Marxist Research Articles

TREATMENT OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COMMON PEOPLE IN THE CREATIVE THOUGHTS OF RAINIS’S PLAYS

Rainis’s world outlook has been strongly influenced by the Marxist philosophy, yet his attitude towards this doctrine is rather complicated. On the one hand, the poet was attracted by the idea of changing the world, voiced by Marxism, and he was fascinated by the personality of Karl Marx, in whom he saw a brave and talented reformer of the society; yet, on the other hand, Rainis has severely criticised a number of ideas propagated by Marxism which have been proposed as the foundation of socialism. Firstly, the distinctly materialistic orientation of the Marxist doctrine and the social and political movements associated with it is incompatible with Rainis’s artistic endeavours and his conviction that the decisive role in the development of the society is played by the enhancement of the man’s spiritual world rather than by the economic conditions and their transformation. Secondly, Marxism is unable to solve the contradiction that occurs between the necessity to act in the name of the interests of the overwhelming majority and, simultaneously, to guarantee a free development of every individual. One could even assert that Marxism tries to bypass the potential conflict between the individual freedom and mass interests. On the other hand, Rainis, who had a high regard for the individuality and wanted to harmonise the collective potential for the development of the society with the free development of the personality, is particularly sensitive to the contradictions existing between the individual and the society and strives to address them in his literary works. The issues outlined above in relation to the treatment of the individual and the mass specific of Rainis’s literary works have been analysed in this article in the context of the working notes of Rainis’s unfinished play “Īliņš (Kurbads)”.

For My Teacher, Walterio Carbonell

This essay is dedicated to Walterio Carbonell (1920-2008), the controversial Afro-Cuban Marxist thinker, on the 50th year of the publication of his masterpiece Como Surgió la Cultura Nacional (“On The Emergence of National Culture”). It was published in a 1961, a year marked by the official declaration of the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution, the victory of Playa Girón (the “Bay of Pigs”), and the launching of a massive literacy campaign. Carbonnell’s text confronts the traditional version of Cuban history, which assigns the leading role of the gestation of Cuban nationality to an enlightened aristocracy of White Creoles of Spanish origin. According to this version, such intellectual groups generated an ideology of independence that led to the beginning of the anti-colonial wars against Spain in 1868. Today, this explanation, with slight modifications, continues to be the most widespread in Cuba.

A Marxist approach on the movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

A Marxist approach on the movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Sève and Alienation – A Biographical Preface

Abstract Lucien Sève devoted his life to the development of a Marxist theory of the personality. In so doing, and as part of a theoretical debate with both Marxist humanists and structural Marxists within the Parti Communiste Français, he was inevitably drawn to analyse alienation as a category of Marxist analysis. His conclusion was that although Althusser had been right to argue for the ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s thought, it was wrong to suggest that Marx abandoned the concept of alienation in his later work. Far from it: a transformed conception of alienation derived from historical materialism remains the key to understanding Marxism.

Marxist Analysis of Alienation (1973)

Abstract Lucien Sève (1926–2020) was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of the Parti Communiste Français. An indomitable opponent of both structural and humanist Marxism, his 1973 article reprinted below represents the core of his conception of alienation. For Sève, whilst the mature Marxism of Das Kapital is fundamentally distinct from the speculative humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts in placing capital, not abstract labour, at the heart of alienation, this reinforces, rather than replaces, the role of alienation at the centre of Marx’s mature thought, and hence of Marxism itself.

