Marxist Humanism Research Articles

In Dialogue: Response to Review

In DialogueResponse to Review Gerald Sim (bio) This is the first in an occasional series of reviews and author responses. Please see Jared Sexton, "For a Neo-Marxism without Guarantees: A Critique of Critical Criticism," Discourse 38.3 (2016): 445–55. Among the browser windows open underneath the e-mail where James Leo Cahill offered me this generous platform to record a response to Jared Sexton's review of my book were two items that modulated my reaction. The first contained a news report about Heath Mello, a pro-choice candidate for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. Mello's prospects in the deeply conservative region had risen on a tide of post-2016 fervor but were taking on water in the election's closing days due to erroneous reporting that in 2009 he had cosponsored a bill requiring abortion patients to look at their fetal ultrasounds. In truth, the legislation only required that patients be informed that the images were available. Still, national women's groups balked. Unsettled by the controversy, Mello's bid failed. In an adjacent tab I had clicked on an interview with Asad Haider, Pakistani American cofounder of the Marxist Viewpoint Magazine. His opposition to identity politics had elicited vocifer-ous criticism. Amid the incoming fire were befuddling accusations from some quarters that he is white. [End Page 263] Toggling through these pages, I was struck by how the confl icts intersected. Under normal circumstances I might have countered with an itemized riposte to the review, but the necessity of that now felt far less pressing. I am hence letting the book speak for itself. To abstain, however, is not to vacuously agree to disagree, because something is terribly wrong in these dangerous times, which a truce does nothing to solve. Plainly, I failed to persuade Sexton, and some of his critiques actually hardened my own convictions. Nevertheless, even if our minds remain unchanged, we must absolutely rethink what we do in the aftermath. In some measure, I wrote The Subject of Film and Race to provoke a dialogue and had similar designs in mind with the chapter about Edward Said's Orientalism that Discourse published in 2012. Those debates, I submitted, were restaging parallel disputes over long-standing rifts between humanism and poststructuralism and between class and identity politics. The book has incited a response that now makes even clearer that these conflicts, considered alongside recent events, remain not merely unresolved but also thoroughly relevant. The last eighteen months have only raised the stakes by revealing the limits of political movements organized around identity. And yet, after November 2016 the Left appears intent on avoiding substantive self-examination. It turned straightaway to writers such as Thomas Frank and J. D. Vance for help in deciphering the "white working class," thus retaining if not accepting a discursive framework based on racial divisions. Vance's Hill-billy Elegy has been a best seller for well over a year.1 It is of course important to better grasp what is happening in places such as rural Appalachia and the industrial Midwest, but the process currently under way reinscribes racial particularism and sheds the aspiration to form a universal working class capable of finding and articulating common cause in a critique of capitalism. My book may not have adopted that position as stridently on every page, but readers could infer it. On that score, we can all be more careful and open, as I would be if I were to write the manuscript now. Proponents of class-based critique, Marxist humanists, Bernie Bros, and all the rest should consider what Haider proffers to Seattle Weekly about how we conduct the work of politics: Now in an organizing meeting, any discussion that takes place between a white person and a person of color will be tense and guarded, because at any time the white person may be accused of white privilege, and thus denounced for bringing irreconcilable political interests into the group. That is a very different kind of politics, and not one that tends to result in [End Page 264] open strategic discussions, building trust between activists, or effectively broadening towards a mass movement. But socialists have to understand...

