Marxist Science Research Articles

Comparing the Two “Cold Wars” Through Gramsci, Althusser and Mao

Abstract There are three overlapping objectives in the article. The first objective is to present three different Marxist perspectives, while focusing on the interpretation of the base/superstructure dialectic which is the key to the understanding of Marxian political economy. The second objective is to make sense of the first and second “Cold Wars” based on the different interpretations of the base/superstructure dialectic. The last objective is to reassert the materialist essence of the base/superstructure dialectic by evoking Marx and his concepts of “Labor” and “Capital”. The three different perspectives are analyzed based on this reassertion. Through these three objectives, two deductions were made: the first deduction is that scientific Marxism requires the acknowledgement of the overdetermination of the economic base (its dominance in the last instance) in the analysis of abstractions, empirical and historical data. The “totality of the relations of production” within the economic base appears abstract in nature, but it represents the ontological category of “Labor” that defines human history since its beginning. It has a transhistorical essence. Human beings work together to produce their basic needs, according to historically specific (abstract) relations of production. The superstructure determines the specificity of the relations of production; it defines the “historical” side of the relations of production in the economic base. In the era of capitalism, “Capital” (the private appropriation of social wealth) is the dominant relation that comes to dictate the “totality of the relations of the production” within the economic base, through the superstructure. Total capital is then the real “subject” of history, and all abstractions gain purpose and practicality based on the class struggle between Labor and Capital. The second deduction relates to real history explained on the basis of the first deduction. Looking at the historical development of the class struggle against monopoly-finance capital (the centralized and concentrated capital) in the 20th century, the First Cold War never truly ended even though the global socialist ideology became weak and the ideological struggle against the imperialist superstructure watered down.

Ideology, Fetishism, Apophaticism: Marxist Criticism and Christianity

AbstractThis paper explores Christianity's ambiguous relationship to capitalism by engaging Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities as a way of rethinking Marxism's critique of religion from the standpoint of political economy. Following Etienne Balibar's distinction between the theory of ideology and Capital's theory of fetishism, I examine how the later Marx conceived of religion as socially conditioned by the society of commodity production, which takes on religious dimensions. Commodities are the basis for a concept of fetishism which commands total subjection, alienating human beings under capitalism. This critical focus also reveals Christianity in its totalizing role as a symbolic structure shaped by the inescapable logic of exchange-value, money, and universal equivalents. Nonetheless, Christianity retains the impetus to anti-fetishism, provided it unites with the Marxist science of critical perception. This anti-fetishistic union focuses on the transparent and revolutionized social relations of real presence as the nonalienated reverse of fetishism's false presence. A critical apophaticism, tempered by the materialist amendments of Marika Rose and Slavoj Žižek, offers the bridge to such a union and highlights the anti-fetishistic avenues of failure and utopia.

The New Development and Modern Value of Engels’ Letters to Materialism in His Later Years

Historical materialism is one of Marx’s greatest discoveries, which is of great significance in the history of human social thought. In Engels’ later years, there was a new trend in the development of capitalist society, where letters became an important carrier for Engels to carry out theoretical research, propaganda and struggle. Engels’ letters in his later years paid full attention to the reaction to the superstructure of the economic foundation and the relative independence of ideology. In addition, it emphasizes that the theory should keep pace with the times, also puts forward and expounds the thought of “historical resultant force theory.” Furthermore, we firmly opposed dogmatism, contrarily adhered and developed scientific Marxism. Engels’ letters in his later years not only enriched and developed Marxist historical materialism, but also provided a strong theoretical basis for the great practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.

Włoska Partia Socjalistyczna i opozycja zza „żelaznej kurtyny”: przypadek Polski w kontekście relacji Craxi–Solidarność

The election of Bettino Craxi as PSI general secretary marked, from 1976, a very important turning point in thehistory of Italian socialism. His dynamic and charismatic leadership in fact contributed to a profound revisionof its ideological seeds, the so-called scientific Marxism, and above all to the recovery of the humanitarianand libertarian suggestions of pre-Marxist socialism. This led to the clear and definitive condemnation of theMarxist-Leninist model, which had found its practical realization in the Soviet system and in the countriesbeyond the Curtain, and prompted PSI to support the anti-communist dissidence and to establish strongrelations with the Polish opposition and above all with Solidarność. Craxi, both in the role of PSI generalsecretary and as Italian prime minister, was able to provide it with a great political-diplomatic support and alot of concrete help. Up to now, the history of these relations has not yet been adequately studied and thispaper therefore aims to fill the gap.

