Marxist Terms Research Articles

Is All Mental Harm Equal? The Importance of Discussing Civilian War Trauma from a Socio-Economic Legal Framework’s Perspective

Abstract In recent years, international law scholars have discussed how civilian mental harm in warfare should also form part of the jus in bello proportionality principle and be balanced to the anticipated military advantage. Yet, these scholars have not proceeded one step further to examine whether socio-economic parameters shaping the individual’s personality, such as education, family ties or the level of income, should be also taken into account as varying variables in this balancing task. This is particularly important given that the particular parameters are tied to the socio-economics rights discourse and the relevant minimal living standards notion developed there. Based on a study we conducted, the article explores whether civilian mental harm should be affected by socio-economic parameters and what this means for the wider role socio-economic rights can play in armed conflicts as well as for the reading of jus in bello along Marxist terms.

Tactics and Principles: A Contribution to Dobrogeanu-Gherea’s Interpretation of Anarchism with Reference to ‘Legal Socialism’

Abstract Early socialism from the second half of 19th century Romania is experiencing a systematic comeback among historians and social scientists. The works of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, the founding father of Romanian Marxism, occupy a central place in this newfound attention towards the origins and struggles of socialism in Romania. This paper addresses Gherea’s interpretation of anarchism on par with his doctrine of ‘legal socialism’. Its purpose is to prove how anarchism acts as a more than tactical catalyzer for legal socialism, placing the latter not necessarily on a new ideological perspective, but further on the terrain of Romanian political status-quo of late 19th and early 20th century Romania. Although more principled than tactical, Gherea’s repudiation of anarchism in progressively unsubstantial Marxist terms has also led to tactical shortcomings. This was the case of the first Romanian socialist party, which was dissolved and absorbed after only six years of existence within the ascending liberal party.

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.

Education as economic stimulus in the human capital century

PurposeThis paper explores the economic and social effects of human capital investment in the 20th century. As well as drawing on census data and statistical yearbooks in Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the paper develops its argument by an intersection of scholarly work in sociology, economics and the history of education to consider the effects of increased human capital investment on economic growth but also on the experiences of childhood, work discipline and the present climate crisis.Design/methodology/approachThis paper considers the implications of what economic historian Claudia Goldin has described as the “human capital century” for the history of school and university education. By reconsidering education in the settler colonies, especially Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, as “stimulus”, this helps explain key aspects of contemporary human capital investment, which the paper argues should be understood as constituted by children's and young people's free labour at school, university and across the economy.FindingsThis research argues that children's and young people's free labour, performed in educational institutions, constitutes a large portion of Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand's national investment in human capital. At key points, this investment has acted as an economic stimulus, promoting surges of profitability. The effects were not confined to young people. Systematised, educational expansion also became the foundation of environmental degradation, labour market exploitation and a relentless increase in service-sector productivity that is worn on professional bodies. Productivity increases have been associated with reduced professional autonomy as a managerial class coerced professionals into working harder, though often under the guise of working “smarter” – a fiction that encouraged or coerced even greater personal investment in collective human capital. This investment of personal time, effort and selfhood by children and the professionals they grew into can thus be seen, in Marxian terms, as a crucial vector of capitalist exploitation in the 20th century.Practical implicationsThe paper concludes by suggesting that a reduction of managerial influence in educational settings would improve learner and professional autonomy with improved labour and environmental conditions.Originality/valueThe paper makes a unique contribution to the history of education by exploring education as stimulus as a key component of education’s role in 20th and 21st century capitalism. It interrogates exploitative aspects of human capital investment, especially in the midst of environmental catastrophe and the recent COVID crisis.

