Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society Introduction: From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia, from Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology (original) (raw)
Related papers
Critique of the analytical categories of Autonomist Marxism
2016
A copy of my 2016 undergraduate thesis which attempted to trace and illustrate the theoretical steps undertaken by Autonomia, and provide a fundamental critique of the categories that it proposed for understanding antagonism in society.
Whilst the need for social and political transformation in the modern world is clear, it isn’t clear just who or what the structural agency for this change will be. It still can be the working class, for the reasons Marx gave. But the mechanisms upon which marxist class politics rest seem to have failed. Some would question the relevance of Marx to the project of emancipation, consigning marxism to the past in the search for a revival of radical politics.Marxism is still geared to the political economy of an industrial capitalist past. For postmodernists, marxism fails to either recognize the new technologies of regulation and, tied to the past, proceeds to advance political programmes that only further processes of bureaucratisation and homogenisation. The 'evident truths' of Marxism as a political movement are considered to have been 'seriously challenged by an avalanche of historical mutations which have riven the ground on which those truths were constituted'. This study looks at the relation between marxism postmodernism with the specific intention of outlining the contours of a 'postmodern marxism', playing up the extent to which the end of Marx's emancipatory project is itself a POSTmodernity rather than an anti-modernity. Particularly important is the role of social identity and pluralisation within an overarching framework. Thus the attempt is made to address the crisis of marxism as opportunity as well as defeat. Whilst some thought that the collapse of the old soviet marxism would mean the end of marxism as such, the view taken here is that the result has been the flourishing of a new Marxism, the foundations of which have been laid by many hitherto ignored and marginalised thinkers in the past.
Historical Materialism, 2005
Postone rejects the traditional view that self-constitution is a transhistorical capacity of 'concrete labour', in favour of viewing self-constitution as an attribute of a historically specific modality of 'abstract labour'. To this extent, Postone can be said to belong to the Rubin school, after the writings of the Russian Marxist Isaak Illich Rubin, for whom abstract labour is the source, substance and subject of valorisation under capitalism. Granted the problems that attend a transhistorical account of self-constitution, it is not however clear that Postone's historicist alternative resolves them. On the contrary, his account raises as many questions as it answers. For example, if, as Postone argues, capitalism comprises a unified system, in which the parts take their social and historical identity from the role they play in reproducing the whole, 10 why assume, then, that capitalism contracts out the valorisation process to one of its parts (abstract labour)? Why privilege a part
Postanarchism from a Marxist Perspective
2010
Postanarchists have tended to portray Marxism as an anachronism, taking the alleged redundancy of Marxism as a starting point for their revitalization of classical anarchism via post-structuralism. Critical assessments of postanarchism have so far failed to interrogate this portrayal of Marxism. This is unfortunate, I argue, because Marxism plays an important function within the postanarchist project, and because it allows postanarchist characterizations of Marxism and poststructuralism to go unchallenged. The first part of this paper delineates the role of Marxism in postanarchism, before examining connections between post-structuralism and Marxism: I argue that Marx's work anticipates post-structuralist concepts of power and subjectivity. The aim of the paper is not to offer a Marxist critique of postanarchism but to establish equal relevance for both anarchism and Marxism to contemporary political thought and practice.
Post-Marx beyond Post-Marx: Autonomism and Discourse Theory
This chapter examines the relation of discourse and media by staging an encounter between heterodox Marxisms. In recent decades, a body of theory known loosely as “autonomism” has emerged out of Post-Operaist movements and debates in Italy. Autonomism can be seen as a reading of Marx paralleling and occasionally engaging with Post-Marxism (more specifically, Ernesto Laclau). This chapter puts these traditions in sustained dialogue around key concepts (language/materiality, hegemony, constituent power, antagonism). It then presents an analysis of contemporary media practices stemming from the theoretical engagement. What types of media subjects, forged via antagonism and striving towards democracy, emerge from these engagements with (post)Marx?
Postmodernism, Marxism and Versions of the Future. An Interview with Professor Martin Jay
Through his interest in postmodernism and in criticism to metanarratives, in this interview Professor Martin Jay tackles some of the main issues that have lately focused the attention of historical theory. Topics such as the turn towards historical experience, Hayden White's contribution to understanding of narratives and language, or the importance of Fredric Jameson, are brought up in this text. Professor Jay also comes back to some of his former well-known themes such as the so-called French Theory, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno and the presence of Marxism in the United States.
Post-Marxism After Althusser: A Critique Of The Alternatives
2009
This dissertation provides a particular Marxian class analytical political economy critique of post-Marxism. The dissertation demonstrates the ways in which different positions within post-Marxism continue to essentialize the conceptualizations of class and capitalist economy. What distinguishes this dissertation from other dominant critiques of post-Marxism is the anti-essentialist epistemological and ontological position it adopts. By adopting an anti-essentialist epistemological position the dissertation is able to demonstrate the discontinuities and continuities between post-Marxism and the Marxian tradition. The dissertation does this by reading the heterogeneous and disparate post-Marxian approaches as so many different ways to "resolve" the central tension of the Althusserian mode of production debate of the 1960s and 1970s: The tension between the desire to think <em>the overdetermination of social reproduction and transformation</em> and the effort to ...
Forthcoming in Portuguese translation in Althusser's Vocabulaire. Edited by Pedro Karczmarczyk and Márcio Naves. (forthcoming in Portuguese and Spanish 2023) Draft. Not for Citation. Any attempt to elucidate connections between strands of Marxist thinking and what has become known as 'post-Marxism' such as the present essay does in exploring the relation between Louis Althusser's work and the broader field of post-Marxism, must pass through what has become known as the quintessential post-Marxist intervention, namely that of Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. This text, subjected to much critique over the years remains central to the post-Marxist project. It also, for the purposes of this essay, offers a window into the ways that Althusser's project is taken up, transformed, and redeployed in post-Marxist thinking. Laclau and Mouffe take up portions of Althusser's work and redeploy it alongside intersecting non-Marxist, or not centrally Marxist, critical theories that fit broadly under the category of poststructuralist thinking such as more recent developments like those found in intellectual movements classed under the moniker "New Materialism" and the like. As there has been so much discussion and debate around and about Laclau and Mouffe's text over the years, I will not dwell too much on its details, nor will I comment on its merits (see Geras 1987 and Mouzelis 1988 for some of this debate). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, however, can help provide the connective tissue between post-Marxism, poststructuralism, and some of the emerging movements mentioned above in a way that is helpful for us in seeing the importance of Althusser's thought which is at the bottom of much of these linked movements. Further, Laclau and Mouffe's book served as a point from which other thinkers began to develop their own versions of post-Marxist thinking through engagement with this text and its authors. Here we can think of the early work of thinkers like Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler whose early intellectual trajectories were marked by consistent engagement with Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxism (Butler et al 2000). We can return to these later thinkers and movements below, but to begin with Laclau and Mouffe, in their 2000 preface to the second edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe both accept that their text is post-Marxist as many have deemed it, and offer an attempt at defining the limits of that term as, "the process of reappropriation of an intellectual tradition, as well as the process of going beyond it" (ix). They also see this as connected to the rise of poststructuralist movements as it those intellectual movements that Laclau and Mouffe also describe as the main source of their ability to push beyond classical Marxism (xi). This definition of post-Marxism, and connection to poststructuralist movements is repeated with minor differences by many writing about post-Marxism in the wake of Laclau and Mouffe. For instance, for Stuart Sim (2000) it is a term that names late twentieth century movements in theory that recognize the limits of a classical Marxist theories in the face of the