinite regression.” But for Hardy, while this account is commendable for its resistance to essentialism, by focusing almost entirely on questions of epistemology Wolff doesn't discuss problems of ontology and cedes too much ground to relativistic accounts of explanation. Here, Hardy thinks, notions of “storytelling” neither suffice nor resolve the problem of teleology inherent in the Hegelian concept of the negation of negation. Hardy argues that, for Marx, Hegel's understanding rests on a circular conception of contradiction because for there to be a negation there needs to be something before it to negate, so the dialectic of knowledge is the recovery of something that has been forgotten. It was partly this circularity, Hardy argues, that pushed Marx to pose the essential question: Where does knowledge come from if there is no outside source for it? If Logic is meant to work by negating itself, then it must already have present an internal End, which it will ultimately find. Resnick and Wolff argued that with the removal of this teleology we end up with the dialectical process without a subject.
Hardy argues that, having unintentionally but inevitably reincorporated Hegel's teleology, what Wolff seemingly wants to do relates to an ontological rather than an epistemological concern: it is a question of what the world is rather than how the world can be understood. It is here that Hardy turns to Althusser to understand how Marx could explain why change occurs. Hardy finds an answer in the concept of contradiction, which Althusser theorized never exists in a pure state but always is in a concrete state situated in a specific social context. A contradiction is always overdetermined, manifested in different ways across societies. Furthermore, no contradiction can be determinant in the last instance; the economy is always constituted by the context of social relations.
Hardy argues that Althusser's specific ontology for aleatory materialism limits the possibility of “epistemological mayhem” wherein one story is substituted for another one ad infinitum. In aleatory materialism, the world is understood as a “moving train” that is always immanent and that works as a result of particular tensions. This train comes from nowhere (origin) and goes nowhere (telos). In this form of materialism, there are long-term causes and effects as well as short-term chance conjunctures. Furthermore, the encounters between things are contingent, the effects of which are unexpected without altogether refusing the notion of “cause.” Rather, cause itself is overdetermined. It is always part of a broader conjunctural setting, and in this way aleatory materialism argues for a situated causality. Social inquiry thus needs to begin with “understanding the world as highly individualized and discrete,” with each moment and each conjuncture the result of the unique set of forces that produced it. As a result, an ontological multiplicity replaces the epistemological multiplicity in Wolff's argument.
Elizabeth A. Ramey's article entitled “Farm Subsidies and Technical Change: State-Mediated Accumulation in U.S. Agriculture” is a detailed analysis of the contradictions of such a “specific concrete conjuncture,” as Hardy would have it: a period in U.S. history that came to determine farm policy, the agricultural sector, and the broader economy. Ramey argues that the U.S. farm subsidies program, which started in the 1920s, intensified the industrialization of farm production. Using Stephen Resnick's model of the “hunt for superprofits,” Ramey concludes that farm subsidies helped secure conditions of successful capitalist industrial production in the U.S. economy. Observing that during the “Golden Age” of capitalism the agricultural sector was the most dynamic sector in the United States while at the same time being subject to massive government intervention, Ramey's central question hinges on the nature of the relationship between state intervention and technical change in U.S. agriculture. Although her focus is on the Great Depression, she also traces the current impact of these policies and highlights as well some of the contradictory effects of the process of accumulation. Ramey argues that, while ostensibly acting in the interests of an idealized family farm, farm programs ended up destroying that very institution by giving farmers the means for vicious competition encouraged by the overproduction of particular food crops. Farm programs contributed as well to increased volatility, crises, and disparity in the farm sector, speeding up the decline of rural communities, leading to mass migration from rural areas, and equally significantly, helping the consolidation of the power of agribusiness. Of the federal agencies created by the New Deal legislation, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) was declared unconstitutional in 1936, the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) worked by establishing a new cash revenue position for farmers, and the Farm Credit Corporation (FCA) gave long-term subsidized credit. Ramey discusses how a vicious process of competition was put in place through both production controls and credit policies administered by these agencies. This placed larger farmers with easier access to technology at an advantage and led to the ruin of the “family farm,” which occupies a central place in the American psyche.
Ramey continues her analysis of farm policy through Resnick's model of the hunt for superprofits, whereby superprofits were earned by those farmers who became early adopters of these technologies. The technologies would disseminate to other farmers, reducing the average social exchange value, which would thus give the edge to those farmers who were more efficient, leading to superprofits. Yet the very success of technical change, with the rise in the organic composition of capital, led to a fall in the rate of profit that stimulated further technical change, highlighting yet again the contradictions of the process of accumulation in the agricultural sector.
