Showing papers in "Historical Materialism in 2007"

From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism

Abstract: Since the crisis of Fordism, capitalism has been characterised by the ever more central role of knowledge and the rise of the cognitive dimensions of labour. This is not to say that the centrality of knowledge to capitalism is new per se. Rather, the question we must ask is to what extent we can speak of a new role for knowledge and, more importantly, its relationship with transformations in the capital/labour relation. From this perspective, the paper highlights the continuing validity of Marx's analysis of the knowledge/power relation in the development of the division of labour. More precisely, we are concerned with the theoretical and heuristic value of the concepts of formal subsumption, real subsumption and general intellect for any interpretation of the present change of the capital/labour relation in cognitive capitalism. In this way, we show the originality of the general intellect hypothesis as a sublation of real subsumption. Finally, the article summarises key contradictions and new forms of antagonism in cognitive capitalism.

The Multitude and the Kangaroo: A Critique of Hardt and Negri's Theory of Immaterial Labour

Abstract: Hardt and Negri's theory of immaterial labour provides a socio-economic foundation in the contemporary world for the philosophical and political elements of their thought Although there has been considerable engagement with Hardt and Negri's work, the socio-economic dimension of their thought has received little sustained attention This is certainly true of their theory of immaterial labour This article aims to remedy this oversight It presents and scrutinises Hardt and Negri's concept of immaterial labour and its putative hegemony It then examines the depiction of the world of paid work in advanced capitalist societies with which the theory is associated and looks at three alleged consequences of the rise of immaterial labour It concludes that this dimension of Hardt and Negri's thought is profoundly flawed, that immaterial labour cannot play the role they wish to assign it in their theory, and that this failure suggests the importance of a different method of developing theory from that employed by Hardt and Negri, along with so many other contemporary writers

Fair-Trade Coffee and Commodity Fetishism: The Limits of Market-Driven Social Justice

Abstract: This paper explores the claims made by various authors that the fair-trade network provides an initial basis for a challenge to the commodification of goods under global capitalism. Proponents of fair trade generally advance two essential arguments in this regard. First, they claim that fair trade reveals the social and environmental conditions under which goods are produced and brings producers and consumers together through 'ethical consumerism', which challenges the commodification of goods into items with an independent life of their own. Second, they argue that fair trade affirms non-economic values of co-operation and solidarity which challenge the capitalist imperatives of competition, accumulation, and profit-maximisation. Drawing from cases in the fair-trade coffee sector, these assertions are critically examined and it is argued that, while fair trade can provide a symbolic challenge to commodity fetishism, in the end this challenge is strictly limited by the power of global market imperatives and the network's market-driven approach.

Intervention The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts

Abstract: This article identifies the two currents that have divided the Left over the Zimbabwe question. It argues that in the course of the radicalisation of the Zimbabwean state, 'Two Lefts' emerged, the so-called 'internationalist' and the 'nationalist', to take up opposite positions over a series of political questions, most notably the agrarian question and the national question. The article defends the nationalist Left and offers a critique of the 'internationalist' Left through a discussion of contemporary imperialism, the neocolonial state, and civil society.

Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism

Abstract: Marxist notions of the origins of capitalism are still largely structured by the famous debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This essay suggests that that tradition of historiography locates capitalism too late and sees it in essentially national terms. It argues that capitalism began, on a European scale, in the important transformations that followed the great revival of the eleventh century and the role played by mercantile elites in innovating new forms of business organisation. However, with this starting point, it becomes important to bring Islam into the picture in a central way, since the Mediterranean was the common heritage of many cultural and religious groups. Islam shaped the tradition of early capitalism both by preserving monetary economy and through its own precocious development of the partnership form. The essay periodises this early capitalism into a 'Mediterranean' and an 'Atlantic' phase, and concludes by looking briefly at the ways in which merchants dominate labour.

In What Ways Is 'The New Imperialism' Really New?

