Marxist Tradition Research Articles

On Cohen’s Critique of Technology and Social Justice

It is supposed that to be just in society is the intrinsic pursuit of Marxist theory in Marx’s original text. While as the result of historical context, according to Marx, the just society can be realized in a far future. Cohen holds materialism standpoint to illustrate historical materialism creatively by functional explanation in the modern history context. In a new time with much more advanced science and technology, he is keeping going with the route of Marxism for overcoming the technique alienation and argues that in order to realize freedom, equality and justice, appealing to empirical critique of technology and exploration of social theory is essential. The demonstration of that freedom, equality and justice are compatible, which is a cornerstone of practical just social theory. As Cohen is in the analytical tradition, his creative functional explanation presents obvious empiricism and analytical character. He digs out the key of resolving problem of development in moral dimension apart from the materialism, and conducts the argument to attack the political designs, which separates free distribution in market, quality in society, and just spirit from each other. This essay is intended to figure out Cohen’s argument that is based on the traditional Marxism and stand, while points out a new way to help people reach the just society at the much more near future.

ДЕГРАДАЦИЯ СОВЕТСКОГО МАРКСИЗМА НА ПРИМЕРЕ ФИЛОСОФИИ И МЕТОДОЛОГИИ ИСТОРИИ ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ XX ВЕКА

In the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet humanities faced crisis of their philosophical foundations — the materialist understanding of history. In epistemological terms, it was caused by the discovered heuristic limits of the abstract-universal materialist theory, which describes the general in the development of reality but eliminates all the diversity of the particular in it. Over time, there emerged two interrelated trends within this crisis — the gradual formulation of the concrete-universal theory, which describes both the general and (in a generalized form) the whole diversity of the particular in development, and the degradation of the abstract-universal theory. The disintegration of the abstract-universal theory has become the dominant trend. It manifested itself in the fact that, recognizing that the general provisions of materialism were true in principle, most Soviet authors began to depart from them when analyzing specific historical phenomena. It was concluded that in a particular situation, social being does not always determine social consciousness, the basis does not always determine the superstructure, material production does not always determine political life and culture. At the same time, there was a rejection of dialectics, an integral part of Marxism. The opinion was often expressed about the equivalence of opposites in their unity and relativity of those parties that were recognized as absolute in traditional Marxism. Such theoretical conclusions resulted in the rejection of historical materialism and transition of the overwhelming majority of the national humanities representatives to the positions of pre-marxist and non-classical philosophy.

A Textbook and Its Author: The Pre-Revolutionary Russian Tradition and Soviet Innovations in Nikolay M. Nikolsky’s Work

In this paper, the author analyses Professor N. M. Nikolsky’s 1933 school textbook on ancient history. Nikolsky introduced a number of interesting innovations in his work uncharacteristic of scholarship of the time. He was able to combine the pre-revolutionary school tradition and elements of Marxism. Equally, the textbook matched the level of historical scholarship of the first third of the twentieth century. Nikolsky’s innovations were almost completely rejected in the 1930s because of the replacement of the pre-revolutionary Marxist tradition with Soviet Marxism. As a result, his contribution to the renewal of the national system of teaching ancient history has been underestimated. Many of his ideas were not unpromising, but simply unfinished. This essay discusses the rivalry between N. M. Nikolsky and V. V. Struve, which the former lost.

MODE OF PRODUCTION IN FISHERMEN COMMUNITY: CASE STUDY OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SHIP OWNER AND LABOUR OF FISHERMEN IN PULAU BAAI AREA, BENGKULU CITY

Modernization in catch fisheries sector by mean machinary application for fishing could be devided into some phases. Every phases showed some production relation between the ship owners and their labours. In the Marxist tradition of thought, the study about these relationship could be gained by elaborate the mode of production. For more specific, this study were elaboratethe mode of production in every phases of modernization. Mode of production consisted force of production and relation of production. In this context, force of production was mean of production like ships, net and seine. While relation of production wasthe organization of fishermen, power and control by the owners to their labours. The study was conducted by using qualitative method so depth interviewed of some key informants had been main method in collecting datas. The results of the study indicated that fisheries modernization in research area held into four phases. We called them as period oflancang, trawl, bagan, and purseseine. Further more, the mode of production in every phases as follow namely, lancang was subsistence production, trawl was commercialist production, and bagan was commercialist production. While purseseine had has two mode of production, namely commercialist production for Bengkulu’s owner and capitalist production for Chinese’s owner.Keywords : mode of production, Pulau Baai, Lancang, Trawl, Bagan, and Purse Seine.