Such contradictions and instability resulting from competitive pressures, Ramey argues, were not resolved but were rather intensified by government intervention. Farm policies encouraged farmers to undertake actions that depressed further the unit values of crops by keeping the “technology treadmill” going. Innovating farmers who had already earned superprofits due to productivity differences also received support from the state to make up the difference between the unit exchange value and the market value. In this case, as prices did not fall, competition played itself out in a different way. State expenditure supported the rising organic composition of capital without a corresponding fall in the rate of profit.
Ramey completes her analysis by pointing at the ways in which continuing price supports contribute to recurring crises in the farm sector. Competition complemented by price supports shaped the development and structure of capitalist agribusiness, providing inputs such as machinery, seeds, fertilizers, and other chemicals and solidifying the monopolistic tendencies of agribusiness, which provided the inputs to the farming sector. Ramey thus concludes that the farm policies of the Great Depression, which continued for years, strengthened the tendency for the concentration of wealth in farming and further marginalized small farmers, sharecroppers, and tenants while increasing the power of rich farmers and the monopolistic tendencies of agribusiness. The farm problem of later years, for Ramey, does not come from a failure but rather the success of U.S. farm policy. Ramey also implicitly demonstrates the falsity of the state-intervention versus free-market capitalism divide. Her historical analysis shows how the massive intervention of the state helped determine the creation of competition within the U.S. farm sector, ultimately leading to the dominance of large farms and agribusiness.
In an article entitled “Violence, Surplus Production, and the Transformation of Nature during the Cambodian Genocide,” James A. Tyner provides a Marxian analysis of a genocidal form of society building in his study of the Khmer Rouge's purported “communist revolution” in Cambodia. The Cambodian genocide, which accounted for the death of approximately two million people, is often attributed to the supposedly inherently violent nature of Marxism. As Tyner argues, however, the genocide was the result of specific administrative policies and practices initiated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (the CPK, also known as the Khmer Rouge), which aimed to drastically increase agricultural production for the global market through forced relocation, collectivization, and food rationing. The Khmer Rouge, Tyner argues, developed a plan of economic transformation from a fundamentally flawed view of Marx's notion of nature in which it assumed that the subjection of the natural environment to the purposeful will of economic production would provide an impetus for the formation of political consciousness. The CPK's conception of nature and its connection to consciousness proved to be “fatal,” according to Tyner. The CPK leadership assumed that unfilled production quotas were the result of insufficient levels of consciousness and collectivity, which was attributed to the sabotage of traitors. In contrast to a communist revolution that would have eliminated exploitative labor, Tyner argues that the CPK developed a form of state capitalism in which surplus was appropriated by state functionaries for the purpose of exchange in the global market. Drawing from Resnick and Wolff's analysis of the Soviet Union, Tyner argues that the political economy of Democratic Kampuchea was more similar to a particular form of state capitalism than to either socialism or communism. Thus, following Tyner's analysis, the Khmer Rouge was not Marxist in either theory or practice.
If the analyses by Ramey and Tyner can be taken as interventions into essentialist conceptualizations of the relation between the state and the economy, the next contribution to this volume is a direct intervention in pervasive conceptualizations of contemporary economies as being capitalist. In his contribution entitled “A Class Theory of Hybrid-Directed Enterprises,” Kenneth M. Levin shows how different class structures can exist in any one site of the economy. Levin claims that the hybridity of enterprises—an analysis of which is not fully developed—can explain the different pressures and tensions at all levels of the class process, including among the managers and the enterprise directors in charge of the distribution of surplus. In this Levin intends to reveal the extent of communist class processes already existing in our midst in tandem with other class processes. Continuing from and building on his previous work, Levin furthers his thesis that the idea of communism does not belong only in the future but is already part of our social reality and is visible through examples in different sectors of the existing economy. For instance, a collective of high-tech engineers who produce and appropriate their own surplus labor in a communist class process can hire a landscaping collective, thus creating a communist/capitalist hybrid. Furthermore, the high-tech engineering collective can enter into business with nonworking partners who are involved in the appropriation of the collective's surplus. Levin goes on to give other examples from different sites, highlighting the different situations that emerge with different forms of hybridity. For instance, what happens if the collective of engineers that is also in a capitalist class process with wageworkers hires a venture capitalist to join its board of directors? The engineers relate to one another as members of a collective, but this same group of producers would relate to nonproducing coappropriators as productive workers would in a capitalist enterprise. In this case, one group of individuals occupies the positions of communist producers/appropriators and capitalist workers while the other group is composed solely of capitalist appropriators. Each hybrid produces its own set of contradictions and tensions within both the fundamental and subsumed class processes. Pointing to successful cases of existing communist enterprises such as Mondragon in Spain, Levin concludes by noting that we can retheorize the existing economy by revealing its communist processes, thus not “imagining” these class processes as a utopia of the future but instead rethinking the idea that the existing social circumstances will not allow for communist processes to flourish. In this way Levin's work too can be seen as an example of Hardy's aleatory materialist ontology revealing the diversity of contemporary capitalism, with the view of the “future” in the present rendered all the more striking as some of the examples he gives are from advanced capitalist contexts where the dominance of capitalist structures is hardly questioned.