Revisiting Marxism and decolonisation through the legacy of Samir Amin

ABSTRACT Samir Amin’s legacy of deployment of Marxist science, dedication to pan-Africanism and commitment to revolutionary liberation of the global South from imperialism and capitalism is re-evaluated from an epistemological vantage point. This is necessary because Amin raised fundamental epistemological issues as he challenged the discipline of economics, built institutions which advanced alternative thinking, and consistently created concepts and theories from concrete situations in the global South in general and Africa in particular. Three main issues stand out. The first is how epistemology shaped modern patterns of domination and subordination within modern Euro–North American-centric internationalism. The second is how intersections of Marxism and decoloniality reinforce a robust critique of modern racial capitalism. The third is how the legacy of Amin enabled a synthesis of Marxism (democratic Marxism of the 21st century), pan-Africanism, and decolonisation (planetary decoloniality of the 21st century) to consistently challenge and oppose the dominant and current imperial/colonial/capitalist internationalism.

Утопия в новейшем западном марксизме: аномалия, надежда, наука

The article investigates the problem of utopia in actual Marxism. It is well known that Marx and Engels opposed their “scientific socialism” to “utopian so­cialism”. The followers of Marx have long supported this orthodox teaching. However, since the middle of the 20th century, Western Marxists have begun to talk about utopia as the central element of their social philosophy. Sociologist Alvin Goldner called these “anomalies”. They stood out as a separate system of critical Marxism from the theoretical system of “scientific Marxism”. The first person to write about utopia was Ernst Bloch. Then Herbert Marcuse turned to the subject. Since the early 1990’s, when it would seem that Marxism was in cri­sis due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of left-wing politics, it has been actively theorized about utopia. In addition to philosophers (Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek) various types of sociologists (Erik Olin Wright, David Harvey) begin to write about utopia. The sociologist Göran Therborn called this trend in actual Marxism “American futurism”. The author of the paper writes that left-wing sociologists and philosophers abandon the traditional understand­ing of utopia (“blueprint”) and think it through in a new way. Sociologists try to talk about utopia in terms of science (“real utopias”), while philosophers theorize utopia as a hope, a horizon of the impossible, a desire for a better future. Despite the fact that these are two different understandings of utopia, the important thing is that for recent Marxists (even “scientific” ones), utopia is one of the most im­portant categories of social theory.

A Tale of Two Marxisms: Remembering Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019)

Intended to capture the entangled history of Marxism, Alvin Gouldner’s two Marxisms also frame the intellectual biography of Erik Olin Wright. In the 1970s Wright’s Scientific and Critical Marxisms were joined, but later they came apart as each developed its own autonomous trajectory. Erik’s Scientific Marxism was the program of class analysis that first brought him international fame. Begun in graduate school, it tailed off in the last two decades of his life, when it played second fiddle to the Critical Marxism of the Real Utopias Project that Erik began in the early 1990s.

Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory’s Emancipatory Claim in relation to Karl Marx’s Claim of Emancipation

The Frankfurt School of Social Research was an offshoot of the orthodox Marxist intellectual movement. Historically, the main force that gave life to Critical Theory is undeniably Karl Marx’s impetus for emancipation, however, in its course of development Critical Theory has abandoned its initial method and the roots of its life force. Nonetheless, there remained that authentic Marxist desire to not only look at the world with philosophical criticism but to change the world in praxis. Thus, the impetus of social transformation through emancipation remained to be alive in the Critical Theory which has fully distanced itself from its foundation. The question runs in line with the historical link between the umbilical tie of Critical Theory with its mother, that is, Scientific Marxism. This question at hand is the problem of the promise of emancipation, since, historically it has been a fact that the claim for economic emancipation did not come about as predicted by Marx, thus, the critical theorists’ claim for socio-cultural emancipation must also be subjected to criticism. Hence, the big question is, “can there be any materialist ground for the viability of the emancipatory claim of critical theory?” With the long history of development of critical theory as a mode of social evaluation from the time of Horkheimer’s radical shift away from the Marxist body to the present era of new social intersubjectivity, can it provide any specific, instance, of emancipation from socio-cultural oppression in a specific society at any given time in history where any form of critical theory has been applied and have proved itself successful. If the answer is to the negative, then, it must be asked why and to what reason/s does it fall short of its promises, without prejudice to the validity of critical theory itself. If, however, this present quest is an invalid question so much that it does not apply in the manner that the first question presupposed the dilemma of emancipation, then the new question would be “how does Critical Theory wish to achieve its promise of emancipation?”