Posthumanism Thinks the Political: A Genealogy for Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics

ABSTRACT This article rethinks the concept of the political from a posthumanist rather than a humanist vantage point. More specifically, it engages in an extended discussion of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos and its claims regarding the relationship between neoliberalism and the economic and political spheres, as exemplified in Michel Foucault’s lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics. While sympathetic with Brown’s views on the deleterious effects of neoliberalism, it takes issue with her critique of Foucault’s “notorious late-1970s antagonism to Marxism” and its effects on his understanding of the relationship between the political and the economic, as reflected in the phenomenon of neoliberalism. This article argues instead that Foucault’s work in The Birth of Biopolitics does indeed have an important genealogical relationship to Marxism, but it is not the humanist Marxism that frames Brown’s analysis. What motivates Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism is not his insufficiently Marxist understanding of the relationship between the economic and the political, but rather his larger project of exploring a theory of social complexity in which the economic does not and cannot unilaterally steer the other social systems, including the political. This understanding is utterly consonant with Foucault’s larger discussion of the qualitative shift from disciplinarity to governmentality, and evinces a genealogical through-line from Althusser’s analysis of structural causality to Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics, to Luhmann’s social systems theory—one that fundamentally changes how we must think the concept of the political within a new understanding of social complexity.

Czechoslovak Marxist humanism and the revolution

Despite their emphasis on humanism and human individuality, Marxist humanists did not deny the importance of social revolutionary change. In the era of the 1960s, revolution still ranked among the central questions with which Marxist humanists were preoccupied. Czechoslovak Marxist humanists’ efforts to develop a new concept of revolution fit firmly within the overall pattern of post-Stalinist thought. I discuss the works of Karel Kosik and Robert Kalivoda in order to present Czechoslovak Marxist humanism as an intrinsically variable intellectual current. An analysis of Kosik’s and Kalivoda’s texts reveals a general pattern within Marxist humanism, while at the same time revealing its specific Hegelian and structuralist variants.

The Praxis School’s Marxist Humanism and Mihailo Marković’s Theory of Communication

Mihailo Marković (1923–2010) was one of the leading members of the Yugoslav Praxis Group. Among other topics, he worked on the theory of communication and dialectical meaning, which makes his approach relevant for a contemporary critical theory of communication. This paper asks: How did Mihailo Marković conceive of communication? Marković turned towards Serbian nationalism and became the Vice-President of the Serbian Socialist Party. Given that nationalism is a particular form of ideological communication, an ideological anti-praxis that communicates the principle of nationhood, a critical theory of communication also needs to engage with aspects of ideology and nationalism. This paper therefore also asks whether there is a nationalist potential in Marković’s theory in particular or even in Marxist humanism in general. For providing answers to these questions, the article revisits Yugoslav praxis philosophy, the concepts of praxis, communication, ideology and nationalism. It shows the importance of a full humanism and the pitfalls of truncated humanism in critical theory in general and the critical theory of communication in particular. Taking into account complete humanism, the paper introduces the concept of praxis communication.

The Machiavellian, the Philistine, the Romantic: Rereading Human, Ah, Human!

Within the few years of its first publication in 1980, Dai Houying’s most popular and controversial novel Human, Ah, Human! drew significant attention from literary scholars throughout Chinese and English world and was often interpreted by the liberal humanist discourse as the representative work of the “thaw literature” or as the plea to revive the “human.” Recently, such appropriations of the notions of “the human” have raised suspicions among some critics both from the Beijing‐based “revisiting the 1980s (重返八 十年代) group” and some Western critical scholars, who begin to reevaluate Marxist humanism in the 1980s China. This paper, however, attempts to utilize several post‐humanist critical theories that have been persistently on guard against the theoretical limits of both liberal and Marxist humanism to reinterpret this novel. Here, the novel Human, Ah! Human , is able to encompass both the contradiction and reconciliation of various kinds of “human” voices. This paper will revisit its theatrical setting where the newborn “human” figures encounter and contend with one another. Rather than the sudden emergence of a humanist hero, or a Marxist humanist hero, it is the encounter of the Machiavellian wild individual, the philistines who pursue earthly happiness, and the romantics, that offer the untrodden path to approach the historical “real.” This paper will exhibit their combinations, permutation, and rehearsal in the fictional structure.