The critiques of capitalism drawing from the interface between Marxist political economy and psychoanalysis and the horizons such analyses offer for radical political possibilities have flourished in the past couple of decades. In his article “In the Beginning … Was the Act! Money, Analysis, Party,” Gregory C. Flemming clarifies the links between psychoanalysis, Marxism, and party politics in Slavoj Žižek's political thought, specifically addressing Žižek's claim that the Leninist political party and Lacanian psychoanalysis share the same form and ontological grounding. To introduce the discussion, Flemming examines how Molly Anne Rothenberg, Fabio Vighi, Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselçuk, and Jodi Dean have utilized Žižek's work to inform projects of social change. As he explains, the ontological positions these theorists adopt to examine the political—madness, surplus value, exploitation, and communicative capitalism, respectively—impacts the kind of radical change believed to be possible and necessary. Whereas Žižek asserts the primacy of commodity fetishism, understood as “the practice of treating money as if it naturally represented the value of a commodity rather than as a social relation,” the mentioned theorists leave it aside, adopting different ontological positions that ultimately lead to different political outcomes. For Žižek, Flemming argues, commodity fetishism forms the limits of our knowledge and our existence. In this sense, commodity fetishism operates similarly to Lacan's notion of the “big Other,” providing the overarching frame of intersubjective interactions. It is at this point that the link between psychoanalysis and the party emerges, for as Flemming writes, “Whereas commodity fetishism is one form of knowledge, the party and psychoanalysis are alternative forms of knowledge, each of which aims at eschewing a belief in the big Other.” In terms of radical party politics, this implies overcoming capitalism by abolishing or giving up our attachment to money, which from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective requires forming a different relationship to the big Other and, in turn, to ourselves.
Our relation to money is also a prominent theme in Ernst Fischer's work entitled “Summer of Equivalence.” In a series of photographs and an accompanying text, the artist muses about the different functions of money as both a pure sign and a store of value, following the work of Georg Simmel. He draws parallels between money and his art through a set of ironic statements where photographs of “beloved” people and landscapes are captioned by prices, all the while pondering how a “price” can be attached to something considered “priceless.” At the end of his wonderings he arrives with amazement at the double functions of photography, at “being” and “representing,” as analogous to that of money. He believes that the subversion of this space needs to start with the acknowledgment of this overwhelming realization. Does Fischer consider our attachment to money in the Lacanian sense, as an attachment to the big Other, something we can give up? His explorations leave us in ambivalence.
Another growing debate within Marxism, that of Autonomia and post-Autonomia, has generated growing interest in the work of seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. In “An Ethics for Marxism: Spinoza on Fortitude,” Ted Stolze presents Spinoza's notion of “fortitude” as a basis for developing an ethics for Marxism. Acknowledging that there is a normative critique of capitalism in Marx's early writings through Capital, Stolze argues that Spinoza's ethics provides a revolutionary “prudence” that can inform and advance Marxian theory and practice. Drawing from a range of radical thinkers, such as James Scott, Simon Critchley, Eric Hobsbawm, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Stolze posits the idea that indignation against social injustice and oppression is the impetus and “first affective moment” that propels revolt and resistance. Given the prospect of prolonged struggle, however, indignation often presents an unstable foundation to overcome oppression, for its associative relations with anger, hope, and fear often result in despair, sadness, and resignation. The second and more affirmative moment of resistance, according to Stolze, is the utopian desire for radical change, which requires acting in accordance with reason and human freedom. Spinoza's notion of “fortitude” (fortitudo), Stolze argues, provides an ethical foundation to sustain the long-term demands of political transformation with the “internal power” required for self-emancipation. Spinoza conceived fortitude as “all actions that follow from affects related to the soul insofar as it understands,” in the forms of both courage and generosity: courage as striving to act “from the guidance of reason, to preserve one's being” and generosity as “the desire by which each one strives, solely from the guidance of reason, to aid other human beings and join them in friendship.” In theory and practice, Stolze argues that fortitude, courage, generosity, and the joyous “active affects” of joining with others have the potential to maintain the “internal power” required to sustain social and political struggles and thus to overcome oppression.