All that is Frozen Melts into the Sea: Arctic Gas, Science, and Capitalist Natures

ABSTRACT Considerable ecological Marxist analysis has investigated the centrality of nonhuman natures such as soil, forests, and rivers in capitalist accumulation: not only the importance of overcoming natural barriers but appropriating the unpaid productivity of natures for free or low cost. The frozen materiality of ice, however, is a particularly unruly and disagreeable nature that defies most attempts to easily subsume it within capital. This article examines the efforts by the Polar Gas Project – a lengthy pipeline proposed during the 1970s that would have shipped large quantities of natural gas from the Canadian Arctic to southern markets – and specific attempts to develop reliable ice science to facilitate its development. Applying Collard and Dempsey’s analytic of five orientations of capitalist natures, this article examines Polar Gas’ attempted production of ice as an “underground infrastructure,” “outcast surplus,” and “threat.” Through this, empirical evidence of scientific work to produce capitalist natures is detailed and the specific materiality of ice examined in the context of proposed accumulation, revealing the historical limits of capital’s production and remaking of nature.

Domination over the Risorgimento: Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony in Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954)

AbstractIn this article I argue that Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony assumes a pivotal role in advancing the romantically tinged narrative in Luchino Visconti’s film Senso (1954) through a politically recoded message. Visconti offers in this film a reflection upon the political climate in Venetia during the Risorgimento through the pre-eminent role of music. In particular, Bruckner’s music emphasizes the condition of the Venetians under Austrian rulers by dominating as an oppressive and overpowering force, not unlike the Austrian supremacy over the north Italians. Bruckner’s music, which relies on a decisively Wagnerian idiom, conveys throughout the film ideas of betrayal, on both the microlevel and the macrolevel. Such betrayals refer to the Christian Democracy, which excluded the Marxist partisans from governing post-war Italy. These events mirror, for Visconti, the failed revolution of the bourgeois-driven Risorgimento in the 19th century due to the idleness of the aristocracy. Interpreted through Visconti’s Marxist ideology, Bruckner is thus an indicator that the hegemony of the elite remained in place, unchanged and unaltered. As the sonic representative of the Austrian monarchy, it opposes the Risorgimento ideal of the bourgeois class and reassures the supremacy of the ruling class.

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

A MARXIST STUDY OF ADVERTISEMENTS IN THE BRITISH NORTH BORNEO HERALD

Now known as Sabah, North Borneo was under the British administration from 1881 until 1963. The British North Borneo Herald was published by The British North Borneo (Chartered) Company and circulated from 1883 until 1941. This study discussed the relationship between advertising, consumerism, and text production by utilising The British North Borneo Herald advertisements. Thirty-four advertisements, published between 1937-1941, were selected based on four criteria: the advertisements must have both visual and body copy; the advertisements were selected from the last five years of The British North Borneo Herald publication; the products advertised were originated from Britain and its allies, and the advertisements chosen promote essential and luxury products. A Marxist analysis, derived from Eagleton’s Materialist Criticism (1978), was utilised for this study. The discussion also includes a discourse on postcolonialism. There are three categories of needs and desires capitalised by the advertisers observed in the advertisements, which are health, lifestyle and relationship. The analysis also revealed that the components of ideology (General Ideology, Authorial Ideology, and Aesthetic Ideology) shape the content of advertisements. Besides that, the findings also exposed the imbalance relationship between the coloniser and the colonised as the colonised were marginalised in and from the colonial advertisements. Therefore, this discussion on advertising, consumerism and the production of text illustrated how advertising works in disseminating consumerist ideology in colonial North Borneo.

Marxist Thinking and Journalism Theory in Brazil

Marxist thinking gained political strength in Brazil with the creation of the Brazilian Communist Party in 1922, but it was only in the 1980s that its influence in the academic field became noteworthy. This article aims to reconstruct and analyze the origins and the main ideas related to its intervention in the academic theorization of journalism. Besides the contribution of the pioneer Nelson Werneck Sodré (“the press as a means of political struggle”), we discuss the theses of Perseu Abramo (“journalism as a means of manipulation”), Ciro Marcondes Filho (“news as commodity”) and Adelmo Genro Filho (“journalism as a form of knowledge”). Finally, we question whether the perspectives opened up by the pioneers and their successors still show enough intellectual energy to think critically about journalism in times of interactive digital media.

