Marxist Discourse Research Articles

“The mother of every insane form: fetishistic interest and capitalistic perversion”

ABSTRACT Money is the epitome of Marx’s fetishised commodity. And, in Marxist discussions of the connected topics of currency and commodity fetishism, it often is left under-appreciated that such fetishism reaches its apotheosis only with the development of ‘interest-bearing capital.’ Herein, I perform two complementary gestures, one as regards Marxism and another with respect to psychoanalysis. Apropos Marxism, I counter-balance the usual, long-standing (over)emphasis on commodity fetishism as per the first volume of Das Kapital with a foregrounding of this fetishism as per the third volume. Apropos psychoanalysis, I shift away from its traditional fixation on reducing financial matters to libidinal contents. I explore instead the implications of the forms of capitalist fetishism for reconsidering the forms of intra-subjective defence mechanisms. This leads me to posit a complementary inversion of Lacan’s dictum according to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’: The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression. To pose a rhetorical question paraphrasing Brecht: What is the laundering of money compared with the laundering that is money?

ململانێ تیۆرییەكانی نێوان حیزبی شیوعی و حیزبی بەعسی عەرەبی سۆسیالیست لە عێراق لە ژێر رۆشنایی كێبڕكێ فیكریی و ئایدۆلۆژییەكان

The Iraqi Communist Party, as a communist organization and representative of the Iraqi left movement and Marxist discourse, opposed the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, which considered itself the agent of pan-Arab nationalist thought Within this conflicting discourse, the most prominent political organizations that have had the most influence in the Iraqi political process for half a century have become. Since the establishment of the monarchy and the republic, political, intellectual and ideological competition has developed between them, so that in several stages these competitions have reached the level of bloody conflict. This study attempts to highlight the most important ideological differences between them The principles of internationalism through its constituent factors such as socialism, communism and idealism have become the basis for determining how they compete. In this regard, it presents their communist and national characteristics and differences alongside the ideas of socialism and social nationalism and their views on religion, while presenting their views on freedom and their position on the fate of ethnic communities.

Immigration, poetry, and translation between Syria and Germany: Adel Karasholi

AbstractThe work of Syrian‐German poet Adel Karasholi exemplifies key vectors of literature in the context of migration, in particular the tension between nostalgia and assimilation. Karasholi's case is distinctive insofar as he lived between two dictatorships, Syria and the German Democratic Republic, and his poetry testifies to processes of ideological accommodation, integration into GDR literary networks, and identity‐political hybridization. A Brechtian aesthetic of engagement and a Marxist discourse of progress coexist with the problematics of immigration and cultural difference. In the early 1990s, Karasholi began to invoke previously rejected orientalist and mystic‐religious tropes as he entered the multicultural public sphere of unified Germany, but in his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (2004) he reverted to the secular modernization sensibility of his GDR years. One of these translations (“In Jerusalem”) is examined closely to reveal Karasholi's strategic choices and subtle differences from the Darwish original.

Метод против истины. Часть 2: Схизма с советским марксизмом и трансформация дискурса Франкфуртской школы

The article is the second part of the study of the evolution of the Frankfurt School theoretical views in the context of the history of Marxism and the development of the «left idea» in the 20th century. The central point is the degeneration of «critical theory» into a conformist quasi-liberal-democratic conception that retains only a distant formal relationship with Marxism. It is shown how the critical attitude and radical negativism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School in the second generation gradually turn to a recognition that an alternative to liberal democracy and the capitalist economy is absent. Combined with the shaped in the 1950s rejection of Soviet Marxism and the USSR, which considered as a form of poorly disguised totalitarianism that fetishized labor and state power and abandoned freedom and reason in favor of domination and effective exploitation, the political conformism of the employees of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main led to their actual break with Marxism. There was a rejection of both the main plots and approaches to their interpretation — economic relations, class struggle, dialectical materialism, etc. — and the Marxist language itself: the second generation of the Frankfurt School does not use Marxist terminology and abandons the Marxist discourse. The critical attitude from the universal metaphysical, as it was in Adorno, is reborn into an morally-epistemological one: it acquires objective limitations and means not pure negativity, but something opposite — a reflexive readiness to be wrong, a willingness to discover a mistake. In J. Habermas and A. Honneth, the critical attitude approaches the critical rationalism of K. Popper and turns from revolutionary into conformational — now it is a tool for creating social harmony and improving, rather than destroying the social order. In this way, the method defeats the truth, declaring it impossible, but in the end turning into an endless, unsolvable promise of approaching an unattainable truth, which cannot be, but which can be imagined. The theoretical (“critical”) work that leads nowhere ultimately benefits the existing order — in full accordance with Marcuse’s ideas about a one-dimensional society, but in a diametrically opposite modality for the second generation of the Frankfurt School: now this is a reason not for horror, but for optimism.

