Accelerate the Contradictions!

CFP: Hegel and Capitalism

2011-04-03T14:18:00.000-04:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Hegel and Capitalism

For the 22nd Biennial Meeting of the Hegel Society of America

To be held at DePaul University, Chicago, IL, Friday afternoon, October 5, to Sunday Mid-day, October 7, 2012

Deadline for submission of papers: January 31, 2012

The conference will cover all aspects of the theme “Hegel and Capitalism,” broadly understood. We invite papers that address this theme historically, systematically, or with reference to current questions and issues. Papers that interpret, engage, or apply Hegel are welcome. Papers that investigate the conference topic in new ways are encouraged.

Submitted papers are limited to 6,000 words, and should be formatted for blind review and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers must be submitted at this length and later adjustments must remain within this limit. Papers submitted must be complete essays; proposals are not acceptable. All papers should be in English. Although papers presented at meetings of the Hegel Society of America are usually published as a collection of essays, publication cannot be guaranteed. By submitting a paper, however, an author of a paper accepted for the program agrees to reserve publication for the HSA proceedings. Final decision as to publication remains dependent on the results of peer and publisher review.

Please send papers to: Andrew Buchwalter, Program Chair (abuchwal@unf.edu)

Marx News

2011-02-09T10:28:00.001-05:00

The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) project has gone on-line:

Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,
Zum neuen Jahr ist die digitale Ausgabe der MEGA in einer neuen Version online gegangen. Man findet sie, wie die bisherige Ausgabe auch schon, unter folgender Adresse:
http://telota.bbaw.de/mega/

There are only a small handful of volumes available as of yet -- Grundrisse, economic notebooks from 1863-67, and volume II of Capital -- but this is the material condition for a wave of new, high-quality Marx scholarship. The bound volumes of the MEGA are insanely expensive, and full collections (not that MEGA is yet complete by any measure) are only available at a very few libraries in the world. Most people who want to do serious work on Marx are forced to rely upon the old and inadequate Marx-Engels-Werke or the English-language Complete Works.

I was able to use the MEGA for my dissertation work, luckily, and it made a huge difference. The mass of Marx's lifework was left in manuscript or notebook form when he died, and the editions of this material that eventually emerged did not do a very good job of carrying over the actual form and history of the manuscripts.

Even the published works suffer from this editorial erasure of history. The most egregious example I know of is this: if you are working on Capital I, and, in due diligence, look at the German Werke version, you find a book divided into 7 Abschnitten and 25 Kapiteln. But all of the English translations are divided into 8 Parts and 33 Chapters. You might be led thereby to think that this difference is some artifact of the translation, or of Engels' postmortem editorial tampering. You'd be wrong. For completely mysterious reasons, the MEW folks took the text of the 4th German edition of the book (1890), but divided it according to the 2nd German edition (1873). The 8 Parts/33 Chapters arrangement came on the scene with the French edition of the book (1875, the last edition overseen to completion by Marx himself), and was incorporated, on Marx's instructions, into the 3rd German edition (1883), and then into the English edition (1886). Why the editors of the Werke decided to undo this authorial decision is beyond me. Only by looking at MEGA, which published each of these editions of the book as separate volumes, can you see what happened.

I have no reason to doubt that there are many, many, many other examples of this sort of thing. The more widely available the MEGA becomes, the easier it will be for students of Marx to discover and correct these sorts of errors.

What's Left of Liberalism?

2011-01-19T10:52:00.000-05:00

Oy, does this thing still work?

So, Matt Yglesias thinks he has no enemies to the left. I haven't waded through all of the post he is responding to, but...

Issue numero uno: de Boer says of Yglesias that he is "one of the most vocal of the neoliberal scolds, forever ready to define the 'neoliberal consensus' as the truth of man and to ignore left-wing criticism." To this, Yglesias responds:

I don’t really know what it means to criticize a writer for holding that his own views are “the truth of man.” Obviously, I agree with my political opinions and disagree with those who disagree with me. If I didn’t agree I’d change my mind.

But you're not being criticized for believing what you say -- you're being criticized for believing what you believe! The problem is content, not sincerity.

