Marx's Communist Research Articles

Beyond workplace democracy: Prefiguring non-capitalist social reproduction within Marx's communist horizon

This contribution argues that, in order to foster a more socially just and sustainable economy and society, management and organization studies need to embrace novel, alternative forms of organizing the economy and society. We first discuss how the scholarship on workplace democracy, which promotes more participatory governance in firms and cooperatives, fails to acknowledge that exploitation and dispossession are constitutive features of capitalist institutions. As these institutions need to abide by the imperative of capital accumulation, they cannot be redeemed. Instead, we propose that our social reproduction should be organized through alternative non-capitalist economic practices. We point to the key role of prefiguration in envisioning alternatives to capitalism, and plead for embedding prefiguration within a ‘communist horizon' based on the Marxist principle ‘from each according to their possibilities to each according to their needs'. We conclude with a call for bringing alternative economies to the core of management and organization studies, in view of expanding our current understanding of the economy beyond capitalism, as a means to sustain life on this planet rather than for capital accumulation.

"Legitimacy, Performance, and China's Democratic Future—Navigating between Prudential Pragmatism and Moral Idealism"

"Legitimacy, Performance, and China's Democratic Future—Navigating between Prudential Pragmatism and Moral Idealism" Gang Lin (bio) Jiwei Ci, Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019. x, 420 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0674-23818-3. During the third wave of democratization, liberal democracy gained popularity in the world. In the past decade, however, it lost momentum, leading to an arguable view of worldwide democracy decline.1 In the case of China, the quest for democracy started well before the third wave, when the first republic in Asia appeared in 1911, although the early rehearsals of representative democracy in that country were unsuccessful. What China has practiced since 1949 is socialist democracy informed by Karl Marx's communist thought but constrained by social and economic underdevelopment and an inexorable legacy of authoritarianism cohabitated uncomfortably with partial and periodical egalitarianism. The Chinese Formula (zhongguo fang'an, in the words of Xi Jinping) of democracy featured by Leninist democratic centralism and one-party leadership is at odds with universally accepted definition of democracy contributed unilaterally by Western democratic societies, where the mainstream views disregard China as a democracy, simply relegating to lip service that country's official upgrading of democracy, freedom, equality, justice, and the rule according to law as part of socialist Core Value (hexin jiazhi). The subject of Jiwei Ci's book—democracy in China—is explored with such arguable conventional wisdom. The coming crisis as the subtitle actually refers to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), rather than democratic fortune in China. Actually, the main theme of the book is why China needs a democratic change and how China can overcome the related challenges with appropriate responses. This volume demonstrates its strength in theoretic/philosophical discourse and logical reasoning, free from empirical hypothesis and verification relying on quantitative analysis. From a prudential perspective, Ci makes a strong argument in the Introduction that China is in an urgency to bring about a democratic regime complementary to its democratic society. While people may disagree on such asynchronism in China's political and social developments, Ci believes China [End Page 177] has developed a substantial degree of democracy in society based on "equality of condition," a concept used by Tocqueville in his pathbreaking book Democracy in America.2 From this viewpoint, political democratization in China is justified not so much by moral desirability as by prudential necessity for reason of institutional fittingness and governability on the part of regime. This does not suggest that the author has no normative inclination on this value-laden subject. As Ci contends at the very beginning, one extraordinary challenge to liberal democracy is its "oligarchic capture" manifested by growing "polarizing effects of globalization and digital technology" in the United States and, to a lesser degree, other advanced European countries (p. 2). However, liberal democracy, despite its drawbacks, is still better than other choices for China. This does not suggest China can easily approach such a desirable—however modest—and necessary goal. Four daunting challenges to China's democratization are presented thereafter: (1) the inexorable role of the ruling CCP, (2) the absence of a basic level of individual and societal moral maturity, (3) the weakening of the party's centripetal capacity of holding a vast country full with ethnic diversity but lacking democratic tradition, and (4) a lack of preexisted institutions to balance democracy against capitalism as well as neoliberalism. According to Ci, these daunting challenges require prudent responses. This book is divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) argues that a looming legitimation crisis calls for an urgent and prudent response. Legitimation crisis is a hot issue in the field of China studies after Mao, as by-products of reform and openness, economic inequality, social polarization, and official corruption have agitated a new legitimation crisis in China. In response to the wave of global democratization, the CCP has tried to "keep pace with the times" and perpetuate its lifespan by transforming itself from a revolutionary ruling party into a "developmental ruling party"—regaining its ruling legitimacy by building a relatively prosperous society and rejuvenating the Chinese nation. In other words, the ruling...

