Anti-capitalist Critique Research Articles

New Masses? Social Bases of Resistance

[New Masses? Social Bases of Resistance] What social forces are likely to challenge the supremacy of capital in the coming decades? In this follow-up article to his magisterial overview of the new global class landscape of our young century, “Klass i det tjugoförsta århundradet” (original “Class in the 21st Century”, also featured in this issue of Arkiv ), Therborn analyses the potential sources of anti-capitalist critique and mobilization, in the dynamic South and the old North. Pre-capitalist populations, “surplus” masses, exploited workers, together with new and old middle classes are all discussed. Finally, Therborn also turns to the movements that may spring from these social bases. What will their demands be? How will they build the alliances that are needed if they are to influence global development towards increased equality and democracy? Publication history: A translation of “New Masses? Social Bases of Resistance” in New Left Review , issue 85 (2014). (Published 22 December 2014) Citation: Therborn, Göran (2014) “Nya massor? Motståndets sociala grundvalar”, in Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys , issue 3, pp. 99–110. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.3.4

Killer Corn and Capitalist Pigs: Forensic Noir and Television Portrayals of Modern Agricultural Technology

Forensic noir, a subgenre of the popular television crime drama, presents science as the definitive solution for solving crimes. At the same time, forensic noir programs portray technology used for economic gain—such as that used in modern “industrial agriculture”—as detrimental to the human condition. These warring interpretations of science present an intriguing critique of capitalism from within the capitalist structure of commercial entertainment. In this qualitative study, episodes of two programs, CSI: Miami and Bones, were content-analyzed for characteristics of the forensic-noir category as well as for elements illustrating the dual nature of their anticapitalist critique of science, technology, and modern agriculture. In these episodes, the crimes committed were directly related to intensive production agriculture and the owners and operators of those production facilities vilified for disregarding the human and environmental impacts of their businesses in their quest for profit. The visual imagery depicted agricultural facilities as “crime scenes” and treated agricultural products as evidence. The forensic dramas painted a largely negative portrait of modern production agriculture as exploitative and profit-driven—criticisms often lobbed at television as a medium for cultural production.

Part 1: Why I Am Not a Postsecularist

This article questions the culturalist and civilizational taxonomies of postsecular theory by redirecting attention toward the practical consequences of public theology in the realm of neoliberal welfare reform. Tracing the simultaneous rise of faith-based welfare and the religious Right in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Middle East, and India, it argues that the postsecular posture of anticapitalist critique testifies at best to a misunderstanding of the constitutive relationship between the neoliberal and the neopaternal. Returning to Marx, the essay posits (contra Polanyi) that capital demands the constant reassertion of fundamental value, even while it works to undermine all historically specific instances of foundation.

Natural Women? Anti-Feminism and Michel Houellebecq's Plateforme

Michel Houellebecq's novel Plateforme (2001) satirically proposes Third World sex tourism as a remedy for sexual dissatisfaction in the West brought on by feminism's destruction of ‘natural’ gender roles. As in Houellebecq's previous work, feminism is lampooned both as a sex-negative censorial force and as a kind of mercenary libertarianism. Plateforme more fully elaborates this position suggesting that feminism is simply an affective projection of neo-liberalism, responsible for an injurious and ‘unnatural’ sexual behaviour that has destroyed kinship relations and contributed to the socio-economic emasculation of Western men. As part of the novel's Swiftian ‘modest proposal’, the narrative sets up a Manichean opposition in which an essentialised ‘natural’ femininity, represented by Thai sex workers, is set against the ruined sexuality of Western women. This article examines the ways in which the novel's ostensibly anti-capitalist critique invokes a quasi-primitivist discourse on sexuality that returns women to a pre-Foucauldian essentialism of the ‘natural’ which offers a site of sanctuary and solace for a masculinity besieged by the neurosis of post-'68 sexualities.

