The Limits to Capital

The central unifying theme in the Manuscripts is the alienation of labour under capitalist conditions of private ownership and its transcendence and abolition under communism. The doctrine of total emancipation which, as I have argued, was crucial in enabling Marx to assimilate ‘class’ and the ‘division of labour’ in his work is much more clearly articulated here and eloquently expressed. Communism, Marx argues, is ‘the positive transcendence of all estrangement’; the abolition of private property, communism: 
is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.27
The vision of communism Marx unfolds in the Manuscripts derives much of its force from his remarkable analysis of the alienation of labour and is clearly underpinned by a preconception of truly human, free productive activity. Man’s productive interchange with nature is in fact taken as the defining characteristic of the species: ‘the productive life is the life of the species’; and Marx is careful to point out that while an animal can also be said to engage in production it ‘only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young’.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California:

We develop a model describing how certain American men, those men who have been described as emasculated by recent socioeconomic changes, construct themselves as masculine through their everyday consumption. We find that American mass culture idealizes the man‐of‐action hero—an idealized model of manhood that resolves the inherent weaknesses in two other prominent models (the breadwinner and the rebel). The men we studied drew from this three‐part discourse—what we call the ideology of heroic masculinity—to construct themselves in dramatic fashion as man‐of‐action heroes. In addition, we show that these men pursue heroic masculinity in very different ways, depending on their social class positions.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/422120

Man‐of‐Action Heroes: The Pursuit of Heroic Masculinity in Everyday Consumption

Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

Mechanic Accents is a widely acclaimed study of American popular fiction and working-class culture. Combining Marxist literary theory with American labor history, Michael Denning explores what happened when, in the nineteenth century, working people began to read cheap novels and the \"\"fiction question\"\" became a class question. In a new afterword, Denning locates his study within the context of current debates on class and cultural studies.

Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America

/pdf/the-making-of-the-crofting-community-154m31vzg9.pdf

The Making of the Crofting Community

'Critical theory is no substitute for historical materialism; language is not life'. With this statement, Bryan Palmer enters the debate that is now transforming and disrupting a number of academic disciplines, including political science, women's studies, and history. Focusing on the ways in which literary or critical theory is being promoted within the field of social history, he argues forcefully that the current reliance on poststructuralism with its reification of discourse and avoidance of the structures of oppression and struggles of resistance obscures the origins, meanings, and consequences of historical events and processes. Palmer is concerned with the emergence of 'language' as a central focus of intellectual work in the twentieth century. He locates the implosion of theory that moved structuralism in the direction of poststructuralism and deconstruction in what he calls the descent into discourse. Few historians who champion poststructuralist thought, according to Palmer, appreciate historical materialism's capacity to address discourse meaningfully. Nor do many of the advocates of language within the field of social history have an adequate grounding in the theoretical making of the project they champion so ardently. Palmer roots his polemical challenge in an effort to 'introduce historians more fully to the theoretical writing that many are alluding to and drawing from rather cavalierly'. Acknowledging that critical theory can contribute to an understanding of some aspects of the past, Palmer nevertheless argues for the centrality of materialism to the project of history. In specific discussions of how critical theory is constructing histories of politics, class, and gender, he traces the development of the descent into discourse within social history, mapping the limitations of recent revisionist texts. Much of this writing, he contends, is undertheorized and represents a problematic retreat from prior histories that attempted to address such material forces as economic structures, political power, and class struggle. "Descent into Discourse" counters current intellectual fashion with an eloquent argument for the necessity to analyze and appreciate lived experience and the structures of subordination and power in any quest for historical meaning. Bryan D. Palmer is Professor of History at Queen's University, Ontario.

Bryan D. Palmer

Papers

Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America

The Making of the Crofting Community

Descent Into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History

Working-class experience : rethinking the history of Canadian labour, 1800-1991

History in Transit: Experience, Identity. Critical Theory