Materialist Framework Research Articles

Revolutionary leadership and pedagogical praxis: revisiting the legacy of Che Guevara

This essay describes the pedagogical foundations of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's revolutionary praxis, situating Che within a redemptive model of educational leadership. Guevarian leadership is articulated within an historical materialist framework in an attempt to present a model of educational leadership that can address the resistance to and transformation of global capitalist social relations and the IMF/World Bank consortia of finance capital.

Socialist Geography in England: J. F. Horrabin and a Workers' Economic and Political Geography

This paper examines the life and geographical writings of the English socialist J.F.(“Frank”) Horrabin (1884–1962) and his attempts to construct a socialist geography. Horrabin was an active socialist in the Labour Party, Fabian Society, and other leftwing groups and very involved in working‐class education through the Plebs League and National Council of Labour Colleges. He was also a journalist, cartoonist, and gifted cartographer. His 1923 text An Outline of Economic Geography, which sold in large numbers and was translated into nine other languages, attempted to provide workers with an account of economic (and political and historical) geography that used bourgeois “pure geography” but put it within a socialist and historical–materialist framework. Unlike Germany and some other countries, England did not have a strong Marxist theoretical tradition, and Horrabin's approach does not develop theory (though it did attract the admiration of the German Marxist Karl Wittfogel). Rather, it sets out to be engaged in practical political education. Horrabin's work was developed within a particular context, but his geographical writings (and pioneering political cartography) exemplify one way of linking geography with political practice, and this paper examines these relationships. Many of Horrabin's concerns find echoes in current radical geography, and his work deserves belated recognition and a place in the history of geography.

WOMEN, MARGINALITY AND THE ZULU STATE: WOMEN'S INSTITUTIONS AND POWER IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

For a number of years the historiography of Southern Africa has been dominated by a materialist framework that has focused upon modes of production and forms of socio-political organization as the determining factors in historical change. Those historians concerned with the history of women in pre-colonial societies – even those who have privileged gender relations in their analyses – have largely been content to construct women's history by applying the insights of socio-economic and political analyses of the past to gender dynamics, and by projecting the insights of anthropological analyses of present gender relations into the past. Some of these historians have concluded that until the arrival of capitalism no substantial changes in the situations, power or status of women took place within Zulu society, even during the period of systemic transformation known as the mfecane in the early nineteenth century.More recently, Zulu gender history has become part of a larger debate connected to the changing political and academic milieu in South Africa. Representatives of a revived Africanist tradition have criticized materialist historians for writing Zulu history from an outsider's perspective and of focusing overly on conflict and power imbalances within the nineteenth-century kingdom in an effort to discredit contemporary Zulu nationalism. To counter this, historian Simon Maphalala has stressed the harmony of nineteenth-century Zulu society, the power advisors exercised in state government, and the lack of internal conflict. Maphalala also claims that women's subordinate role in society ‘did not cause any dissatisfaction among them’, and argues that ‘[women] accepted their position and were contented’. In recent constitutional debates many South African intellectuals including members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (CONTRALESA), invoked this ‘benign patriarchy’ model of pre-colonial gender relations to oppose the adoption of gender-equality provisions in the new constitution. As Cherryl Walker has noted, the hegemonic definition of traditional gender relations to which such figures have made rhetorical appeals often masks not only the historicity of these relations but also hides dissenting opinions (often demarcated along gender lines) as to what those relations are and have been.

A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson.

Gregory Bateson was one of the most original social scientists of this century. He is widely known as author of key ideas used in family therapy - including the well-known condition called 'double bind' . He was also one of the most influential figures in cultural anthropology. In the decade before his death in 1980 Bateson turned toward a consideration of ecology. Standard ecology concentrates on an ecosystem's biomass and on energy budgets supporting life. Bateson came to the conclusion that understanding ecological organization requires a complete switch in scientific perspective. He reasoned that ecological phenomena must be explained primarily through patterns of information and that only through perceiving these informational patterns will we uncover the elusive unity, or integration, of ecosystems. Bateson believed that relying upon the materialist framework of knowledge dominant in ecological science will deepen errors of interpretation and, in the end, promote eco-crisis. He saw recursive patterns of communication as the basis of order in both natural and human domains. He conducted his investigation first in small-scale social settings; then among octopus, otters, and dolphins. Later he took these investigations to the broader setting of evolutionary analysis and developed a framework of thinking he called 'an ecology of mind.' Finally, his inquiry included an ecology of mind in ecological settings - a recursive epistemology. This is the first study of the whole range of Bateson's ecological thought - a comprehensive presentaionof Bateson's matrix of ideas. Drawing on unpublished letters and papers, Harries-Jones clarifies themes scattered throughout Bateson's own writings, revealing the conceptual consistency inherent in Bateson's position, and elaborating ways in which he pioneered aspects of late twentieth-century thought.

