Historical Materialist Tradition Research Articles

“Winning the Peace”: The Role of International Peace Settlements in the Creation of World Orders – A “Geopolitical Marxist” Perspective

For the discipline of International Relations (IR), the study of International Peace Settlements (IPS) for the organization of postwar international orders has thus far primarily been the purview of realist, liberal, and constructivist approaches. To date, Marxist approaches have tended to either ignore the significance of IPS in the formation of new global orders or have been inscribed into longer-term overarching processes – namely, the reified consequences of the development of capitalism. These proclivities have had the unwelcome effect of subsuming the role historical agents have played in the devising of international ordering strategies under preordained universal “laws of motion” and downplaying the broader efficacy of foreign policymaking in the building of world order. This paper proposes to rectify this Marxist lacuna by highlighting how adopting an approach that elaborates on the principles of Geopolitical Marxism (GPM) in IR can overcome these shortcomings. The paper argues that a radical historicist methodology for analysing these important world-historical junctures retrieves the significance of contextualized agency within the historical materialist tradition and overcomes the issues beholden to structuralist Marxist approaches.

Society's ‘New Normal’? The Role of Discourse in Surveillance and Silencing of Dissent During and Post Covid-19

Within the historical materialist tradition, communication is principally understood to occur in concrete social contexts which are continually shifting in real socio-historical environments. Such a view of language and communication enables for an examination of media narratives in fast changing political landscapes surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular the manner in which normalisation of the discourses of surveillance takes place in the time of the health crisis. In examining surveillance practices and silencing of dissent in capitalism, we point to the dangers of a newly emergent narrative of the ‘new normal’ which threatens a violation of human rights and civil liberties.

Superfood as spatial fix: the ascent of the almond

In the twenty-first century, a widening array of unassuming fruits, vegetables, seeds and grains have been crowned “superfoods.” While many are exotic imports marketed to Western consumers through neocolonial narratives, others are familiar domestically-grown supermarket staples spectacularly rebranded. Why has “superfood” status become so central to the American produce industry? What sort of subjectivities does a superfood cultivate among consumers? This paper charts the ascent of the almond to superfood status as the latest in a series of spatial fixes alleviating the pains of chronic overproduction. The spatial-fix is a material-semiotic process with important psychosocial dimensions often downplayed in the historical materialist tradition. Drawing on historical archives, advertising materials, interviews with current and recently retired almond industry marketing professionals, and observation at the annual industry conference from 2015 to 2018, I show that as almond production surges the industry must constantly work to change the way consumers see almonds (from seasonal specialty to superfood) and the way they see themselves (from sophisticated to superhuman). While consumers resist and reinterpret the shifts in food meanings fashioned to compensate for overproduction, a century of effective material-semiotic fixes attests to the industry’s influence on foodways. The case of almonds is used here to theorize the broader superfood trend and its imagined “super” subjects as produced through the political economy of industrial agriculture. Understanding the political economic underpinnings of superfoods reveals not only the historical foundation of this contested contemporary food phenomenon, but also sheds light on the metamorphoses of food meanings fundamental to agrarian capitalism.

Salvaging the Symbol in Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead

The essay seeks to set the framework by which we may appraise the efficacy of the salvaging strategies employed by Muriel Rukeyser's poetic response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster in West Virginia in her collection, The Book of the Dead (1938). In seeking to reclaim the lost experiences and objects of exploited miners, Rukeyser's project to salvage their anonymous suffering at the hands of capitalist greed places her as an artist within the historical materialist tradition outlined in Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History (1942). The Book of the Dead explores the legacy of European capitalism's displacement of the Native-American ‘Asiatic’ society as delineated by Marx in the Grundrisse (1939). It is argued that Rukeyser aims to salvage the signs and materials of industrial conflict, such as the insurrectionary figure of John Brown, in order to begin to create the ‘always-unfinished symbol’ against the misappropriating machinations of capitalism, continuing the work of poets such as Herman Melville. The essay argues that Rukeyser's symbolic framework which aims to spur the subjective worker to action through imagination invokes a ‘Hydraulic state’, as in ancient Egypt, inspiring a quasi-religious submission to the higher unity of the hydroelectric dam and those who died creating it. Finally, we explore the implications where this spur to collective working-class action depends upon the consciousness of the human conduit: the irony at the heart of Marxist autonomy.