Marx, labour economics and the academy

Never mind the current level of business confidence: capitalism is in deep crisis. The 2008 financial collapse was caused by greedy bankers who failed to observe the traditional rules of their trade. Scathing critics of nationalisation and advocates of spectacular salaries and inexplicable bonuses, they happily accepted government bailouts, but continued to reward themselves generously. Their opposition to regulation is as great as ever, but they have joined used-car salesmen as objects of public suspicion, as one scandal follows another. Economic recovery, we are told, requires growth. What this means is more of the same that led to the crisis: the production of goods and services that people often do not need and certainly cannot afford. The result: unsustainable debt. Much of this consumption-led growth is achieved at the expense of the environment and the dwindling resources of the planet. In this dismal scenario there is a sinister subplot. Where recovery is reported it is not matched by job creation. The system wants consumers, not employees. Workers are an encumbrance, although when it cannot avoid taking them on it drives down costs by searching the globe for the cheapest, least organised labour. The social costs are enormous, alienating and compounding. They are rarely addressed by the media, which is mesmerised by the market, profit and shareholder value. The political consequences have been slow to emerge. The Arab Spring, South African township unrest and unofficial strikes, occasional riots in European cities, the fall of the Dutch government, the trial of the Icelandic prime minister and the defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy have been significant straws in the wind. The Occupy Wall Street movement has been strong-armed out of the picture for the moment, but real grassroots anger is yet to come. The last Great Depression was ultimately resolved by world war. That will not happen again, but it would be foolish to assume that business can continue as usual. In the long term this situation is untenable and seems ripe for revolution. History suggests otherwise. Capital is power, and bankers and financiers continue to rule. During his successful election campaign, French president Francois Hollande pointed out that they, not Sarkozy, were his main opponents. It's an increasingly widespread view. Yet the political left has allowed itself to retreat into hand-wringing impotence while the carnage continues. In academic corridors there is renewed interest in Marxist analysis, enough to revisit the work of the most famous occupant of the British Museum Reading Room. Karl Marx's Communist manifesto was first published in London in 1848 and its stirring opening sentence (78) proclaims: 'A spectre is haunting Europe.' Of course, he got the politics totally wrong, although he was undoubtedly correct in saying that history is an account of struggle versus domination and exploitation. In advanced economies the industrial proletariat tended to be a conservative, self-interested force, not Marx's revolutionary vanguard. This was more likely to be found amongst the peasantry or radical fractions of the middle-class intelligentsia. And when they occurred, revolutions tended to be hijacked by opportunistic authoritarians. His philosophy was not much better. The Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) he converted into dialectical materialism. But he failed to appreciate the logic that Utopia, a socialist state in Marx's view, is further subject to change unless it resorts to repression. However, Marx's economics, helped by the insights of his friend, Friedrich Engels, is both plausible and durable. Capitalism does indeed drive down wages, fail to pay people their real worth and extract the surplus to accumulate capital. Labour is dehumanised, commodified and robbed at the point of production. That this failed to produce revolution was due to the shrewd behaviour of capitalists, in Marx's lexicon 'the bourgeoisie'. …