Issue numero dos: Yglesias avers, "while I’ll cop to being a 'neoliberal' I don’t acknowledge that I have critics to the 'left' of me." He then rattles off a list of his primary policy concerns (to which I'll return), before saying:

I recognize that many people disagree with this agenda, and that many of those who disagree with it think of themselves as "to the left" of my view. But I simply deny that there are positions that are more genuinely egalitarian than my own. I really and sincerely believe that liberalism is the best way to advance the interests of the underprivileged and to make the world a better place.

The unspoken assumption throughout is that Left = egalitarianism. No one is more egalitarian than Yglesias, hence no one is further to the Left than he. Now this assumption has a long history. In academic circles it certainly runs back to the 80s, when the Marxists stopped calling themselves Marxists and started calling themselves egalitarians, when historical materialism went out the window, to be replaced by neo-Kantian moral theory.

If this assumption is taken on board, then those who thinks of themselves as being to the Left of liberalism are actually just sentimentalists and wishful thinkers -- they will the end of equality without willing the means of liberal government, which is the only mechanism for achieving equality. Genuine egalitarianism is liberal egalitarianism.

As someone who thinks of himself as to the Left of liberalism, and who has never hoisted the banner of Equality!, I'd like to register an objection.

Equality always has to be specified. Equality unmodified means nothing; we must answer the question: Equality of what? For Yglesias, it is equality of economic freedom, greater equality of economic outcome (wealth), and equality of respect and recognition -- pretty much the standard Rawlsian package. Thus, look at the specific issues that concern him:

More redistribution of money from the top to the bottom.
A less paternalistic welfare state that puts more money directly in the hands of the recipients of social services.
Macroeconomic stabilization policy that seriously aims for full employment.
Curb the regulatory privileges of incumbent landowners.
Roll back subsidies implicit in our current automobile/housing-oriented industrial policy.
Break the licensing cartels that deny opportunity to the unskilled.
Much greater equalization of opportunities in K-12 education.
Reduction of the rents assembled by privileged intellectual property owners.
Throughout the public sector, concerted reform aimed at ensuring public services are public services and not jobs programs.
Taxation of polluters (and resource-extractors more generally) rather than current de facto subsidization of resource extraction.

Most of these -- 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 -- are nothing more than efforts to extend and perfect the market. They internalize externalities, eliminate rents, etc. Now I don't necessarily disagree with all of these things, but every one of them implies that we need more and better markets. The remaining concerns -- 1, 3, and 7 -- aim to establish the non-market prerequisites of these more and better markets.

Nowhere is there even a hint of the thought that an increase in market freedom might lead to a decrease in other sorts of freedom, or to less happiness, or to any other bad outcome. Nowhere is there any mention of something like a guaranteed basic income, or of any other policy that would reduce the need for people to rely upon wage labor to live. Nowhere is there any attention to global macroeconomic dynamics like the swelling of the global surplus population -- the hundreds of millions of people who do not participate in any meaningful economic activity whatsoever. Nowhere is there any reference to tax competition. Nowhere is there any hint that all these wonderful markets might depend upon the existence of a labor market, including a market for bare subsistence wage-labor, with all the poverty and desperation that market implies.

In short, nowhere does Yglesias hint that more and better markets might themselves be problematic. That's not to say that the Left is or ought to be in favor of fewer and worse markets, but to say that the Left, since Marx, has been centrally opposed to the notions of freedom and equality that find their ground in "the market" -- the surface appearance of capitalism.

So, I say to Yglesias: sorry dude -- there's definitely plenty of room on your Left, and it's populated with enemies -- like me.

Upcoming SSPP Panel

2010-10-20T13:18:00.000-04:00

As part of SPEP this year (right here in Montreal!), the Society for Social and Political Philosophy has organized the following panel:

Moralism vs. Meliorism

2010-10-18T13:53:00.006-04:00

Sandy Levinson, at Balkinization, asks how libertarians might respond to the recent rescue of miners in Chile, which was largely funded by the Chilean state. Levinson thinks the Chilean state was right to step in and ensure that the rescue effort was made, but thinks this stepping in by the state does not sit well with libertarian notions about legitimate state action, since the state was not protecting anyone against a violation of their rights. That is, the Chilean state was acting as an insurer, not as a police force. If one admits that the Chilean state was right to act as an insurer in this case, then Levinson thinks one will be hard pressed not to endorse a welfare state, which acts as insurer in lots of cases. So, libertarians are supposedly caught between a) admitting that the state rightfully serves a welfare function, and b) looking like hard-hearted bastards who think it was wrong for the miners to be rescued.

