Eighteenth Brumaire Research Articles

Vietnam, the Movie: Part Deux

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (nguyen, sympathizer 179). and so viet thanh nguyen's The Sympathizer invokes Karl Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” although the reference is just as likely to be Edward Said's Orientalism, since Marx was concerned with political representation (608), whereas Said was concerned with discursive representation (21). These words frame the important middle act of The Sympathizer, one that focuses on the filming of The Hamlet, a mash-up of Hollywood's sins against not only Vietnamese but also Asians and Asian Americans at large. Reading like a morality play crossed with a backstage musical, this section draws on thinly veiled references to Francis Ford Coppola (the Auteur), Marlon Brando (the hespian), and Martin Sheen (the Idol), who drag the narrator from his newly formed Southern Californian refuge and round up a bunch of stray boat people milling around in the Philippines to put on a movie about the Vietnam War. From the recycling of American military equipment originally sold to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the reuse of Vietnamese bodies recently shot at and now en route to the United States as refugees, every aspect of the making of The Hamlet illustrates the dangers of allowing oneself to be represented by others. More subtly, The Sympathizer shows how difficult it is to intervene in this regime of representation, especially in the name of authenticity, as it is often deployed by protestors against stereotypes in the media. But if we situate the section on The Hamlet within the overall narrative of The Sympathizer and also in Nguyen's larger critique of memory industries as war industries, we must also understand that the content of the ilm is less important than the dynamics of spectatorship. By linking the narrator's quixotic quest to subvert this film with his repression of his complicity in the rape and torture of a communist agent during the narrator's days as a mole in the South Vietnamese police, Nguyen suggests that watching the Vietnam War is potentially as dangerous as ighting in (or misrepresenting) the war.

Arendt’s Revolutionary Antiquity

While ostensibly tracking the distinctiveness of the “physiognomy of the twentieth century,” Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution brings a number of other historical horizons into view. Antiquity, the late eighteenth century and the contemporary condition continually merge in her analysis. Arendt’s discussion thus provides a telling counterpart to Karl Marx’s description of the role of antiquity in the French Revolution in the Eighteenth Brumaire. The chapter argues that it is by coming to terms with the notion of revolution that Arendt defines and refines her concept of the political, a concept which emerges from the confluence between antiquity, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the democratic uprisings of the twentieth century.

Fanon: Absorption and Coloniality

Fanon: Absorption and Coloniality Joshua Clover (bio) Fanon’s significance to the present moment seems to me to hinge in large part on his identification of the lumpenproletariat as revolutionary subject, an identification that was anathema then (and largely remains so now) to traditional Marxism. Surely all remember Marx’s magnificent litany in the Eighteenth Brumaire of “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass,” subject to the sway of whoever held the day, notably Bonaparte, “chief of the Paris lumpen proletariat” (Marx 2003, 170–71). We could treat Marx’s assessment of the structural position of the lumpenproletariat as a historical invariant, as some have, meaning that Fanon must cleave from Marx’s understanding of class. Or we could consider that the situation surveyed by Fanon in 1961, extending from the Caribbean to Africa, Maghreb and Mashreq—a situation of racialized colonization—was still capitalism but one sufficiently distinct that we could allow him such a claim about the lumpen then and there, while recognizing that this claim would have little purchase in the “developed” nations in Europe, say, or the United States. That is to say, we could have a historical rather than static approach to the contours of class. [End Page 39] Once we have allowed this, we are able to admit of present debates, particularly those endeavoring to rethink the relation between capitalism and colonization in both in the former First World and at the level of the world-system, including the brace of recent “new histories of capitalism” attentive to the role of slavery in capitalism’s formation. We might ask, on behalf of the West’s purveyors of an orthodox socialist class politics and particularly those possessors of a faith in a renewed workers’ party and/or advocates of what is presently called by the awkward post-dialectical term of anti-anti-racism—we might ask the question of whether the world of the capitalist core might now more resemble Fanon’s than it once did, and what that might tell us. My suspicion is that, here in the West, we are closer to Fanon than ever before. Fanon took the historical violence of colonization to descend from a kind of speciation, “the organization of a Manichaean world” wherein no détente is possible (2004, 43). For the colonized, “There is no question for them of competing with the colonist. They want to take his place” (23). Here already we have a distance between colonial and conventionally western capitalist scenarios, the latter understood as presupposing class competition, both inter and intra, as a driver of development and of accumulation premised on exploitation. In Fanon’s Africa, the lumpen—we shall modulate that name before the end—are excluded rather than exploited. Shanty-town dwellers make their way toward economic centers, condemned nonetheless to “circle the towns tirelessly, hoping that one day or another they will be let in” (81). But they are the lumpen because this does not and cannot happen; the colonized will not be absorbed into the ranks of free labor. As Fanon points out, “under-developed” nations, upon throwing off formal colonization, often try to develop their way out of this situation toward an absorptive capitalism, premised on the ceaseless gains in productivity that characterize “developed” nations. The political leader of an underdeveloped country is terror-stricken at the prospect of the long road that lies ahead. He appeals to the people and tells them: “Let us roll up our sleeves and get to work.” Gripped in a kind of creative frenzy the nation plunges into action of a hugely disproportionate nature. The agenda is not only to pull through but to catch up with the other nations as best one can. There is a widespread belief that the European nations have reached their present stage of development as a result of their labors. Let us prove therefore to the world and ourselves that we are capable of the same achievements. (Fanon 2004, 52) [End Page 40] Shortly they discover their position in the world-system...

