Western Marxism, Anti-Communism and Imperialism

For 'Western Marxism' — a term introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in 1955 in his Adventures of the Dialectic (1973) to describe the philosophical tendency stemming from Georg Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1971; originally published in 1923) — no concept internal to Marxism has been more antithetical to the genuine development of historical materialism than the 'dialectics of nature'. Commonly attributed to Engels rather than Marx, this concept is often seen as the differentia specifica that beginning in the 1920s separated the official Marxism of the Soviet Union from Western Marxism. Yet, as Lukács, who played the leading role in questioning the concept of the dialectic of nature, was later to admit, Western Marxism's rejection of it struck at the very heart of the classical Marxist ontology — that of Marx no less than Engels.KeywordsHistorical MaterialismHuman PraxisClass ConsciousnessDialectical MaterialismMetabolic RelationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The impoverishment of mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially as it is practised in the bastions of academic power and respectability in the United States, can be registered in terms of its wilful and continuing conceptual blindness to mutually constitutive relations of governance/resistance at work in the production of global politics. This has been underscored in recent years by the rise of powerful transnational social movements seeking to reform or transform global capitalism, a coalition of coalitions recently reincarnated in the form of a global peace movement opposing the blatantly neo-imperial turn in US foreign policy. As the essays in this Special Issue attest, critical scholars of world politics have developed conceptual vocabularies with which to (re-)construct, from various analytical-political perspectives, aspects of these governance/resistance relations. My task in this article is to argue that – under historical circumstances of capitalist modernity – a dialectical understanding of class-based powers is necessary, if by no means sufficient, for understanding social powers more generally, and issues of global governance and resistance which implicate those powers. Although it is not without its tensions and limitations, I have found re-envisionings of Marxian political theory inspired by Western Marxism – and in particular by interpretations of Antonio Gramsci – to be enabling for such a project. Marxian theory provides critical leverage for understanding the structures and dynamics of capitalism, its integral if complex relationship to the modern form of state, the class-based powers it enables and the resistances these engender; and Gramsci's rich if eternally inchoate legacy suggests a conceptual vocabulary for a transformative politics in which a variety of anti-capitalist movements might coalesce in order to produce any number of future possible worlds whose very possibility is occluded by capitalism. In the present context of globalising capitalism and neo-imperialism, such resistance has taken the form of a transnational confluence of movements for global justice and peace.

This is a recent contribution to the Routledge series Studies in Critical Realism. Jonathan Joseph, its author, aims to develop Gramsci�s celebrated analysis of hegemony in a critical realist direction by distinguishing analytically between �structural hegemony� and hegemonic projects and then connecting them dialectically. He develops this approach through a critical engagement not only with Gramsci�s work but also with other positions and debates within classical Marxism, Western Marxism, and post-Marxism. The intended result is a �theory of hegemony [that] combines the political moment of agency with the structural nature of social reproduction� (161). He illustrates his arguments with observations on a range of historical conjunctural analyses drawn from classical Marxism (i.e., Lenin and Trotsky) and Western Marxism (notably the Anderson-Nairn thesis on the peculiarities of British development) and, for his contemporary analyses, from the development of Fordism and the state in post-war Britain in the context of globalization. And he concludes with the view that the Leninist theory of the vanguard party can be grounded in a critical realist understanding of the heterogeneity and complexity of capitalist social formations.

“Alienation” is an important concept in the field of Marxist philosophy. With the rise of cultural studies in the late 20th century, it became a frequently borrowed term in the field of literary theory, used to explain contemporary society. From the continental philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries to classical Marxism in the mid-19th century, and then to sociology in the late 19th century and Western Marxism in the 20th century, the concept of “alienation” has evolved within various disciplines and historical contexts, shaping its developmental trajectory. Since the 20th century, as a key term in cultural studies, “alienation” has inherited the intellectual legacy of political science and sociology, while opening up critical perspectives in cultural studies. This has made it an essential topic in the realms of literature and culture. By employing the method of conceptual history, one can examine the changing meanings of “alienation” in classical Marxism, especially Western Marxism. From a diachronic perspective, this approach can further clarify the implications of “alienation” in the social and historical changes of the 20th century, enhancing the understanding of classical concepts.