Examining the Late Medieval Village from the Case at Ambroyi, Armenia

Examining the Late Medieval Village from the Case at Ambroyi, Armenia

Mészáros and the Critique of the Capital System: Foreword to <em>The Necessity of Social Control</em>

Istvan Meszaros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms of thought—is unequaled in our time. No less a historical figure than Hugo Chavez referred to him as the “pathfinder” of twenty-first century socialism.… The role of this foreword is to help to put his system of thought as a whole, and this book in particular, in their historical contexts, while illuminating some of the distinctive concepts governing his analysis.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

La théorie du système monde (TSM) : Analyse de l'histoire mondiale, de la mondialisation et de la crise mondiale

This article provides a concise summary of the distinctive concepts and historical interpretations provided by the World System theory developed by the author and the late Andre Gunder Frank. A series of contrasts are made between this new approach and that of classical Marxism and neo-Marxist Wallersteinian world-system theory. A critique is presented of the Eurocentric aspects of these other approaches and an alternative non-Eurocentric analysis is offered. The formulations of the Gills and Frank world system analysis are an attempt to preserve many elements of the Historical Materialist tradition and remain true to its critical intent, while providing a framework that responds to the framing of world development in truly world historical context, and encompasses both the past history of several millennia of world development processes and the problematic of “globalization” and global history.

Adult education and the State: Gramsci, the historical materialist tradition and relevant others

This paper focuses on the relationship between adult education and the State within the context of hegemonic globalization and the all pervasive neoliberal ideology. It draws from a variety of sources and provides an overview of discussions concerning the State giving pride of place to the Historical Materialist tradition in the area. Using a Gramscian perspective, it argues that contrary to the widespread mantra that the state has receded into the background in this era of globalization, we argue that the State remains ever so present in this context and, if anything, remains central to the Neoliberal project.

"The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra": A Reply to Ron Greene

In two recent articles, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," and "Rhetoric and Capitalism" (1998, 2004), Ronald Walter Greene pays considerable attention to Marxist rhetorical theory, especially the work of Dana L. Cloud (1994, 2001a, 2001b, 2002) and James Arnt Aune (1994, 2001). These essays usefully point up what is at stake in the debate between poststructuralist theory and Marxism: whether an instrumental, class-based, socialist critical and political project is still feasible and necessary in today's world. Rejecting both Aune's Marxist-humanist approach and Cloud's more economic vision of agency, Greene claims that the changing character of global capitalism and recognition of the "constitutive power" of discourse render rhetorical criticism and practical politics on a Marxist basis untenable. Although we appreciate Greene's engagement with Marxism, we contend that the arguments sketched out in his essays are theoretically and politically flawed. First, Greene's criticisms are directed against a crude caricature of Marxist epistemology that obscures the complexity of theories of representation and ideology in the historical materialist tradition. Second, underwriting Greene's entire project are confused, and in some cases demonstrably false, assessments of the nature and historical trajectory of world capitalism and of the current prospects for class-based social movements. Finally, Greene endorses something like a democratic project but offers no normative criteria for such a project beyond the immanence of always-already present communicative agency and the excesses of joy afforded (to some) by the capitalist system. We will examine each of these shortcomings in turn. [End Page 72] Real Lies: The Complexity of Marxist Epistemology Greene and other poststructuralists charge Marxist theorists in the field of rhetorical studies with holding a dubious representational theory of truth.1 In contrast, Greene embraces a critical approach that examines "how rhetorical practices create the conditions of possibility for a governing apparatus to judge and program reality" and that views "what is in the true" as rhetorically produced (1998, 22). At odds with Greene's approach, Marxists claim that, in a range of ways, ideological discourses reflect, distort, and/or negotiate with the objective social realities, interests, and lived experiences of contending classes in capitalist society. Moreover, we believe that—by means of interpretive, historical, and empirical research—Marxist scholars and activists may develop fuller and more accurate theoretical "representations" of such realities and interests and of the various ways they shape our lives and our political struggles.2 This is not to say, however, that the process is simple or mechanistic. Marxist critical practice retains the evaluative power of realism without laying claim to absolute or unmediated empirical knowledge; moreover, we do not believe that ideas are mechanistically generated epiphenomena of economic motive. Discourses, as any communication scholar would agree and as Greene points out, do have effects or "effectivities." Yet anyone interested in a normative political project (which Greene wishes to escape, a point to which we shall return) must recognize the possibility of falsehood. However, as Raymond Geuss (1981) argues, falsehood is not only a matter of empirical misrepresentation. In addition to epistemic falsehood, ideological discourses may exhibit both functional falsehood (referring to how even plausible ideas can bolster oppressive power) and genetic falsehood (ideas promulgated by those with ulterior motives, or intentional mystification). Similarly, analytic Marxist Jon Elster (1985) offers a view of ideology that regards discourses as more than simple epiphenomena of economic situations and struggles.3 Elster describes three overlapping forms of ideological production: the interest-based dissemination of distorted ideas, the failure of social imagination associated with widespread support for the capitalist system and U.S. imperialism, and the psychological comfort of palliative discourses such as religion and patriotism.4 Understanding how widespread adherence to common-sense ideas is accomplished is a project central to...