Movies, Modernity, and All that Jazz: Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred

Over the past decade, in a proliferation of scholarship paralleling more general critical investigation into the connections between literature and jazz, scholars have taken up the question of jazz and blues influence in the poems of Langston Hughes. (1) Much of this scholarship has centered on Hughes's accomplished poem sequence, his 1951 Montage of a Dream Deferred, in which poems based on everything from boogie-woogie to bebop are juxtaposed to depict the dreams and difficulties of a Harlem in transition. Considering these approaches to Hughes's poetic appropriation of African American musical forms, in conjunction with a surging critical interest in the intersection of modern poetry and mass culture, it somewhat surprising that so little attention has been given to the various mechanisms--the phonograph, the radio, and above all, the sound film--through which this music was often heard and which are so prominently depicted in Hughes's work. This inattention to Hughes's fascination with the instruments of mass culture goes hand-in-hand with a general critical neglect of Hughes's radical politics. When treated at all, Hughes's radical commitments have often been reduced to the proletarian poetry of the 1930s that has generally been taken as a kind of hiccup--an abrupt disruption and departure from issues of race and community that concerned him in the 1920s and that he would return to in the 1940s and for the rest of his career. Ryan Jerving, for example, places Hughes's jazz poetry directly against such commitments, arguing that Hughes's handling of jazz--and his virtual abandonment of it for almost two decades--bears the telltale marks of an entertainment industry form that could not be articulated confidently or without a certain ambivalence to black identity or to anticapitalist critique until after the Second World War (661). (2) I want to suggest, however, that while Hughes does in his late poems return to jazz and blues, his handling of them still very much caught up in the ambivalence and anticapitalist critique that had marked his radical poetry of the 1930s. His insistence on the authenticity of jazz as an African American art form as well as a form of social critique, evident in his depiction of bebop in Montage, asserted against the standardization of jazz by a (white) U. S. culture industry, whose most powerful agent, Walter Benjamin reminds us, is the (221). Under this culture industry, as Krin Gabbard has argued, the movies became a powerful site for producing a mythology of jazz--that other history of a commercial music that so often neglected by scholars in favor of a few unusually talented composers and performers (1-2). I will show how Hughes incorporates both jazz and film form into his poems, placing them in dialectical contention, to emphasize both the music and one of its pervasive mediums. This dialectic played out in a number of discursive registers--oral/visual, black/white, embodiment/disembodiment, sex/impotence, and primitivism/progress--that Hughes foregrounds in an attempt to offer a specifically black subjectivity that becomes a point of negotiation of mass modernity as well as a productive alternative to it. (3) Formally, the poem itself becomes a forum for staging this dialectic and ultimately Hughes's poetry serves to help articulate a point of political resistance beyond the realm of the poem. Movies and Mass Modernity From the early days of silent cinema, African Americans have had a complex relationship with film. They were, not surprisingly, generally caricatured and ridiculed on the silver screen, often by white actors in blackface. As a coherent audience to which films were actually aimed, African Americans were generally ignored, and as several scholars have pointed out, the very standardization of a Classical Hollywood style--with its emphasis on the invisible continuity of image and sound--was dependent on a stable notion of whiteness. …

Their Modernity Matters Too: The Invisible Links Between Black Atlantic Identity Formations in the Caribbean and Consumer Capitalism

Much work in the field of Black Atlantic studies has highlighted the lives and philosophies of liberation of black savants such as W. E. B. DuBois and Claude McKay. These and other black intellectuals, who combined anti-capitalist critique with the struggle against anti-black racism, have been heralded as planetary humanists eschewing exclusive nationalism. This article seeks to complement this body of work by revealing the underprivileged actions of the Afro-Caribbean working classes to tame capitalism and demolish racism. It focuses on Elza, Tica and Amelia Richardson, three sisters who were born in the Dominican Republic and whose travels and kinship ties connect the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean to Canada, Western Europe, and the United States of America. Reading the life histories of the Richardson sisters, it is possible to see beyond race and recognise the power that consumer capitalism has had in shaping both blacks and whites in the Caribbean and its Diaspora.