Different forms of anticapitalist resistance and rebellion in the last decade have spread with a focus on rights in urban areas. What Harvey calls the “right to the city” is becoming an increasingly visible manifestation of anticapitalist sentiments in different parts of the world. This theme is in part the concern of the article in the art/iculations section. Konstantina Kalfa, in “On Creatively Destructing,” analyzes urban regeneration processes through the lens of the concept of creative destruction in conditions of capitalism. Following Marx, the accumulation of capital, argues Kalfa, and the very process of the making of capitalism is itself constituted by its own annihilation—an idea which found its kindred spirit also in the work of the Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who argued that capitalism continually revolutionizes itself by destroying what exists and replacing it with what is new. Thus, Kalfa argues, creation and destruction are connected. First, because something has to have been created for it to be destroyed, as nothingness cannot be destroyed. But there is yet another level of connection between creation and destruction, at the level of their perceptions as interpretation. Here, every truth functions as suppression, and to the extent that a creation can step on an older creation—thus covering up, destroying, and hence becoming interpretation—destruction, becoming a metaphor as truth, thus uncovers interpretations, almost reminding us of Hegel's negation of negation. This stands in contrast with vandalism, which is the expression of a “malignant, evil spirit” yet, argues Kalfa, is selectively implemented as it proves useful to the promotion of the strongest contemporary connection between destruction and creation. For instance, in the contemporary urban context, the process of creative destruction is described as regeneration, which, following Harvey, is an inherent part of absorbing surplus capital. Kalfa argues that when the process of creative destruction becomes such a part of city life, the city loses its materiality and becomes the process itself. She observes that what promotes one of the most basic conceptions of the modern movement in urban construction is the growing anxiety about debris, noise, vibrations, and dust produced by construction. It is this same anxiety, argues Kalfa, that motivates research and innovation in “safe” building demolition, by which she concludes that the mentioned research develops in connection with the strong environmental interest capital developed in the 1990s.
Kalfa also argues that through anthropomorphization, especially through metaphors of the body, the processes of creative destruction are presented as spontaneous “self-emergence,” just as the body is a self-regulating organism, thus rendering the capitalist context itself as natural. Yet, Kalfa argues, the limits of this slippery analogy can be seen in the difference that separates the urban context from the human body, which is the fact that there will always be “deliberate purpose applied to individual instances of variation, selection, and crises” as dictated by capitalism, that system which is driven by conflictual class relations and can thus disrupt its own self-preservation.
Vandalism as unproductive destruction, Kalfa argues, is incorporated into capitalism in the form of madness and as displacement. It is “abnormal behavior” that needs to be remedied and healed. In being the “deviant,” Kalfa points to the possibility created by vandalism, of other spaces, heterotopias that, it should not be forgotten, can also be incorporated by capital. But, Kalfa asks, what else can bring about possibilities beyond capitalism if not something that is annoying to and pushed by capitalism? Can vandalism be part of that rethinking, of reimagining and reclaiming that space, of a revolution?
Some of Kalfa's questions find their way into the work of Nandita Raman, entitled “A Reverent Commemoration of Sequence of Heroic Acts.” Through a series of photographs and brief interviews with people from different walks of life in the Slovakian town of Žilina, Raman explores the meaning, function, and context of statues in the varying responses to the questions she poses. Igor believes that statues have a role to play if only as reminders of the past, adding however that if he had the choice, the statue he would build would be that of a mother and a child; a book artist believes that there should be other ways of celebrating people than raising statues; a psychologist claims that everyone brings something to life, a difference which itself needs to be celebrated, so why the need to raise statues to specific people? In response to the question of why there are so many statues in Žilina, a city planner argues that it has something to do with low self-esteem from having always been part of a larger political unit—as well as the changing power relations and the cynical adjustment of the sculptor to new circumstances, who through connections got the contract for the new statues. Power relations within the changing urban context are manifested in all spaces and in all forms, including artistic ones such as statues becoming part of the processes of “creative destruction” as well as potential sources of resistance.
