Marxist Historians Research Articles

Militantes, Intelectuales Y Revolucionarios: Ensayos Sobre Marxismo E Izquierda En América Latina

Militantes, intelectuales y revolucionarios is a collection of essays with many qualities. The book brings together a cohort of scholars who examine the Left from various angles and from different countries and periods, mostly during the Cold War era. Most of the essays have been published previously and have been updated for this edition. Labor, Marxism, communism, and armed struggle are better represented for Argentina than for other countries. One essay deals with the Mexican Left of the 1960s and another with Marxist historiography of the Mexican Revolution, invoked with some nostalgia by Luis Ruiz. An essay dealing with the Peruvian Communist Party and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) in Ayacucho after the Second World War showcases a brief period of their confrontation when communists and communism became a casualty of the Cold War, which the anticommunist APRA cashed in on by defending “landed interests against campesino challengers” (p. 74). It was followed by the proscription of both parties by the military government of General Manuel Odría.The book is divided thematically, and the Peruvian Left is traced in another section through the intellectual output of the prolific and morally committed historian Alberto Flores Galindo. One essay unveils the intellectual portrait of the Córdoba-born José Aricó, who became a protagonist in debates that rocked the Latin American Marxist Left for decades, which the entrepreneurial Aricó turned into books, publishing houses, and journals in his native Argentina both during his Mexican exile and after he returned to Buenos Aires. The Cuban Revolution is omnipresent in the book, although the sole essay dealing with the revolution is concerned with the historiographical conundrum of nationalism. This topic, which transcended the revolution, was discussed and written about during the ideologically defining 1960s in Cuba.The volume is framed by the image on the book's cover of a boyish José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian Marxist, sitting at his typewriter and by the memory of the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died in 2012. Drawing upon both, Carlos Aguirre outlines in his introduction that the book is a contribution to the Left's self-criticism and reexamination at a time of the renascent academic and political Left in Latin America, a point that Massimo Modonesi, with Antonio Gramsci in hand, puts in a different way. Citing the Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa from his presidential inauguration in 2007, Modonesi conceptualizes the ongoing process of change as the breakup of the neoliberal hegemony under the strain of popular subaltern opposition.Eric Zolov's imaginative and beautifully written essay, titled “Expanding Our Conceptual Horizons,” explores the contours of the New Left in 1960s Mexico. A crossroads for the New and old Left, Mexico became the place where Ernesto Guevara became the revolutionary Che and where Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg created the “New Left sensibility” (p. 111), with lasting impact on the present. Within the framework of the book and the larger picture that Zolov draws, it may be worth pointing out that the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) was not founded in 1949, as the author claims (p. 107). Created in 1938 by the Mexican Marxist Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Zolov's example of the old Left, a left-wing continental labor federation such as the CTAL, would have been impossible to form after the democratic spring was over and the Cold War set in. It required another old leftist, Lázaro Cárdenas, to be president of Mexico and Franklin D. Roosevelt president of the United States for such an enterprise to strike roots. In fact, by 1949 the American Federation of Labor succeeded in creating a well-financed organization to embark on destroying the CTAL.In this volume, as elsewhere, Marc Becker stresses the communist contributions to the construction of indigenous nationalities in Ecuador in contrast to the Peruvian, and specifically Mariátegui's, refusal to ally with the Communist International to create an indigenous republic in the Andes. Becker's work also goes against the grain of interpretations claiming that Marxism relegated ethnic and nationalist identities to a secondary status, highlighting instead individuals' class origins. In light of these contrasting national pasts, Becker argues that while by the 1980s Peru descended into the bloody and destructive neo-Maoist Shining Path insurgency, activists in Ecuador pursued a nonviolent, successful struggle of indigenous nationalities “that the Comintern had originally articulated in the 1920s” (p. 231). One might add that this is perhaps a unique occurrence in the history of the zealous Communist International's attempts to advance the class-based proletarian world revolution.In sum, this collection of essays opens a much-needed reexamination of the history of the hemispheric Left, Marxism, communism, and anticommunism in their manifold expressions and regional variations, and it hopefully will be followed by many such reassessments.