THE TRUE HISTORY AND LEGAL MEANING OF COLONIALISM IN THE HOLY LAND: THE 2042 B.C.E. PROJECT

One of the most inexplicable uses of certain Marxist terms, such as colonialism, imperialism and settler-colonialism is with regard to the State of Israel, a frequent target of Marxists, and ethnic Jews, the descendants of the indigenous people of the modern State of Israel, who are often referred to as Zionists. Though there are no logical connections between the policies and acts of the State of Israel or Israeli citizens, on the one hand, and the complaints of Marxists regarding domestic American strife and discrimination, on the other hand, that has not stopped Israel from being a prominent target of Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter. In fact, anti-Israel activism, and castigating Israel as a settler-colonialist entity, have become central planks of the Black Lives Matter movement and even radical American politicians such as Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Because Marxist terms are now being weaponized in ways that are utterly at odds with the history and meanings of these terms, and those weaponizing the terms allege that they have legal import in questions as to the legitimacy of the State of Israel, this article will explore the most frequently used terms and how such terms have been historically applied in various situations. After providing definitions for the terms, this article will apply these terms to the history of the Jewish claim to Israel to determine whether there is any basis for theories of colonialism, imperialism and settler-colonialism being applicable to Israel and Zionism. Finally, the history of those who make competing claims to the land, including Palestinian Arabs and Muslims generally, will be reviewed to determine whether these parties are more properly characterized as colonialists, imperialists, or settler-colonialists. The purpose of this article is not to present a Marxist point of view about the three terms, colonialism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism; rather, this article intends to take a legal view of these non-legal terms to determine whether the terms should have any legal effect vis a vis the rights of people to self-determination and also to examine the internal consistency of the use of these terms by Marxist activists and Marxist scholars across different peoples and states.

Rossi-Landi e il pragmatismo

As already emerges in his 1961 book, Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune, Rossi-Landi reflects on sign and language relatedly to the American tradition in pragmatism from Peirce to Morris (he published a monograph on Morris in 1953). He also recovers the contribution made by Giovanni Vailati, who was among the first in Italy to recognize the importance of Peirce’s pragmatism. Through Peircean pragmatism, Rossi-Landi oriented his work from the very beginning in the direction of a semiotics of interpretation in contrast to a semiotics – or better semiology in this case – of the code, of decodification. His “philosophical methodics” continues to be characterized in terms of “pragmatism,” from his works of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, 1968, and Semiotica e ideologia, 1972), to his last book Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni (1985, the year of his death), in which recovering Wittgenstein he reconsiders the question of the “traps of language” in the Marxian terms of “linguistic alienation.”

Digging Walden’s Soil with Marxist Tools: A Study on Thoreau’s Walden

The nineteenth century saw industrialization become a significant force in the United State of America, just as in much of the developed world, and with these new developments, the so-called new Eden started to face the corruption of modern life. With mechanization came the speed-up associated with capitalist production, and alongside this speed-up came ideas of the corruption of society with the evils it bears: wealth and avarice, degradation of human values, and general indifference to nature and one's self. Some movements of the century, such as philosophical Transcendentalism and the Utopian Societies, can be understood as nascent reactions to this increasingly corrupted system. Henry David Thoreau, one of the most prominent writers of Transcendentalism, was also a very influential figure and critic in terms of social life and politics. He rebelled against institutions of every kind: church, state, social convention, inherited tradition, and indeed even eschewed society itself, turning his back on it to spend two years in the natural isolation of a wood-built cabin by Walden Pond. Like his contemporary, philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx, Thoreau believed that there was a connection between social justice and political economy. He was a daring fighter against particular modes of capitalism, religious organizations he saw as oppressive, and the coercive actions of an unfair state; he was also an ardent advocate for the abolition of slavery and for the emancipation of African Americans. This article argues that, to a great extent, even though Thoreau cannot be called a Marxist, Walden was an experiment in building an idealistic world in which with no class division, no religion, no ownership similar to a Marxist utopia in microcosm. Thus, Thoreau emerges as a revolutionist, and in his microcosm; Thoreau had no rules, no social division, or no private property. Much as, the language they use is quite different and Thoreau does not use Marxist terms, the similar themes they explore in their works cannot be underestimated. Hence, the aim, here, is to cultivate Walden's soil and unearth the connections between Marxist philosophy, in particular, The Communist Manifesto and Thoreau's Walden. While the paper considers Walden as a whole, the focus is primarily on the first chapter of the book, "Economy" and the ideas presented in this chapter are compared with those in the pithiest expression of Marx's political program The Communist Manifesto.