Kaddish for Che

Kaddish for Che

Neutral, Atheist, or Antitheist? School as an Ideological Battlefield in the Late-Socialist Slovenia

At a time when the shortcomings of Yugoslavia’s self-management “third way” were already clearly visible, American political scientist Oskar Gruenwald argued that the country proved to be the “most radical, liberalized, and humanized among communist party states.”1 Gruenwald emphasized the value of liberalization, democratization, decentralization, socialist legality, and Marxist humanism in theory and socialist practice as it gradually developed since the 1948 Tito-Stalin split. Indeed, this assessment also corroborates with the classification of “limited pluralism,” offered by Juan J. Linz.2 However, religious policy remained one of the most ambiguous aspects of state-society relations in the most ethnically and religiously diverse socialist country in Southeast Europe. On one hand, Yugoslav laws on religious communities were somewhat restrictive, but they enabled autonomy for national episcopates and offered the best conditions for religious communities in socialist Eastern Europe.3 On the other hand, their implementation depended on (frequent) political oscillations on the level of federation, republics, and local communities.4 Therefore, in the case of the Soviet Union compared to Yugoslavia in terms of its multiethnic and multireligious landscape, regional examination proved to be advantageous in order to study complex dynamics of secularization in the realm of socialist modernity.5

PEDAGOGIA CRÍTICA COMO PRÁXIS MARXISTA HUMANISTA: PERSPECTIVAS SOBRE SOLIDARIEDADE, OPRESSÃO, E REVOLUÇÃO

RESUMO : Este artigo pretende explorar a fundamentação teórica e filosófica da pedagogia crítica no Humanismo Marxista através do conceito de práxis (revolucionária) e através de uma investigação sobre o papel da solidariedade na superação da opressão. Mais precisamente, ele examina a vasta obra teórica sobre o Humanismo Marxista e como suas perspectivas sobre a opressão, alienação, libertação e revolução são essencialmente ligadas ao conceito de práxis, que é central para a pedagogia crítica de Paulo Freire. A solidariedade, que normalmente é apresentada de forma tangencial à discussão, torna-se um dos pontos focais do argumento, enfatizando totalidade e coletividade em uma visão de libertação destinada à abolição e superação (aufheben ).

Critical Theory of Communication as Critical Sociology of Critique in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Abstract THIS ESSAY IS A REFLECTION ON JAN LØHMANN STEPHENSEN’S REVIEW ESSAY ON MY BOOK CULTURE AND ECONOMY IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA (CONJUNCTIONS, VOL. 2, NO. 2). IT CONTRASTS CREATIVITY AND SOCIAL PRODUCTION IN MARX’S THEORY, CLARIFIES MY RELATIONSHIP TO BOLTANSKI AND CHIAPELLO’S APPROACH, REFLECTS ON THE INFLUENCE OF HUMANIST MARXISM ON MY THOUGHT, AND ARGUES FOR GROUNDING MEDIA/COMMUNICATION STUDIES AND DIGITAL MEDIA RESEARCH IN CRITICAL THEORY, UNDERSTOOD AS A CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF CRITIQUE THAT COMBINES SOCIAL THEORY, EMPIRICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH AND ETHICS.

Decolonizing Praxis in Eastern Europe: Toward a South-to-South Dialogue

This article pursues two distinct yet interrelated levels of analysis. Theoretically, the article seeks to destabilize Western narratives of a transition from humanism to anti- and post-humanism in radical scholarship by foregrounding two traditions from Eastern Europe and the Caribbean where the language of the human persisted long after its declared obsolescence in the West. The argument made here is that these divergent narratives (or “bifurcations”) of the human were neither wholly contingent nor just a matter of distinct intellectual traditions, but were deeply interwoven with both the history of the Cold War and the legacies of colonialism. On a praxical-political level, the article also engages in a close reading of arguably the major tradition of Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe, that of the Praxis circle in former Yugoslavia. While examining the specific political and theoretical reasons for the persistence of humanism in the writings of Praxis, the article argues that, in the end, their radical humanism never completely freed itself from its deep colonial dispositions, leading also to a series of controversial political choices in the 1990s. Drawing on Caribbean humanism as a counter-point to the Marxist humanism of Praxis, the article argues that radical intellectuals in Eastern Europe today need to learn from both the insights and severe limitations of their Praxis predecessors.

