(Un)doing Marxism from the Outside (original) (raw)

‘Against a Closing World. Introduction’. In OPEN MARXISM 4. AGAINST A CLOSING WORLD. In Dinerstein, A.C., García Vela, E. González and J. Holloway, Pluto Press, London-New York: 1-16

Open Marxism 4. Against a closing world, 2019

We write against a closing of the world. Walls are going up around us. The wall on the USA border with Mexico, the walls that UK Brexiteers would build, the walls being constructed by left and right nationalisms all over the world: walls of exclusion, of borders, often walls of hatred, walls of pain. Intellectually and academically too, walls are going up around us. In the universities (where the four of us work), the walls of academic correctness are growing bigger: the pressures of competition, insecurity and the precarity of academic work, combined with quality assurance committees, lists of indexed journals, and quantitative criteria of assessment, make it harder, especially for students and young academics, to write what they want to write. To say what they want to say. The disciplines of the social sciences are becoming just that: disciplines. While resistance struggles continue and expand outside academic walls, critical thought is being squeezed out of the universities, reframed in innocuous forms or simply sidelined. Gradually, often without us noticing it, critical terms become taboo. They become ‘durty words’ (Brunetta and O’Shea 2018). Increasingly, these durty words begin to be whispered, until they fall out of use altogether. ‘Revolution’ is the most obvious one, but also ‘class struggle’, and ‘capital’ too. The more atrocious the barbarity of patriarchal and colonial capitalism becomes, the less we can name it. Radical thought has not come to an end though. Not at all. The critique of capital exists. But it survives mainly in the shadow of the criticism of the forms of expression of capital: authoritarianism, neoliberalism, the financialisation of the economy, policy failure, the crisis of representative democracy, etc. We write against the closure of the world, then, because we see a danger in some of the present struggles today: that we only demand regulation, job creation, distributive justice, transparent democracy, etc. In our view, these criticisms and demands are necessary and important but they are incomplete without a critique of capital

Fasil Merawi book chapter on Marxism Globalization and Liberation of the Subject.docx

Karl Marx's philosophy represents a project of human emancipation against the alienation, commodification and fetishism brought by the capitalist order. Grounded on the premise that human history is founded on a dialectics of opposition and class struggle, Marx presented capitalist societies as consumerist, material and exploitative economies that facilitate the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie in the name of private ownership and property. Marx distinguished between political and human emancipation, and called for a class revolution of the proletariat that dismantles capitalist production. Although Marx's ideas are currently appropriated by diverse traditions of critical and postcolonial theory, especially in the globalized world of a synthesis of cultures and simultaneous clash of civilizations, still Marxism is regarded as something obsolete, dogmatic, utopian, repressive and a lost cause. In this essay, I argue that overcoming the dogmatic metaphysics of Marxism, its little attention to the role of the subject and uncoupling Marx from Marxism facilitates a better understanding of Marxism in the world of globalization. Marx's critique of capitalism is still valuable today and could be used to expose the workings of ideology, limits of instrumental rationality and paradoxes of advanced industrialist societies. As such, Marxism could furnish a suitable ground for the liberation of the subject in the world of globalization.

Globalisation, the State and Class Struggle: A Critical Economy Engagement with Open Marxism

This article explores common commitments between competing historical materialist perspectives within International Political Economy (IPE). It does so by engaging with the approach of Open Marxism that has emerged as the basis of a radical rethinking of theories of the state, the dialectic of subject-object and theory-practice, as well as commitments to emancipating the social world. Despite these contributions, though, there has been a sonorous silence within debates in critical International Relations (IR) theory in relation to the arguments of Open Marxism. In contrast, we engage with and develop an immanent critique of Open Marxism through a 'Critical Economy' conception of the state proffered by Antonio Gramsci. Previously overlooked, this alternative approach not only promotes an understanding of the state as a social relation of production but also affords insight into a broader range of class-relevant social forces linked to contemporary processes of capitalist development. A key priority is thus granted to theorising the capitalist state, as well as issues of resistance and collective agency, that surpasses the somewhat 'theological' vision of state-capital-labour evident in Open Marxism. Moreover, it is argued in conclusion that the approach we outline provides an avenue to critique additional competing 'critical' approaches in IR/IPE, thereby raising new questions about the potential of critical theory within international studies.

'Histories of Power' and the 'Universalisation of Capital': Between and Beyond Marxism and Postcolonial Theory

Capitalist development in India, and the politics of those who are its immediate victims, defies the main varieties of postcolonial theory and Marxism that are in contentious debate today. The paper rescues the debate between the two approaches from being cast as one between culture and political economy, and between particularity and universalism. Instead, it draws on recently translated works by Marx, debates in agrarian political economy, and contributions that emphasize the temporal specificity of contemporary capitalist development. It shows that the ‘dull compulsion of economic forces’ is held back by on-going politics of hegemony in which fractions of capital want state protection, and democracy and rights provide the poor with limited but sometimes effective political power. As a result, the primitive accumulation process is incomplete, and mature capitalism, defined by some Marxists as ‘universal’, is held in a sustained state of deferral.

The Real (of) Marx: Adivasi Worlds as Tombstone of the Illicit

After the Revolution: Essays in Memory of Anjan Ghosh. Ed. by Partha Chatterjee. Orient Blackswan: Hyderabad. , 2020

This paper is a play on the Moebius: the Real of/in Marx, i.e. the work of the (Lacanian) Real in Marx and the real Marx. It could also have been titled the Moebius between 'The Other of Marx' and 'The Other Marx'. In 2001-2002, I had titled an assignment I was writing for Anjanda (late Anjan Ghosh) in terms of the Other (question), wherein I focused on the 'non-West' and how it featured in the late Marx. It was Anjanda who had directed my attention - then wedded uncritically to historical materialism - to the 'non-West' in Marx, and how it inaugurated the question of non-capital (not necessarily pre-capital), and what could be called 'non-wage' or 'non-capitalist' labour practices within the womb of capitalism, practices that do not feature in 'Classes' (Chapter 52 of Capital, Volume III) - but which also bring Marx' s work and reflection on class and 'what makes classes', as he asks in the chapter, to a seeming halt; the text breaks off at this point. It is interesting to note that the text of Capital breaks off the moment Marx engages with the theorisation of class or classes. Is class then the Real of Capital? Does Capital, the 'book' , hit Lacan' s inassimilable Real once it hits the question of class? Or is non-West (as also non-capital) the inassimilable Real in the Marxian schema? Is it the non-West (as also non-capital) that is taking (the late) Marx beyond the merely objective historical trend, fashionably called historical materialism? Or is it class that is inaugurating a principled break with the way things are? It is almost as if Marx comes to face ‘a moment of pure surprise’, as if there is a crisis of some kind (in his theory) to which he cannot as such react, something he cannot easily re-present. This moment seems to come at least twice in Marx: first, with and through the question of class; then, with and through the question of non-West (as also non-capital). It is the experience of the non-West that takes Marx to non-capital, as a condition for post-capitalist praxis. It is as if the experience of the (post)colonial takes Marx to the post-capitalist condition. The post-colonial and the post-capitalist are thus in a mutually constitutive relation—one ushers in the other. This paper argues that while the West (Britain and Germany to be precise) was for Marx the archive of the present, that is, of capital, the non-West (Russia and Asia, including India and the Bengal village [Marx 1974: 245–284]) was for Marx the archive of the future, that is, of post-capital.