Marx’s Theory: Evolutionary or Revolutionary? An update of Gouldner’s statement on the distinction between Scientific Marxism and Critical Marxism

The purpose of this article in the field of the history of economic thought is to investigate from a scientific viewpoint whether Marx’s theory is evolutionary or revolutionary by analyzing some main texts of Marx such as The Capital, The German Ideology and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The idea to be hereby updated was first seen by this author in the book of Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxisms. Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (Gouldner, 1980). Gouldner confronts Scientific Marxism with its emphasis upon the laws of development against Critical Marxism stressing practice and critiques. This question has been addressed in some realms of non-Marxian economics as a critique of the scientific research programme of Marx and Engels. This is due to this is a fundamental Marx’s topic related to his method and to his use of dialectics in his quest for the overcoming of capitalism and ultimately for human emancipation. The result is that the ambiguity between both Marxist theories is related to the fastness of change and method, whereby Critical Marxism is nowadays more relevant. Section 1 is an introduction on the scientific problem at hand. Section 2 is about related problems. Section 3 is a brief analysis of key Marx’s texts. Section 4 updates Goldner’s insights. Section 5 gives open conclusions. References are listed at the end of the article.

Science and the Rebuilding of the “Rational Subject” in 1980s China

Throughout the history of modern and contemporary China, the concept of “science” maintains a crucial significance. Since the May Fourth period, “science” represented the advanced civilization and culture of the West. Because of its critical role, quarrels over the question of science were abundant in China in the years after the Cultural Revolution, notably in the “debates on humanism and science” ( kexue lunzheng ). Following that, scientific Marxism, which is based on natural dialectics, surpassed other discourses to become of dominated importance to the intellectual discourses of post-Mao China. Scientific Marxism was considered the highest form of truth in revolutionary China, when transcendental truth reigned supreme. Following the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals embracing scientific thought sought to locate “another science” with which to replace scientific Marxism. Addressing an understudied yet crucial aspect of 1980s intellectual history, this paper explores the central ideas and discourses of scientism in this historical moment, as well as the intellectuals who took part in its construction and controversy.

Critical Realism and the Althusserian Legacy

AbstractThis paper undertakes an historical re‐evaluation of Louis Althusser's philosophical legacy for modern Marxism. While Althusser self‐consciously sought to defend the scientific character of Marxism, many of his closest followers eventually exited the Marxian paradigm for a post‐structural post‐Marxism. We argue that this development was predominately rooted in a series of philosophical errors that proved fatal in a period of retreat for European socialism. There has always been, however, a second post‐Althusserian legacy associated with the critical realist conception of Marxism initiated by Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskar found part of his inspiration in Althusser's successful posing of the question of Marx's science and this paper sets out to excavate the proper links between Althusser and Bhaskar in order to deepen the relationship between critical realism and scientific Marxism.

History and the Traumatic Narrative of Desire and Enjoyment in Althusser

According to the common image of Althusser that circulates today, my title names everything that is missing from his work. For decades, he has mainly been known--and dismissed--for his allegedly puritanical and sterile project, principally in For Marx and Reading Capital, to elaborate theoretically rigorous Marxist science. Where in such an undertaking to attain correctness is there room for anything as referentially particular as history, as literary as narrative, or as emotionally fraught as trauma, desire, and enjoyment? Yet I contend that while these things are certainly not at the center of his theory, they are nonetheless crucial to it. Of all these topics, Althusser's relationship to history has received the most attention and generated the most controversy. His pronouncement in Reading that Marxism Is Not Historicism has often been taken to evince hostility to historical studies as whole. (1) Yet what Althusser attacks is not the study of history as such or its relevance to Marxism, but the concept of homogeneous, linear time that underlies many diverse ways of doing (2) Indeed, Althusser's critique of historicism in this special sense is also call for new historiography that would rethink historical time explicitly as function of the structure of the whole uneven social formation. (3) The importance of history to Althusser can be seen in the fact that he not only credits Marx with founding history as science, he also insists in the liminal texts of For Marx that his philosophical essays do not derive from merely erudite or speculative investigation. They are, simultaneously, interventions in definite conjuncture; Each the result of special occasion, these pieces are none the less products of the same epoch and the same history. (4) But despite this emphasis on conjunctural pressures, Althusser never delineates them very fully in his theoretical corpus, which lacks the fully elaborated historical case studies that abound in Marx. Even in the autobiographical The Future Lasts Forever, he coyly withholds any discussion of such matters, referring the reader instead to his published writings, which he then declares do not treat history inadequately: I know you are waiting for me to talk about philosophy, politics, my position within the Party, and my books, how they were received; to reveal those who liked them and those who were implacably opposed to them. But I do not intend to discuss these totally objective matters in systematic manner because the information is available to anyone who does not have it already, just by reading what I have written (a vast number of books published in many different countries.) You can however rest assured that I only ever trot out the same old themes which can be counted on the fingers of one hand. (5) To large extent, Althusser in his own practice replaces history as commonly understood with the history of the production of knowledge, attributing to Marx the claim that it takes place entirely in knowledge, in the 'head' or in 'thought.' (6) This claim is at work in surprising way in the theory of symptomatic reading, where even what is problematic in relation to knowledge is made to serve it, for symptomatic reading poses the inadequate concepts, borrowings from other theories or metaphorical formulations Althusser calls symptoms, in the texts of Marx and the Marxist tradition as sites for further conceptual work: a science only progresses, i.e., lives, by the extreme attention it pays to points where it is theoretically fragile. (7) Nor does ideology, which Althusser characterizes as unconscious, escape this extreme and cognitive fix. What Alex Callinicos wittily dubs the epistemological blues that pervade For Marx and Reading Capital consist precisely in making ideology problem of knowledge. Even after Althusser redefines ideology in more material terms as actions inserted into practices . …