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Roman Rosdolsky, and the making of history

E.H.Carr and Isaac Deutscher were by any measure the two most important left-wing historians working in Britain during the Cold War. Their work not only led to both to being attacked by both conservatives and liberals at the time. They also found themselves subject in 1963 to a powerful broadside authored by Roman Rosdolsky, the Ukrainian Marxist now living in the USA. In his attack Rosdolsky berated the two together for failing to explain in Marxist terms the role (or otherwise) played by 'accident' and the 'individual' in history. This article examines the Carr-Deutscher relationship, what united and what divided them, and why they found themselves subject to Rosdolsky's detailed critique.

Broadening the Collective Turn in Marketing: From Consumer Collectives to Consumption Agencements

Broadening the Collective Turn in Marketing: From Consumer Collectives to Consumption Agencements

Химическая теория флогистона в культурной экономике огня: от Просвещения к современности

The article focuses on how the chemical concept of phlogiston functions in the so-called economy of fire from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, in view of a shift in “pyropolitics” (politics of fire) in their relation to the economic paradigms (cameralism, industrial capitalism, postindustrial digital economy), and theories of chemical flame processes (phlogistics, oxygen theory,theory of detonation and deflagration). The phlogiston concept is explored as the key substantial notion of the phlogictic chemical theory of the Enlightenment (regarded also as a natural “cameralistic science” in terms of metallurgy), the epistemological metaphor of ignorance in nineteenth-century Marxist discourse. Phlogiston circulates in the economics of fire discourse as a signifier for surplus value (and some other Marxist terms). “Fire as equivalent to money” becomes, in petropolitical studies, a means for turning petropolitics into pyropolitics with the radical metaphor of “PyroGaia” (Nigel Clark) in the Anthropocene period.

Factories Against the Clock: Time-discipline and Resistance in the Silk Reeling Factories of Bursa 1850-1915

What can the study of different regimes of time discipline in factories and deviations in their measurement tell us about the relationship between capital, labour and the state authority in the Ottoman Empire? In this article, I will answer this question by analysing the official letters and petitions of the Bursa Silk workers to explore how “watchless” people understand and negotiate new time patterns emerged from mechanized production. I argue that the mechanized factory production did not result in a clock-measured, regular working day up until the early twentieth century in silk factories of Bursa. These irregular labor patterns, however, cannot be explained by the immature scale of the industry or lack of labor rationalization. The answer lies at the heart of the working day: such irregularity enabled employers to increase, to say it in Marxist terms, the absolute surplus value. Furthermore, I will argue that the demand for regimented work hours came not from the capitalists, and it was not the Ottoman government`s top-down reforms. Rather, the demand to curb all-invading, irregular work hours came from the young female laborers who were deemed the least “time-conscious”. In this light, the story of Bursa decenters the male-dominated view in the global history of economy and labour and adds nuance to our understanding of the temporalities of capitalism.

Introduction

The scholars who present their work here in this Special Issue on Writing Through Things: Past and Broken Things were invited to contribute their research in the form of a traditional article or creative work that explores the fission between the arena of the mind and the concrete, tangible things of the world around us; to explore that ‘unexplored world’ of ‘memory, emotion, and untapped creativity’ (Pollack, 2011: 230). The events of 2020, lockdowns and self-isolating, meant that we were, perhaps more than ever, surrounded by our own things, offering an opportunity to see these things differently and maybe more clearly. Bill Brown explains that “the work being done… under thing theory is addressing how it is that the inanimate object world helps to form and transform human beings. Part of that is to say: how does our material environment shape us?” (Brown, 2012). We, as writers and researchers, are concerned with that which forms and transforms us and the world around us. These catalysts of formation and transformation can be people, experiences, landscapes, and sometimes they can be the seemingly everyday objects that surround us. As Brown points out, the things that impact on us do not have to be those of ‘economic value in Marxist terms’; they can be ‘small things’ of ‘symbolic value’ (Brown, 2012).

There’s a riot goin’ on

ABSTRACT In this paper we take up the concept of the ‘chorus’ as explored by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In that book, Hartman imagines the chorus as a collective expression of resistance and survival – the sound of many voices speaking out and speaking up. We argue that the concept of the chorus can be understood in Marxist terms as an expression of surplus population, and as such, is always provoking crisis. We consider surplus populations in relation to three historic moments of upheaval and resistance, and the representation of these events (or lack thereof): the riot of Black girls at the Bedford Hills Reformatory in 1919; cafeteria riots led by trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people in the 1950s and 1960s in California; and the 2004 Palm Island riot that irrupted in the wake of the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In each case, the riots (and their expression in the form of a chorus) responded directly to aggressive policing and the violence of the state. These riots are not merely about responding to the violence of policing but also about defending that irreducible and generative excess that might variously be described as Blackness, queerness, and Indigeneity.

