Ellen Meiksins Wood Research Articles

CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO E. P. THOMPSON

ABSTRACTIn this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays “The Peculiarities of the English” and “Eighteenth‐Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” In the first section, I argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that Thompson developed a genuinely historical materialist theory of class formation as a “structured process” that moves from class struggle to class consciousness, a theory that complicates the frequent description of Thompson as a “voluntarist.” In the second section, I take a more critical position toward Thompson's understanding of class, discussing a tension between this notion of class as structured process and his numerous invocations of class as a form of “lived experience” whose diversity and unpredictability exceed theorization. This tension aside, Thompson claims that, in the case of the nineteenth‐century English working class, to which he dedicated so much research, lived experience coincided with the more general structured process he posits. In the third section, therefore, I more fully elaborate on this specific process of class formation as Thompson portrays it, identifying and discussing three intertwined threads: (1) a movement from a past‐oriented defense of traditional institutions to a future‐oriented demand for reforms, (2) the development of oppositional, class‐specific pedagogical institutions and practices, and (3) the creation of a distinct class culture (which Thompson closely aligns with the achievement of class consciousness) that is aware both of itself and of its antagonism with other classes.

Arendt’s Break with the Liberal Imaginary of Society

The first part of the article analyses the imaginary of the characteristics and form of (civil) society as developed in early modern liberal political philosophy, especially by John Locke and Thomas Paine. It uses different contemporary receptions of the key authors of this tradition, namely the liberal reception of John Keane, which emphasizes the theoretical distinction between civil society and the state, the materialist reception of Ellen Meiksins Wood, which contextualizes political ideas in the political struggles and class interests of the time, and the reception of Foucault, which focuses on the development of biopolitical governmentality. The article finds that the liberal tradition imagined (civil) society as a given and self-regulating sphere that does not require interference from the state. A socio-historical presupposition of this imaginary was the economic sovereignty of individuals, and it overlooked the relations of domination and exploitation. In its second part, the article presents Hannah Arendt’s critical concept of society. She did not conceptualize society as a given totality and in a spatial way, but used it as a qualifier of a specific, impoverished mode of being, in particular to analyse the situation and perspective of minorities.

The concept of a social formation in the writings of E. P. Thompson and Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this article, I consider what E. P. Thompson and Ellen Meiksins Wood have to say about the concept of a social formation and its significance for Marxism. I consider these thinkers together for two reasons. In the first place, the views of Meiksins Wood owe a great deal to her engagement with Thompson’s writings. In the second place, despite Meiksins Wood claim that she is simply following a lead provided by E. P. Thompson, there is a significant (though unacknowledged) difference between her views and his. Meiksins Wood departs from Thompson when she argues that the concept of a social formation ought to be excluded from the lexicon of Marxism. When discussing the concept of a social formation, both Thompson and Meiksins Wood attach importance to the ‘general illumination’ passage in the general introduction to Marx’s Grundrisse. However, they read this passage in very different ways. According to Thompson, this focal passage supports the view that the concept of a social formation is of fundamental importance for Marxist historians. This reading constitutes a challenge to Meiksins Wood’s view that the concept of a social formation is an Althusserian accretion which has a little significance for our understanding of the views of Marx and Marxism.

Is capitalism structurally indifferent to gender?: Routes to a value theory of reproductive labour

The contributions of Ellen Meiksins Wood to social property relations arguments have facilitated an enhanced understanding of the historical specificity of capitalism and its structuring conditions. Yet such arguments also have some questionable assumptions when it comes to theorising gender and so-called ‘extra-economic’ identities, most noticeably regarding capitalism as indifferent to gender relations. This article delves into such issues by delivering a set of quandaries about various aspects of the social property relations approach and its relevance to wider debates on economy and space. We contend that debates in Marxism Feminism and social reproduction theory therein should be elevated to centre stage in considerations of political economy and economic geography. Consequently, it is possible to dispense with the notion that capitalism is structurally indifferent to gender, which mars the social property relations approach. At the same time, however, there are tensions within Marxism Feminism, not least revolving around questions of value, the role of unpaid labour in the household, and wider theorising on the relationship between ‘market’ conditions and extra-economic relations of ‘state’ power. We explore two major contending routes to what we call a value theory of reproductive labour within Marxism Feminism and conclude that this reconnaissance provides an opportunity to initiate enhanced discussion on future political struggles against capital's requirements.

