Marx's Work Research Articles

Reification as Ecological Critique

In Kohei Saito's ecological Marxism, reification explains how formal economic categories lead to ecological crisis. Saito, however, lacks an account of praxis; of the collective political agency capable of overcoming reification. The relationship between reification and praxis was a central motif of Georg Lukács’ early Marxist work. An integrated concept of reification could then fill this gap in Saito's theory, thereby illuminating the political transition towards ecosocialism. Further, by resolving the ambiguous status of “nature” in Lukács critical theory, which currently blocks the possibility of such a conceptual integration, the critique of reification can be extended to the natural sciences.

SCIENTIFIC LIFE

Objective: The objective of this study is to clarify the unity between science and human life. Thereby clarifying that science is a product of human life. Science becomes a commodity in trade to make money. This study aims to contribute to clarifying the difference between creativity and scientific instinct. Methods: To achieve the above-stated goals, this study uses a qualitative method. In particular, the content of this research is reviewed and analyzed from human science. In addition, the subject accesses documents mainly from Karl Marx's complete works and academic articles referring to human life. Results: Examining human life as directly related to science reveals several important findings. First, science takes the methodology from the history of philosophy and mathematics as scientific instinct. Second, true science is closely related to human life, that is creativity in science, this is the most basic characteristic of true science. Third, creativity in science becomes a scientific commodity, making the products of science have a money instinct. In human life, science becomes a money instinct. Conclusion: Science is human life. Human life is expressed in different professions and job positions. Different job positions have different abilities and needs. One person's ability is another person's need. Satisfying ability is creativity. The creation of life is science. That is scientific life. Science separated from life becomes metaphysical theory and pure reason. Pure reason becomes a cognitive methodology, making science strange. All perception depends on pure reason, making the rest of life an aspiration and an ideal that is foreign to real life.

The Contradiction between Use-Value and Exchange-Value: Ecology, Imperialism, and the Telos of Production

This article elaborates and defends a critique of capitalism which, despite its appearance in various bodies of work, has not been named or systematically differentiated. The critique locates a contradiction between production for use-value and production for exchange-value, or a contradiction in what we call "the telos of production." While maintaining that it has some basis in Marx's work, we defend this model as preferable to the critique of capitalism based strictly on the exploitation of labor (which we call the "exploitation-exclusive critique"). We attempt to show this by applying the two approaches to the empirical realities of the ecological crisis and ongoing imperialist relations. It is not necessary, however, to abandon the critique of exploitation, or various other criticisms of the capitalist system: we claim that the telos of production critique is the most general diagnosis of capitalism and is capable of incorporating the other major critiques.

Beyond the Binary of Race and Class: A Marxist Humanist Perspective

Abstract The emergence of a new generation of antiracist activists and theorists seeking to advance an anticapitalist agenda creates a new vantage point for re-examining how racism relates to the logic of capital. This essay explores sources in the work of Marx, twentieth-century Marxists, and Frantz Fanon that can provide direction for overcoming the binary of class and race.

Domination, social norms, and the idea of an emancipatory interest

Domination, social norms, and the idea of an emancipatory interest

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

ПОГЛЯД НА ПРИРОДУ І СЕНС ЛЮДСЬКОГО ІСНУВАННЯ У КИТАЄЗОВАНОМУ МАРКСИЗМІ

B a c k g r o u n d . Sinicized Marxism involves the utilization of Marxist theory to address issues specific to China and the transformation of China's rich practical experience into theory, combined with Chinese history and traditional culture. This can be observed in the context of the exploration of philosophical-anthropological issues. M e t h o d s . The key methods employed to address the outlined tasks were comparative and dialectical. The use of the comparative method allowed for the identification of commonalities and differences in the understanding of the human problem in Western European and contemporary Chinese philosophy. The inclusion of the dialectical method helped reveal contradictions in the explication of the nature and meaning of human existence by various contemporary Chinese thinkers. R e s u l t s . It has been found that contemporary Chinese thinkers perceive a dichotomy in human nature–social and natural. Considering not only Karl Marx's works but also those of other Western philosophers, particularly Immanuel Kant, Marxist philosophers in China emphasize the social component of human nature, which is crucial to individuality. C o n c l u s i o n s . It is argued that Sinicized Marxism, like its Soviet counterpart, also incorporates the concept of the "new man" whose life's purpose is to exist exclusively based on the principles and values of Marxist philosophy. The formation and functioning of this concept are influenced by extensive discussions regarding the role of humans in history. Sinicized Marxism emphasizes that each individual, living in society, pursues their own specific values and, guided by them, acts to achieve their realization. Although these goals and actions are diverse, varied, and contradictory, there is a common essence underlying this mass of individual goals and actions. Accordingly, contemporary Chinese thinkers assert that within a specific historical society, people are integrated independently of their will and desire into a unique system of material relations that constitutes their social existence. As a result, they are in a certain way connected within each formation and with the means of production. Production relations organize people, stimulate their activities, generate certain relationships and dependencies among social groups. Common interests, reflected in consciousness, more or less consciously, unite people, motivating them to strive for the realization of certain social goals. The thesis is substantiated that although Sinicized Marxism emphasizes the social goal of human life, it also encompasses considerations about the existential aspect, manifested in living for self-improvement and for the sake of others.