How Foucault Got Rid of (Bossy) Marxism

ABSTRACT Foucault distanced himself from Marxism even though he worked in an environment—left French theory of the 1960s and 1970s—where Marxism was the dominant frame of reference. By viewing Foucault in the context of French Marxist theoretical debates of his day, we can connect his criticisms of Marxism to his discussions of the status of intellectuals. Foucault viewed standard Marxist approaches to the role of intellectuals as a problem of power and knowledge applicable to the Communist party. Marxist party intellectuals, in his view, had developed rigid and universal theories and had used them to prescribe action, which prevented work on the sorts of problems that he uncovered—even though these problems were central to the development of capitalism.

‘The Shadows of Black People Who Have Disappeared’: Alekos Doukas's Interpretation of the Dying Native Fantasy

Between the late 1920s and early 1960s, Alekos Doukas (1900–62), a Greek migrant and writer, engaged with the widely held belief that Australia's Indigenous people were a doomed race. By focusing on letters, articles, and fictional writing by Doukas – all of which were written in Greek – this article brings together histories of migration and histories of settler colonial thinking about Aboriginal people. Although, as we show, the pessimistic racialist views he expressed in them were largely consistent with the view that Aboriginal people were in a state of racial decline, his views also shifted, we argue, under the influence of a Marxist analysis of colonialism and his fleeting encounters with Aboriginal people. Doukas' writings show how the dominant story of Aboriginal racial decline could be learnt, confirmed, revised, and at times idiosyncratically interpreted by non-Anglo migrants living in Australia.

The role of regressive sugar tax in the soft drink industry levy (SDIL): A Marxist analysis

Simmering beneath the bubbles of your regular soft drink are the issues of social class, subjugation, and social injustice. Sugar is a commodity and it is this component when added to soft drinks that now attracts a taxation liability under the Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) which was introduced in the UK in April 2018. In this critical taxation article, we argue that the UK’s capitalist state is using the excuse of concern with workers’ health to justify taxing a commodity, which is at best an authoritarian attempt to manage people’s behaviour to make it more conducive to capitalism, but will fail; add to economic inequality and inequity; and is therefore, morally delinquent.

‘The future was over’: Memory, meaning and temporality in Go, Went, Gone

Using Thing theory and a Marxist analysis of temporality, I show how identity formation in Erpenbeck’s novel relies on objects and a person’s ability to work, demonstrating how the dehumanizing effects of capitalism not only impact the asylum seekers in the novel, but its German characters as well. Although characters fight against dehumanization, Erpenbeck’s novel demonstrates that the only hope for the future lies in systemic change. Although the majority of scholarship on Go, Went, Gone reads it through the lens of Europe’s refugee crisis, I argue that Erpenbeck contextualizes the crisis, situating it in a dehumanizing capitalist system fraught with internal contradictions to show the true crisis is not an influx of migrants, but the failure of the German political and economic systems to account for them.

Unbalanced exposure: existentialism, Marxism, and philosophical culture in state socialist Hungary

Existentialism and existentialist thinkers enjoyed sustained interest in Hungary under communist rule. From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, this branch of “bourgeois philosophy” never ceased to generate renewed attention. However, this reception was not subsumed into the ideological orthodoxy, nor was it simply destined to fuel Marxist–Leninist criticism. Whereas Georg Lukács’s polemics with existentialism in the 1940s set the agenda to embrace a highly critical reception, it was precisely Sartre’s influence in the 1960s that had opened the door for a more open-minded Marxist reading of existentialist thinkers in Hungary. This paper seeks to reconstruct the intellectual motifs and contexts that underlie this uncommon development. In focusing predominantly on the period of the 1960–1980s, I am particularly interested in exploring Lukács’s role in the changing attitude towards existentialism in Hungary; the controversies between various Marxist approaches dealing with existentialist thinkers and the ways which the influence of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus in literary circles influenced the tenor of their philosophical reception. Through this exploration, I will seek to provide a deep insight into one of the richest intellectual landscapes of the philosophical culture in state socialist Hungary.