Jacob Levy responds by saying -- these are my terms, not his -- that there's a difference between legitimacy and justification. The Chilean state, like all states, has way more power than is legitimate. This is, in large part, because actual states are never the outcome of social contracts:

States did not come about by individualist contractualist consent; they are not the institutional form of morally foundational nations; religious, hereditary, and customary forms of legitimation may remain sociologically credible in some places but are surely not morally well-grounded accounts of the justifications for the organized use of violence.

Nonetheless, states exist, and have a mass of de facto power. The question is, how should this power be used? Jacob thinks -- rightly, I say -- that the illegitimacy of state power has no immediate bearing on the question of how that power might be justifiably used now that it exists. The libertarian is committed to saying that the Chilean state has amassed illegitimate power -- power that cannot be "morally well-grounded" -- but that, nonetheless, it is justified in using that power to rescue the miners, since "capacity and proximity can generate outcome-responsibility." It might be wrong for the Chilean state to have the power to rescue the miners, but it might still be right for the Chilean state to use its power to rescue the miners.

So far, so good. I am myself fond of drawing this same distinction between legitimacy and justification, and I think it does get Jacob's special version of libertarianism out of the dilemma Levinson is pushing.

Where I think there might be a problem is here:

The state’s first duty, the prevention of interpersonal violence, follows more or less straightforwardly from the kind of social organization that the state is: the agency that is able to claim and enforce a local monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force.

Notice that word, "legitimate"? Now, I know Jacob is using that in a purely Weberian way -- the local monopoly on legitimate initiation of force is the local monopoly on de facto accepted initiation of force. But this points, nonetheless, to the ideological underpinnings of state power. The state is only the state if it seems to people to be a legitimate power. I would hazard that a state that goes about rescuing miners is, other things being equal, more likely to seem legitimate to the people it governs than is a state that does not undertake such insurance and welfare tasks.

If this supposition is true, at least in the normal run of things, then Jacobite libertarians (as opposed to the Jacobin libertarians caught in Levinson's dilemma) seem caught in another dilemma, more psychological than logical. Since the state that uses its illegitimate power in justifiable ways thereby secures that power -- after all, people are not in a habit of differentiating between legitimacy and justification -- there is some tension between a) the hope that what power there is will be well-used, regardless of its source, and b) the desire that justice will be done by stripping illegitimate power from its holders. If the usurpers use their ill-gotten power well, and placate the people with bread and circuses, what hope is there that we will ever be rid of usurpers? There is some psychological difficulty in saying: "I hope that thief uses what s/he has stolen in such a way that it's harder to convince people s/he should give what s/he has stolen back to its legitimate owners."

This psychological dilemma between stringent moralism ("Let justice be done, tho' the heavens fall!") and soft-hearted meliorism ("What's done is done, so let's make the best of things") is not restricted to libertarians, of course. It is analogous (but only analogous) to the tensions in Marxism that give rise to "accelerating the contradictions" as a tactic -- trying to ensure that the usurpers aren't able to or won't do anything with their power that might incline people to forget that they are usurpers. Now, it's not surprising to me that Jacob tends to the soft-hearted meliorism side of things, but I don't think anyone can go very far in that direction without jeopardizing their commitment to the notion that the usurpers have what they have illegitimately. If strict determinations of right are to have any purchase at all, they have to have that purchase against the good outcomes that might come about at the expense of strict determinations of right.