A Study of Marx's Thoughts on Beauty

In Marx's works, "the way of mastering art" and other expressions about beauty are mentioned. Do these expressions mean that Marx thinks about human existence, human comprehensive development and human liberation from the anthropological intention of beauty? In this paper, Marx's knowledge formation track is investigated from Marx's learning experience from middle school to university and life experience in his youth, tracing the ancient Greek origin of Marx's aesthetic tendency, citing Marx's image data in the eyes of western scholars, and analyzing the implication of Marx's thought on beauty.

The Paris Commune and Karl Marx's Le capital

Few books on political economy have become as influential as Capital, volume 1. After Karl Marx, in 1867, published the first volume of Capital on the capitalist mode of production, the book was published again in Russian in 1872, in a second German edition in 1872–3 and in French—as Le capital—in 1872–5. The publishing process of the French edition started in December 1871 in the wake of the Paris Commune. This article aims to investigate the conditions that led to the initiation of this process. We specifically argue that by looking at the Paris Commune and its aftermath, we are in a better position to understand the new possibilities it created for publishing Marx's work in French, the connections it facilitated, and the way it shaped the publishing process of Le capital.

Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility by Kōjin Karatani, and: Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson, and: Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism by Thomas Nail, and: Transgender Marxism ed. by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke

Reviewed by: Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibilityby Kōjin Karatani, and: Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Traditionby Cedric J. Robinson, and: Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxismby Thomas Nail, and: Transgender Marxismed. by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke Matthew Bost Kōjin Karatani, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility. Trans. Gavin Walker. London: Verso Books, 2020. 160 pp. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 3rdEd. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 429 pp. Thomas Nail, Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 247 pp. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke, eds. Transgender Marxism. London: Pluto Press, 2021. 305 pp. In the conclusion to "What is an Author?" Michel Foucault singles out Karl Marx as one example of an "uncommon kind of author" whose name is not merely attached to a set of texts, a system of belief or a scientific discipline. Whereas these more common forms of authorship treat the author of a text or theory as an originary point that can be imitated, challenged, or discredited, Marx functions instead as someone who produces a set of "rules for the formation of other texts" that render his thinking internally heterogeneous, "creat[ing] a possibility for […] texts, concepts and hypotheses" that differ from Marx's while nonetheless belonging to the discursive field he founded. This sense of internal heterogeneity prompts a continual "return to origin" on the part of those indebted to Marx, a "reexamination of Marx's [texts]" that "modifies Marxism" by re-performing it from new perspectives and in new historical conjunctures, while retaining Marx's relevance as the proper name attached to an evolving logic of practices. One can find examples of this heterogeneity in Marx's continual revision of [End Page 268]his theories throughout his own life, from his immanent critique of philosophy to his working-through of the failure of the 1848 revolutions, his turn to political economy, and his late grappling with the Paris Commune. Insights like Foucault's have also grounded a robust tradition of conceptually focused re-readings of Marx that emphasize the internal heterogeneity of his thought. These readings include, at a minimum, Louis Althusser's diagnosis of an "epistemological break" between an earlier humanist and later materialist Marx, Jean-François Lyotard's pluralization of Marx into a swarm of desires and affects, Jacques Derrida's interrogation of the ambivalent specters haunting Marx's work, Thomas Kemple's and Charles Barbour's engagement with Marx's criticism of other authors as a form of rhetorical invention, and Barbour's reading of Marx's texts in The Marx Machineas a fragmentary collection of conceptual machines, "disassembled in a manner that opens onto innumerable possible assemblages" outside the circumstances of their composition. Finally, the power of continual returns to Marx has been felt every time his work has been re-performed in a new political context, from the debates in the various Internationals, to those who used Marx's work as a standpoint from which to critique the USSR and other "actually existing socialisms." It also extends to the ways that Marx's work has been a resource for anti-colonial politics, traditions of Black radicalism and Indigenous resistance, feminist and queer analyses of reproductive labor and sexuality under capitalism, and recent discussions of communicative and platform capitalism, tendencies discussed respectively by Vijay Prashad, Robin D.G. Kelley, Glen Sean Coulthard, Silvia Federici, Kevin Floyd, and Nick Snricek, to name just a few. This brief sketch indicates the vast resources that have emerged from thinking through Marx's differences and breaks with himself, from re-signifying his concepts, and from subjecting him to immanent critique that points out the partiality of his perspective while maintaining the radical horizon of his work. It also prompts more specific questions that might guide future scholarly and political uses of Marx's work: What rhetorical or critical moves have accompanied the return(s) to origin Foucault discusses? What can these moves tell us about useful ways to place Marx's texts in conversation with new perspectives and contexts? And...