<p>Los Estados imperiales, lejos de ser substituidos por la expansión en el exterior del capital, han crecido y se han convertido en componentes esenciales de la economía política mundial. El presente ensayo dirige una fuerte crítica al libro <em>Imperio</em> de Antonio Negri y Michael Hardt, y argumenta que el concepto de imperio de los autores encubre el papel del Estado imperial, disminuyendo así la importancia de un adversario esencial en las primeras líneas de la defensa de los privilegios y el poder de las compañías multinacionales. Al realizar la crítica a Imperio aprovecha la oportunidad para explicar el papel prioritario que el Estado imperial juega hoy, pues la globalización no existiría si no fuera por la intervención estatal. El imperialismo adopta muchas formas, pero persigue siempre el mismo objetivo: la conquista de mercados. Todo esto es el pretexto para poner de manifiesto lo que es el Imperio, el imperialismo que aún subsiste y el Estado. El Estado no sólo no deja de tener razón se ser sino que es pieza clave en el engranaje del sistema capitalista mundial hoy en día y más que nunca.</p>

John Bellamy Foster and Gabriel Rockhill assess the history and influence of Western Marxism, defined not geographically, but by a rejection of the Marxism developed in the Soviet Union, in the Global South, and even in classical Marxism. This strain of Marxist thought, birthed in the imperial core, represents a concession to the dominance of U.S. ideology, rather than to correct the pressing issues confronting society today.

REVIEW OF THE NEW TEXTBOOK SERIES IN MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMICSNew Textbook Series in Modern Political edited by Enfu cheng et al.:1. Modern Political 2nd ed., edited by Enfu Cheng, Jinhua Feng, and Yan Ma, Shanghai, Shanghai University of Finance & Economics Press, 2012, x + 589 pp., 60 (paperback), ISBN 97875642126672. Intermediate Modern Political 1st ed., edited by Enfu Cheng, Bin Yu, Yan Ma, Leming Hu, and Ganqiang He, Shanghai, Shanghai University of Finance & Economics Press, 2012, VII + 690 pp., 88 (paperback), ISBN 97875642147393. Advanced Modern Political 1st ed., edited by Enfu Cheng and Yan Ma, Shanghai, Shanghai University of Finance & Economics Press, 2012, x + 692 pp., 95 (paperback), ISBN 9787564214722Steve cohn, an American heterodox economist, has been researching competing economic paradigms in china. He argues that economics has replaced marxist economics as dominant economic paradigm in china (cohn 2011). Here neoclassical in its broadest sense, refers to mainstream economics in West.Cohn's argument has been confirmed by Haiping Qiu, a marxist economist at renmin University of china in Beijing. According to Qiu (2014), economics education and research in china have been westernizing gradually since mid-1990s. In fact, Western economics, especially Western mainstream economics, now has dethroned marxist economics as dominant economic methodology in china, marginalizing marxist economics severely.Of course, there are many complicated domestic and international factors behind shift. But one direct factor, I think, may be textbooks. cohn (2011) mentions,Some of Marxist economists I interviewed criticized their Marxist colleagues for failing to innovate or update Marxist thinking. They lamented lack of attention to mathematical techniques and continued use of old textbooks. They implied that this gave students impression that Marxism was dated and had been superseded by more modern theories.The publication of textbook Series in modern Political Economics (hereinafter referred to as the Series), edited by Enfu cheng et al., in 2012, may be first meaningful attempt to change situation. Enfu cheng is a marxist economist at chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. As cohn (2011) observed, While retaining a fairly orthodox viewpoint, Professor cheng has tried to open marxist discourse in china to interactions with other heterodox paradigms. He has also tried to welcome more mathematical analysis alongside qualitative analysis. this point has also been incarnated in Series, especially in Advanced Modern Political Economics (hereinafter referred to as the textbook), which was designed basically for doctoral students in chinese universities. other two books of Series, Modern Political Economics and Intermediate Modern Political are basically for undergraduates and for master's degree students, respectively.While retaining an orthodox viewpoint and discourse of classical marxism, textbook gives a fairly large space to an introduction of relevant economic theories of various schools of marxism (most of which were labeled as revisionism, a pejorative term, in chinese academia for decades after 1949) and other heterodox schools. these schools of thought include leninism, trotskyism, Western marxism, Post-Keynesian Neo-ricardianism, Japanese marxian mathematical Neo-marxian and Analytical marxism, among others. textbook also gives enough space to comments on and/or counterarguments against these theories.The textbook implies that some concepts or principles in classical marxism, where necessary, could be improved or even revised. for example, New Presumption about Value-creating living one of what textbook calls four theoretical Presumptions in modern marxist Political Economics, given at very beginning of book, is that productive labor, which creates value, not only includes labor that produces material commodities, which marx expounded, and labor that displaces tangible or intangible commodities, which marx basically expounded, but also includes labor that produces tangible or intangible cultural commodities, labor that provides services for production and reproduction of labor commodities, and managerial activities undertaken by owners of private, productive enterprises (cheng and ma 2012, 4-5). …