CFP: Rethinking Reification

2010-10-18T10:01:00.002-04:00

RETHINKING REIFICATION

Panel to be held at the 2011 meeting of the Society for Existential and Phe-nomenological Theory and Culture, May 31–June 3, at the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University, in conjunction with the Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

For much of the twentieth century, the concept of reification was a powerful tool in the intellectual arsenal of Marxist social critique. Beginning with Georg Lukács, and continuing through the work of figures such as Horkheimer, Ador-no, and Marcuse, the concept provided critical social theory with an incisive analytical capacity that also lent normative support to emancipatory goals. Along with much of the conceptual apparatus of Marxism, however, during the latter decades of the twentieth century the idea of reification grew increasingly marginalized within humanistic and social-scientific disciplines. With the new century, though, there are signs of renewed interest in the concept—for exam-ple, Timothy Bewes’ Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002), Axel Honneth’s Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (2008), and Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (2009). While such contribu-tions differ considerably in terms of their disciplinary foci and underlying theo-retical commitments, they nonetheless jointly attest to the idea that there may be an important place for a renewed concept of reification within contempo-rary critical social theory. The aim of this panel is to explore — from phenome-nological and existential perspectives — the potential value and feasibility of such a conceptual retrieval. Papers may address any aspect of reification, al-though those with a contemporary focus and/or interdisciplinary approach are especially welcome.

Paper proposals should be sent to Bryan Smyth (basmyth@memphis.edu) by December 1, 2010. Proposals should include the title, author’s name, institu-tional affiliation, and a detailed abstract of approximately 250 words. Propos-als will be initially reviewed by the panel organizers, and acceptance will be conditional upon the author’s ability to submit a complete paper (not more than 4000 words) by February 1, 2011 for anonymous review.

For further information, contact Bryan Smyth (basmyth@memphis.edu).

CFP: The Spirit of Capital: A Conference on Hegel and Marx

2010-10-14T10:24:00.000-04:00

THE SPIRIT OF CAPITAL: A CONFERENCE ON HEGEL AND MARX

THE TENTH ANNUAL GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

AT THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: MOISHE POSTONE

APRIL 28TH -29TH, 2011

“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’sLogic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” wrote Lenin in 1915. In 1969, Althusser responded, “A century and a half later no one has understood Hegel because it is impossible to understand Hegel without having thoroughly studied and understood Capital.” What are we to make of this challenge today? Are we now ready to understand Hegel through Marx, and Marx through Hegel?

It is high time for a reassessment of the core stakes of the Marx-Hegel debate. What would it mean to think the concepts of capital and spirit together? This conference is a place to explore the internal relations between Hegel and Marx’s philosophical projects. Some possible questions include: how does Hegel’s phenomenology, logic, philosophy of nature, history and right internally contain the elements that Marx will use to decipher the world of property, labor, commodities and capital? Is Capital a logical theory of forms or a theory of history? How does Marx negate and realize Hegel’s project? What is the role of labor in Hegel, and the role of spirit in Marx? Does the development of history show the unfolding of freedom or the unfolding of capital? This conference echoes the early Frankfurt school tradition, with its project for a critique of the social forms of the present. We encourage submissions on a wide range of topics and thinkers:

Possible Themes

Capital and Spirit

Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Grundrisse

Property, Alienation, and Class

Form and Content in Hegel and Marx

Concrete and Abstract Labor

Master and Slave

Critique, Dialectic and Method

Time and History

Freedom and Necessity

Substance and Subject in Capital

The Value-Form

Critique of Labor

Revolution and Negation

Materialism and Idealism

Proletarian Self-Abolition

Commodity, Money and Capital

The Philosophy of Right

Possible Thinkers:

I.I. Rubin

György Lukács

Karl Korsch

Ernst Bloch

Walter Benjamin

Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Theodore Adorno

Herbert Marcuse

CLR James

Raya Dunayevskaya

Guy Debord

Alexander Kojeve

Jean Hyppolite

Frantz Fanon

Helmut Reichelt

Hans-Georg Backhaus

Gillian Rose

EMAIL SUBMISSIONS TO: spiritofcapital@gmail.com

SUBMISSION DEADLINE is Dec 1st, 2010

Papers should be sent as word documents or pdfs, not exceeding 5000 words. Personal information including institutional affiliation is to be sent in the body of the email and should not appear on the paper itself or in the file name.