The Development Course of Karl Marx's National Concept

The formation of Marx's national concept has roughly gone through three different stages of development, namely the initial exploration stage of Marx's national concept, or the budding period. This historical period focuses on the basic viewpoints on nationality and related issues in Marx's classic works. The theoretical establishment stage of Marx's view of the nation, focusing on the analysis of Marx's more mature national theory than the infancy stage on the basis of analyzing the reality of social revolution and the revolutionary development of different countries; Marx's deepening research stage on national issues in his later years , in-depth study of Marx's "Summary of Morgan's "Ancient Society" and Engels' "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" on the theory of national issues. In each development stage, Marx's classic works are used as the research basis and classification standard, and they are placed in the social environment and the background of the times in which Marx lived to investigate and analyze, and strive to reflect and interpret Marx's main views on ethnic issues in this historical period.

Labor and Botmäßigkeit: Marx’s Duel with the Liberal Tradition

The tradition of Liberalism has been at odds with a Marxist analysis of society since Marx's own critique of bourgeois society as early as his writing of The Poverty of Philosophy. However, there remains a piece of conceptual scaffolding often unscathed in its deconstruction: Sovereignty. In this article, the problematization of a Marxian critique of Sovereignty, as a form of abstract right, is analyzed in order to illuminate Marx's conceptual and perhaps linguistic struggle with the German term The Poverty of Philosophy. We see this struggle most clearly in his chapter on ‘The Labour and the Valorization Process' in The Poverty of Philosophy, and in this article, we undertake a painstaking close reading of a central passage in The Poverty of Philosophy to then relate it to the complete body of Marx's work. Ultimately, by investigating Marx's complicated use of The Poverty of Philosophy, we will be able to differentiate the political dimension of Marx's labor process from the Liberal tradition. In doing this, we will show the inadequacy of the Liberal tradition to ground a theory of subjectivity in nature and in human society, and reveal Marx’s desire to reconcile the relation between the human society and nature through the labor process.

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Afterword: Some Illustrations

Afterword: Some Illustrations

The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy

Reviewed by: The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy Lydia Heiss The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. Pp. vii + 345. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1-64014-046-2. The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century sheds light on current thematic and form-based developments in German-language short story writing and fills the void created by a lack of recent academic publications on the genre. Fifteen years lie between its publication in 2020 and that of the most recent edition of Leonie Marx's important theoretical work Die deutsche Kurzgeschichte. But what exactly constitutes a short story? This is a central issue the volume seeks to address. One of the masters of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe, defined the short [End Page 396] story in his famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) as a story to be read continuously without interruption achieving a "unique or single effect" (61). The editors of the volume, Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy, unfold their central thesis that the short story form is ever-changing and elusive in terms of a fixed definition. Instead, they advocate for a flexible framework for future research, in which any critical approach—be it thematic, form-focused, or based on a certain theoretical perspective—must be specifically tailored to the author, text, or collection at hand. Concerning the German-language short story, the matter of genre definition is further complicated historically and methodologically by terminology, i.e., the difference between Erzählung and Kurzgeschichte, and the delimitation against other German short prose genres like the Novelle. Furthermore, in the twenty-first century, the World Wide Web and digital media have especially impacted the creation and distribution of short stories. The contributions to the volume are grouped into three sections and address form, function, and theme in the works of both well-known and up-and-coming contemporary authors. The theme-centered part of the first section begins with Katharina Gerstenberger's reflections on the "odd" hybrid genre of Berlin short stories, which takes city literature's primary focus on place and blends it with the short story's focus on plot. The second contribution with thematic emphasis by Todd Herzog explores the close link between Poe's definition of the short story and S. S. van Dine's definition of the detective story and stresses the innovative aspect of short crime fiction. The first section's form-centered part presents the short story as a performative, ambiguous, and subjective genre with a tendency toward the political. Emily Spiers highlights that especially its "dialogic" quality and "fragmentary form" are what make the short story performative (51). Kate Roy's contribution focuses on the shortest form of short story writing, the short-short, stating that its extreme brevity underlines the importance of the implicated and the unsaid. Helmut Schmitz closes out the second part of the first section with his reflections on similarities and differences between the German Novelle and the American short story. The second section comprises eight author-focused essays. In the first contribution on well-known writer Clemens Meyer, Gillian Pye detects a lack of academic attention to his short fiction despite his many prizes and wide press coverage. By showing how it is precisely Judith Hermann's sometimes criticized minimalistic style that makes the reader's own reality "present" (139), Leonhard Herrmann presents more recent works of Hermann as underrated by critics. Heide Kunzelmann expands on Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig's tendency toward open-endedness, moments of crisis, and the uncanny in the Western capitalist world and highlights how he makes the disoriented reader complicit in their construction. Through the example of Swiss author Peter Stamm's publication of his collected short stories, Andrew Plowman explores different approaches to collections, their self-reflexivity and construction. Heike Bartel and [End Page 397] Elizabeth Boa investigate the work of Ulrike Almut Sandig and Sylvia Bovenschen. They find that in the digital age, a time of acceleration, these authors use...