Allegory and Impasse: Revolutionary History and Revolutionary Modernity in Marx and Engels

Paul de Man’s “Literary History and Literary Modernity” serves as a telling point of departure for reexamining the configuration of revolutionary history and revolutionary modernity in polemical writings written by Marx and Engels in the aftermath of the 1848–1849 European Revolutions. What de Man calls “literature” models an impasse between modernity understood as an aspiration to pure action free from the mediation of history and history understood as the inevitable recursivity through which such action finds itself caught in reflections on—and repetitions of—the past. Marx’s early “Letters to Ruge” already hints at the potential conflict and co-implication of a backward looking-left melancholia with a forward-driving revolutionary project. These issues get taken up not only in the much cited Eighteenth Brumaire but in the more purely polemical writings of Marx and Engels’s London exile. In these writings, Marx and Engels explore how the anarchic putschist fantasies of their fellow communists (August Willich and Karl Schapper) paradoxically converge with the most retrograde apologetics of their liberal opponents (Gottfried Kinkel and Arnold Ruge). They detail the short circuit between calls for an immediate renewal of revolutionary action and a nostalgic retreat from any action into secondhand literary posturing. At the same time, Marx and Engels’s own relation to that short circuit proves difficult to stabilize. Their allegory of history as long-term struggle does not conceal their ironic imbrication in the aporias they delineate. The conclusion is not that revolutionary Marxism has no alternative but to reiterate the same short circuit, but rather that it must recognize, with Marx and Engels, how revolution inevitably turns on the impasse as it takes place in a disjunction of time with itself: a conjuncture whose status remains radically undecidable.

Marx’s Theory: Evolutionary or Revolutionary? An update of Gouldner’s statement on the distinction between Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism

The purpose of this article in the field of the history of economic thought is to investigate from a scientific viewpoint whether Marx’s theory is evolutionary or revolutionary by analyzing some main texts of Marx such as The Capital, The German Ideology and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The idea to be hereby updated was first seen by this author in the book of Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxisms. Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (Gouldner, 1980). Gouldner confronts Scientific Marxism with its emphasis upon the laws of development against Critical Marxism stressing practice and critiques. This question has been addressed in some realms of non-Marxian economics as a critique of the scientific research programme of Marx and Engels. This is due to this is a fundamental Marx’s topic related to his method and to his use of dialectics in his quest for the overcoming of capitalism and ultimately for human emancipation. The result is that the ambiguity between both Marxist theories is related to the fastness of change and method, whereby Critical Marxism is nowadays more relevant. Section 1 is an introduction on the scientific problem at hand. Section 2 is about related problems. Section 3 is a brief analysis of key Marx’s texts. Section 4 updates Goldner’s insights. Section 5 gives open conclusions. References are listed at the end of the article.