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? offers a crash course in the history of imperialist propaganda, as well as in the Marxist method for analyzing culture and ideology. Author Gabriel Rockhill demonstrates the explanatory and transformative superiority of a dialectical and historical materialist approach, while elucidating how the world of ideas is a crucial site of class struggle. He then engages in a meticulous counter-history of the Frankfurt School—which made a foundational contribution to Western Marxism—by situating it within the global relations of class struggle and the imperialist war on actually existing socialism. With the explicit and direct backing of powerful elements in the capitalist ruling class and the world’s leading imperialist state, the Frankfurt School developed a widely promoted form of compatible critical theory as an ersatz for dialectical and historical materialism. The volume concludes by bringing to the fore the positive project that serves as the guiding methodological framework for the work as a whole: a thoroughly anticolonial and anti-imperialist Marxism dedicated to building socialism in the real world. Drawing on extensive archival research to pull back the curtain on ruling class machinations, Rockhill’s book elucidates how the intellectual world war on the socialist alternative has sought to shore up and promote a “compatible left” intelligentsia while misrepresenting, maligning, and trying to destroy the revolutionary left.

Reviewed by: The Social Project: Housing Postwar Franceby Kenny Cupers Richard C. Parks (bio) The Social Project: Housing Postwar France. by Kenny Cupers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp. xxix+ 424. $115/ $31.50. The Social Project: Housing in Postwar France, written by architectural historian Kenny Cupers, gives careful attention and novel analysis to the explosion of public housing projects and suburban growth in post–World War II France. The book itself, which is quite substantial and contains more than 125 pictures and 21 full-color plates, is divided into three main sections that focus on each of the decades of the trentes glorieuses, or thirty-year postwar economic expansion in France: "1950s: Projects in the Making," "1960s: Architecture Meets Social Science," and "1970s: Consuming Contradictions." Those who are familiar with France know well the jarring juxtaposition between a city's historical center and its suburban periphery. In urban agglomerations like Paris, Lille, Marseille, and Grenoble, the cobbled lanes, monuments, and museums of the centres-villesepitomize medieval charm, while the suburbs, or banlieues, which mushroomed in the postwar era from the surrounding agricultural fields, are home to modernist structures, much concrete, and the bulk of the population. According to the orthodox historical narrative, French technocrats and sundry "experts," intellectually formed in the crucible of war and imperial domination, forced public housing on the French populace in a heavy-handed, outward push from the centralized state apparatus. Where Cupers's work shines is in rejecting and redefining the master narrative that explains the shift toward industrial production of housing in France and the concentration of resources on grands ensembles, or mass housing projects. By integrating architectural history, urban history, and social science, Cupers achieves a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis that transcends the classic urbanisteapproach. Hence, The Social Projectis noteworthy in [End Page 593]that it challenges the overly deterministic, étatistapproach to massive planned projects and favors "situated agency over abstract