Dimitrije Matic: Hegelianism and Naturalism

Dimitrije Matic (1821-1884) was a philosopher, jurist, professor of public law at the Belgrade Lyceum and politician. He served as Serbia?s Minister of Education and Church Affairs, acting Foreign Minister, Speaker of the Parliament, and member of the State Council. He was president of the Serbian Society of Letters and member of the Serbian Learned Society. Matic belonged to Serbian liberal-minded intellectual circles. He believed that the rule of force was unacceptable and that governments should promote and support popular education. Matic studied philosophy and law in Serbia (Kragujevac, Belgrade), Germany (Berlin, Heidelberg) and France (Paris), and received his doctorial degree in philosophy in Leipzig. In Berlin Matic embraced Hegel?s speculative philosophy and theory of state (philosophy of law). Among his professors were Georg Andreas Gabler (Hegel`s immediate successor), Otto Friedrich Gruppe, Wilhelm Vatke etc. In Halle he listened to another Hegelian, Johann Eduard Erdmann. He had the opportunity to attend Friedrich Schelling?s lectures on the philosophy of mythology. If the Right Hegelians developed Hegel?s philosophy along the lines they considered to be in accordance with Christian theology, and the Left Hegelians laid the emphasis on the anti-Christian tendencies of Hegel?s system and pushed it in the direction of materialism and socialism, Matic would be closer to the first. Actually, he was mostly influenced by his professor Karl Ludwig Michelet, with whom he established a lifelong friendship. Matic?s doctorial thesis (Dissertatio de via qua Fichtii, Schellingii, Hegeliique philosophia e speculativa investigatione Kantiana exculta sit) addressed the question of how the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel developed from Kantian speculative thought. The paper deals with the question whether Matic took a shift from Hegelianism to Positivism (Naturalism) in the 1860s, which is a claim that was taken for granted in the Yugoslav (Serbian) Marxist histories of Serbian philosophy after the Second World War and Communist revolution. In fact, it is rooted in Milan Kujundzic-Aberdar?s (1842-1893) periodization of the Serbian philosophical literature. Kujundzic, professor of Philosophy at the Belgrade Great School, classified Matic?s Science of Education into the latest period of natural philosophy. In order to answer the question, the paper looks into the evolution of Matic?s philosophical, legal and political views. Matic followed Hegelian philosophy in his: Short Review (according to Hegel?s ? Psychology in Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences); Principles of Rational [Vernunftrecht] State Law [Staatslehre] according to Heinrich Zepfel?s book on the philosophy of law (Grunds?tze des allgemeinen und des konstitutionell-monarchischen Staatsrechts and Hegel?s Philosophy of Law) and History of Philosophy (according to Albert Schwegler?s History of Philosophy). There is nothing in Matic?s Science of Education that would corroborate the claim that he shifted from Hegelianism to Positivism. Though he had to attune his views to the changed, anti- Hegelian, intellectual climate and influences on academic life, he remained a Hegelian. The paper deals with the reasons why the Marxist histories of Serbian philosophy insisted on his alleged conversion.

John Donoghue. Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution.

A decade ago, new scholarly interest in the English Revolution was sparked by Carla Gardina Pestana's The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (2004). John Donoghue acknowledges Pestana's work and goes deeper into the English side of the subject, particularly into the role of a single London neighborhood—the Coleman Street Ward—in the revolution in England and in its colonies. His claims are thought provoking, his findings are intriguing, and comparisons with Pestana's work are inevitable. The “godly entrepot” (p. 5) of Coleman Street Ward was home to a surprising number of merchants and preachers who were prominent in both the magisterial and radical aspects of the Revolution, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. Donoghue discovers 21 merchant revolutionaries, led by Martin Noell, Maurice Thomson, and Isaac Pennington, who encouraged and effectively used local militancy in their parliamentary politics while profiting from trade and military ventures to the English empire. Noell and Thomson transported tens of thousands of Scots, Irish, and English prisoners of war and other migrants as “bonded slaves,” as well as African slaves, to English America. These merchants helped create the Navigation Act of 1651 that was foundational to English “plantation capitalism” and they profitably armed and provisioned the fleets that brought royalist Barbados and Virginia into subjection, as well as the fleet and army that captured Jamaica. Donoghue uses class rhetoric unapologetically, and praises Marxist historians generously, but this is no Marxist analysis. Economics are always off stage in this detailed study of politics and religion.