Redeeming History: What It Is, and What It Is Not

2010-10-07T16:19:00.004-04:00

On the basis of my lecture today:
Franz Fanon, in "On Violence," makes the following, arresting claim: “The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world […] will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history into their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities.” (pp. 5-6)

This seems to say that colonialism will come to be justified, retrospectively, by decolonization. This theme in Fanon is an echo of a theme in Marxism and many other radical liberation movements: that of an eschatological redemption of history, or the justification of suffering by its overcoming.

For example, Marx writes, in the notes that were turned into Capital, vol. 3:

More than any other mode of production, [capitalism] squanders human lives, or living labour, and not only flesh and blood, but also nerve and brain. Indeed, it is only through the most enormous waste of the individual development that the development of mankind is at all preserved in the epoch of history immediately preceding the conscious organization of society.

G.A. Cohen glossed this claim as:

Despite its consequences for the producers, capitalism was needed for progress, since it extended man’s dominion over nature and so brought forward the day when the struggle with nature could be ended, and so, too, the derivative battle of class against class. (KMTH, 25)

To be more precise, Marx's claim here seems to be of the form: The suffering attendant upon capitalism is a necessary condition for the liberation of communism.

Cohen and Fanon seem to go one step further, and to claim that: The suffering attendant upon capitalism (or colonialism) will be redeemed by the liberation of communism (or decolonization).

This second claim -- the redemption of history by liberation -- certainly goes far beyond the first, which seems merely to spell out what the word liberation means. The redemption of history thesis should not, however, be mistaken for two other theses with which it is frequently confused.

First, from the redemption of history thesis it does not follow that exploitation or colonization cause liberation by causing the suffering that motivates liberation. does not redound to the moral credit of the capitalist, colonist, or slaver. That is, the redemption of history thesis does not entail that exploiting, enslaving, or colonizing people is all well and good, since it leads eventually to liberation. Rather, it redounds to the moral credit of the ones who overthrow capitalism, colonialism, and slavery; it is only the action of these self-liberators that retroactively gives some meaning or purpose to the suffering of the oppressed. That suffering was one of the necessary conditions and causes of the liberation, and the greatness of the liberation thereby bestows meaning on the suffering – the suffering was not in vain.

This confused thesis is not a straw man: those on the Right in the US who say that slavery ended up being a good deal for African Americans, since they are better off now in the US than they would be in Africa are making precisely this claim. This confused claim amounts to concluding that, since suffering is the necessary condition of liberation, suffering is the cause of liberation. This erases the act of liberation altogether.

Second, from the redemption of history thesis it does not follow that liberation is the teleological end of history, or that suffering is explained functionally by the liberation that redeems it. That is, it does not entail that, somehow, the suffering took place for the sake of the liberation it made possible, as if the liberation were causally pulling history forward through a period of suffering. The fact that suffering is a necessary condition for the communist revolution does not explain why that suffering took place. (Jon Elster imports all sorts of nonsense into Marx by reading every instance of either the necessary condition thesis or the redemption of history thesis as if it were an explanatory claim.)

Finally, for the sake of contrast, the redemption of history thesis might be compared to Locke's justification of slavery. For Locke (on at least one reading), slavery is justified where the slave has broken the law of nature and put themselves below humanity, and submitting to slavery is breaking the law of nature (irrationally throwing your life into the hands of another), so that any existing slavery is justified -- since no rational human being would submit to be a slave, all slaves must be less than rational and less than human. This approach justifies all existing slavery, while implying that all slavery that has been thrown off was illegitimate. The contrast can be summed up neatly. Locke: Only and all existing slavery is justified; Fanon: Only and all overcome slavery is justified -- slavery is always wrong so long as it actually exists, and can only come to be vindicated by being thrown off in a liberation struggle.

If this is all right, then I think the best way to understand the redemption of history thesis is as a claim that motivates -- and is designed so to motivate -- liberation struggles. If you are conscious of all of the suffering that has gone into the creation of our world, and that continually goes into its reproduction, this “myth” or “ideology” – I use those terms consciously and without pejorative intent – of redemption through liberation says: What, will all of that have been for the sake of TiVo and barbecue flavoured Bugles? Millions have died and worse, all so you can enjoy Law and Order: SVU? Surely we can do better than that! What must we do so as not to be tortured by the knowledge of the suffering that has made our lives possible? We must make ourselves truly great – tear this whole world down to the bedrock and rebuild something worthwhile – if we are to redeem all that has happened!