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

Capital and Marx’s Epistemological Revolution from Neue Marx-Lektüre to Political Marxism

The paper discusses the thesis about Marx’s “epistemological revolution” by elaborating two issues that incorporate two entirely different contemporary Marxist traditions. To give this undertaking a more precise formulation, in its first part, the study examines the relationship between theory and history within the critique of political economy, proposed by Michael Heinrich under the tradition known as Neue Marx-Lektü re. It then turns to introducing the second part of the discussion related to the “commercialization model” of capitalist development, outlined by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood within the context of the so-called Political Marxism. A special emphasis is thereby put on the latter, since it deals with the contemporary nature of a few distinct epistemological and methodological novelties of the Capital, as well as some posited in the Grundrisse.

Rethinking the Category of Class: Tempora Multa of the Plural Subject

This article attempts to rethink the Marxist category of class in response to criticism of the progressivist conception of history. The Marxism of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has typically run into a problem arising from the fact that accepting the proletariat as the subject of history makes any political action aimed at social transformation superfluous. From a political viewpoint, the concept of the subject of history either implies that the working class will spontaneously carry out its historical task without any intervention, or requires the dictate of the party to act as a revolutionary vanguard for the working class. Many theorists (Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Daniel Bensaïd, Massimiliano Tomba, et al.) have pointed out that emancipatory politics should abandon the idea that history is linear and that it has a particular subject. Does this then mean that the concept of class itself should be discarded? Althusser’s concept of the social whole as a weave of multiple temporalities allows us to take a new look at the problem of class in Marxist theory and political practice by understanding class as neither essence nor structure, but rather as a conflictual social relation and a political concept. Based on the works of Edward Thompson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Étienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Cinzia Aruzza, etc., the author demonstrates that the multi-temporal structure of capital means that class contradiction cannot be confined to the matters of production because class struggle unfolds at all levels of surplus value creation — production, exchange, reproduction and circulation of capital taken as a whole. Moreover, other social movements — feminist, anti-racist, migrant, etc. — lead to a redefinition of key aspects of class subjectivity related to the concepts of productive labor and exploitation. With left-wing politics now in crisis, class struggle also entails a struggle for recognition that the problem of class is a political one.

Ancient equality against modern democracy: resources of critique in Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood

ABSTRACTIncreasing discontent with the current status of democracy has prompted a renewed interest in Athenian democracy. This article contributes with the first comparative analysis of two political theoreticians – Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood – whose reactivations of ancient political experiences significantly predate recent trends. Despite the fact that Arendt levelled fierce critique against the Marxist tradition of which Wood was a part, it is shown how both thinkers involved a close consideration of the relation between the social/economic and the political in their analyses; regarded Athenian forms of equality as the differentia specifica when measured against modern incarnations of democracy; committed themselves to the controversial move to grant slavery a marginal role in their analyses; turned to the American Revolution to discern the specificity of the ancient forms equality and modern democracy; and how both departed from the mainstream definitions of democracy as a list of institutions or a number of criteria. We argue that Arendt and Wood reach similar conclusions about the distinctive form of separation between the political and the social/economic in Athens, reach different conclusions about the distinctive forms of collapse and separation respectively in the modern epoch, but nonetheless unite in their critique of the American Revolution. On those premises, the central aim is to investigate how the reactivation of Athenian equality can serve as a resource for critique of three forms of equality that underpins democracy in the modern age, which we designate formal, distributive and imaginary equality.

Socialism and democracy: the political engagements of Ellen Meiksins Wood

The untimely death of Ellen Meiksins Wood on January 14, 2016 deprived the Left of one of its most original voices. Following Meiksins Wood’s own approach to political theory, we consider her work about the contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy, and her commitment to a political program that led beyond capitalism towards a genuinely democratic society, in the context of her life and times.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Democracy against capitalism. Renewing historical materialism", London, Verso, 2016, 300 pp.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Democracy against capitalism. Renewing historical materialism", London, Verso, 2016, 300 pp.

Introduction to ‘Britain versus France: How Many Sonderwegs?’

In memoriamof the late Ellen Meiksins Wood, this piece firstly remembers the main achievements of her forty years of work. Secondly, it introduces one of her contributions, ‘Britain versus France: How ManySonderwegs?’, until now unavailable in an anglophone publication and reprinted in the present issue. This contribution is a useful reformulation of her arguments concerning radical historicity, the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’, and the specificity of French and British state formation and their political revolutions – in contrast to arguments for a GermanSonderwegas an explanation for the rise of fascism. Wood also provides a fruitful illustration of how to apply a social-property relations approach to the development of the rule of law in each of these states, and thus furthers opportunities for debates on the potential of Political Marxism for understanding contemporary class struggles over rights.