Radical Sensibility in ‘The End’

This paper offers a historically contextualized reading of what is perhaps the most explicit engagement with radical politics in Beckett's work, the encounter in The End (1946), Beckett's first piece of postwar fiction, between the narrator, a homeless beggar, and a Marxist orator who abuses him as a ‘leftover’ and denounces the charity of the passers-by as a ‘crime’. With reference to Beckett's later rejection of existentialist interpretations of his work with the words ‘I'm no intellectual. All I am is feeling (sensibilité)’, and Theodor Adorno's contemporaneous diagnosis in Minima Moralia (1944–1947) of the ‘barbarism’ of cultural criticism's relentless demand to unmask the material relations enfolded in the notion of sensibility, this paper reads this scene as a parody of the callously unsentimental rhetoric of the Parti Communiste Français and the Sartrean existentialist humanism that was the official philosophy of de Gaulle's Fourth Republic. In particular, the orator's castigation of the protagonist as a leftover (un déchet) can be read as part of a long tradition of Marxist excoriations of the lumpenproletariat—the amorphous class of ne'er-do-wells to which so many of Beckett's postwar protagonists belong—that has a precise historical origin in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and its denunciation of the role of la bohème, the ‘scum, offal, refuse of all classes’, in the 1851 counter-revolutionary coup d’état of Louis-Bonaparte. Before 1851, however, the amorphous mass of the destitute and homeless was capable of serving as a figure of revolutionary potential, as Walter Benjamin's study of Baudelaire shows, where it was the ragpicker's ‘obscure state of revolt against society’ rather than the optimism of utopian theorists that inspired Baudelaire to fight on the barricades in the failed uprising of 1848. In its presentation of a confrontation between the callous optimism of political futurity and the contemporary extremes of human suffering, The End stakes an allegiance with the war's ‘leftovers’ that is out of step with the official radical politics of the time.

Comment: The Making of a Reference Book

Comment: The Making of a Reference Book

A Biographical Turn?

Evgenii Akel'ev, Povsednevnaia zhizn' Vorovskogo mira vo vremena Van 'ki Kaina (Daily Life of the Thieves' World in the Time of Van'ka Kain). 413 pp. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2012. ISBN-13 978-5235035089. Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of Russian America. 386 pp. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. ISBN-13 9781620402399. $28.00. David Nasaw, opening 2009 American Historical Review roundtable on biography, expressed the attitude many historians have toward the genre when he wrote that it remains the profession's unloved stepchild, occasionally but grudgingly let in the door, more often shut outside with the riffraff. (1) Many scholars, Nasaw noted, believe that biographies cannot provide the analytically sophisticated interpretation of the past that academics have long expected. (2) The roundtable featured nine articles from well-known historians, most of whom qualified their entries by claiming that their books were typical biographies. These apologies aside, all the articles offered useful ideas for broadening the genre's boundaries. Lois Banner emphasized the power of culture in shaping the self, in accord with the belief that culture, nature, is the primary force molding individual personality. (3) Judith M. Brown declared that she does not see myself as biographer but as a historian of time and region ... who uses the medium of 'life histories,' of individuals and groups of individuals, to seek evidence to probe many key issues. (4) In the case of historians working in ancient and medieval history, the sources for are limited, situation that Robin Fleming uses to explain why scholars in these fields to prosopography, or multiple biographies. (5) In his contribution to the roundtable, Jochen Hellbeck argued that cradle-to-grave biographies seem to limit, rather than enrich, historical understanding, because their on single thinking and acting personality easily breeds self-absorption, at the expense of larger transpersonal dimensions. Instead, he suggested that scholars should focus more on and why the sources that we treat as biographical raw material were produced in the first method that would shift the perspective from thinking and speaking biographical subject to the making of subjects of biographical experience. (6) Finally, as Kate Brown argued in her article Place in Biography for Oneself, biographies do even have to be about individuals but could be about places such as the Ukrainian heartland. (7) One key point for historians, Nasaw concluded in his introduction, is to treat individuals as part of larger social structures and cultures. He approvingly cites Marx's view from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Men make their own history, but they do make it just as they please; they do make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. (8) Yet there is still room for the more traditional biographical approach. In her book on the genre, Barbara Caine writes, can be seen as the archetypical 'contingent narrative' and the one best able to show the great importance of particular locations and circumstances and the multiple layers of historical change and experience. (9) Caine even writes that a biographical turn has taken place, one that involves a new preoccupation with individual lives and stories as way of understanding both contemporary societies and the whole process of social and historical change. (10) A biographical boom has certainly taken place in our field of late. The study of Soviet subjectivity that began in the mid-1990s introduced major rethinking of how we understand the modern self in general and the creation of Homo sovieticus in particular. Other scholars have charted equally ambitious, innovative approaches that span the centuries, even while treating the term biography with caution. …

The Surplus of the Machine: Trope and History in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Abstract This article stages a new encounter between rhetorical studies and the thought of Karl Marx. We examine one of Marx's central writings on French history, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, arguing that Marx's text enacts a philosophy of rhetorical trope that facilitates new and productive connections between philosophy, rhetoric, and theories of social change. Focusing on Marx's use of metonymy and chiasmus to structure his narrative, we argue that these figures function as rhetorical machines—textual devices that render legible the causal logics which led to Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew Louis being crowned emperor of France following an 1851 coup d'état. In addition, our diagram of Marx's tropological machines highlight points of unspent potential for resistance within and against such causal logics. We thus establish Marx as a resource for materialist theories of rhetorical trope, demonstrating the value of his concepts for accessing the political surplus of the present.