Connected and entangled histories: writing histories of education in the Indian context

This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who researched indigenous Indian village schools, key to educational transmission until the early nineteenth century. The educational work of the nationalist leader M.K. Gandhi inflected the work of such educational historians. The article devotes some attention to ways in which twentieth-century ‘new education’ reinvented aspects of pre-colonial South Asian education. Marxist, feminist, Dalit and Subaltern historians of education have analysed the differential and hierarchised spread of ‘western’ education in South Asia. Nonetheless, this article shows how the educational agency of Dalits, women, peasants and working people has been analysed by scholars. The article then examines recent scholarship which views the origins and growth of ‘western’ education in South Asia in the framework of transcultural transactions. It ends from the vantage point of connected and entangled histories of education, looking beyond the unit of the nation state.

Ijtihad into philosophy: Islam as cultural heritage in post-Stalinist Daghestan

Starting in 1960, authors of various Daghestani nationalities initiated a re-evaluation of the role of Islam in the history of Daghestan. An important historical personality to draw upon was Muhammad al-Quduqi, a Daghestani Islamic legal scholar of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Quduqi was known for his sympathies towards ijtihad (Islamic legal reasoning by analogy) and for his call to replace customary law by Islamic law. This article studies how Quduqi was brought back into Soviet discourse in 1960, and how his advocacy for ijtihad was subsequently interpreted in Marxist terms as a quest for philosophy, rationalism and progress, with secularizing terms drawn from the discourse of Daghestani Jadids of the 1920s and 1930s. A comparison is then made with Soviet Tatarstan, where Marxist historians constructed a similar autochthonous trajectory of Tatar-Islamic progress and enlightenment. In both cases, Islamic concepts were taken out of context and used for the construction of a secularized national Muslim cultural heritage (miras) that would prepare the ground for socialism – with the difference that in Daghestan, this Muslim Mirasism was multi-ethnic in character.

Post-colonial historiography and the polemicist's task: understanding Perry Anderson's Indian Ideology

In three articles in the London Review of Books (LRB), Marxist historian Perry Anderson presented a sweeping, synoptic polemic on modern India.1 Re-cast as extensively footnoted chapters entitled ‘...

Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez y el otro marxismo

In this note, Bolívar Echeverría highlights the importance of Sánchez Vázquez in the history of marxism, since 1950’s until the end of the 19th century. Echeverría observes the importance and radicality of Spanish philosopher’s philosophical approaches. From the debates with Althusser, Sartre and the dogmatic marxism, until the defence of radical democracy and the critic to the dictatorship of the Capital, the author reminds us of the state of being in force of Sánchez Vázquez’s work.

Plekhánov e a crítica estética marxista: entre a intenção e o gesto

Georgi Plekhánov é parada obrigatória para quem se dedica a compreender a trajetória do marxismo na Rússia. Além de introduzir textos clássicos de Marx no país, foi responsável pelas diretrizes políticas que guiaram o movimento operário organizado até por volta de 1914 e por escrever textos de crítica estética inovadores nesse campo de pensamento. Este artigo se debruçará sobre esta última faceta de seu trabalho, mais depurada em seu ensaio Arte e Vida Social, de 1912, a fim de compreender como suas formulações, atravessadas que estavam pelas contradições de um método restritivo, não deixaram de trazer contribuições significativas para o entendimento do que denominava “especificidade do estético”. Em um debate direto com a tradição bielinskiana, Plekhánov soube com ela dialogar e desbravar um campo de conhecimento até então praticamente inexplorado no marxismo.