Amnesiac Monument, Nostalgic Fashion

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Nineteenth-century residents in the foreign settlements considered their stay in the city as temporary sojourns [yuju]. For a recent study of Shanghai courtesan houses, see Liang Liang , Samuel Y. ‘Ephemeral Households, Marvelous Things: Business, Gender, and Material Culture in Flowers of Shanghai’ . Modern China 33 . 3 2007 : 377 – 418 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ‘Ephemeral Households’; for neighbourhood culture in nineteenth century Shanghai see Liang Liang , Samuel Y. . ‘High-Tech Cities and the Primitive Jungle: Visionary Urbanism in Europe and Japan of the 1960s’ . International Studies in Philosophy 36 . 2 2004 : 45 – 66 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ‘Where the courtyard meets the street’. 2. The ‘old mole’ revolution of the proletarian masses is a central idea in Marx's Communist Manifesto — see Bataille Bataille , Georges . ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Word Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist’ . Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 . Trans. Allen Stoekl et al. Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P , 1985 . 32 – 44 . [Google Scholar]. 3. It was during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 that Shui On transferred its capital from the hard-hit Hong Kong into Shanghai, whose economy was then relatively independent of the global economy. 4. Deploying architecture and urban building programmes as a means to solve social problems was a central concern of European avant-garde movements. When an architectural revolution replaces the social one, it becomes more like a play in a theme park. An example of such urban revolution is Constant's New Babylon Project (1958–1972) (and the Situationist International's unitary urbanism); see Liang Liang , Samuel Y. . ‘Where the courtyard meets the street: Spatial culture of the Li Neighborhoods, Shanghai 1870–1900’ . Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67.4 (forthcoming Dec. 2008) . [Google Scholar], ‘High-Tech Cities’. 5. This spatial restructuring of Shanghai can be seen within the big picture of recent developments in ‘world cities’ such as London and New York (eg see King King , Anthony D. Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the Twenty-First Century Metropolis . London : Macmillan , 1996 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The kind of global ethos which Shanghai now clearly represents is not unique and is, in some sense, characteristic of the modernisation of cosmopolitan urban nodes of capitalist economy. (For pointing this out, I am indebted to the editor Suman Gupta.) 6. Except for Figure 11, all pictures were taken by the author in the summers of 2006 and 2007.

Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (review)

Reviewed by: Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes Matthew Rebhorn Martin Puchner . Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Translation/Transnation Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 320, illustrated. $60.00 (Hb); $22.95 (Pb). Although neither "theatre" nor "performance" occur in the title of Martin Puchner's expansive and refreshingly clear Poetry of the Revolution, this work, nevertheless, provides valuable insights into the study of theatre and performance, as well as their relation to modernism, by resuscitating one of the brashest and yet most under-theorized modern genres: the manifesto. Using Marx's Manifesto as a springboard into a compelling historicization of both theatre and modernism, Poetry provocatively cuts in two directions at once. It opens up the field of theatre studies by insisting on the animating tension between theatricality and performativity in the manifestos of the avant-garde, even as it complicates the study of literary modernism by rereading its origins and its avant-garde manifestos as inherently theatrical texts. By underscoring the formal rather than doctrinal aspects of what Puchner calls "manifesto art" (6), Poetry dynamically recasts the shape and reach of the manifesto, and of avant-garde modernism, by placing theatre and performance at their very core. The entire argument of Poetry hinges on Puchner's adroit and convincing demonstration of the theatrical and performative under-currents shaping Marx's Communist Manifesto. Puchner argues that the core of the Manifesto's power lies both in its assumption of a communal power that does not exist and in its rousing call to enact that power: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" In Puchner's terms, these manoeuvres spring from the Manifesto's "theatricality," the way it both envisions and sets the stage for the future, and from its "performativity," the way it brings the reader to the point of enacting that communal power. Although Puchner sketches a pre-history of the Manifesto pointing back to the English Revolution and Protestant Reformation, he convincingly demonstrates that it was, in fact, Marx's combination of theatricality and performativity that provided the spark for all subsequent iterations of manifesto art. Poetry thus complicates Mary Ann Caws's suggestion in her Manifesto: A Century of Isms (2000) that manifesto art only begins in the twentieth century, and by tracing the development of manifesto art from The Communist Manifesto to The Drama Review, the book also substantially expands on Marjorie Perloff's The Futurist Moment (1986). Furthermore, by tracing the publication history of the Manifesto throughout Europe, North and South America, and Asia, Puchner enlarges both its historical context and its geographic scope—ultimately making a case for manifesto art being a new kind of "world literature." [End Page 465] As with his analysis of Marx, Puchner is at his best when he offers reassessments of crucial theoretical mainstays. In a subtle re-evaluation of Austin's How to Do Things with Words, for instance, Puchner suggests that while revolutionary manifestos fail to have the "perlocutionary effects" that Austin emphasizes, they are, nevertheless, theatrical in assuming the power of speech acts, thus making the history of modernism in many ways a history of the manifestation of the theatrical power that Austin dismisses. Returning to this argument in Part Four, Puchner also offers a trenchant analysis of Artaud's manifesto of the "theatre of cruelty"; its notorious failure to be borne out in performance paradoxically reveals how infused the theatre is with manifestos that (like Marx's) failed to "perform" their revolutions. While filled with dazzling theoretical insights, the bulk of Poetry is devoted to an extensive genealogy of the avant-gardes and their varied reactions to the theatrical qualities of the manifesto. In Part Two, Puchner dwells on the ultra-nationalism of those avant-gardes, revealing how Marinetti's futurist "manifesto art" made porous the "membrane" separating art from politics (79). In a reading of Lewis's vorticist play, Enemy of the Stars, Puchner systematically unpacks how vorticism, while a reaction against Marinetti's fascistic manifesto, nevertheless was animated by the same tensions between theatricality and performativity. Love it or loathe it, Puchner argues, the manifesto's foundational energy, shuttling between the theatrical imagining of...