Jacques Derrida’s Marxism: An Althusserian Analysis

The on-going research study tends to conduct the textual analysis of Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1994) by Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) to discuss and trace the impact of Marxism on him and in turns his responses towards it. He defended Marxism against world capitalism in the post-Cold War “New World Order” after the fall of Communism in 1989. He made a great contribution to the development of Marxist discourse from a deconstructive perspective. Therefore, the research paper focuses on the question, how did Derrida come under the influence of Marxism in his later career? It is mostly concerned with the critical responses of Derrida’s contemporary Marxist critics to Derridean deconstruction in general and to the publication of the book cited-above in particular as well as Derrida’s responses to them. In this way, the study attempts to explore the ways in which Marxism and deconstruction encounters and influences each other. Though it mainly concentrates on Derrida’s text on Marx, his other works also come under discussion. Althusserian Marxist hermeneutics has been employed as the theoretical and analytical framework in this textual study.

Bimetallic Apartheid: British Imperia­­­­lism and the Gold Standard

ABSTRACT In 1920, Vladimir Lenin defined “imperialism” as national exploitation, which raises the question of how nations exploited other nations throughout history. This article will argue that answering this question requires introducing new concepts into Marxist discourse that can capture competition among multiple states and currencies, namely the “hegemon-rival” dialectic between the “currency hegemon” and the “mercantile rivals.” Focussing on the British empire, this article will show that British currency hegemony based on the gold standard functioned by a system that can be called “bimetallic apartheid,” which involved arbitraging the value of gold against silver in order to facilitate the plundering of India and China, however, as other states began to industrially “catch up” with Britain (i.e., the “mercantile rivals”), the credibility of the British gold standard was undermined.

Aphasia or Scientific Revolution? (Discourses of Soviet Marxist and non-Marxist Economists in the 1980–1990s)

The change of discourse among Soviet economists preceded the change in the social structure of the USSR. Due to these changes, there appeared a number of socio-economic phenomena that could not be described in terms previously known to economists of the time. This led to a painful disorder of the collective cognitive structure shared by Russian economists – aphasia. The changes that took place in the economy of the country could not be described in Marxist terms of progress: the latter did not allow the «restoration of capitalism» after many years of «mature socialism» domination. At the same time, barter, non-payments, and the financial pyramid built by the state did not fit into the liberal discourse either. The main force behind the delegitimization and destruction of the Soviet social order was the Marxists. They defined the phenomena they observed as «non-socialist», which led them to the conclusion that the bureaucracy and the nomenklatura dominated the USSR. From the ugly pseudo-socialist state, they suggested moving towards «true socialism». But the democratic transformations they proposed largely coincided with those that figured in the official authoritative Marxist discourse. Against this background the gradual transition to the dominance of the liberal economic discourse is quite natural. However, at the first stage of the political confrontation the calls for economic liberalization were accompanied by the sympathy of domestic liberals for authoritarianism A. Pinochet, which could not but cause their subsequent discredit. Nevertheless, after 1998 there was a rapid period of «normalization» of the discussion. Liberal discourse becomes the main one and acquires respectability, both in politicians’ discussions (including the communists) and in the academic environment. The discourse of Yu.V. Yaremenko made it possible to see the structural imbalance of the Soviet economy. Under these conditions, the transition to the market «cut off» most of the non-competitive industries leading to the fact that Russia was among the poor countries. The decisions to release prices and launch a decentralized mechanism for bank lending to investments were necessary to eliminate the main structural imbalances. This approach has been relegated to the periphery of economic discussions. The interpretation of the transition of speech practices from Marxism to the modern economic mainstream as a scientific revolution is a retrospective rationalization of the catastrophe that occurred. The period during which most of the judgments of Russian economists were poorly correlated with the observed phenomena. Most works of that time are now forgotten. The author characterizes now forgotten ways of discussing economic phenomena as aphasia.

“My Whole Life I’ve Been a Fraud”: Resisting Excessive (Self-)Critique and Reaffirming Authenticity as Communal in David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” and Albert Camus’s The Fall

The themes of paralyzing, solipsistic self-critique versus the necessarily communal character of authentic, meaningful existence in the work of American novelist David Foster Wallace are best understood in light of existentialism. This article compares Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” with Albert Camus’s novella The Fall, as responses to similar unproductive tendencies within the respective postmodernist and Marxist discourses of their times. Both works portray an absolutist self-critique that produces feelings of (inauthentic) fraudulence and exceptionality; and both include an interlocutor that ultimately makes the reader the direct addressee of the text. In doing so, “Good Old Neon” and The Fall confront the reader with the moral task of resisting excessive (self-)critique and reaffirming authentic, meaningful existence as always arising in connection to others.