From Marx to Berlusconi: Lucio Colletti and the Struggle for Scientific Marxism

This essay reviews the life and work of the Italian Marxist philosopher Lucio Colletti (1924–2001). Colletti developed theories of value, aesthetics, law, and politics that are still relevant but that have been strangely sidelined, even within Marxist discourse. In the 1970s, he was described as the most important living Italian Marxist philosopher, eclipsing even such figures as Antonio Gramsci and Galvano Della Volpe. By the 1990s, he was in the arms of Silvio Berlusconi: not so much From Rousseau to Lenin, more From Marx to Berlusconi. By contextualizing Colletti's life and work, this essay suggest reasons for his rightward political trajectory and compares and contrasts his work with that of another scientific European Marxist, Louis Althusser. Colletti and Althusser engaged in a dialogue in their lifetimes, but the legacy of their joint, if conflicting, struggles for Marxism as scientific materialism lives on in today's accelerated culture as a new depression beckons.

Roman Imperial Cosmopolitanism as a Factor for the Affirmation of the Universe of Christianity

Many religious and secular studies have already been devoted to questions concerning the Christian religion. However, even today, the problem of the origins of Christianity, the birth and formation of its doctrine, studies of the early stage of its existence remain such that they can not be considered definitively. Thus, Soviet religious studies, being held captive by Marxist "canonical" ideas about religion in general, and ideological postulates about early Christianity in particular, could operate only on a number of hypotheses, according to which, as a matter of fact, the origins of Christianity were first deduced from the social and economic phenomena. found among the slaves of the Roman Empire. Not being able to accurately reveal the theoretical sources of Christianity, Marxist science thus removed itself from the study of a whole set of factors that not only determined the emergence of Christianity itself, but also ideologically determined its entire fate.

The Althusserian moment and the concept of historical time

The period running from the late 1960s through to the 1980s is often seen as one in which theory assumed a particular importance in many areas of the humanities and social sciences. This paper focuses on the Althusserian component of this moment of theory in Britain, but it also reflects on the emergence of the form of historical understanding, and of the understanding of historical time in particular, in which such objects as ‘the moment of theory’, ‘the spirit of the age’ or ‘England in 1819’ can appear as objects of historical enquiry. The first section sketches some of the links between the Althusserian component of the British moment of theory and this broader issue, and I return to the latter in my final section. The intervening sections examine the Althusserian component more directly. After presenting Althusser's account of the concept of historical time I consider the ramifications of two features of his intervention in the realm of theory. One is that his distinction between Marxist science and the theoretical ideologies which threaten its existence cannot be sustained, and the other that, in spite of its manifest iconoclasm in certain respects, this intervention has a distinctly defensive character.

Theory-Jamming

Musical improvisation (or jam) suggested as a method of rigourous eclecticism required by the diffusion of communication theory.

Age of the law's end

This article examines the rise and fall of the Falun Gong movement in China and its subsequent rebirth abroad. To make sense of Falun Gong requires situating the movement within the social context of post-Maoist China and its appearance at a time when the space of everyday life was, and continues to be, radically transformed by market forces in the name of, paradoxically, ‘scientific Marxism’. After examining the central role a reified view of science plays in the cosmology of Falun Gong, I turn to two central paradoxes: first, how the Chinese Communist Party's suppression of Falun Gong has itself been grounded in the Party's own reification of science, and second, how what began as a micro-level response to global forces has been sustained in exile by these very same forces.