On Moral Equivalency and Cold War History

The controversies over the “National History Standards” and the Smithsonian's abortive effort to mount a fiftieth anniversary exhibit on the decision to drop the atomic bomb, along with insights drawn from the opening of former Soviet and Eastern European archives, highlight the “moral equivalency” debate being waged over the writing and teaching of Cold War history. Gaddis suggests the need for historians to rethink some of their academic approaches to this subject, using a moral as opposed to a materialist framework.

The Rose of Babylon: Walter Benjamin, Film Theory, and the Technology of Memory

The intellectual limitations of an age are nowhere more evident than in the agreement they produce between opposite views. In every intellectual situation, certain things become almost impossible to believe, almost impossible to understand, while others become almost impossible to avoid. Indeed, without a strict critical consciousness of the prejudices which command language long before we arrive and begin to set its machinery in motion, the most significant possibilities for opposition in our views are always mysteriously taken away. The recent reception of Walter Benjamin is an instructive case in point. I would certainly concede that his work is most complex and difficult to isolate within the confines of one particular viewpoint, but this concession only highlights the suspicions aroused by recent scholarship on him in the Englishspeaking world. There are areas of agreement which belie the apparent differences of approach, often contradict the avowed central purpose and even disrupt the scholarly arguments of important studies on Benjamin. This is clearly illustrated in two books by well-known and authoritative figures published respectively in 1981 and 1982: Terry Eagleton's Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, and Walter Benjamin: an Aesthetic of Redemption by Richard Wolin. These men differ very sharply in their estimation of Benjamin's ideological value. Wolin regrets the long period when Benjamin worked within a historical materialist framework, whose concerns, his book

Labouring Men: Love, Sex and Strife

Studies of gender and studies of the labour process are incomplete unless they take each other seriously. This article explores the interrelations between class situation and experience, paid work, the family-household, masculinity and male heterosexuality as they are borne and reproduced by labouring men. Against the psycho logisation of the 'men's liberationists' this article insists on the salience of structure. It suggests that the working class, of which labouring men are a small part, can be understood in its strategic power and weaknesses only through the study of the whole lives of its members, changing and changed by each other as they stand in contradiction to capital, its forces and agencies. The article is based on personal accounts by about forty labouring men. It relies on and attempts to draw together within an historical materialist framework insights from the sociologies of the labour process and the working class, studies of masculinity and Marxist feminism.

Existentialism and Feminism: the Rhetoric of Biology in the Second Sex

For a feminist today The Second Sex is in many ways a deeply embarrassing document: a pioneering study of women's oppression which apparently relies entirely for its emancipatory impact on Sartre's philosophy. Feminist theorists have long criticised Sartrean existentialism for its inherent anti-feminism. How then does Beauvoir carry off her feminist project? Does she really manage to transform existentialist discourse into a rhetoric of liberation or do we have to reject The Second Sex as an awkward reminder of the inevitable limitations of a feminist analysis conducted in isolation, without the support of a broad political movement? Beauvoir's analysis of the oppression of women in The Second Sex is based on two fundamental principles: (1) Woman in patriarchal society is defined as man's Other. She is immanence (passivity, objectification) and he is transcendence (activity, striving, subject-being). (2) There is no such thing as a female nature, no essence of womanhood. All theories of the 'ewig Weibliche' or 'eternel feminin' are patriarchal mystifications. As it stands Beauvoir's analysis would seem to be entirely under the sway of Sartrean ontology. But although it is true that she never exp/icity distances herself from his abstract idealism, already the introduction to her essay demonstrates her swerve away from his master text Being and Nothingness. Already in her opening pages Beauvoir can be seen surreptitiously trying to tack a form of materialism on to Sartre's tragic ontology. There is a specific reason for this move: Beauvoir needs a materialist framework for her theory of woman as the Other in order to avoid the absurd conclusion that all

Outside the Domestic Labor Debate: Towards a Theory of Modes of Human Reproduction

The concept of 'modes of human reproduction' posited at the same conceptual level as 'modes of production' offers the most viable materialist framework for understanding sexual asymmetry both historically and in different social formations of the present day.