Abstract: This essay argues that it is a matter of vital concern to develop a theoretical apparatus that is adequate to the inherent spatiotemporal dynamics of capital accumulation and the changing practices developed to manage the crisis tendencies of those dynamics. This requires integrating the a-spatial theory of capital accumulation and its internal contradictions with the spatial/geographical theory of imperialism that invokes geopolitical and geo-economic struggles between nation-states. I argue that the two are linked by the way capital deals with the problem of absorbing capital surpluses, namely through geographical (and temporal) fixes. The geographical fix requires imperialist expansionism and the battering down of all barriers to the spatial movement of capital. Such a conception provides the necessary clarity in formulating the relations between capital and state that are sometimes missing from Ellen M. Wood's arguments in Empire of Capital.

From Pin Factories to Gold Farmers: Editorial Introduction to a Research Stream on Cognitive Capitalism, Immaterial Labour, and the General Intellect

Abstract: Th is article introduces a series of essays on the related concepts of cognitive capitalism, immaterial labour and the ‘general intellect’, which will feature in the pages of Historical Materialism from this issue onwards. It outlines the stakes of the theoretical discussion around these concepts and welcomes the recasting in Marxian terms of debates which have oft en been monopolised by apologetic treatments of capitalist development. It also identifies five areas which future articles in this ‘research stream’ will be preoccupied with: (1) the interpretation of Marxian notions, especially arising from the Grundrisse; (2) the philosophy of history and the schemata of social change that underpin concepts such as cognitive capitalism; (3) the identification of hegemonic social figures (e.g. the immaterial labourer, the ‘cognitariat’); (4) issues of philosophical anthropology bearing on the definition of knowledge and intellect; (5) the role of debates on value (and its possible crisis) in assessing the idea of knowledge as a productive force.

The 'Law' of Uneven and Combined Development: Some Underdeveloped Thoughts

Abstract: This paper presents a critical reconstruction of the main Marxist debates about the idea of 'leaps forward' in historical development. There have been two important approaches: the so-called 'law of uneven and combined development', as developed by Leon Trotsky, George Novack and Ernest Mandel, and Jan Romein's 'handicap of a head start'. Although Romein's approach is Stalinist in origin, elements of it are compatible with Trotsky's interpretation. But, even an expanded version of the 'law' of uneven and combined development lacks predictive value, although one can say with certainty in hindsight whether a combined development has taken place. It is argued that the 'law' is, in fact, an underspecified social mechanism and that its explanatory power can be increased by identifying a number of recurrent patterns.

A Reply to Critics

Abstract: Ellen Wood replies here to the symposium on her book, Empire of Capital, by laying out her views on the specificity of capitalism and capitalist imperialism, the relation between global capital and territorial states, the problematic concepts of 'globalisation' and 'financialisation', and how our understanding of capitalism affects our conceptions of oppositional struggle.

On Materiality and Social Form: A Political Critique of Rubin's Value-Form Theory

Abstract: This paper critically examines I.I. Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value and argues that two different approaches to value theory can be found in that book: a more 'production-centred' value-form theory uneasily co-exists with a 'circulationist' perspective. This unresolved tension, the authors claim, reflects a more general theoretical shortcoming in Rubin's work, namely, a problematic conceptualisation of the inner connection between materiality and social form that eventually leads to a formalist perspective on the value-form. Furthermore, the paper argues that all those antinomies are an expression of the historical and political context underlying Rubin's work, in which Marxism was being codified as state ideology. The political implications of Rubin's formalism are explored through the critical examination of its consequences for the comprehension of the social determinations of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class.

The Pitfalls of Realist Analysis of Global Capitalism: A Critique of Ellen Meiksins Wood's Empire of Capital

Abstract: The dynamics of the emerging transnational stage in world capitalism cannot be understood through the blinkers of nation-state-centric thinking. In her study Empire of Capital, Ellen Meiksins Wood exhibits the reification and outdated nation-state-centric thinking that plagues much recent work on world capitalism and US intervention, expressed in the confusing notion of a 'new imperialism'. The overarching problems in Wood's study – and, by extension, in much of the 'new-imperialism' literature – is a reified notion of imperialism, a refusal to draw out the analytical, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological implications of capitalist globalisation, and an incessant reification of the state. Instead of a 'new US empire', the current epoch is best understood as a new transnational phase in the ongoing evolution of world capitalism, characterised in particular by the rise of truly transnational capital, globalised circuits of accumulation, and transnational state apparatuses. 'US imperialism' refers to the use by tansnational elites of the US state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend and stabilise the global capitalist system. US militarisation and intervention are best understood as a response to the intractable contradictions of global capitalism.