Soviet Marxism and the Self-Consciousness of Russian Philosophy

Did the Soviet period in the history of the national philosophy turn into a failure in the intellectual tradition, a time without serious research activity, when philosophy only catered for the needs of ideology without yielding any fundamental results in the humanities? The author of the article tries to answer this question; her thoughts are based on two books devoted to a landmark event in the history of Soviet philosophy, the so-called case of epistemologists. The discussion makes it possible to oppose the ideology-ridden pseudophilosophy for the development of the Marxist tradition by young philosophers who began their professional career in the early 1950s at the Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow State University and the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In her article, by considering the example of E.V. Ilyenkov’s creative work, the author shows that the Soviet reception of Marxism, which emerged in the second half of the 1950s and is referred to as the thaw in Soviet philosophy, gave rise to a number of concepts and ideas that followed the lead of the world’s philosophical endeavors of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Comment: India's Development Projects, or Hinduism, a Love Story

Martin J. Haigh's India Abroad is ill-informed and misleading in multiple ways. It presents a romanticized view of ‘Indian’ culture and, what the author calls, Hindu or Hinduism. The article represents misreading of post-colonial praxis, and in turn, post-colonial comradery. Post-colonialism, as an intellectual movement, examines the impact of colonialism on the cultures of colonizing and colonized people. Post-colonialists, sometimes drawing upon Marxian traditions, have mapped exploitative and dependent relations between the metropolitan and colonial societies (Gregory et al. 2009, Blaut 1993). Post-colonial theorists tend to be sensitive to the political implications of the ways the history and cultures of colonial societies are represented. And I bring up post-colonial theory precisely because this post-colonial call to sensitivity, that the author highlights by citing Kumar (2005) has morphed into romanticization and celebration of this category called Hindu, and in turn India, in very problematic ways. In what follows, I highlight how the author's attraction to cultural relativism obfuscates social contradictions and a history of exploitation in India.

Para uma compreensão materialista histórica e dialética do conceito de classe: uma retomada das obras clássicas de Marx e Engels e das produções de E.P. Thompson

Classe Social é um dos principais conceitos na tradição marxista e um dos conceitos chave das Ciências Sociais. A relevância deste para a análise das identidades e sociedades contemporâneas é atualmente debatida e problematizada, ganhando destaque no debate entre marxistas e pós-marxistas, assim como na suposta emergência de uma “nova classe média brasileira” a partir dos “Anos Lula” (2003-2011). Este artigo busca contribuir para a qualificação deste debate na medida em que retoma noção de classe social dentro da tradição marxista, explicitando diferentes tratamentos deste conceito nas obras de Marx e Engels e mobilizando o historiador inglês E. P. Thompson para exemplificar como um membro de uma abordagem “materialista histórica” da tradição marxista continuou a mobilizar e dar sentido ao conceito de classe social.

On the Labour Theory of Value in Marx and in the Marxist Tradition

1. Sraffa's work has succeeded in bringing again to light the approach to distribution and value which was that of the English classical economists up to Ricardo and which had been subsequently ‘su...

АНАРХИСТСКАЯ ОНТОЛОГИЯ ТЕЛА: МЕЖДУ УГНЕТЕНИЕМ И СВОБОДОЙ

This article focuses on the outlines and specificity of the anarchist ontology of the body from the libertarian perspective, which is opposed to the Marxist tradition, on the one hand, and to the traditions of the right-wing discourse on the other hand. Within the context of the mentioned issues, the article attempts to reinterpret such phenomena as oppression, emancipation, body and subjectivity. Thus, it makes possible the reflection about the basic emancipation practices, which already exist in culture (for example, the ‘body positivity’ concept). In order to identify an optimal way to elaborate the specified issues, the article performs the inter-discourse analysis of the body philosophy in general (basing on Y. Mishima’s essay Sun and Steel , which conceptually constitutes a contrasting background for clarifying libertarian conceptions).

Interpellation, Counterinterpellation, and Education

In a recent essay in Rethinking Marxism, as part of a special issue on the legacy of Louis Althusser’s thinking, Tyson E. Lewis takes up Althusser’s thinking on schooling, trade unionism, and seminars to delimit the concepts of interpellation, counterinterpellation, and disinterpellation respectively. While Lewis’s work is a crucial first step for understanding the little-known contours of Althusserian pedagogical theory, he does not elaborate key theoretical work done on the concept of counterinterpellation, namely that of the Marxist philosopher of language Jean-Jacques Lercecle. Engaging with Lecercle’s work deepens Lewis’s novel argument around the newly-coined term disinterpellation, which he distinguishes as fundamentally educational, as opposed to interpellation and counterinterpellation, which he calls forms of political activism. If one considers Lecercle’s derivation of the concept, Lewis’s characterization of disinterpellation as educational and counterinterpellation as political activism changes somewhat, and broaches fundamental questions for Marxist educational theory. In this essay - which is a comment on Lewis’s important step towards Althusserian pedagogical theory - I will present Lecercle’s account of counterinterpellation, setting this concept within the larger context of Althusserian philosophy. I then respond to the equivalence Lewis draws between counterinterpellation and interpellation to advocate disinterpellation as a model for Marxist educational theory and practice, a move which poses two important questions for critical educational theory in the Marxist tradition: Is there a forceless force within what both Gramsci and Althusser called balance of forces of the political terrain, and must education be that forceless force? I show these questions and their implications have important theoretical consequences for Marxist educational theory and practice in general, and the specific theory and practice Lewis advocates.