A Postcolonial Reading of the Sonderweg: Marxist Historicism Revisted

A Postcolonial Reading of the Sonderweg: Marxist Historicism Revisted This article deals with the Sonderweg thesis by reconciling David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley's criticism of the German Sonderweg with a postcolonial critique of Marxist historicism. The global trajectory of Marxist historiography shows that the «singularity » of the Sonderweg came to be conceptually translated as «particularity» within the Eurocentric and capitalocentric «universality». This sublime transmutation of the singularity into the particularity through the Leninist trope of the «Prussian path» implies the temporalisation of historical spaces in a linear development scheme, which accommodates global historicist time in a twisted form of «first in Europe, then elsewhere». A postcolonial reading of the Sonderweg throws light on Marxist historiographical debates on colonial modernity versus Sonderwege by subjecting the Eurocentric conception of the «Prussian path» to the complexity of global modernity.

Towards a libertarian turn? Notes on the past and future of radical urban research and praxis

Marxists have always tried to present the history of the workers' movement as if it were the history of Marxist organising efforts, and the history of critical ideas as if it were the history of Marxist thought; consequently, the crisis of Marxism has been presented as a crisis of radical thought as such. However, new radical social movements and thinkers have appeared during the last two decades - and a libertarian flavour is a common feature of many of these movements and thinkers. It would be wrong to exaggerate the contemporary role of libertarian thought and praxis, as some of them still present Marxist discursive or even practical elements; that is to say, some of them are more or less ‘hybrid.’ But it would be equally wrong to deny the relevance of a clear, present-day resurgence of libertarian ideas and ideals. The scenario of a widespread ‘libertarian turn’ similar to the ‘radical [≈ Marxist] turn’ of the 1970s is for several reasons unlikely. Nonetheless, considering some current trends, the hypothesis of a ‘mid-ranged’ or ‘partial’ libertarian turn is totally plausible. In fact, my hypothesis is that such a ‘libertarian turn’ is already ongoing. How can socio-spatial research in general, and urban studies in particular, help us understand (and perhaps inspire or at least support) the (re)new(ed) forms of insurgent praxis and thinking we have witnessed in the last two decades? And to what extent will the libertarians (activists, academics and scholars-activists) be able to explore and use the currently existing room for manoeuvre?

Darcus Howe: A Political Biography. By Robin Bunce and Paul Field.

This is a long overdue and badly needed biographical portrait of the black Trinidadian political radical and broadcaster Darcus Howe, who as one of the leading ideological agitators of the British Black Power Movement made a critical contribution to the shaping of modern multiracial and multicultural ‘postcolonial’ Britain after his arrival in the ‘Mother Country’ in 1961. Howe’s life is a rich one and well-lived: from birth in colonial Trinidad in 1943 as a teenaged campaigner for ‘West Indian self-government’ in Eric William’s People’s National Movement, to someone who, after making the move to Britain as an aspiring 18-year-old law student, as his biographers Robin Bunce and Paul Field note, ‘made Britain his home, fighting all the while for immigrants to enjoy the full rights of citizenship without having to renounce their history or identity: to integrate on their own terms’ (p. 2). Bunce and Field detail how Howe, following in the footsteps of his great uncle and mentor, the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James, intellectually fused ‘English and Caribbean radicalism’, noting that in the face of the British colonial myth of the ‘civilizing mission’, ‘Howe and the Black Power Movement would civilize Britain by challenging the state-licensed barbarism of the Metropolitan Police (Met), by teaching Britain to become a harmonious multiracial society through bringing “reason to race” ’ (p. 2). The pioneering efforts of Bunce and Field, undertaken in close collaboration with Howe himself and his partner, Leila Hassan, mean that for the first time the essential facts of Howe’s life and work are presented in one volume, complete with some remarkable photographs. At least some aspects of the fascinating, gripping, and often inspiring record of activism and campaigning that emerges will doubtless be new to the vast majority of readers, and the authors are to be commended for making this such an accessible and readable narrative that illuminates the wider civil rights and black liberation struggle in Britain.