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ <i>Life in the Iron Mills</i>

The Return of Marxist Discourse to Russian-American Fiction: Keith Gessen’s Novel A Terrible Country

ABSTRACT While most of the immigrants who came to the United States from the former Soviet Union have become conservative Republicans, the generation of so-called Russian-American writers has rejected the right-wing politics of their parents in favor of a more liberal position. However, few of these authors go as far as embracing “communism” or Soviet-style state socialism. An interesting exception to this rule is the writer and journalist Keith Gessen. Unlike the Russian liberals, who criticize the Putin regime as a relapse into Soviet-style totalitarianism, Gessen interprets Putinism as a symptomatic manifestation of global neoliberalism. Gessen’s 2018 novel A Terrible Country traces the protagonist’s (and Gessen’s own) political evolution from liberalism to neo-Marxism. The book also contains a fictional portrait of the prominent Russian poet and Marxist activist Kirill Medvedev. This article discusses Gessen’s portrayal of contemporary Russian society in the context of neo-Marxist theory. As it argues, even though the plot of the novel is situated in 2008, Gessen presents an indictment of the regimes of Putin and Trump by using his own bicultural Russian-American identity as a springboard for politically engaged fiction.

Alienation and action in the young Marx, Aristotle, and Arendt

Alienation and action in the young Marx, Aristotle, and Arendt

Toward a Theory of Cultural Revolution

Before his complex involvement in the events of the Cultural Revolution, Yao Wenyuan emerged as a central figure in wide-ranging theoretical debates around questions of beauty under the aegis of the Aesthetics Debate of the 1950s and ’60s. This debate provided the conditions for a series of engagements on the part of Chinese and Soviet aesthetic theorists with the conceptual vocabulary of the “early Marx,” preceding the more famous embrace of humanist Marxist discourse in the 1980s. This article proposes to take Yao seriously as a theorist of an anti-humanist proletarian aesthetics, whose thought seeks to pose the relations between labor and aesthetics in terms strictly opposed to the philosophical figure of the human that emerged in the thought of more prominent figures such as Li Zehou. It does so by tracing Yao’s conception of aesthetics as a site of class struggle at the level of sensorial experience, in terms that suspended any attempt to articulate a universalist aesthetic according to humanist tropes of creative labor. The depth of Yao’s aesthetics not only demonstrates the theoretical underpinnings of the Cultural Revolution, but so too does it underscore the persistence of the problems of humanism and anti-humanism in engagements with Marxist thought.

Fear of Chaos: Sociological Interpretation of Demand for Detective Genre

The essay offers a sociological analysis of the origin and popularity of the detective genre. There are many explanations for the phenomenon of the popularity of the detective genre, but they do not answer the question why the genre became relevant in the middle of the 19th century and remains so until now. Its genesis and role are interpreted in the middle and late 19th century and in the modern world. The moment when the detective genre emerged approximately coincides with the birth of classical sociological theories. Both sociology and the new literary genre are reflections on the changes that took place in the 19th century. The detective reflects current social problems and new technologies. The classic detective contains many typical features of positivist, functionalist, Weber and Marxist discourses. The essence of detective discourse is built into the ideas of faith in the scientific method and the morality of order, criticism of the capitalistic social system and the possibility of understanding social actions and motivation of different characters. The demand for a detective today is crucially connected with the rapid technological and social changes that take place today, and the Future Shock caused by them, described by Alvin Toffler. The pace of technological change is noticeably ahead of human adaptation to a new social reality. A person is forced to somehow endure or overcome this severe state for the psyche. Reading detective stories creates a short-term illusion of the possibility of mitigating and overcoming the Future Shock. However, reading or viewing a detective story does not provide a real chance to adapt to the liquid modernity.Such an important psychotherapeutic function is unique among literary and movie genres, so it can be predicted that detectives, despite the skepticism of many critics and intellectuals, will remain in demand and relevant in the future.

Analysis on the Construction of Marxist Ideological Discourse Power in the Environment of Big Data.

The core of socialist ideology is Marxist discourse power, which refers to Marxism's dominance in ideological education and dissemination as well as its dominant position throughout the entire social ideological system. Big data (BD) has altered how people think, captured recent advancements in the process of thinking development, enriched and advanced thinking science, and improved how people think in relation to the times. This paper examines the BD era's discourse power construction of Marxist ideology. The percentage of respondents who answered "several times a day" when asked if they listen to, watch, or read political news on a daily basis increased from 7.2 percent in 2018 to 17.5 percent in 2021. The percentage of "once a day" and "several times a week" responses also increased, but the response "once or twice a week" did not. Understanding the latest developments and ideas in human thinking in the age of BD can help us think more broadly and creatively, and it can also give us the theoretical groundwork and thinking power to advance the use and development of BD.