A teologia de Marx explicada às crianças

A doutrina de Marx pode ser entendida como uma sobreposição de quatro camadas de pensamento. 1) Um interessante, embrionário, materialismo prático, secularizado, moderno, que demanda recuperação e desenvolvimento em nossos dias em diálogo com aquisições da filosofia prática contemporânea. 2) Um materialismo histórico, lamentavelmente esquemático, dualista, determinista, cripto-normativo, com todo jeito de filosofia idealista da história, do qual sua crítica do capitalismo, luta de classes etc., é o capitulo decisivo - um materialismo que poderia ter sido uma melhor conversão de Hegel para fora do idealismo e da metafísica. 3) Um humanismo especulativo, do ser-genérico, que assume a critica feuerbachiana do cristianismo como seu pressuposto/fundamento, junto como o próprio cristianismo (especulativa, feuerbachianamente traduzido), e que toma como medida e telos a plena reunificação da sociedade como verdadeiro corpo político. Esse humanismo, para desespero dos que percebem sua debilidade, v.g. Althusser, nunca é abandonado por Marx nem pelos marxistas tradicionais, embora seja desenvolvido por Marx, na crítica da economia politica, como “determinação pelo nível essencial”, efetivamente social, mascarada, por trás de uma “aparência real” onde toda liberdade e particularidade é ilusão. Aqui nos ocuparemos principalmente do ponto três.

Marx’s influence on Brazilian social work

This article discusses the influence of Marx and the Marxist tradition on contemporary Brazilian social work. Marx’s method of political economy is a central element in understanding the professional ethical-political project that has been fostered since the late 1960s, known in Brazil as the Reconceptualization Movement. Finally, the article points to the challenges of this perspective for the current situation.

Rethinking Value, Labour and Class in critical OS through the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism

This article addresses the growing interest in value as a topic of inquiry in critically oriented organisation studies by generating new key resources for its understanding, analysis and investigation derived from the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism’s reinterpretations of Marx’s critique of political economy. After reviewing the three most influential Marxist traditions in critical organisation studies – Labour Process Theory, postoperaismo and paleo-Marxism – with particular attention to the relation between value and labour, we advance the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism as offering an alternative conceptualization of such relation that overcomes key critiques to these three traditions. This conceptualization is distinguished by its focus on how the classed relations of production specific to capitalist society assume market-mediated social forms in the sphere of circulation. We conclude by suggesting a number of areas across which this strand of Marxist theorising can help grant new analytical and political resources to existing and future research on contemporary work and economic life as well as its alternatives.

Kritische Pädagogik nach Marx

Critical pedagogy after Marx Western Marxism, the New Marxist Reading and Educational Connections The article attempts to bring together variants of German pedagogical Marx reception and three central historical readings of Marx’s theory. After an overview of the interpretations of Traditional Marxism, Western Marxism, and the Neue Marx-Lektüre, it is shown that the pedagogical reception is predominantly connected with Western Marxism. It is argued that perspectives of a critical pedagogy that takes up insights from the currently popular reading of the Neue Marx-Lektüre are yet to be developed. Some apparently crucial aspects are discussed in this respect.

Cornelius Castoriadis on the Scope and Content of Neoclassical and Marxian Economics

:The paper presents the thought of the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis on economic methodology and the neoclassical and Marxian traditions. Castoriadis suggested that the scope of economic theory includes the identification of “local” regularities and not the search for invariant “laws.” He criticized the use of equilibrium and the utilitarian framework in the neoclassical tradition and proposed to approach human agency based on the Aristotelian concept of the “social individual.” In addition, he criticized the deterministic nature of the Marxian “laws.” According to Castoriadis, the use of concepts such as the “production function” and “capital” presents a number of caveats.

Their Dialectics and Ours

This paper chronicles a “missed connection” between the young Herbert Marcuse and his American contemporary, the philosopher Sidney Hook, and finds an unexpected complementarity in their efforts to reinvigorate the Marxist tradition against the backdrop of Stalinism. It examines the two philosophers’ first exchange in the early 1940s, by which time Hook had abandoned both his political and intellectual radicalism. Finally, it shows that the terms of Hook’s objection to Marcuse’s critical theory prefigured the tradtional left’s resistance to Marxist-humanism following the dissemination of Marx’s early manuscripts two decades later.