forces and contingency over determinism" (p. xv). The most interesting part of this analysis, especially in section 2, describes an emerging "bureaucratic epistemology" wherein usagers—the "users" of the product—engaged in a dialectic exchange with the technocratic elite that planned and built the housing (p. 155). The constant dialogue between the usagersand policymakers, developers, and architects, which was mediated by social scientists, reshaped the ethos of public housing production in France into a grand social experiment. As Cupers observes, an important facet in facilitating this new exchange was the shift from the quantitative analysis of economists and demographers to the qualitative research of urban sociologists in the postwar era. Another important aspect of the new interplay between the technocracy and consumerism is the fascinating shift from a "ruling state" to a "serving state," where in a Foucauldian twist the state would rule by serving (p. xix). For this analysis, Cupers also relies on Paul Rabinow's interpretation of "welfare" as a key element to the French "modern" state (p. xxiv). It is interesting that historians of French colonialism often consider the colonies as the laboratories of the metropolitan state. In the post-colonial era, as Cupers points out, the laboratory shifted to the suburbs of the metropolitan cities—what was once being contested on "foreign" soil, far from the French public's scrutiny, was now being debated in their backyard in the most literal sense. The planning sites of grands ensemblesemerged as the social laboratories of citizen participation and governmental policy-making, which evolved by the late 1960s into the "science of programming" lived space. The final section describes the overreach of housing production and experimentation as planners sought to fashion "urban density and centrality" out of whole cloth. These readymade ersatz cities were a step too far. Realizing that many middle-class families were transitioning away from state-planned communities in favor of the private market, the government tried to respond by offering "intermediate" and "flexible" housing options. Burdened by a slowing economy, the state was not nimble enough to mimic the options provided by private builders. This book will be of special interest to historians of technology and science in the way that it examines the epistemologies of state...

Through a reappraisal of the work of four major figures in critical theory – Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin – Filippo Menozzi rethinks the tradition of critical theory in relation to pressing concerns in postcolonial studies. Revealing these authors’ continued relevance to urgent issues in the 21st century, from struggles against racism to social movements and the transmutations of global capitalism, Menozzi reimagines them as central to an alternative genealogy of critical theory that moves beyond their European provenance and the limitations of “Western Marxism”. In doing so, this book challenges, more broadly, the view of critical theory as steeped in Eurocentrism, culturally conservative, and politically defeatist. Contesting this in four chapters,Postcolonial Historical Materialisminserts Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and Benjamin into key contemporary sites of militancy and debate. Engaging with a wide range of European and non-European sources, Menozzi proposes a new concept of “postcolonial historical materialism”, indicating how the heritage of critical theory can reopen global possibilities of utopia and revolution in a non-utopian age of global emergencies, social unrest, and the unfinished history of decolonisation.