The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology

This article develops a theoretical foundation for understanding the human influence on the oceans and the resulting oceanic crisis as it relates to the depletion of fish stock and the expansion of aquaculture. Drawing on environmental sociology and insights from the historical materialist tradition, the authors study the nature-society dialectic as it relates to human interactions with the ocean for the capture of fish. We extend Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift to the marine environment to (a) understand the human transformations of the ocean ecosystem, (b) examine the anthropogenic (human-generated) causes of fish stock depletion, (c) study the development of aquaculture in response to the oceanic crisis, and (d) reveal the ecological consequences of ongoing capitalist production in relation to the ocean environment.

Empire and Multitude

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have chosen to call the current global system "Empire."* Their choice of that term is intended to distinguish its essential constituent characteristics from those that define "imperialism." Imperialism in this definition is reduced to its strictly political dimension, i.e., the extension of the formal power of a state beyond its own borders, thereby confusing imperialism with colonialism. Colonialism therefore no longer exists, neither does imperialism. This hollow proposition panders to the common American ideological discourse according to which the United States, in contrast to the European states, never aspired to form a colonial empire for its own benefit and thus could never have been "imperialist" (and thus is not today anymore than yesterday, as Bush reminds us). The historical materialist tradition proposes a very different analysis of the modern world, centered on identification of the requirements for the accumulation of capital, particularly of its dominant segments. Taken to the global level, this analysis thus makes it possible to discover the mechanisms that produce the polarization of wealth and power and construct the political economy of imperialismThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Sraffa's Early Philosophical Thinking

This paper investigates a number of aspects of Piero Sraffa's early philosophical thinking by placing him within the historical materialist tradition of reasoning about the relation of ideas to the historical process. It first distinguishes Alfred Marshall's views about the historical development of ideas by addressing Marshall's responses to the criticisms of William Cunningham of the English Historical School. Marshall's concept of economics as a universal engine of discovery was rejected by Sraffa in his early writings. Sraffa's critique of Marshall is then argued to lead to two early philosophical commitments on Sraffa's part: that deductivist modes of explanation are inappropriate in economics and that economics aims to explain the underlying structures of causal interaction that had been the concern of the classical political economists. The paper closes with brief remarks on how Sraffa's later philosophical thinking might be approached.

Approaches from a Historical Materialist Tradition

Approaches from a Historical Materialist Tradition