Law, Marxism and Method

Law is crucial to the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism. While Marx never produced a comprehensive theory of law, state and rights, there is much in his work, and in the broader Marxist tradition, that can help us understand the nature and role of law in contemporary capitalism. This paper sketches out some of the key resources from within the Marxist tradition that can assist us in developing Marxist understandings of law, state and rights today. Specifically, the focus is on the question of method, drawing out three key strands from Marx's own work: (i) the importance of dialectical materialist analysis; (ii) the historically specific and transitory nature of capitalism and (iii) the centrality of class antagonism and class struggle. The argument advanced here, in sum, is that Marxist explanations of law, state and rights should foreground these analytical reference points, in order to make the role of law intelligible, and to begin to sketch how movements for fundamental social change might understand and engage with the law.

The Continuing Relevance of the Marxist Tradition for Transcending Capitalism

No idea is more closely associated with Marx than the claim that the intrinsic, contradictory dynamics of capitalism ultimately lead to its self-destruction while simultaneously creating conditions favourable for a revolutionary rupture needed to create an emancipatory alternative in which the control by the capitalist class of investments and production is displaced by radical economic democracy. Marx’s formulation of a theory of transcending capitalism is unsatisfactory for two main reasons: 1) the dynamics of capitalism may generate great harms, but they do not inherently make capitalism unsustainable nor do they generate the structural foundations of a collective actor with a capacity to overthrow capitalism; 2) the vision of a system-level rupture with capitalism is not a plausible strategy replacing capitalism by a democratic-egalitarian economic system. Nevertheless, there are four central propositions anchored in the Marxist tradition that remain essential for understanding the possibility of transcending capitalism: 1. Capitalism obstructs the realization of conditions for human flourishing. 2. Another world is possible. 3. Capitalism’s dynamics are intrinsically contradictory. 4. Emancipatory transformation requires popular mobilization and struggle. These four propositions can underwrite a strategic vision of eroding the dominance of capitalism by building democratic-egalitarian economic relations within the contradictory spaces of capitalism.

“We have been thrown away”: surplus people projects and the logics of waste

ABSTRACTThis essay considers discourses of waste that include humans among the objects of discard: surplus/disposable populations in the Marxian tradition, or what Zygmunt Bauman has called “human waste.” Notions of “surplus people” have a long history in South Africa, and this essay traces a genealogy of their narrative and cultural forms. These forms can alternately mask and expose the “indispensable dispensab[ility]” of vulnerable communities treated as waste: devastated, depleted, discarded, disregarded. I situate the blockbuster film District 9 within a longer tradition of documenting the plight of people who recognise that they have been “thrown away,” in texts by Solomon T. Plaatje, Cosmas Desmond, Nadine Gordimer, and others. Attending to questions of geographic and temporal scale, I read between the historical example of South African apartheid and “global apartheid” as shorthand for the stratifications effected by neoliberal globalisation. How do these formations attend to the ideological violence, racial specificity, and enforced invisibility of surplus? This exclusion from the polity works through acts of un-imagining: in moments of crisis when they are pushed to the brink, the poor may have no recourse to the ethical and political grounds upon which they might claim the right to survival.

DE LA CRITIQUE DU PRESENT AUX POSSIBILITES DANS L’HISTOIRE: A PROPOS DE L’ ONTOLOGIE DU NON-ENCORE-ETRE DANS LA PENSEE D’ERNST BLOCH

Ernst Bloch's The Principle Hope [de Prinzip Hoffnung] (1954-1959) in the context of the twentieth century emerges as a theoretical work not interior of the Marxist tradition whose central objective is an interpretation and update of the utopias that mark the history of culture: an inheritance intact. As a work of historical memory, such a thought refuses to play such as is what is forgetfulness. However, in different categories of argument, a denial of all extreme pessimism as to the possibilities for historical transformation - and which is current to the concept of utopia - lies in the theorizing of what the author calls the ontology of the still-not-being, that is , from a philosophical debate about external reality. In his most important work - text that enters into the index of Marxist orthodoxy - a constant passage from anthropology and psychology to ontology is observed, so as to think of the being of subjectivity as much as it is of the work, as well as the dialectical relations between them. In this hermeneutics of utopias we see a reflection arise in which the philosophical primacy is not the being, but the still-not-being. From this perspective, we may think that Ernst Bloch's philosophy is utopian as a theory of the still-non-existent being. An ontology of the still non-being, object of the present reflection, is presented as one of the central themes in The Hope Principle.