“Marxism” as Tradition in CCP Discourse

Abstract This study discusses how the Chinese Communist Party has fashioned “Marxism” as a tradition during the last three decades. I argue that its leaders have invented the tradition of Sinicised Marxism by means of a ritualised repetition that emphasises a largely factitious continuity with the purpose of legitimising the Party, justifying policy changes and winning factional struggles. The point is corroborated by an analysis of the invocation of “Marxism” during key political phases in the reform era when the pretence of continuity became crucial for the CCP, including 1978–1985, 1992–1995 and the Eighteenth Party Congress of 2012. The article shows how, in the debates on “the criterion of truth” and “Marxist humanism”, the reformists endorsed a re-definition of Marxism that aimed at saving communism from radical Maoism and legitimising the new policies. Next, I examine texts from the beginning of the second reform period, when official propaganda strove to justify the roll-out of a market economy by portraying “pragmatism” as the essence of Marxism. Finally, I analyse how Party-state leaders have invoked Marxism around the time of the last leadership transition. The article suggests that such a use of “Marxism” in contemporary official discourse originates from Mao Zedong Thought as well as in a gradual hollowing out of the concept. As a result it sheds light on the ideological undertows of China’s contemporary socio-political history and on the chances of future political change.

Book review: Bento’s Sketchbook, by John Berger

John Berger Bento's Sketchbook Verso: London, 2011; Xiii + 128pp, 120 colour illustrations: 9781844676842, 14.99 [pounds sterling] I first fell under Berger's spell as a student grappling with different forms of documentary storytelling. I soon discovered that I was not alone, for his work draws warm praise from many distinguished writers, including Susan Sontag and Geoff Dyer. Indeed, Dyer was so smitten by Berger's writing that he made an Alpine pilgrimage to meet his self-exiled mentor, launching his career with a critical study of Bergers oeuvre. His imaginative breadth, vision and style--if not his political engagement--are apparent in much of Dyer's subsequent polygenre success. Berger's latest book is another of his 'collaborations': this time, a collection of text and drawings based around the thoughts of the 17lh-century philosopher and lens grinder Baruch, or 'Bento': Spinoza. Its seemingly random assemblage of anecdote and reflection belong to a singular form of literary documentary ('Bergermentary', perhaps?) that the author has been developing for most of his career. Berger was an artist before becoming a writer, as, apparently, was Spinoza. However, after his death, Spinoza's sketchbook was lost, and for years Berger imagined what secrets it might reveal if it were ever found. Many of the stories here are triggered by sketches recalling past encounters with people, objects and places. Berger being Berger, the act of writing is always political, and he gets straight to Chekhov's point: 'The role of the writer is to describe a situation so truthfully ... that the reader can no longer evade it'. By focusing his thoughts around those of Spinoza --a thinker Berger has admired ever since he was a teenager, discovering that Spinoza was Marx's favourite philosopher--it becomes clear that Berger has several radical agendas he wishes to pursue, including a novel vision of kinship. Ultimately, he wishes to convert us all to mystical materialism: the realisation that we are all one substance with the Universe, and more importantly, with one other, thus squaring the circle of Marxist humanism with pantheistic monism. Spinoza's great intuition was to realise that there are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamt of in our own 'philosophies': 'Consequently thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended through this and now through that attribute'. Berger's methodology has always been to show rather than tell, and he carefully infers our shared humanity by means of anecdote, analogy and reflection, each meditation juxtaposed against a judiciously chosen Spinozan quotation. By the end, the anecdotes have melted away, leaving only a series of extracts strung together like exploding firecrackers to reinforce his main themes in the reader's mind--ambitious themes, concerning the limitations of perception, the illusory nature of perfection, the indifference of God, the essence of existence, the composition of the body, and the confrontation of confusion by accepting our human limitation. These intellectual pills are all sweetened by Bergers development of a range of amusing, uplifting and intriguing stories. To cite just one example, he recounts an amusing tale of attempting to draw Antonello's Crucifixion in the National Gallery on Good Friday, which riffs on subjects ranging through Easter, Sicily, Trafalgar Square, wartime piano recitals, perspective, solidity, public spaces, attendants, security, reason (or the lack of it) and a climactic expletive, all bookended by an apposite quote to tease out a suitably oblique moral, like a modern-day Aesop or La Fontaine. …