Research / ethics environment in social and human food sciences: debates, constraints, limits and lessons

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination. (People) make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Preamble The set of questions posed to me by the editors of this issue of Ant...

Emerson / Marx, actualité du spectre

Based on a detailed comparison of Marx and Emerson, this article suggests that the frequently contradictory ways in which the two writers explore a shared philosophical vocabulary may be a crucial aspect of what makes them relevant today. Both make frequent use of terms such as “mind,” “thought,” and “action,” all borrowed from the tradition of philosophical idealism yet deployed in such a way that their multiple meanings become apparent, simultaneously recalling the uses to which they were put by earlier writers and allowing the reader to imagine new discursive strategies similar to those employed by Emerson and Marx. Ultimately, in spite of their differences, both thinkers seem equally interested in defining speech and writing as modes of action. This hypothesis will be explored by way of a comparison between key passages from Nature and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ; meanwhile, an attempt to work out which of the two writers is the more radical in this respect will lead to an unexpected result.

Trotsky y América Latina: una aproximación al concepto de Bonapartismo

In the following paper, through reading the writings in the Mexican exile addressing Latin America's problems, we analyze the elaborated category of Bonapartism proposed by Trotsky. At first, we explore some elements of the reference text from where the concept of –The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx–and then focus on Trotsky´s given use to analyze the reality of Latin America in the early and mid XX century. Some of the postures that can be seen as a change of Marx´s perspective when analyzing non-Western realities reappear around the idea of Bonapartism, in relation to a Latin American case that should stop thinking about the European model. This approach allows us to deepen the problem of translatability of specific historical junctures, which are central to unravelling the history of “mismatch” between the left and the Latin American populism.

This Could Be the Start of Something Big: Linking Early Managerial Choices with Subsequent Organizational Performance

This Could Be the Start of Something Big: Linking Early Managerial Choices with Subsequent Organizational Performance

The Edifice Complex: Architecture and the Political Life of Surplus in the New Baku

Just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed . . . they . . . conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonored disguise and this borrowed language. — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Reading the Interregnum: Anachronisms in Gordimer’s July’s People

Reading the Interregnum:Anachronisms in Gordimer’s July’s People Nasser Mufti (bio) There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 18. Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People famously ends with Maureen Smales running towards a helicopter whose contents may carry her “saviours or murderers” (158). The novel is set in the midst of a civil war between the apartheid government and black revolutionaries, and Maureen’s flight could signal equally the perseverance of the old regime or the arrival of South Africa’s postcolonial future. Either way, her final gesture promises a termination to what Gordimer described as an “interregnum,” a transitory stage between the two regimes. However, because of the ending’s deliberate and famous ambiguity, the text withholds the conclusion to this historical interstice. The question that the ending poses to the reader—indeed one that has troubled the novel’s critics since its publication—is how to read such an ending. The difficulty of reading in the interregnum is something that Maureen herself struggles with over the course of the novel. In an early chapter, she cannot finish reading a translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi because “the transport of the novel, a false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for [End Page 64] her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness” (29, emphasis original). Michael Neill has helpfully called this the Smales’s “temporal dislocation,” which refers to the disjuncture between epistemological and interpretive registers, where, for example, Maureen’s capacities for reading fall short because she is “in another time, place, consciousness” (73). This is not the fault of Manzoni’s novel but a symptom of the interregnum, for the narrator explains Maureen’s quandary as follows: “if [Maureen] did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here [in the interregnum] when it was finished” (28). Reading carries with it the danger that the interregnum will remain in transit and inconclusive by the time that she finishes the book. In other words, something about the interminability of the interregnum—its refusal to come to an end—calls for a way of reading that can endure how the historical interstice outlives the act of reading. Maureen’s anxiety about reading is itself dramatized for readers in the ending of July’s People, who like her must suspend the desire for resolution and endure what J. Hillis Miller has described as the “disquieting power” of “unreadability” (Reading Narrative 98). Gordimer borrows the concept of the interregnum from Antonio Gramsci—whose remarks on the term she uses for the epigraph of July’s People: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms” (276).1 The fact that the old “is dying” signals that its death is in the process, while the fact that “the new” cannot be born signals that its birth is deferred. A terminal past and embryonic future cohabit the interregnum, which suggests an impasse rather than a transition from one regime to another—much like what Walter Benjamin meant by a “present which is not a transition” (262). Gramsci’s formulation of the interregnum resists beginnings and endings, as it represents a state of paralyzed transit involving a simultaneous departure and arrival of two distinct eras. This notion is radically different than, for example, the iustituim that Giorgio Agamben discusses, which is “not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic state of law, as in the dictatorial model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law” (48). In Gramsci’s interregnum, law is not at a “standstill,” but is precisely what is contested—will it apply to the old or new regime? Similarly, one can distinguish the interregnum from the openness that Slavoj Žižek sees in the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania. He describes “rebels waving [End Page 65] the national flag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing...