The plains truth: The impact of colonialism on Indian women

Somewhere between fact and fancy, between competing perspectives and interpretations, lies the truth. No extreme position can totally reflect the data, but neither does interpretation collapse into relativism. In these pages I have noted that as Plains society became increasingly enmeshed in production for the fur trade, a simple yet significant degree of specialization of labor emerged, forged along traditional lines. Women were precluded from contributing to hunting, a situation fostered by the effects of the horse on their foraging economy. Private property relations both resulted from and compounded this situation by assuring men a degree of control over distribution, exchange, and production unknown in the previous century. The result was the relative decline in the position of women. An historical materialist framework succeeds here. In adopting it we avoid outlining the problem in a one-dimensional way by interpreting homeostatic function and conflict diachronically. Most significantly, historical materialism does not present the problem in a simplistic (either functionalism/or conflict theory) framework, but rather seeks to argue from the former to the latter via an examination of the relations of production. In tribal society, unlike class society, relations between the sexes do not lend themselves to overt political expression in the context of massive movements which have revolution or social change as the sole end. The institutions of kinship and family, and their reproductive functions, effectively prohibit this antagonistic splintering of society Patricia C. Albers, \ldExpansion and Flexibility in Dakota Familial Structure,\rd paper delivered to the Family History and Heritage Symposium, Brigham Young University, 1975. . And this is even more the case where we find both family and wider kin groupings looming importantly in economic matters. Contemporary society can readily make for feminist issues, precisely because families are increasingly superfluous; the result being that the exploitative relations between the sexes are more sharply defined and given expression. In tribal society, however, kinship is the fulcrum of social life and is the modality of all institutions. To the degree that Plains Indian women could seek status within, and identify with, the domestic unit or band, the social schisms forming in Plains society could remain smoldering beneath the surface. The very nature of kinship society precludes the kind of class conflict which occurs in centralized or formative state systems. But it is no guarantee against structurally significant discontent.

A Materialist Framework for Political Geography

A Materialist Framework for Political Geography

The Materialist Approach to Sport Study: An Alternative Prescription to the Discipline's Methodological Malaise

Alan Ingham has criticized the prevailing positivist and blatantly ideological methodologies used in sport study and offered a Weberian alternative. This paper presents a different methodological approach; one based on a materialist understanding of the relationship between sport and society. By examining the totality as the real object of study and integrating the conception of dialectical analysis, it is argued that the labor process constitutes the ontological basis of social history and thus of sport study. Using labor as the take-off point, the paper illustrates in some detail how sport study can be integrated into the materialist framework. The final section discusses the ideal-type approach offered by Weber pointing out that it is a redundant methodological construct once the pivotal relations of social history have been identified. Finally, it is argued that the Weberian position also harbors certain ideological elements that often go unnoticed

Migration and modes of exploitation: Social origins of immobility and mobility

Migration has been the subject of considerable research in recent years, much of it conducted by economists. This paper is an attempt to provide the basis of a general, materialist framework for research on population mobility. As such it pays particular attention to changing mechanisms of exploitation, which are typically ignored in conventional studies of migration. This article focuses on pre‐capitalist relations of production restricting population mobility, the factors that make those controls increasingly unstable and the different implications for migration of different forms of the transition to capitalist relations of production. Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence it then considers the various functions of migration in transitions to capitalist production.

Hearts Starve as Well as Bodies: Ulrike Prokop's "Production and the Context of Women's Daily Life"

Creating ties between theories of feminism and has been a continuing concern of new women's movement and, to a lesser degree, of undogmatic Marxist groups since late 1960s. In many respects printing of Ulrike Prokop's Production and Context of Women's Daily Life marks completion of just such a discussion in New German Critique a discussion which began internally three years ago with socalled Debate. By translating several major feminist concepts into historical materialist framework of Frankfurt School, Prokop, who is involved in both West German women's movement and Frankfurt School, provides an important link between socialist and feminist theory. The significance of her analysis of domestic labor as basis of women's oppression is best understood in context of other major socialist feminist works: Juliet Mitchell's Woman's Estate, Mariarosa Dalla Costa's article Women and Subversion of Community, as well as Sheila Rowbotham's Woman's Consciousness, Man's World.1 New German Critique's decision to begin discussion of women's movement in spring of 1975 with Marcuse's Marxism and Feminism2 reflects our history as a journal: NGC had incorporated theories of Frankfurt School, with which Marcuse had been associated, into its ongoing discussion of as a critique of traditional scientific socialism. Thus it was no accident that Marcuse's article was used as a springboard for our first discussions of feminism. It also reflects tenor of our discussions. Underlying most of our study until then was question of feminism's significance for left, a question that Marcuse addresses directly. He prefaces his article by stating that the Women's Liberation Movement today is perhaps most important and potentially most radical political movement we have. Feminism, he maintains, will be major