The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire by Thomas T. Allsen, and: Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art by Roxann Prazniak

Reviewed by: The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire by Thomas T. Allsen, and: Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art by Roxann Prazniak Jennifer Purtle The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire by Thomas T. Allsen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 230. $45.00 hardcover, $44.95 e-book. Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art by Roxann Prazniak. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 287. $80.00 hardcover, $30.00 paper. As narratives of globalization multiply, scholars and authors of popular nonfiction alike have increasingly turned their attention to the study of the Mongols and their Eurasian empire to understand the premodern processes of this phenomenon. Indebted to Janet Abu-Lughod’s seminal work, which identifies the Mongol empire as one of eight zones of transmission within a thirteenth-century world system, two books of 2019 embody the different methods current in the study of the Mongol empire.1 After World War II, European and North American [End Page 328] programs in Mongolian studies emphasized philology and linguistic facility in the languages both of the Mongol empire and also of the secondary scholarship written about it. Thomas Allsen’s posthumously published work exemplifies scholarship of this type. However, a newer mode of Mongol-empire scholarship is emerging in which authors— including some who are not expert in even one premodern language of the Mongol empire—write historical narratives across the span of the Mongol khanates based mainly on secondary literature and translations of primary sources. The research foundation of such works has greater affinities to popular nonfiction than to academic scholarship. Roxann Prazniak’s book utilizes this latter approach. Different as they are in working method and philological foundation, both Allsen’s The Steppe and the Sea and Prazniak’s Sudden Appearances make visual and material culture central to their narratives of political and economic history. Given the polyglot nature of the Mongol empire, the transmission of images, objects, and people played a significant role in establishing cultural continuity among geographically discontinuous lands outside the framework of language; such movement underpins the narratives of both books. Beyond a shared general interest in how mobility shaped the Mongol empire, Allsen acknowledges that “informal conversations” with Prazniak on Yuan-dynasty empress portraits that depict pearl jewelry and pearl-adorned boqtaq (Mon., headdresses) precipitated his project (p. 231); correspondingly, Prazniak notes Allsen’s engagement with her research (p. ix). These portraits, such as an untitled portrait of Čabi (Ch. Chabi 察必; 1225–1281), consort of Qubilai Khan (Ch. Hubilie han 忽必烈 汗; 1215–1294, r. 1260–1294), indeed figure prominently in both books (Allsen, pp. 52–55; Prazniak, pp. 177–94). The Steppe and the Sea has two main parts. The first, “From the Sea to the Steppe,” traces in eight chapters the mechanisms by which pearls entered new physical and cultural contexts. These chapters first establish contemporary and historical lexicons for describing and analyzing pearls (chap. 1). Then they consider means of acquiring pearls, from pearl hunting (chap. 2) to gifting, commodity trading, tribute paying, and forcible seizure (chap. 3). Allsen documents the amassing and stockpiling of pearls (chap. 4). His narrative subsequently transitions from pearl acquisition to structures of their value (chaps. 5, 6), including their symbolic value (chap. 7) as well as their [End Page 329] significance and circulation after the disintegration of the Mongol empire (chap. 8). Whereas part 1 principally addresses what might in classic Marxist materialist terms be considered the productive forces involved in the “making” of pearls as a commodity in the Mongol empire, part 2, “Comparisons and Influence,” subsequently addresses in six chapters what in similar Marxist terms would be the social and technical relations of production. Put more simply: part 1 follows the logic of production, including the production of value, and part 2 addresses topics that bear upon consumption. Part 2 begins with price and pricing (chap. 9) as well as marketing (chap. 10), then it extends the discussion to market substitutes and competition from fakes (chap. 11). Consumption is also analyzed in relation to routes of distribution (chap. 12) and the economic outcomes shaped by...