The Ghosts of Radicalisms Past: Allen Ginsberg's Old Left Nightmares

The Ghosts of Radicalisms Past:Allen Ginsberg's Old Left Nightmares J. Jesse Ramírez (bio) The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names . . . . Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte So it would be necessary to learn spirits . . . to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. . . . And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx The Time is Out of Joint On a night in 1954, peyote-entranced allen Ginsberg gazed out the window of his apartment in San Francisco's Nob Hill district and beheld "a ferocious building . . . looming in the cloudy wisp fog" (Ginsberg, Journals 61). The building was the Sir Francis Drake, a luxury hotel at 450 Powell Street. A year later, during another peyote experience on the streets of San Francisco with his lover Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg saw the "smoking building in red glare downtown . . . again" (qtd. in Raskin 138). Spellbound, Ginsberg rushed inside the hotel where, in a cafeteria on the ground floor, he furiously wrote the opening stanzas of a new poem. The hotel appeared before the young, still unpublished poet in the form of a monster, a "Moloch" [End Page 47] that he shouted at, condemned, and even implicated in the death of a friend in the New York City subway: "Moloch! Molock! Whose hand ripped out their brains / and scattered their minds on the wheels of the subways?" (Howl 58). Ginsberg scribbled the lines at the foot of a draft of "Howl," establishing the visual and rhythmic base of what would become the second of its four parts. When Ginsberg read the first part of "Howl" just a month later, minus the still underdeveloped Moloch section, at San Francisco's Six Gallery, he launched his career as the most influential Anglophone poet since T.S. Eliot. But Ginsberg began backwards. For all the fame of its opening line—"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . ."—the historical and thematic core of "Howl" is not Part I, composed in August 1955, but the Moloch vision of 1954. On those surreal San Francisco nights, as fog descended and skyscrapers towered in the misty darkness, out of what historical alleyway did Moloch emerge? In this essay, I historicize Moloch and other apparitions for the sake of rethinking Ginsberg's mid-century poetry and the American cultural and social histories it has helped define. Despite a recent surge in secondary and primary source materials, from biographies to comic books to full-length films, Ginsberg and Beat Generation scholars are only just beginning to correct several common oversights that have hindered a full appreciation of the politics of "Howl" and several other major Ginsberg poems of the 1950s. Scholars have generally overlooked residual political and aesthetic forms in Ginsberg's early verse partly because their readings of the Beat Generation emphasize the Beats' irreverence toward the past, their eastern religiosity, and what Jack Kerouac called their "wild selfbelieving individuality" (32). According to the standard historical narrative, the Beats challenged the postwar Age of Consensus by dodging and denouncing all traditions in the name of personal liberty. The historian Christopher Lasch crystallized this widely held view when he wrote that "pastlessness" is the Beats' "very essence" (70). Accordingly, many commentators have portrayed Ginsberg's standpoint in the 1950s as fundamentally private, personal, and influenced not by the leftist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, but instead by jazz, black hipster subcultures, and idiosyncratic writers like Walt Whitman, William Blake, William Carlos Williams, and fellow Beat Jack Kerouac, among others.1 As Ben Lee notes, Ginsberg's and the Beats' hip, mystical individualism has been considered [End Page 48] political only in a futural sense (if at all): a rebellious structure of...