François Furet: A melancholy revisionist?

François Furet: A melancholy revisionist? Arthur Goldhammer (bio) Review of Chirstophe Prochasson , François Furet : Les chemins de la mélancolie. Paris : Stock , 2013 . 558 p. When asked to write an intellectual biography of François Furet, Christophe Prochasson surely knew he faced a daunting task. Twenty-five years ago, as France celebrated the Bicentennial of the French Revolution and communist domination of Eastern Europe crumbled, Furet’s reputation and influence stood at a pinnacle. No one had done more than he to wrest the interpretation of the Revolution from the Marxist historians who in his view had shoehorned it into a Procrustean bed of party-sanctioned dogma, and no one had done more to explore “the past of an illusion” that had induced so many young French intellectuals, including himself, to devote years of their lives to the party. Because the demise of communism defined the epoch, the crown of epochal historian devolved on Furet. A quarter of a century later, the landscape looks rather different. The pastness of the past has reasserted itself, and many people today must find it difficult to imagine that interpreting the French Revolution “correctly” could once have seemed a vital prerequisite to situating oneself properly in the present. Academic historians—a tribe among whom Furet lived at best uncomfortably—prefer it this way. A hundred interpretive schools have bloomed, and none is in danger of achieving the ideological hegemony that academics fear more than [End Page 209] the seductions of historiographic fashion or the curse of antiquarian irrelevance. In a sense, the very magnitude of Furet’s success has become an obstacle to understanding what he achieved or why he thought it important. This, as Prochasson suggests, was one source of the “melancholy” under the sign of which he sets his essay in biography. That said, the choice of “melancholy” as a unifying thread for a book about Furet might seem strange. How could a historian who had accumulated celebrity, influence, institutional power, and professional acclaim be described as melancholy? To be sure, every life contains its share of private disappointments and frustrated ambitions, but Prochasson has almost nothing to say about either Furet’s private life or the battles in which he engaged as head of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). We do learn that Furet suffered as a young man from tuberculosis, which left him confined to a sanatorium for lengthy periods. This enforced confinement proved to be a boon to the young scholar. The sanatorium contained a library of 25,000 books and provided a quiet environment in which to read them and prepare a licence en droit. His conversion to history came while still convalescing, when he forged ties with a number of young communist history students who would remain lifelong friends, including Mona and Jacques Ozouf, Alain Besançon, Maurice Agulhon, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Furet’s initial engagement with history thus coincided with his initial engagement with communism, the story of which comprises the first fifth of the book. We learn little about Furet’s activities as a militant. Very likely what Le Roy Ladurie says of himself—that adherence to the party was the cure for his “Robinsonism,” his “love-hate relationship with solitude”— was also true of Furet. Alain Besançon recalls the keen pleasure of conversations among comrades in a left-wing student milieu freed from the oppressive conformism of Sciences-Po. It was in the Saint-Just Cell that Furet met his first wife, Jeannette Rouil. In the same milieu, Denis Richet, with whom he would later collaborate on the book that first gained him notoriety, met and married Furet’s sister. Whatever else communism may have meant to Furet, it provided him with a network of close friends with similar intellectual and political interests, and this, as much as any ideological attraction, must have complicated his exit from its orbit. Prochasson adds the interesting observation that, in the French [End Page 210] academic world in the 1950s, communism functioned as “une savonnette à vilains: the sorbonnard Furet, who had failed to join the normalienne nobility, found another way in by way of political commitment” to communism. [48...