Marx's Critique of Economic Categories: Reflections on the Problem of Validity in the Dialectical Method of Presentation in Capital

Abstract: It has often been pointed out that the Marxian theory of value contains some inconsistencies, usually in relation to the concept of abstract labour. However, the contradiction between the concept of labour and the concept of validity with which Marx operates in Capital (without actually explaining this conception) has never been discussed. A detailed analysis shows that this concept of validity refers to the process of abstraction which is carried out by the participants of the exchange process. Only the rigorous comprehension of this process of abstraction can illuminate that for which the concept of abstract labour was developed: the unity and universality of value. On this basis, the paper criticises the Marxian development of the money-form and presents an alternative approach that builds on the aforementioned concept of validity. This concept is formulated in more depth by recourse to the works of Hegel, Simmel and Adorno. Furthermore, the paper reconsiders the dialectical development of categories in the light of this alternative conception of the money-form as totality and abstraction (in the sense of Hegel and the young Marx). Finally, the distinction between simple circulation and the process as a whole (found only in the Grundrisse) is explored and it is argued that, according to the novel reading proposed, it acquires a fundamental significance.

Political Marxism and Value Theory: Bridging the Gap between Theory and History

Abstract: This article proposes a reading of value theory firmly entrenched in the historicist framework of political Marxism; one which gives precedence to social relations and historical development over abstract logic and formal models. It argues that Marx's theory of value can be read as elucidating how social norms are being unwittingly created under capitalism by contrast with precapitalist societies. The article is divided into two sections. The first examines the two main ways in which value is considered within Marxism and highlights the problems that can emerge when taking into account the issue of the specificity of capitalism. The second section offers an alternative formulation of value theory grounded in the notion of alienation. This leads to the conclusion that the idea that value is shaped by labour refers to a political fact about decisions concerning the organisation of the labour process, rather than an economic fact about the expenditure of labour in the process of production. Value reflects the class struggles over the labour process and the norms that govern social life, rather than an embodied quantity of socially necessary labour-time expended within the labour process.

Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico. Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico

Abstract: testo Nietzsche filosofo \"totus politicus\" marzo 2003 Domenico Losurdo testo Ossietzky 3 giugno 2004 Jochanan Trilse-Finkelstein testo Il Sole 24 ore, 25 febbraio 2003 Giuseppe Bedeschi testo The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 2004 Raffaella Santi testo Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 21 febbraio 2003 Kurt Flasch testo Actuel Marx 2004 Didier Renault testo La Rinascita della sinistra 21 febbraio 2003 Ugo Dotti testo Belfagor. Rassegna di varia umanità 31 gennaio 2004 Domenico Losurdo testo Stilos. Il settimanale dei libri (La Sicilia) 18 febbraio 2003 Nicola Adragna testo Jahrbuch für Extremismus und Demokratie 2003 Ernst Nolte testo Il Secolo XIX 11 febbraio 2003 Paolo Battifora testo Idee. Rivista di filosofia 2003 Antimo Negri testo

Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital'

Abstract: This intervention concerns the different statute of abstraction in Marx's work. By means of a critical confrontation with Chris Arthur's work, Finelli presents his thesis of the presence of a double theory and fuction of abstraction in Marx's work. In the early Marx, until the German Ideology, abstraction is, in accordance with the traditional meaning of this term, a product of the mind, an unreal spectre. More exactly, it consists in negating the common essence belonging to labouring humanity and projecting it, as alienated universal, into the idea of philosophy, into the state of politics and into the money of the market. In the later Marx, the nature of abstraction is, rather than mental, practical. It is directly related to the quantity without quality of capitalist labour, and it is the product of the systemic connection of machines to labour-power. In contrast to Arthur, Finelli maintains that practical abstraction in the Marx of Capital is not located in the zone of exchange and the market, where there is the mediation of money. On the contrary, it is located in the zone of production, which, for Marx, is a social ensemble not mediated by money but by relations of technological domination.

Production vs. Realisation: A Critique of Fine and Saad-Filho on Value Theory

Abstract: This article assess two important recent books on Marx's political economy and argues that, despite many virtues, there are some crucial limitations in their approach to Marx's political economy. Ben Fine's and Alfredo Saad-Filho's Marx's 'Capital' and The Value of Marx by Saad-Filho place too much explanatory weight on the composition of capital, giving too little attention to Marx's analysis of money, and to the processes of circulation and realisation.