The “Sinification” of Marxism: rudiments, a historical parenthesis and a “new round” of development in modern China

During the global financial crisis in 2008, the collapse of the ideology of Marxism can be traced in the scientific discourse – all the remaining socialist foundations and bases collapsed, and new formats were mixed and transformed into a chaotic order and new political foundations. Socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era. The main social contradiction in China has transformed into a contradiction between the growing desire of people for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development. Changes in the main contradictions in Chinese society have determined that the scientific discourse should consider people's desire for a better life as the goal of social struggle, constantly strengthen people's sense of happiness and security and constantly contribute to the overall prosperity of the nation. The main purpose of the article is to crystallize the “new round” of the development of Marxism in China, which began with the arrival of Xi Jinping to rule the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China. The authors reveal the prerequisites for the origin of Marxism in the world (from the level of an idea to a real embodiment), give a historical overview of the formation of Marxism in China (the main stages are identified and each of them is characterized), and also argue for the emergence of a “new round” of development in modern China based on a comparison of new bases of ideology and fundamental Marxist theories.Despite the collapse of the socialist system, it cannot be assumed that the external alternative to capitalization and socialization has historically exhausted itself. The experience of modern China, which opens up space for the development of capitalist forms in those parts of the economic space where they show their advantages and have not technically exhausted themselves, is much more consistent with Marx's natural-historical approaches: not to jump over regular stages (falling, as a rule, into the abyss), but to create opportunities for development and the historical exhaustion of natural forms.

Social Realism in Meena Kandasamy’s Novel The Gypsy Goddess

Social realism, as derived from the Marxist ideology, is something which adheres to reality, avoids romantic embellishments, and creates truthful portraits of life that expose human flaws. In it, we find characters with genuine jobs and problems. It records the life of an average farmer or labourer. The novel the Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy is an indictment of Communism and atrocities inflicted upon untouchable coolies and paddy workers. Mena Kandasamy presents the fictionalized version of the tragedy, portrayed on the documents taken from history and interviews of people who faced that actual incident. The landlords murder a communist leader. After that, the Dalit labourers go on strike, Dalit workers are forced to work back on farms, and those who refuse are assaulted and punished by the police. The democratic demand for justice by the untouchables farmers of Kilenmani, Tamil Nadu, are faced with a terrible series of actions which prove ‘might is right’, and the poor, helpless farmers are only left to suffer and die due to hostile conditions. The novel is a fine narrative of their plight and the traumatic conditions caused by the violence inflicted upon them. In brief, it is a fictionalized work on social realism. The present paper is a brief study of events that occur in the lives of Dalit, unprivileged paddy workers and their exploitation by so-called Upper Caste or Landlords and their realistic representation.

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Socio-Psychological Problems of the Protagonist in Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen. An Analytical Study

This paper explores the socio-psychological problems of the protagonist in Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen, discoursing the causes for the socio-psychological problems that the marginalised were subjected to in the epic era. This research aims to study the-then social conditions and analyse how they cause the trauma in the psyche of the protagonist. While the Freudian psychological approach interprets that the causes for the psychological distress are to be searched for in the unconscious minds, the Marxist approach asserts that they are to be seen in the then-material conditions of social life. So, the Marxist literary critical approach is necessary for carrying out this research, tracing the dialectical relationship between the human psyche and the then-contemporary social relations. It is asserted that the social discriminations would adversely cause socio-psychological problems among individuals and it was true in the case of Karna, too.

A Note on the Surplus Approach as ‘Neo-Marxian’ Political Economy

ABSTRACT After a short survey of the reasons why the label ‘Neo-Ricardianism’ customarily fixed to the surplus approach to political economy should be discarded for good, the note focuses on Marx's analysis of the influence of income distribution on the incentive to invest and technical change. It is held that it is principally this analysis that should be taken as the foundation for any further development of the surplus approach, with a view to putting together the essential elements of an alternative theory of employment and activity levels within which also the role of the State and its economic policy may be critically dealt with.