Production et distraction. L'imaginaire moderne entre le travail et le spectacle

If production is the material axis of industrial revolutions, the spectacle is its intangible basis. At the beginning (second half of the 18th century), in Marxian terms, it was a superstructure used to feed and justify the structure. However, it quickly becomes the pulsating heart of modern societies. This is where the modern collective imagination really develops: mass culture. The cultural industry thus takes shape on the social body so as to spontaneously attach it to the order in force and, at the same time, to resemble it as much as possible. It also becomes a battlefield, the terrain where tactics of daily resistance to production are deployed.

The Political Unconscious in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations

This paper aims to explore three Victorian novels, namely Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) bringing together Marxist and postcolonial theories. While some novels written in the Victorian era deal with imperialism and the colonized overtly, in these three novels, the colonies and the colonized are dealt with indirectly as if only in-passing. However, these in-passing references are very significant because they constitute the recurrent silences, gaps, and absences in these texts, which has critical implications. In Marxist terms, it is history that haunts these texts in these gaps and silences, which means that these Victorian novels are inevitably related to Britain’s imperial history and its ideologies. What is given repeatedly at the margins or gaps of these texts demonstrates the obsessive return of the issue of colonialism though the texts seek to repress it. Exploring the return of the colonial repressed in the gaps and silences of these novels by focusing on Fredric Jameson’s conception of the political unconscious, this paper argues that these novels have twofold function: while expressing the deep-seated anxieties, fears and desires of the Victorian society by projecting them onto the non-white others, they contribute to shape a certain understanding of the colonized other and also a certain sense of national identity.

"She Was My Kind of Scientist"

In the late 1960s, the North American women's liberation movement was reaching a highpoint of activity, its militancy complemented by a flourishing literature. This was the environment into which Margaret Benston's 1969 Monthly Review essay, "The Political Economy of Women's Liberation," struck like a lightning bolt. At the time, many in the movement were describing women's situation in terms of sociological roles, functions, and structures—reproduction, socialization, psychology, sexuality, and the like. In contrast, Benston proposed an analysis in Marxist terms of women's unpaid labor in the family household. In this way, she definitively shifted the framework for discussion of women's oppression onto the terrain of Marxist political economy.

La contradicción entre capitalismo y democracia: hacia una nueva perspectiva emancipatoria

Vários autores ao longo das últimas décadas consolidaram uma forte "crítica democrática" do marxismo. Neste artigo vamos nos concentrar nos trabalhos de Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe, de um lado, e Axel Honneth, de outro, que questionam o marxismo a partir de perspectivas que buscam reconstruir a reorganização das relações sociais que emergem com a modernidade, a "revolução democrática" e o direito moderno. Nosso objetivo é mostrar que a teoria da derivação estatal de Antoine Artous permite reformular, em termos marxistas, a contradição entre capitalismo e democracia. Isso, ao mesmo tempo, reconstruiria os processos de extensão dos direitos na modernidade e abriria um projeto anticapitalista não totalizante, diferente do que chamaremos de "concepção orgânica" da emancipação. Como nosso trabalho é principalmente teórico, nossa metodologia será a interpretação de textos e o confronto de hipóteses de leitura.

Super-exploitation of Adivasi Migrant Workers: The Political Economy of Migration from Southern Rajasthan to Gujarat

This article offers a political economy account of labour migration of Adivasi workers from southern Rajasthan to growth centres in Gujarat. It unpacks the structural forces that shape this labour mobility, which erupted only as recently as 30 years back. The article focuses on three industries that are key employers of migrant workers—construction, textile as well as small hotels and restaurants in the Gujarati cities of Ahmedabad and Surat. It presents evidence on labour market segmentation and resulting unequal wage distribution between migrants in this corridor by their social group. This is complemented by an extensive mapping of the informal practices that violate applicable legal provisions found in these industry segments. Through these, the article teases out the mechanisms by which the community undergoes what in Marxian terms are referred to as surplus extraction and super-exploitation. The article finds that Gujarat’s economy utilizes the historically low socio-economic position of Adivasis for capitalist accumulation, such that the community’s poverty and disadvantaged position is reproduced inter-generationally, instead of being interrupted by their employment in the growth centres of the state. JEL: O15, J61, N35