Under the cobblestones, the beach: the politics and possibilities of the art therapy large group

This paper discusses the politics and possibilities of linking the personal and political with therapeutic and social transformation through a teaching method provided in the art therapy training at Goldsmiths – the art therapy large group (ATLG). Three key ideas of May ‘68 are related to the ATLG and their relevance to other psychotherapies and psychotherapy trainings is considered. These ideas are: the importance of the ‘capitalist’ university as an essential terrain in the struggle for social change; the Atelier Populaire’s use of art in an anti-capitalist critique of the commodifi cation of art and artist in society, and the anti-imperialist character of the May events. These ideas are related to the theoretical base of the ATLG in the large verbal group literature, Performance Art and to the wide international membership of the ATLG, creating a forum for engaging with global issues. To illustrate these points, we give an example of the interface of the political and the impact of a real event – the university lecturers’ strike in 2006 – and the learning that took place in relation to this through the ATLG. We conclude that through a critical engagement with the university within the global terrain of contemporary neoliberalism, the ATLG provides a territory that can integrate the political and therapeutic in arts / psychotherapy trainings; provide a critique and alternative to the commodifi cation of art and artist and engage with issues of difference in the globalized market place. The ATLG prepares the artist / student / therapist / worker to critically engage in the personal and social transformation of the politics of art and psychotherapy provision in the public, private and voluntary sectors.

After '68: Narratives of the New Capitalism

WHOSE REVOLUTION? Most commemorative commentary on the legacy of '1968' revolves around a now familiar set of issues. (1) It asks how far the putatively revolutionary aspirations of the radical students and (to a lesser extent) workers--who demonstrated, occupied and fought with police across the globe during that year--were realised. It speculates as to how far those revolutionary aspirations were ever authentic, and how far they were 'really' just a cloak for an as-yet inarticulable set of desires for new freedoms: freedoms which post-Fordist consumer capitalism would go on to fulfil more satisfactorily than any form of socialism ever could. This essay will begin by revisiting this set of problematics, but in an attempt to go beyond them, by considering some of the issues in terms of the much wider question of how the evolution and emergence of contemporary capitalism is understood. It will argue that an understanding of the significance of '1968' remains fundamental to any historical narration of the mutations in capitalism of the late twentieth century. It will also argue that one of the reasons that '1968' has proved to be such a confusing event for subsequent commentators to narrate, and such a provocation to oversimplification, is that it was a moment whose specificity and consequences could not be understood in terms of the rather simplistic understanding of the social dynamics of advanced capitalist societies which was prevalent across the political spectrum during the middle decades of that century. Ultimately, it will suggest that any account of social change which escapes these simplicities must, by the same token, draw our attention to the continued indispensability of an anti-capitalist critique to any meaningful democratic politics. The striking fact from which this discussion starts is this: the world of today is not the one that the radicals of 1968 hoped to build by any means, because it is one in which the requirements of capital accumulation continue to organise most areas of social life across the globe, generating massive inequalities and condemning many of the formerly colonised peoples to extreme poverty, ruining the planetary ecosystem and subjecting millions in the 'developed' world to stress, overwork or poverty; and yet the culture of today's capitalism is different from that of the mid twentieth century in ways which seem to answer with strange precision to some of the demands of those protesting voices. The rigid hierarchies and narrow career paths of classic corporate culture have given way to the networked world of 'flat' management, rapid promotion, flexible working and short-term contracts, offering far more freedom of movement, far more capacity for self-development and self-expression than was available to the 'company man' of the mid twentieth century. To the successful, a 'portfolio career' today offers the kinds of opportunities for travel, autonomy and variety which once only typified the working lives of creative artists or certain kinds of politician. (2) Professional women have opportunities barely imaginable thirty years ago, and the entire education system has been transformed beyond recognition by the presence and success of girls and women at every level, as have a number of key cultural institutions such as the publishing industry. The social liberalism of contemporary culture, with its toleration of diverse lifestyles and modes of sexual expression, its valorisation of cultural and religious plurality, would have amazed and delighted the most imaginative libertines of almost any previous generation. The official embrace of multiculturalism was a long way off in the days when Enoch Powell could give his 'rivers of blood' speech (3) and not assume it to be a political suicide-note, but now few public institutions or corporations can avoid paying lip service to it, at least. The deference which once characterised relations between members of different classes or between juniors and seniors within all kinds of institution, is today long gone, even out of the memory of younger generations. …