Ethical Concerns Related to Medical Genetics

KEYWORDS Bioethics. Genetic Technology. Cloning. Embryo Research. Genetic Determinism ABSTRACT great biochemist Erwin Chargaff, who discovered the parity theory of the DNA bases, once made a critical remark on the newly developed discipline of bioethics: A fashion is going around the world, the fashion of bioethics. All the powers have entered into a holy hypocritical alliance with this fashion. With this remark, a parody of the first two sentences of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, Chargaff intended to point out the weakness of bioethics. Despite his skeptical views of bioethics, there are experts who discuss activities of biotechnology and grant the approval to the result of its research, including the bioethicists from genetic engineering companies like Monsanto and Movartis. Present article is an attempt to look into some relevant issues of genetics and ethics that defy our solution, especially with reference to the third world societies.

Review: Communists on Education and Culture

Many will consider this a strange work in so far as communism appears to be a long spent force from the standpoint of the twenty-first century. However, Morgan's book is one of history. He invites us to consider the thinking and the works of a chosen group of communists in their times and in their different contexts. His book is written for the general reader rather than the academic specialist. Morgan looks at the period between 1848 and 1948. The beginning of the period is marked by the publication of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.

The Dialectical Structure of Marx's Concept of ‘Revolution in Permanence’

This article argues that while the limitations of Hegel's political reconciliation with existing reality has long been evident, the depth of Marx's challenge to capital cannot be fully comprehended, let alone restated for today, without a re-encounter with Marx's rootedness in and transcendence of Hegel's concept of absolute negativity. The need to go beyond critiques of private property and the market by projecting ground for the negation of capital creates a compulsion to return to Hegel at his most ‘abstract’ level—the Absolute. THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY of Marx's Communist Manifesto last year seemed to have brought with it a shock of recognition concerning the timeliness of Marx's critique of existing capitalism. For some, the Manifesto's discussion of the relentless drive of capital for self-expansion makes it ‘the most concise and thrilling account of a process that creates havoc in the contemporary world, the inexorable pressure of globalization.’ For others, the Manifesto's description of ‘a class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital,’ makes it the best ‘characterization of capitalism at the end of the 20th century currently available.’

Marx and Utopia: A Critique of the “Orthodox” View

AbstractThe predominant view of Marx's communist society is that it is a form of Utopia in which there is complete social harmony, with no private space for individuals, no conflicts, and no politics. The author argues that this “orthodox” view is a misreading of Marx's works, especially of certain key early works. According to his interpretation, in Marx's communist society there is private space, private/particular interests, controversy, politics, and rights. The author discusses the major theoretical/ methodological errors of the “orthodox” interpretation, such as interpreting key statements by Marx at the wrong level of generality.

Tensions from technology in Marx's communist society

Tensions from technology in Marx's communist society

Marx's Vision of communism a reconstruction

Recognition of the trends and their meaning has led to a renewed interest in Karl Marx's vision of the communist society. Marx construed his vision of communism out of the human and technological possibilities visible in his time, given the priorities that would be adopted by a new socialist society. The programs introduced by a victorious working class to deal with the problems left by the old society and the revolution would unleash a social dynamic whose general results, Marx believed, could be charted beforehand. Marx's communist society is in the anomalous position of being, at one and the same time, the most famous of Utopias and among the least known. The proletariat's victory is not completed with the revolution, but must be fought over and won again with all those leftovers of the old society whose hostility impairs the process of social reconstruction.

"Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto," by D. A. Drennan

"Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto," by D. A. Drennan