For the last decade and a half, policymakers have focused on structural adjustment and liberalization of the economy. State intervention--quite significant for decades--has lessened. After the debt crisis, Mexico signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In 1991, it joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). By 1994, Mexico had signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), opening its markets to Canadian and U.S. products. Today, policymakers are content with the results. International financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the multilateral development banks (MDBs), share their enthusiasm and are now supporting the fine-tuning of economic policy, concentrating efforts on the consolidation of reforms. However, important sectors of society assert that reform has negatively impacted family income, restricted access to public services for much of the population, and forced businesses to collapse under the sudden pr essure of foreign competition. Criticism is usually directed at the government, without taking the MDBs' role into account. Nonetheless, the MDBs play an active role: they provide macroeconomic policy advice and participate in a large number of compensatory and sectoral reform loan programs. MDB loans also represent a significant proportion of Mexico's external debt. They do not, however, represent a large proportion of the country's federal revenue or expenditures. As economic have advanced, policy themes have changed. The MDBs now argue that adjustment programs alone will not solve the country's economic problems. In the new MDB view, governments should make a conscious effort to avoid social and political instability by implementing compensatory programs. The impact of structural adjustment should be softened through social projects, while second-generation reforms (generally sectoral) should be consolidated without sacrificing governance. As the MDBs shifted their policy recommendations, they have also begun an internal reform process, creating operational directives that mandate public access to information, environmental protection, and respect for the rights of indigenous peoples through consultation and participation. [1] The MDBs propose stakeholder participation to manage the political costs of adjustment and avoid political instability. In this essay, we analyze how MDB policies and projects pass through the national government and are finally implemented. We argue that the government has significant bargaining power, which it uses to block participation, because Mexico is one of the largest debtors to the MDBs. When participation occurs, it occurs when and where organized sectors of the population are active. Since the portfolios are significant, public disclosure of their terms and conditions is politically risky. This may explain why civil society participation is invited in a piecemeal fashion and even then with serious limitations. Civil Society Under the One-Party System When the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) became the ruling party in the late 1930s, it established a corporatist structure, affiliating the population to mass party organizations in three sectors: peasants, represented by the Confederacion Nacional Campesina (CNC); workers, represented by the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico (CTM); and popular, represented by the Confederacion Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP). These organizations acted as a control and support apparatus for the ruling party. For decades, the state also played a central role in development. State-owned enterprises controlled key areas of the economy. In rural markets, the state protected basic crops with import licenses and tariffs. Government companies also provided the majority of the production credit, crop insurance, and fertilizers. After the Mexican miracle in the 1960s, external debt ballooned, casting doubt on the sustainability of the economic model. …

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre

The article examines the heterogeneous space of the intensively developing early Soviet Marxist discourse. The author proves that its development in the early years of Soviet philosophical culture was determined not only by political and ideological reasons, but also by internal factors, conditioned by the claim of Marxism as a research strategy to the status of a comprehensive and consis­tent theoretical program. The article demonstrates that the study of the variety of archival materials deposited in the funds of numerous cultural and bureaucratic institutions of that time, as well as the rapidly developing Soviet intellectual pe­riodicals, allows us to conclude that the real picture of the development of Rus­sian philosophy in the early Soviet period was more complex, diverse and in­tense than it is often considered. The author identifies several key “points of tension” (later developed in Western Marxism) characteristic of early Soviet Marxist discourse, which coexisted and competed relatively freely in the cultural space of Soviet Russia: the controversy surrounding R. Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation of capital; the discussions that accompanied the formation and the first stages of the development of so-called neo-Marxism (Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch) and the related controversy about the philosophical legacy of Vladimir Lenin; disputes about the philosophical and methodological founda­tions of political economy and, accordingly, about its subject and the limits of the application of Marxist theoretical tools to Marxism itself; historical and philosophical discussions about the genesis of classical Marxism.

Global capitalism as practiced today is a complex matrix of states (sovereign nations in principle), peoples, nations (be they “homogenous” or not), and social classes formed by the capital/labor conflict inherent to the capitalist mode of production. As such, conflicts between states and class struggles are interwoven in a close relationship of interdependence. The interdependence of social struggles in various countries of the world, therefore, depends on how the various dominant blocs exploit the possibilities at their disposal in the international arena. Success here depends upon the value of their respective political and social projects. This article argues that the cooperation of independent nation states founded on the Sovereign Popular Project (embracing industrial self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, and popular democracy) is a fundamental precondition for a progressive move beyond the current international system of imperialist hegemony.

This article critically examines the emergent anthropological analytic that situates African witchcraft within modernity, global capitalism and state structures. Despite the contrast the authors of this analytic make with what theycall the older anthropological analytic that viewed witchcraft as a sign of traditional African social organization, I suggest that both approaches neglect the various social projects, social identities and power relations involved in witchcraft, including those surrounding anthropology as a discipline. I elaborate this point through discussing some of the overlapping and contesting forms of authority, including my own as anthropologist, involved in a witch-finding exercise that took place in the early 1990s on commercial farms and Communal Lands in Hurungwe District, northwestern Zimbabwe.