Notes from the Editors, March 2016

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, March 2016 (Volume 67, Number 10)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-10-2016-03/">buy this issue</a></div>Ellen Meiksins Wood, who died on January 14, was coeditor of <em>Monthly Review</em> with Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy from 1997 to 2000, and a major contributor to historical materialist thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her parents were socialist refugees, members of the Jewish Labor Bund who came to the United States in 1941, after fleeing Latvia in the 1930s, when indigenous fascists came to power. Her mother worked for the Jewish Labor Committee in New York and her father for the United Nations. Ellen obtained her B.A. in Slavic languages at the University of California at Berkeley and went on to do graduate studies in political science at Berkeley, where she met and married Neal Wood, a professor in the department. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, she taught political theory in the political science department at York University in Toronto.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-10" title="Vol. 67, No. 10: March 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Recognition of Laborers as Citizens: First Worker Democracy versus Liberal Capitalist Democracy

This article presents an analyses of democracy and capitalism from the point of view of Political Marxism, particularly Ellen Meiksins Wood. It distinguishes between two conceptions of democracy: the ancient Athenian democracy which conferred a civic status on subordinate classes, creating the unique social class, the peasant-citizen and contemporary elitist liberal capitalist democracy. Consequently it shows that the former was first and only workers democracy in history. Further it compares these two democracies and their influence on economy, particularly class relations and issues of exploitation. It finishes by presentation of limits of modern democracy and proposes possible solution.

The difficult whole: Siah Armajani, Robert Venturi and the politics of modernist architecture

Since the late 1960s, the Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani has primarily worked on the border between sculpture and architecture, creating large-scale public installations such as reading rooms, gardens and bridges. These works commonly evidence a formal concern with relationships between part and whole. This article connects Armajani’s interest in part–whole relations with the writings of Robert Venturi, arguing that Armajani’s practice establishes a critical dialogue with the history of modernist architecture. However, it also demonstrates that Armajani’s practice complicates the proto-postmodern approach of Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) in several ways. Unlike Venturi, Armajani explicitly politicizes the question of part–whole relations, presenting it not as a purely aesthetic question, but as a formal metaphor for egalitarian social relations. By incorporating certain distinctly modernist techniques into his sculptures, Armajani also shows that, contra Venturi, the question of how to safeguard diversity within a social collective was already a concern among modernists themselves. Finally, Armajani's work further contrasts with Venturi’s writing through its turn to the politics of class struggle. Drawing on the writings of the Marxist theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood, the article argues that Armajani drew attention to the limitations inherent in postmodernism’s ‘politics of diversity’, demonstrating its class blindness and thus its failure to sufficiently challenge contemporary capitalist ideologies.

Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment. By Ellen Meiksins Wood. London: Verso, 2012. 336p. $26.95.

Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment. By Ellen Meiksins Wood. London: Verso, 2012. 336p. $26.95.

What We Should Want with History: A Meditation on Cultural Studies, Methodology, and Politics

AbstractThis essay evaluates two of the central problems for Cultural Studies as a field: how to generate methodologically rigorous scholarship that is also politically useful; and how to productively use models and theory in the practice of history. Beginning with conversations about the place of (disciplinary) history in Cultural Studies, this essay explores one of the legendary debates in the field: between E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and (at least in theory) Louis Althusser. Though the debate centered on the degree to which the English Civil War could be termed a “bourgeois revolution,” Thompson's fundamental critique concerned Anderson's use of abstract models in history. However, the distinctions Thompson makes are not nearly as clear‐cut in practice – particularly when we look at Ellen Meiksins Wood's attempt to intervene on Thompson's side in her 1991 book The Pristine Culture of Capitlism. Wood's understanding of capitalism relies on an abstract conceptualization of that mode of produciton that is ironically similar to that of Althusser and Anderson. Arguing this as an illustratration of the importance of explicit models and methods, the essay develops Richard Johnson's account of Marx's use of abstraction and theory in his own historical scholarship. Marx's framework is then deployed to reconsider the English Civil War in realation to a key contemporary concern: the origins of copyright and intellectual property. It ends by advocating for what I term anarchic abstraction: a conscious, rigorous, politically‐committed, and dialectical attention to the order and determinations of history with no strict hierarchy given in advance.

Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay (eds): Peasants and globalization: political economy, rural transformation and the agrarian question

On May 23, 2007, for the first time in history, most of the world’s population lived in urban rather than rural settings (Araghi, this volume). Furthermore, neoliberal globalization has tended to deepen agricultural integration into global economic flows (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, this volume). For some, most notably Hobsbawm (1994), these trends signify the ‘‘death of the peasantry’’, and place in doubt the continued relevance of the agrarian question. Peasants and Globalization: Political economy, rural transformation and the agrarian question is about the fate of the peasantry in the contemporary world—a world subject to continual agrarian change. It asks if peasants, and agriculture more broadly, continue to matter in contemporary processes of capital accumulation on a global scale. The volume brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars who all use the agrarian question as their analytical starting point. It is framed as a conversation between different positions on the agrarian question—a conversation that sometimes plays out in fascinating ways, like the side-by-side chapters by Henry Bernstein and Michael Watts that debate the contemporary relevance of ‘‘peasant’’ as an analytical category. This book would be suitable for graduate and advanced undergraduate readers and courses, particularly since it locates itself within a timely and highly relevant debate about the future of rural spaces, people, and products. Each author brings his or her own perspective to this discussion, which the editors highlight through six different ‘‘agrarian questions’’ at play within the chapters of the book. Still, the reader is struck by the ways in which these different positions are frequently not at all mutually exclusive. Thus, while the editors identify separate agrarian questions of land, gender, labor, class and food, for example, a reading of the full volume suggests that the answer to the contemporary agrarian question must simultaneously incorporate all these factors. The bulk of the book is arranged in two parts, highlighting, respectively, historical and contemporary perspectives on agrarian change. The first three chapters of the section on historical perspectives focus on the origins and early period of capitalism, arguing that capitalism had its origins in agriculture, and in particular in changing patterns of land use, rather than technological development (Ellen Meiksins Wood), that rural class differentiation determined the timing and nature of agrarian transition (Terence Byres), and that colonialism was the most important factor preventing the agrarian transformation in the colonies and new republics in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Amiya Kumar Bagchi). A chapter by Farshad Araghi takes a world-historical perspective and draws connections between the globalization of the late twentieth century and the colonial-liberal globalism of the nineteenth century. Using the memorable metaphor of the ‘‘visible foot’’, Araghi outlines global depeasantization, the process of dispossession by displacement, as a defining feature of the agrarian program of postcolonial neoliberal globalism. Wrapping up the historical section of the book is Miguel Teubal’s discussion of peasant struggles in Latin America, in which he argues that contemporary social movements around land and agrarian reform present new characteristics not seen in twentieth century movements. The new movements are based on the peasantry and indigenous communities, which were frequently left out of or hurt by previous reforms. In these movements, land remains of central importance, but agrarian reform is not associated M. Walsh-Dilley (&) Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA e-mail: ms396@cornell.edu

Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle Ages

AbstractThis article seeks to contextualise Ellen Meiksins Wood’s recent survey of classical and medieval political thought within the context of some of the prevailing approaches to the history of political thought. After an initial elaboration of Wood’s ‘political-Marxist’ approach to issues of historical development and contextualisation, I emphasise what is significant about Wood’s specific contribution to the study of Greek, Roman and medieval political ideas in particular, as well as to the history of political thought in general.

The New-Old Imperialism

Theories of globalization in the 1990s and theories of ‘new imperialism’ in early 21st century find the ‘classical’ theories of imperialism of the early 20th century, particularly that of Lenin, to be outdated. This article criticizes this assumption, discusses David Harvey's and Ellen Meiksins Wood's important contributions, and argues that Lenin's notion of imperialism as an epoch of capitalist decline is indispensable for any further development of understanding of today's world conditions of crisis and war.

Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship

There are significant inequalities in the lives of America’s children, including inequalities in the education that these children receive. These educational inequalities include not only disparities in funding per pupil but also in class size, teacher qualification, and resources such as books, labs, libraries, computers, and curriculum, as well as the physical condition of the school and the safety of students within it. While not all schools attended by poor children are bad schools, and not all schools attended by well-off children are good schools, there are clear patterns. Poor children are more likely to attend crowded and poorly equipped schools with less qualified teachers than the children of more affluent families. They are less likely to have computers, books, and advanced placement academic courses. To give one example of the differences in school resources, the wealthiest districts in New York spent more than $25,000 per pupil at the same