Global Economic History as the Accumulation of Capital Through a Process of Combined and Uneven Development: An Appreciation and Critique of Ernest Mandel

Abstract: O'Brien provides a critical assessment of Ernest Mandel's 1975 monograph Late Capitalism. In so doing, he offers a historical narrative that puts into question Mandel's framing of 'waves' of capitalist development as a process of capital accumulation that was dependent upon uneven development in the Third World. O'Brien starts by problematising Mandel's argument that an initial concentration of money, capital and bullion in the hands of Europeans explains combined and uneven development. He goes on to demonstrate that Mandel's (and Lenin's) notion of imperialism as a necessary conduit for the flow of surplus capital from industrialising Europe does not stand up to the historical evidence. In fact, O'Brien maintains an alternative thesis, namely that these marginalised regions were insuffciently penetrated by European capital.

Evolutionary Psychology: 'New Science of the Mind' or 'Darwinian Fundamentalism'?

Abstract: As practitioners of a putative science of the mind, evolutionary psychologists have earned a degree of cachet with their provocative and sometimes controversial pronouncements about human nature and behaviour. In this article, I briefly survey the history of an evolutionary approach to the psychological sciences before considering the core assumptions of the field that has come to be known as 'evolutionary psychology'. By examining one particular example of evolutionary psychological research - on interpersonal attraction - I find this 'new science of the mind' to be lacking. Rather, I propose that developmental systems theory, buffered by a reconsideration of the dialectical sciences, offers a more comprehensive and rigorous approach to psychology. I further propose that historical materialists and those on the Left generally should take a keen interest in these issues as they have a bearing on social and political outcomes.

Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution? A Belated Response to Eric Hobsbawm

Abstract: Ten years ago, Eric Hobsbawm presented his Deutscher Lecture on 'Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution?' This essay argues that Hobsbawm articulated a perspective on the Russian Revolution that was shared by a much wider audience on the Left after the fall of the Soviet Union and that many of these arguments continue to resonate today. Placing the contours of the historiographical discussion of the Russian Revolution within a broader political context, I argue that Hobsbawm has underestimated the extent to which the standard academic accounts intentionally have marginalised Marxist interpretations. Hobsbawm's own ambivalence toward the October Revolution and his lack of clarity on the origins of Stalinism are not supported by the latest empirical research and concede much ground to strident anti-Marxists. Rather than refuting the Marxist classics, new evidence from the archives of the former Soviet Union actually offers substantial support. The renewed academic attacks on the Russian Revolution, including the deliberate omission of evidence that support the Marxist interpretation, should be challenged rather than embraced by socialists.

On the history and logic of modern capitalism:the legacy of Ernest Mandel

Abstract: Mandel's Late Capitalism is the last large-scale effort to make sense of the development of capitalism since 1945 that is linked to the tradition of classical Marxism. The book provides an excellent case to study the difficulties of any such enterprise to come to grips with the historical developments of capitalism at large or with any of its particular phases or epochs. The difficulties that Mandel tries to surmount in order to reintegrate the theory and history of modern capitalism are, however, closely linked to ambiguities already present in Marx's original general theory of capitalism.

The Economic Foundations of Contemporary Imperialism

Abstract: This paper argues that present-day imperialism is strongly related to the domination of a precise form of capital, namely highly concentrated interest- and dividend-bearing money-capital which operates in financial markets, breeds today's pervasive fetishism of money, but is totally dependent on surplus-value and production. Two mechanisms ensure the appropriation and/or production of surplus-product and its centralisation to the world system's financial hubs. In the 1980s, foreign debt prevailed. Foreign production and profit repatriation by TNCs now represent the main channel. Following the transfer abroad of part of its production by US TNCs, the issue for the US in their relations with the rest of the world is not the commercialisation of surplus through exports, but dependency on imports and, more crucially, on large inflows of money-capital to support the stock market, buy T-bonds and refinance mortgage. This new dependency helps to explain the 'paradox' that US imperialism is increasingly forced to try and offset this through extra-economic and even military coercion where it can.