Charles Mills’s Radicalism

This paper revisits an aspect of Charles Mills’s work that is usually overlooked, namely, his early engagement with the tradition of analytical Marxism, particularly in From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003). This collection of essays is important not only because it marks Mills’s intellectual trajectory, but also because, as I aim to show in the following, it allows us to trace the source of Mills’s radicalism. I argue that Mills’s radicalism locates the causal source of social change in the material conditions of oppression. I then show how this analysis of Mills’s radicalism can help in clarifying his critique of ideal theory and his insistence on the importance of nonideal theory. I end by considering the relation between class and racial oppression in Mills’s early Marxist work.

The Concept of Alienation in Marx's Early Works: A Historical Approach

Tarihsel kökeni insanlığın kendisi kadar eski olan yabancılaşma kavramı, hem antik çağda hem de modern çağda birçok filozof tarafından farklı şekillerde yorumlanmış ve birçok toplum tarafından da tarihin farklı dönemlerinde farklı anlamlarda kullanılmıştır. Eski Ahit’ten, Roma hukukuna hatta Fransız devriminin düşünsel temellerini atan Rousseau’ya kadar geniş bir literatüre sahip olan yabancılaşma, felsefi olarak ilk kez Hegel tarafından ele alınmıştır. Marx ise erken dönem eserlerinde yabancılaşmayı sınıfsal ilişkilerin bir sonucu olarak yorumlamıştır. Marx’ın bu yorumu, kavramın günümüzdeki kullanımının temellerini oluşturmuştur. Bu çalışmada, öncelikle yabancılaşma kavramının etimolojik kökeni ve tarihsel gelişimi incelenmiş daha sonra kavramın modern felsefedeki gelişimi incelenmiştir. Son olarak kavramın tarihsel gelişim süreciyle Marx’ın erken dönem eserlerindeki yabancılaşma kavramı karşılaştırılmış ve aradaki benzerlikler ortaya konulmuştur.

E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles, eds. The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity

E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles, eds. <i>The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity</i>

Thinking as an Engelsian

In this essay, I address the question of how Marxism influences our thought and action as radical intellectuals by focusing on Friedrich Engels’ work, Dialectics of Nature, the way it has been taken up in critical environmental studies and how Engels’ thinking has influenced me. In later life, Engels made important contributions on topics that are distinct from Marx's economic work. He attempted to apply dialectical methods to the “natural sciences” and he also used his knowledge of anthropology to produce a study of the historical origins of private property and women's oppression. In both cases he has been accused of adopting a positivist approach that lacks the emphasis on human agency found in Marx. Here, I challenge this view by showing how Engels’ work has been of use to practicing scientists – particularly to Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in their book The Dialectical Biologist. I further argue that this understanding of dialectics is fully commensurable and actually advances an approach to Marxism that is based on human self-emancipation. As an undergraduate biology student these scientists inspired me with their approach to their subject as well as their activism. The essay concludes with some brief thoughts on the importance and limitations of adopting a Marxist method when considering socio-environmental change.