Materialism, Social Formation and Socio-Spatial Relations : an Essay in Marxist Geography

Marxist geography is a part of marxist science and as such it has the relative autonomy of the instances of the societal whole studied. These instances or the relations between instances which are the object of marxist geography are first the dialectical relation between social formations and the natural world and second the spatial dialectic between components of a social formation embedded into space or between social formations in different regions. Hence the need to refer to the concepts of mode of production and of social formation and to define and illustrate the concept of spatial dialectic and the development of contradictions in space.

To change the world we need revolutionary democracy

John Holloway's book is a remarkable essay, thought-provoking and truly radical in the original sense of the word, of 'going to the root of the problem'. Whatever its problems and weaknesses, it brings to the fore, in an impressive way, the critical and subversive power of negativity. Its aim is ambitious and topical: 'sharpening the Marxist critique of capitalism'. The key philosophical chapters of the book deal with fetishism and fetishisation. Creatively drawing on Marx, Lukacs and Adorno, Holloway defines fetishism as the separation of doing from done, and the breaking of the collective flow of doing. This is a very insightful viewpoint; but Holloway seems to identify all forms of objectivity with fetishism. For instance, he complains that, in capitalism, 'the object constituted acquires a durable identity'. Well, would a good chair produced in socialism not become 'an object with a durable identity'? His refusal to distinguish between alienation and objectivation (cf. note 22 of ch. 4) (1)--a mistake the young Lukacs did not make, in spite of his late self-criticism of 1967--leads to a denial of the objective materiality of human products. Another powerful argument is his criticism of 'scientific Marxism', i.e. those theories which attempt to enlist certainty on the side of socialism, and which claim to explain and predict historical change according to 'scientific laws'. This section is one of the most important of the book, and a significant contribution to a critical Marxist approach to politics. Among the 'scientific Marxists', Holloway includes Kautsky, Lenin's 'What is to be done?' (1902), and Rosa Luxemburg's 'Reform or Revolution?' (1899). However, he seems to ignore the latter's pamphlet on 'The Crisis of Social Democracy' (1915), which represents a radical methodological break with the doctrine of scientific certainty, thanks to a decisive new formulation: the historical alternative between 'socialism or barbarism'. This essay is a real turning point in the history of Marxism, precisely because it introduces the 'principle of uncertainty' into socialist politics. Now I come to the main bone of contention, which gives the book its title: changing the world without taking power. Holloway suggests, at first, that all attempts at revolutionary change so far have failed because they were based on the paradigm of change through winning state power. However, as he acknowledges in note 8 of p. 217, historical evidence is not enough, since all attempts to change the world without seizing power have also failed, so far. He attempts, therefore, to ground his claim on the distinction, introduced in chapter 3 but which pervades the whole book, between 'power-to'--the capacity to do things--and 'power-over'--the ability to command others to do what one wishes them to do. Revolutions, according to Holloway, should promote the first and uproot the second. I must confess that I am not persuaded by this distinction. I think that there can be no form of collective life and action of human beings without some form of 'power-over'. Let me try to explain my objections. They have to do with the idea of democracy: a concept that hardly appears in the book, or which is dismissed as a 'state-defined process of electoral influenced decision making' (p. 97). I have to disagree. I believe that democracy should be a central aspect in all processes of social and political decision-making, and particularly in a revolutionary process--an argument presented by Rosa Luxemburg in her (fraternal) critique of the Bolsheviks ('The Russian Revolution', 1918). Democracy means that the majority has power over the minority. Not absolute power: it has limits, and it has to respect the dignity of the other. But still, it has power-over. This applies to all kinds of human communities, including the Zapatista villages. For instance: in 1994, after twelve days' fighting, the Zapatistas decided to stop shooting and to negotiate a truce. …

A Marxist Critique of Marx's Theory of History: Beyond the Dichotomy between Scientific and Critical Marxism

This article argues that an application of Marxism to itself can help us transcend Gouldner's (1980) dichotomy between scientific and critical Marxism. After demonstrating that the paradigmatic document of scientific marxism, Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, turns the structural logic of capitalist economy into the basis for a transhistorical theory of social-economic development, this article explores the limitations of critical Marxism's response to scientific Marxism and concludes that a viable, not class-centered, reformulation of the emancipatory project is possible through an analysis of capitalism's “dialectic of scarcity.” The task of the emancipatory project, it is argued, is to turn humanity, and not the working class, from a political subject in itself to a political subject in and for itself.