Dewey, Hook et Mao : quelques affinités entre marxisme et pragmatisme

The history of Marxism and of pragmatism have made it difficult for us to imagine today that they were once closely related, in various respects. This has resulted in an underestimation of the affinities between the philosophies of Marx and Dewey or of the influence exercised by Dewey on Marxism in the United States, via Hook, and in China, via Mao. The latter point is indeed the one least well known. Mao drew on Dewey prior to his conversion to Marxism, his approach to which would continue to be durably influenced by the echo of a number of Deweyan themes : the political importance of education, the instrumentalist and pluralist conception of the relation between theory and practice, the invocation of a concept of inquiry. Today it has become possible for us to acknowledge that the history of the 20th century is not exactly what we believe it to be, with the result that we can therefore reconsider the manner in which we inherit it.

HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY

ABSTRACTThe recent death of Eric Hobsbawm provides a fitting occasion to take stock of the entire trajectory of his work. Taking his final book, How to Change the World, as its starting point, this essay considers Hobsbawm's effort to change the way history was written. It divides his career into three main phases: 1) during the 1940s and 50s when he served his apprenticeship and emerged as a leading labor historian of modern Britain. Working in conjunction with colleagues in the Communist Party Historian's group, Hobsbawm helped to raise Marxist history to academic respectability; 2) during the 1960s and 70s, Hobsbawm reached the apogee of his career, publishing the first two volumes of his synoptic history of modern capitalism, as well a multitude of more specialized and critical works. No longer just one among a group of Marxist scholars, he—along with E. P. Thompson—became one of the most famous and influential historians in the world. 3) For Hobsbawm, as for other Marxists, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of crisis, when Marxism was destabilized and communism collapsed. Ironically, this essay argues, it was during this challenging period that Hobsbawm's most influential work appeared—most notably, his studies of modern nationalism and his analysis of the “invention of tradition”. Whereas the early Hobsbawm had worked to bring Marxist history into the academy, the later Hobsbawm (perhaps inadvertently) showed how the academy could absorb analytical elements initially formulated in a Marxist framework by translating them into non‐Marxist terms. Whatever one thinks of Hobsbawm's intellectual legacy, one must acknowledge his status as a polymathic giant who wrote global history that was at once theoretically grounded, publicly accessible, and historiographically consequential.

DESAFIOS DA HISTÓRIA DA EDUCAÇÃO NA PERSPECTIVA MARXISTA

O texto desvela os desafios que a teoria marxista e sua concepção de história, em interlocução com a primeira geração da Escola Des Annales, coloca à História da Educação. Este estudo ainda ressalta o caráter ético- político da concepção de história marxista, no debate com setores pós-modernos. Também, apresenta o compromisso revolucionário e emancipatório dessa perspectiva para a pesquisa e o ensino da História da Educação

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012): Some Questions from a Never-completed Conversation About History

Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012, celebrated as a great Marxist historian. This reputation overrode criticisms of his persistent refusal to radically break with Stalinism. This essay revisits a left-wing critique—by two former Communist Party members who left the Party in 1956 after Khrushchev's ‘secret speech’ and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution—which shows how Hobsbawm's politics influenced his history. It argues for collective work to establish a new theoretical basis for a Marxist approach to history.

The Promise of the 1821 Revolution and the Suffering Body. Some thoughts on Modernisation and Anti-intellectualism

How can we understand and interpret the popular narrative of the 1821 revolution that speaks for the suffering body of the fighter while it reproaches the "Frenchified heterochthons" and conveys a kind of anti intellectualism (defined broadly and loosely by Merle Curti as "a suspicion of, opposition to, or derogation of intellectuals")? The popular view of 1821 has its origins in the memoirs of the "freedom fighters" written after the War of Independence. Its main motifs travelled from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century and lent themselves to multiple readings and various ideological uses. Although it has a socio political content, it cannot be explained in terms of a grand narrative of class war, as some Marxist historians of the twentieth century argue; neither can it be understood in terms of the grand narrative of Greek modernisation, that is, as a survival from a previous stage of historical development, a relic from the past, even though it draws its motives from traditional sources and idealises the role of chieftains in the War of Independence. I suggest that we approach the anti-intellectualism of the early nineteenth century from an anti-essentialist perspective of Greek history that highlights the Janus-face of modernisation and the ambivalent nature of modern ideologies (especially of popular nationalism) with regard to the relation between the intellectual and the people or the nation.