The concept of “capitalism” in the history of Russian self-awareness

Starting point is that Marx never used the concept capitalism. “Capitalism” literally “grow” from the translation of the Marx’s Capital into Russian language and the discussions around it which were initiated by Populists and Marxists. It happened long before the emergency of Weber’s and Sombart’s works which give precedence in popularization of the concept “capitalism”. The article shows that Marxist and partly Liberal discourses of capitalism firstly formed in Russian language in the papers of Russian writers, philosophers and politicians. Thanks to translation of Marx’s Capital and discussions around it in Russian cultural environment it was made the key terms of Marxist understanding of capitalism that allows the conclusion that Marxist discourse of capitalism can be determined as Russian. Our research showed that the concept capitalism became commonly-used in Russian political literature and also emerged and took root in Russian vocabulary before that it happened in Europe countries. There is reason to believe that at first the concept “capitalism” with its stable Marxist content emerges in Russian language, and then this form, “forged” in Russian philosophical and political discussions and fixed in the vocabularies, becomes the sample for Marxist interpretation of capitalism in principle. Thus, European understanding of “capitalism” essentially turns out Russian meanings.

Nature of the State: Marxist Critique and its Divergences in Contemporary World

This paper seeks to synthesize the scientific issues of the Marxist critique of the State. Taking insights from secondary literature, it discusses the concept and characteristics of the State in general and then specifies the contestations of the Marxist perspective on the nature of the State. The paper illustrates how classical Marxism perceives State as a unilinear product of class struggle and serves the welfare of the dominant class. However, the recent developments in Marxism have raised questions to the realist and structural perspective of the State. The Neo-Marxist and post-Marxist scholars contributed along with the concepts of ideology, changing relations of base-structure, hegemony, State apparatus, and crisis in the purist form of class. This paper concludes that these developments are unavoidable in the present-day Marxist discourse which can be theoretically levelled as multi-realist and post-structural critiques of the State. It is expected that the implication of the paper lies to foster the Marxist critique of the state, primarily in different social science disciplines including political science, international relations, economics, and development studies.

All the Poor and Wretched

AbstractIn this article, Ng examines Tan Malaka's engagements with labor universalism and Muslim universality in his respective attempts to theorize the problematic of minority subjectivity vis-à-vis universal emancipation. Located at the periphery of global capitalism, Indonesia, though embodying conditions of subordination, exploitation, and unfreedom through historical colonialism, is notably marked by a necessary unevenness in totalization and complete subsumption; this set of heteronomous conditions gave rise to historically distinct and specific discourses and forms of resistance. In positing the Dutch East Indies as one of the peripheral sites within a global Marxist knowledge economy, Ng argues that the constellation of Marxist discourses articulated by Tan Malaka—organized around the “Muslim question”—attempt to powerfully link the question of peripherality to emergent notions of the universal. Ultimately, the “Muslim” for Tan Malaka emerges not as an identity, historical subject, or a people per se, but as a “minor” political model of composition immanent to the relations of capital.

Episodic Literary Movement and Translation: Ideology Embodied in Prefaces

This paper discusses translation practices from a historicist viewpoint, contextualizing them in their emerging “episode.” The latter is a concept drawn from sociology of literature and accounts for the rise of certain discourses and ideologies in a society. On the basis of the argument that translation practices are informed by the general literary and socio-cultural milieu in which they are produced and consumed (also known as ideology of representation), the paper studies the translators’ prefaces to three translations published between 1953 and 1978—a period dominated by Leftist and Marxist discourse in Iran. Drawing on a historically oriented model which holds that the translator’s ideology is revealed at the moment in which he/she chooses a text, and continues through the discourse he/she develops to translate that text, the research embarks on studying translation practices on two levels of choice mechanism and prefaces. Prefaces are discussed in the light of the dominant ideology of representation that is characterized by a revolutionary discourse. The research demonstrates that these translators opted for a strategy that incorporates the translations in the Persian cultural setting with minor changes in a way that politicizes the foreign literature.

When identities are ignored: capital, social capital and the failure of the Indian left

This article, by examining the social component within capital and analyzing the Marxist discourse of social capital as a neo-liberal agenda that separates the social from capital, addresses the failure of the Indian left to acknowledge the caste system and identity politics in India in its potential for revolutionary political mobilization. The notion of theoretical purity, and the dogmatism that explained caste politics as a reactionary identity politics, is rather a reflection of Hindu sentiments and commonsense, from which the leadership of Indian left organizations are unable to liberate themselves.

A Historical Investigation on the Early Organization of the Communist Party of Guangzhou and the Construction of Marxist Discourse Power

As one of the earliest communist groups established in China before the founding of the Communist Party of China, the early organization of the Communist Party of Guangzhou assumed the political responsibility and historical mission of constructing the right to speak of Marxism, and played an important role in promoting the modernization and popularization of Marxism in China and the birth of the Communist Party of China.