Comment on Marchman Andersen et al.: Social inequality in health, responsibility and egalitarian justice

There is a growing distaste for the use of the term ‘lifestyle’ in connection with health issues. It is a phrase that only entered common parlance around 1970 and would, in my view, be better reserved for the pages of glossy consumer focussed magazines from which it originated. It does not seem to me either accurate or appropriate that an addiction to nicotine, alcohol or fast food is regarded as a ‘lifestyle’ over which free choice can be exercised. Neither should it be a potential excuse for limiting access to health care necessary to deal with the detrimental effects. The role of the global commercial interests behind the mass production and skilful marketing of tobacco, alcohol and food cannot be extracted from the analysis of the decisions made by individuals, communities or indeed, countries. Such vested interests seek to profoundly alter the decisions made by individuals through pricing and promotion in all its many forms. They also seek to impede public health measures aimed at protecting population health— witness the global campaign by the tobacco industry against those advocating plain packaging of tobacco products. Given the reach of anti-health forces into all areas of society it is wrong to consider causative factors of noncommunicable diseases as if individual choice can operate insulated from social, commercial and exploitative influences. Karl Marx could not have put it better when he wrote in the opening paragraphs of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte published in 1852:

Bernard Smith

Bernard Smith (1916–2011) was a giant on the Australian intellectual scene, and a major analyst of and contributor to the processes of cultural traffic between the antipodes and the centres of the world system. He was a lifelong Marxist, or historical materialist. Yet his scholarship also wore an open weave. Was he then a Marxist in politics? This essay argues that his historicism placed his thinking firmly with the owl of Minerva, rather than in the driver’s seat of history. Marxism, for Bernard Smith, was ex post facto, placing him with the tragic irony of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire rather than with the activist intent of the Theses on Feuerbach. Distance, for Smith, was everything.

Reassessing Corporate Personhood in the Wake of Occupy Wall Street

This article is about corporate personhood, discussed on the backdrop of class consciousness and criticisms of capital generated by the recent and continuing Occupy Movements. I am at first concerned with articulating the evolving jurisprudence of corporate personhood as developed in the United States Supreme Court. Combined with this doctrinal approach, I offer a Marxist criticism of corporate personhood jurisprudence that culminates in a discussion of the Occupy Movements’ logic of resistance to corporate domination in United States law and policy. First, I discuss the role Marxist criticism has played in legal discourse and articulate the importance of a Marxist framework for current legal criticism. Second, I focus on several authors, and their texts, which shape the current struggle against corporate personhood and shed light both on the Occupy Movements and the relationship between law and capitalism. Karl Marx is indispensable to this pursuit and I chose to focus on his discussion of law in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which I read in close comparison to Evegny Pashukanis’s The General Theory of Law and Marxism. Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism provides an analysis of capitalism that illuminates the role of capitalist ideology in early proto-capitalist Europe and is one place to find an historical basis both for the evolution of capitalism and the Occupy Movement’s critique. This historical focus is traced through Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution where he brings the centrality of capital to government to the field of United States history. This historical critique will help the reader understand the concern corporate personhood causes amongst many people. I offer Beard as a more specific theorization of the role of capitalism to the law in the United States. This historical focus, I believe, is also in keeping with Marx’s interest in the historical. Third, I delve into the evolving jurisprudence of corporate personhood, describing the shifting terrain of Supreme Court decisions and the evolution of the corporation as a person from 1819 to the present. I hope that by beginning before Santa Clara, students, scholars, and activists might enrich their understanding of this complex area of law. Lastly, I analyze the Occupy Movement’s position as a critique to corporate personhood specifically and to capitalism in the legal and economic structures of the United States generally. By analyzing this modern movement, I hope a deeper understanding of the corporate person develops. I also analyze the many resolutions passed at the local and state level urging the end of corporate personhood and position these resolutions as indicators of the Occupy Movements’s success engendering at least quasi-legal change. The point is simple: capitalism has been enshrined in the jurisprudence of corporate personhood and through theoretical critique and analysis of modern practical resistance the jurisprudence of corporate personhood may be better understood and, indeed, critiqued.

History and repetition

Author's Preface to the English EditionIntroduction: On Repetition, Singularity, and Historicity, by Seiji M. Lippit1. Introduction: On The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte2. History and Repetition in Japan3. The Discursive Space of Modern Japan4. The Allegory of Oe Kenzaburo: Football in the Year Man'en 15. The Landscape of Murakami Haruki: Pinball in the Year 1973, Translated by Hisayo Suzuki6. The End of the Modern Novel, Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs7. Buddhism and FascismGlossaryWorks CitedIndex