Rethinking the “Other Transition”: Towards an Alternative Marxist Explanation

After a long hiatus, Marxist historians are once again debating the “other transition”: from ancient society to feudalism. Considerable improvements in empirical knowledge have not, however, been matched by bold advances in historical materialist theory. Prominent contributors now question whether any meaningful transition occurred at all, emphasizing the persistence of feudalism (Wickham) or the maturation of an incipient capitalism (Banaji). In this, they reproduce a central methodological shortcoming of Perry Anderson's pioneering work, which is a reluctance to think beyond the “mode of production” concept itself. The alternative concept of mode of exploitation focuses on the multiple “political” mechanisms by which surplus was extracted from direct producers. In Merovingian and Carolingian Gaul, the manorial exploitation of free and unfree tenants, as well as state (“public”) exploitation of the landowning, arms-bearing peasantry, generated a social logic distinct from both the late Roman Empire and early Frankish feudalism. There was not just one “transition,” but two.

So In-sik's Communism and the East Asian Community (1937 - 40)

This article discusses the philosophical works of Sŏ In-sik, who published mainly between 1937 and 1940, following his five-year imprisonment as a member of the M-L (Marxist-Leninist) group and the Korean Communist Party. While it recognizes a major shift in his thinking in 1938, this article questions the assertion that the “preconversion” and “postconversion” works can be strictly separated in terms of their content. Rather than making an immediately political argument, it examines the contemporaneity of Japanese and Korean philosophy of the 1930s and 1940s, through close readings that open up the conceptual and practical problems of imperial nationalism, Marxist historicism, and universality. The first part discusses Sŏ’s early work on the contradictory character of the intellect under capitalism and his idealization of the laboring human. The second part addresses Sŏ’s so-called “conversion” to supporting the Japanese empire, through textual analysis that highlights the continuities and discontinuities between his earlier Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history and his later concerns with cultural crisis and Kyoto School dialectics. The third part looks more specifically at Sŏ’s “disguising” of his Marxist view of history behind a Hegelian logic of nation-state formation and discusses the problem of mimesis and representation in the inversion of Hegel.

John Molyneux and the Question of Art

In the last decade or so the Young British Artists movement has sustained a bitter controversy. The movement itself seems to polarize commentators in a vivid opposition. Those who think an unmade bed or a shark pickled in formaldehyde are creations that only someone with more money than sense could regard as genuine art, and those who believe that they are significant works in their own right. The attitude of the Marxist commentariat to this movement has generally tended to be positive. Prominent Marxist and art historian John Molyneux has devoted considerable space to a defence of figures like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, arguing that their work provides a continuation of the most radical and imaginative artistic traditions in the spirit of ‘Giotto and Brueghel, Hals and Rembrandt, Hogarth and Goya, Courbet, Picasso and Warhol’. In his article ‘The Legitimacy of Modern Art’, Molyneux offers a systematic defence of the Young British Artists movement, striving to show how the work of these artists is underpinned by a profoundly revolutionary and democratic current. This article offers a decisive rebuttal to Molyneux's position. It attempts to show that much of the ‘art’ of the so called Young British Artists is little more than spectacle; that their work is incubated in an isolated and rarefied realm dominated by slick patrons and investors, and consequently attains an empty and vacant character. An emperor without clothes. Furthermore, the author attempts to locate the germ of Molyneux's theoretical confusion in an unconscious conflation of the Marxist categories of ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ value. Finally, through a critique of Molyneux, the writer hopes to elucidate in outline a more viable and genuinely Marxist answer to the question—What is Art?