HEGEL AND THE REVOLUTIONS REVISITED

In the preface to his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor recognized two ways that every Hegel commentator can go wrong: “Either one can end up being terribly clear and sounding very reasonable at the cost of distorting, even bowdlerizing Hegel. Or one can remain faithful but impenetrable, so that in the end readers will turn with relief to the text in order to understand the commentary.” While it is hard to imagine ever turning to thePhenomenologywith relief, Taylor's cautionary remark draws attention to the indirect relationship between the form and content of Hegel critique: either one attains formal clarity at the expense of material complexity or material complexity at the expense of clarity. The task of the critic, according to Taylor, is to find a balance between these two extremes. The various “Hegel revivals” of the past century, like that of Lukács and the Marxist humanists in the interwar years or Kojève and the existentialists in postwar France, have all struggled to find this balance. The latest Hegel revival is no exception, but both Rebecca Comay'sMourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolutionand Susan Buck-Morss'sHegel, Haiti, and Universal Historyremind us that insight also comes from the extremes.

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

In urban South Africa today, there is evidence of deep-rooted exclusions, signalling the ongoing need to realise city rights. While the socio-economic rights framework is a liberal one, the ‘right to the city’ as coined by the French sociologist/philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the late 1960s stems from a Marxist humanism. The literature that considers the relevance of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ for the urban condition of the 21st century largely emanates from and speaks to urban struggles in the First World or so-called ‘global North’. At the same time, a prominent shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa invokes an explicitly Lefebvrian right to the city in its urban struggles over the past eight years. This paper discusses key aspects of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, in part contested, in relation to the field of tension that represents informal settlements in cities such as Johannesburg today. It focusses in particular on Lefebvre’s humanist concept of a right to the ‘ oeuvre ’ or ‘creative work’ in relation to that of ‘inhabiting’. These are less explored dimensions of Lefebvre’s right to the city, but of central relevance for an engagement with informal settlements and for constructive mobilization around the South African urban condition today.

Ideas on the Current Construction of Literary Theory

This article puts forward several ideas on the development of literary theory in contemporary China. Firstly, the philosophical basis of literary theory should be shifted from a simplistic epistemology to Marxist ontology with praxis as its theoretical core. Secondly, the mode of thinking in literary theory should be altered from a substantial one to a generative one. Thirdly, literary theory should go beyond the methodological framework of subject-object dichotomy, and adopt a renewed way of dialectical thinking. Last but not the least, it is necessary for us to rediscover the vitality and realistic meaning of the proposition of “literature is the study of humanity” from the perspective of Marxist humanism.

Responding to Tani Barlow: Women’s Studies in the 1980s

This essay is Li Xiaojiang’s response to Tani Barlow’s “Socialist Modernization and the Market Feminism of Li Xiaojiang” (ch. 6 of Barlow’s The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism). Barlow, in discussing Li Xiaojiang’s work in the 1980s, wholly overlooked the key article “The Progress of Humanity and Women’s Women’s Liberation” （人类进步与妇女解放） published in Marxist Studies （马克思主义研究） in 1983, which Li claims was the first theoretical article on women to appear in a mainstream authoritative journal in mainland China. Li agrees with Barlow’s characterization of one of her two ideological roots as Marxist humanism but says that her other root is not “psychodynamics” but Western feminism—though in her own work she has tried to keep some distance from it and refrains from using the word feminism (in Chinese or English) to describe the 1980s women’s movement in China, preferring the term women’s studies movement. Li rejects Barlow’s characterization of her work in the 1980s as “market feminism” on the grounds that China was not then oriented to a market economy and that Li’s theoretical attention at that time was on socialist revolution and Marxist theory about women’s liberation. Li agrees with her critics’ views that she is an essentialist feminist, for she holds that one is born a female and that the second-sex status is a necessary period in the historical evolution of humanity.