The Game of Meaning: Collage, Montage, and Parody in Kurt Schwitters' Merz

The Game of Meaning:Collage, Montage, and Parody in Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Patrizia McBride (bio) When the Anglo-American artists known as "neo-dada" rediscovered the work of Kurt Schwitters in the late 1950s, they thought they had found a model for robust artistic intervention that promised a way out of the strictures of Abstract Expressionism. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Allan Kaprow saw in Schwitters's collages of recycled refuse a model for critiquing the self-perpetuating cycle of consumerism and waste in capitalist societies. However, their interpretation of Schwitters's practices was based on a misreading of sorts, since Schwitters's use of trash in his collages had never been intended as an anti-capitalist critique of social relations in its day. Quite to the contrary. It had originally served to sustain a formalist aesthetics predicated on the autonomy of art from politics. Indeed, Schwitters's flaunted disinterest for politics with regard to Germany's aborted revolution and the turmoil of the early Weimar period had earned him the contempt of militant Dadaists like George Grosz and Richard Huelsenbeck, who curtly denied his request for admission to the Berlin Club Dada.1 While critics have fully acknowledged Schwitters's path-breaking exploration of collage and assemblage, his productive blending of visual and verbal art forms, and his contributions to typography and advertising, they have also often concluded that his formalist understanding of art, revolving around the distinctive theory of montage he labeled Merz, was indebted to a nostalgic quest for order and harmony. According to this assessment, Schwitters conceived of art as a site of transcendence that promised the harmony and structure sorely missing in Weimar Germany. Yet Schwitters's putative desire for order and [End Page 249] transcendence is difficult to reconcile with the exuberant transgression of boundaries—of the canvas, of the text, of different media and codes—that his montage practices relentlessly stage. Indeed, his art vigorously engages the messiness and incoherence of everyday experience rather than enacting its sublimation.2 This apparent contradiction raises the question of what kind of intervention is made possible by an artistic practice informed by abstraction, understood as a denial of figural representation or traditional narrative, and the combinatory principle of montage. In reconstructing the discourse on art and literature that unfolds in Schwitters's fictional and theoretical writings, I will show that his concept of montage embodies an understanding of reality as a universe of manipulable signs.3 By severing the link to representation, Schwitters fashioned art into an emancipatory realm for playing with the practices that make up ordinary signification, in a way that exposes their changeable and malleable nature. It is notable that the very aspects that made Schwitters appear marginal within prevalent accounts of Dadaism, namely, his emphasis on the specificity of artistic practice, his concern with reconceptualizing the art object, and his lack of iconoclastic rage even in his most radical experiments, have become central themes in recent endeavors to reevaluate Dada as a substantive, complex moment in the trajectory of the historical avant-garde.4 This article contributes to this reassessment by outlining the constructive intervention made by Schwitters's theory and practice of abstract montage. While it is true that Schwitters's hermetic practices refrained from commenting on the volatile mix of political retrenchments and socio-economic changes in Weimar Germany, they nevertheless modeled a type of emancipatory engagement with contemporary experience, albeit one that is qualitatively different from the political activism advocated by Grosz and Huelsenbeck in the early 1920s. This lies in conceptualizing art as a distinctive, cognitive medium that optimistically embraces the situatedness of ordinary practices of meaning-production, which it presents as open to subversive manipulation. Schwitters's aesthetic practice and reflection turn on his program of Merz, a theory of abstract montage that supplied him with both an analytic framework and a brand label for his diverse artistic pursuits.5 His first comprehensive articulation of the concept is found in an essay from 1920 that sketches his position with regard to the politicization of the German avant-garde following the establishment of the Berlin Club Dada in 1918.6 Schwitters's unstated aim in this text...

Workers' Control and the Struggles Against “Wage Slavery” in the Gilded Age and After

