Showing papers in "Historical Materialism in 2002"

The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things: A Tendency in Fantasy Theory

Abstract: Although it is unclear whether, by ‘fantasy’, Butler intends a narrow deŽnition (generic fantasy, i.e., imitation Tolkien heroic or epic fantasy and sword ’n’ sorcery) or a broad deŽnition (the fantastic genres, i.e., generic fantasy, sf (science Žction), horror, supernatural gothic, magic realism, etc.), such statistics nonethless make the need for a Marxist theory – or preferably, Marxist theories – of the fantastic selfevident. The last twenty or thirty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion in the study of fantastic texts and genres. Literary studies has embraced the gothic, fairy tales and sf, and screen studies has developed a complex critique of horror and is now beginning

Lineages of Empire

Abstract: I Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire is a powerful antidote to the gloom, suspicion and hostility that have characterised the predominant reaction of the radical Left to the advent of so-called globalisation. While excoriating its destructive aspects, Hardt and Negri welcome globalisation as the dawn of a new era full of promise for the realisation of the desires of the wretched of the earth. In the same way that Marx insisted on the progressive nature of capitalism in comparison with the forms of society it displaced, they now claim that Empire is a great improvement over the world of nation-states and competing imperialisms that preceded it. Empire is the new logic and structure of rule that has emerged with the globalisation of economic and cultural exchanges. It is the sovereign power that effectively regulates these global exchanges and thereby governs the world. Unlike empires of pre-modern and modern times, the singular Empire of postmodern times has no territorial boundaries/frontiers or centre of power. It is a decentred and deterritorialised apparatus of rule that incorporates the entire global realm.

The pulse of freedom? Bhaskar's dialectic and marxism

Abstract: Eight years have elapsed since the publication of Roy Bhaskar’s Dialectic. The stated aim of this project was extraordinarily ambitious. This was, basically, threefold. First, the ‘dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism – understood as consisting of transcendental realism as a general theory of science and critical naturalism as a special theory of social science’. Second, ‘the development of a general theory of dialectic . . . which will . . . be capable of sustaining the development of a general metatheory for the social sciences, on the basis of which they will be capable of functioning as agencies of human self-emancipation’. Third, ‘the outline of the elements of a totalising critique of western philosophy, in its various (including hitherto dialectical) forms . . . [that is] capable . . . of casting light on the contemporary crisis of socialism’.1 All of this was to be achieved primarily through the ‘non-preservative sublation of Hegelian dialectic’2 and the preservative sublation

Going in the Wrong Direction: Or, Mephistopheles – Not Saint Francis of Assisi

Abstract: Toni Negri’s work is enormously attractive, not only for its own merits, but because it responds to a desperate need. We are all looking for a way forward. The old state-centred model of revolution has failed catastrophically, reformism becomes more and more corrupt and barren, yet revolutionary change is more urgent than ever. Negri refuses to give up thinking and rethinking revolution: that is the great attraction of his work. The problem is that Negri leads us in the wrong theoretical direction. Negri, and now Michael Hardt who joins him as co-author of Empire, seek to develop Marxist and revolutionary theory as a positive theory, rather than a negative theory. This has important consequences, theoretically, politically and in terms of the analysis developed in Empire.

Gems and Baubles in Empire

Abstract: For an often indecipherable book with openly revolutionary aspirations, Hardt and Negri's Empire has received an astonishing degree of mainstream, as well as radical, attention. This in itself suggests the need for a serious investigation of Empire's content, but our interest does not lie in identifying this book as a curious cultural artefact. Empire is ultimately an important book because serious engagement with the contradictory richness of its ideas on the nature of empire, capitalism and resistance in our time, can help advance the 'liberatory' project that we share with Hardt and Negri. Only the most ungenerous of reviewers could fail to admire the ambitious scope of their attempt to integrate history, philosophy, sociology, culture, and economics with a politics from below. And, yet, the end result is a most frustrating book: full of promise but also of inconsistencies, self-contradictions, flights of exaggeration, and gaps in logic.

Through the eyes of the fantastic: Lefebvre, rabelais and intellectual history

Abstract: In the late 1940s, with the increasingly strict Stalinist line of the Parti Communiste Francais, Henri Lefebvre was in an awkward position. His Hegelian Marxism, his interest in thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, and his refusal to toe the party line had him marked out as a difŽcult presence within the party. His work on logic had particularly upset the ruling echelons, because of his heretical claim that logic – an apparently idealist superstructure – transcended historical context. As he remembered some years later, he had argued that logic was ‘the same in Paris, Moscow and New York . . . that A = A or (A+B)2 is the same formal identity in all countries, all regimes, all modes of production’.1 This is because logic and the dialectic do not function as superstructures. Though they are historical developments, they are not contained within the ideology or institution that gave rise to them.2 It was no surprise that the PCF publication of Logique formelle, logique dialectique (1947, but written around 1940) – the Žrst

What's Darwinian about Historical Materialism? A Critique of Levine and Sober

Abstract: Over recent decades, there has been an explosion of innovative theory and research in the synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and population genetics that is the dominant theoretical perspective within the life sciences.1 This is reason enough to make it important to develop an understanding of neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology. But the need for historical materialists to do so is particularly acute. After all, if Darwinian evolutionary biology explains the course of human evolution, and historical materialism explains the course of human history, then the two theories need to be articulated in some way. Why and how did human evolution give rise to, and to some degree give way to, human history? And there is another reason why Marxists should acquaint themselves with Darwinian biology. Part of the explosion of Darwinian evolutionary biology has involved persistent and inuential attempts to apply explanatory strategies derived from the theory of natural selection to human social life and history,