Is the Post in Postsocialism the Post in Posthumanism?

This essay brings into dialectical consideration the relationship between postsocialism and posthumanism in China through the life story of Marxist humanism from the global 1960s to the present across Eastern Europe, France, and the United States. It especially foregrounds the American counterpart to the irruption of Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe and the humanist controversy in France during the 1950s in the now marginalized work of Raya Dunayeskaya, which brought Marxist humanism, feminism, and antiracism into a powerful interarticulation. The essay argues that postsocialism is not a discreet formation affecting only previously or actually socialist countries and that, when seen through the lens of Marxist humanism, to which American ethnic studies can be considered heir, the condition today in China and globally is resoundingly not posthumanist.

Considerações críticas sobre o humanismo marxista na perspectiva da antropologia cristã

Considerações críticas sobre o humanismo marxista na perspectiva da antropologia cristã

Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism

“Humanism” is a term that has designated a remarkably disparate set of ideologies. Nonetheless, strains of religious, secular, existential, and Marxist humanism have tended to circumscribe the category of the human with reference to the themes of reason, autonomy, judgment, and freedom. This essay examines the emergence of a new humanistic discourse in feminist theory, one that instead finds its provocation in the unwilled passivity and vulnerability of the human body, and in the vulnerability of the human body to suffering and violence. Grounded in a descriptive ontology that privileges figures such as exposure, dispossession, vulnerability, and “precariousness,” this new humanism is a corporeal humanism. This essay probes both the promise and the limitations of this emergent humanism with particular reference to recent work by feminist philosophers Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero.

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Since the mid-1990s, the focus of my work has shifted discernibly, if not dramatically, from a preoccupation with poststructuralist analyses of popular culture, in which I attempted to deploy contrapuntally critical pedagogy, neo- Marxist critique and cultural analysis, to a revolutionary Marxist humanist perspective. My focus shifted away from the politics of representation and its affiliative liaison with identity production and turned towards the role of finance capital and the social relations of production. Against a utopian theory of entrepreneurial individuality and agency backed by a voluntarism unburdened by history, I came to see the necessity of transforming the very structures of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by means of a pedagogical praxis guided by the revolutionary knowledges of historical materialism. In so doing, questions of patriarchal and sexist ideology are connected to their material origins—of social labor—that emphasize the relations between the sexes and how the distribution of labor in capitalist economies have generated the alienating conditions in which men and women relate to themselves and to one another (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, I locate my work within what I take to be the fundamental condition of late modernity—a brutal and systematic extraction of surplus value from proletarianized regions of the world (usually decaying in a climate of bourgeois- comprador nationalism) culminating in a condition of substantive inequality and an egregiously unequal division of labor—a condition that is structurally inescapable under the regime of capital. Through the generalization of exchange- values mediated by the machinations of capital accumulation on a global scale, this regressive situation has spawned alienated lifeworlds festering in the swamp of reification and the commodification of everyday life. Since my shift in focus, I have come to view the assertion of many poststructuralists—that Marxism constitutes a totalizing pressuring of meaning into semiotic foreclosure, placing an overlay of determinism on the free interplay of cultural discourses with their free-floating auto-intelligibilities, their aleatory and indeterminable play of the sign, and turning the jazz of signification into a military march of pre-ordained procrustean meanings—as an exclusion of causality from the domain of history by replacing it with difference and play. In effect, by situating the social as a contingent totality, the avant-garde politics of representation articulated by the poststructuralists become part of a larger ensemble of textual reading practices that obscure the production practices of capitalism (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008). I also had serious problems with what progressive educators were describing as the struggle for democracy in the public sphere because so much of this discourse involved pedagogically fostering a respect for the values of democratic citizenship and appealing to moral sentiments and critical reasoning.