In nineteenth-century America, visions about the good life among labor reformers often entailed the concept of a democratic republic of citizens dedicated to self-directed work as small producers. Specific strains of the emerging workingclass movement helped to transform this artisan republican ideology into an anticapitalist critique of what was called the of slavery. Their spokesmen sparked the imaginations of working people with a vaguely defined but powerful vision of a cooperative commonwealth. This article1 focuses on the reformunionist, populist, socialist, and syndicalist movements in US labor history that aimed at enhancing workers' control and eliminating slavery in the years between 1870 and 1920. These movements differed from bread-and-butter trade unionism and progressivism that pinned all hope on progress, the rise of prosperity, and redistribution of wealth. For the sake of brevity, the various forms of anarchism and Utopian communitarianism will be omitted, since their impact was relatively less significant in the domain of labor participation. Special attention will be paid to the Utopian, millenarian, and dystopian aspects of the movements concerned, and to the view, initially expressed by Daniel Bell, that American socialists were other-worldly chiliasts who neither understood nor cared about the realities of American life (6-7). While there is an element of truth in this assertion, on its own it falls short of adequately explaining why these attempts at workers' control resulted in such dismal failure. The key, as I hope to demonstrate, lies elsewhere. Gilded Age Reformers, Christian Rhetoric, and the Battle Against Plutocracy The period between 1873 and 1897 was marked by steadily falling prices, economic recessions and depressions, and a working-class movement dominated by the rise and fall of the Knights of Labor. The next period, up until 1914, saw rising prices, corporate consolidation, and the emergence of the industrial, craft-based unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its affiliates challenged by socialist and syndicalist opponents on the left (Stromquist 544; Dubofsky, State 2). The Knights of Labor (1878-1893) was an industrial union organized at the national level, headed by a General Assembly. Workers were eligible to join, at least in theory, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity. With the exception of certain professionals, all gainfully employed individuals (including unskilled workers) could join, but three-fourths of each assembly had to be wage earners. This union was part of a broader reform movement that pressed for a producerist republican society, and it supported the eight-hour day, boycotts and arbitration (rather than strikes), various political reforms (including a graduated income tax), as well as consumers' and producers' cooperatives. The AFL, a self-appointed adversary of the Knights, was founded in 1886, and accepted individuals and locals from its rival union. The AFL, however, recognized the autonomy of each trade, thus limiting itself chiefly to business unionism and to skilled workers. Its unions stressed ownership, favored checks on immigration, demanded relief from technological job displacement, and proposed enactment of labor legislation. As a less radical strand of labor reform, the AFL also cooperated with employers, participating in the National Civic Federation (1900), for example, to help foster mediation of labor disputes (Encyclopedia 755-56). During the first period, particularly between 1886 and 1894, many labor reformers denounced the system and envisioned a cooperative commonwealth where productive labor would reap its full reward. An insecure economy marked by declining prices made producerism attractive to heavily indebted small farmers, struggling small businessmen, artisans experiencing deskilling, and laborers in saturated labor markets (Stromquist 545). …

Egalitarisme et critique sociale

This article considers, in the light of the revival of anti-capitalist critique since December 1995 in France and the protests at Seattle, Prague, and Genoa, the conceptual gap between normative political philosophy and explanatory social theory. It argues that the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and others may offer some philosophical resources for closing this gap and allowing normative theory and social critique mutually to support each other.

Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde

At the turn of the century the philosophy of Henri Bergson captivated France, and Bergson's theories of intuition and elan vital influenced artistic and political notions of the supreme individual, the collective consciousness of a class or race, and the esprit of the nation itself. Here Mark Antliff demonstrates how various artists in prewar France positioned themselves and their art in this plurality of political discourse. By interrelating such movements as Futurism, Cubism, and Fauvism, he elucidates the pervasive impact of Bergson on modernism in Europe, especially in terms of theories of organic form. Antliff defines the anarcho-individualism of Gino Severini as it relates to the anarcho-syndicalism of other Futurists, and contrasts both to the Puteaux Cubists, who embraced a leftist discourse of celtic nationalism. All these groups, including the Rhythmists, an international group of Fauve painters, defined their Bergsonism in reaction to the campaign against Bergson launched by the royalist organization L'Action Francaise. Antliff shows that tbe organicism central to the Bergsonism of these leftist groups had a postwar legacy in fascist ideologies in France and italy, and charts the transformation of an anticapitalist critique into the politics of reaction. Thus Antliff relates the Bergsonism of these movements to the larger political culture confronted by the Parisian avant-garde, exposing the volatile relation of art and culture to ideology in prewar France.

The Jew as Other under National Socialism: Veit Harlan's Jud SuSS

The Jew as Other under National Socialism: Veit Harlan's Jud SuSS