One of the consequences of the Autonomist and post-Autonomist movements has been the pressure to rethink Marxism's central concepts. In the first of the book reviews in this issue, on Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right, Mark Bergfeld argues that Eagleton has made a constructive contribution toward moving Marxism into the mainstream. Bergfled's claim is that, in contrast to discussing debates “inside of Marxism,” Eagleton addresses the common questions and objections that arise against Marx and his followers, such as claims that Marxism is outdated, reductionist, utopian, impractical, violent, and incompatible with democracy. Eagleton, argues Bergfeld, successfully addresses these questions by concentrating on the importance of class, by defending revolution, and by emphasizing the importance of human agency. As Bergfeld observes, many contemporary movements and theorists focus on the “multitude” or the “indebted” as alternative political subjects at a time when working-class organizations are in decline, thus rendering critical reevaluation necessary with respect to realities of racial and gendered oppression. Bergfeld concludes that Marxism will only have a future if it is able to articulate a project of human liberation that is capable of becoming popular among the masses.
A similar concern for rethinking appears in J. W. Mason's review of Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy's The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Duménil and Lévy's analysis of the 2007–8 global financial and economic crisis from within the long-term trajectory of capitalism, Mason argues, is one of the more convincing analyses of the recent crisis, for it avoids duplicating the false homogeneity of capitalist firms common in mainstream and Marxian accounts. The authors present finance as a new social actor that emerged out of the crisis of the 1970s. In addition to capital's attack on labor in response to that crisis, capital employed the weapon of finance to attack managers in the form of corporate takeovers, buyouts, and restructurings, creating a disciplinary relationship between the owners of capital and corporate management. Mason argues that—while Duménil and Lévy's discussion of this process is not entirely new, and though they fail to mention other Marxists such as Robert Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer, David Kotz, and Doug Henwood, who have examined the role of finance since the 1970s—The Crisis of Neoliberalism nonetheless is “an immensely valuable book” in that the authors show how the establishment of financial hegemony in the era of neoliberalism not only produced deregulation and the opening of cross-border capital flows but also brought about the valuation of firms and social life according to the universalization of financial criteria. Duménil and Lévy argue that the possible outcome of the crisis could be the advent of a “neomanagerialist” regime at the expense of finance, leading to a reemergence of the managerial class and state autonomy, but Mason notes that it is too soon to tell if we are starting to witness the “dethroning of finance” and the retreat of “the universalizing logic of profit.”
In a third book review, on British Communism and the Politics of Literature: 1928–1939, Christopher Pawling argues that author Philip Bounds challenges the dominant interpretations of prewar British Marxist literary criticism. Early British Marxist critics, such as Ralph Fox, Alick West, and Christopher Caudwell, were largely dismissed by Raymond Williams and his students as uninteresting and as an “embarrassment.” Pawling argues that Bounds, in returning to the work of these critics, is able to recover them from this (up to now) negative legacy. Rather than following the common approach of simply placing the authors in the context of the Great Depression, Bounds examines them in relation to the cultural and political considerations of the Communist party and Comintern. Bounds argues that the work of these theorists had an impact on the public sphere of the period and that their work actually contributed to the revival of Marxist theory in the 1970s, of which Williams and others were a part. Though Pawling contends that the book contains some weaknesses, particularly concerning the interpretation of Caudwell, he argues that Bounds provides a significant and persuasive contribution to literary research from which future scholars will surely benefit.
With this issue we are saying goodbye to several comrades on our editorial board. Mwangi Githinji, one of our longest-serving members who has given 14 years to the RM editorial board has decided to step down. Mwangi has worked with commitment in different capacities of our collective: he served as a co-chair and member of our conference committees, as well as on subscriptions. While expressing our gratitude for his work, we also want to tell him that he will be dearly missed for his wit, incisive and creative suggestions, and his ability to chair a board meeting to end on time! We wish him the best as he starts new, exciting and other politically engaged projects he has established.
From the time of its establishment, Rethinking Marxism has considered art an imperative part of its contents. True to its interdisciplinary commitments, the journal has always tried to engage with artistic discourses as crucial discussions to be had in analyses and critiques of contemporary society and as sources of social change. As a journal, we would like to believe that the heartbeat of our efforts can be felt not only in the theoretical pieces but also in the artwork we publish.
Our art editor—Susan Jahoda, who, since 1991, and then with Jesal Kapadia, who joined her in 2001, has worked with complete devotion to find art and artists, conversing with artists about the themes of their work, mediating between artists and the journal, and acquiring, processing, and finalizing the artwork for each issue—has also decided to step down from the editorial board. With her own fine artistry and artistic sensibility, she managed to walk the difficult line between the production requirements of the journal and her artistic commitments. We are grateful to her for the thankless work she did for the journal, the countless hours she dedicated to our collective effort, and we wish her inspiration, which she doesn't need, and good luck, which all artists do, no doubt. As we wonder at the kind of transformation the journal will go through after her departure, we remember Susan's words when she first broke the news: “Change is difficult, but it can be positive.” We hang on to these words and hope that they come true.
—The Editors |