Whatever faults this ideology has as ideology, it ought not be mistaken for what it is not.

James Scott: Adam Smith or Karl Marx?

2010-09-20T14:49:00.001-04:00

I can't escape James Scott right now. Jacob Levy has contributed his two cents to the discussion of Seeing Like a State over at Cato Unbound. There's a lot to talk about in Jacob's contribution, but I just want to point to one thing for now. Jacob writes:

I suspect that Scott has been mildly embarrassed by the libertarian enthusiasm for Seeing Like a State, and since its publication he’s been at pains to be clearer than he was in the book that the market can also be a force of high-modernist social flattening. But he has not (that I’m aware of) pushed the thought very far, or told his readers much about when the market is that kind of force on its own, and when it is so when joined to state power.

My Marxist self jumps up and down and yells: when have there been extensive markets that were not joined to state power!?!?!?!?!?!

Jacob draws a connection between Scott's concerns and Adam Smith's discussions of the state. Fair enough. But one of the greatest thinkers to take up Smith's insights into the function of taxation, colonialism, national debt, etc., was Karl Marx. Chapter 31 of Capital, "The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist," discusses the systematic interrelation among the various aspects of what he calls "primitive accumulation." Marx writes:

The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England, in more or less chronological order. These different moments are systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection. These methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized power of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten its transition.

The punchline:

Tantae molis erat [so great was the effort] to unleash the 'eternal natural laws' of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the separation between the workers and the conditions of their labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, and at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into the free 'labouring poor,' that artificial product of modern history.

I take Marx's point to be this: the free market admired by Smith, Hayek, Levy, etc., is constituted by massive state action. It is not just that capitalism was caused in the past by massive state actions, but that massive state action must persist for so long as the market in labor power, and hence capitalism, is to exist. The fact that the modern market and the modern state are coincident historically is no accident -- they, in fact, have the most intimate bond with one another.

Stuff I'd like to say something about but don't have time to right now...

2010-09-14T16:03:00.002-04:00

A back and forth at Crooked Timber and Lenin's Tomb over rational choice theory and Leftist/Marxist political theory.
And another post at CT, this one about James Scott vs. Hayek on markets and the loss of local knowledge. Scott, btw, is speaking here in Montreal this coming Monday, 20 September:

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University announces: Professor JAMES C. SCOTT: "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia." A lecture on Monday, September 20, 2010, at 7pm; Hall Building (corner of Bishop and de Maisonneuve), room 763.

I could support this platform...

2010-09-06T20:39:00.002-04:00

Universal, equal, and direct suffrage with secret ballot in all elections, for all citizens of the Reich over the age of twenty, without distinction of sex. Proportional representation, and, until this is introduced, legal redistribution of electoral districts after every census. Two-year legislative periods. Holding of elections on a legal holiday. Compensation for elected representatives. Suspension of every restriction on political rights, except in the case of legal incapacity.
Direct legislation by the people through the rights of proposal and rejection. Self-determination and self-government of the people in Reich, state, province, and municipality. Election by the people of magistrates, who are answerable and liable to them. Annual voting of taxes.
Education of all to bear arms. Militia in the place of the standing army. Determination by the popular assembly on questions of war and peace. Settlement of all international disputes by arbitration.
Abolition of all laws that place women at a disadvantage compared with men in matters of public or private law.
Abolition of all laws that limit or suppress the free expression of opinion and restrict or suppress the right of association and assembly. Declaration that religion is a private matter. Abolition of all expenditures from public funds for ecclesiastical and religious purposes. Ecclesiastical and religious communities are to be regarded as private associations that regulate their affairs entirely autonomously.
Secularization of schools. Compulsory attendance at the public Volksschule [extended elementary school]. Free education, free educational materials, and free meals in the public Volksschulen, as well as at higher educational institutions for those boys and girls considered qualified for further education by virtue of their abilities.
Free administration of justice and free legal assistance. Administration of the law by judges elected by the people. Appeal in criminal cases. Compensation for individuals unjustly accused, imprisoned, or sentenced. Abolition of capital punishment.
Free medical care, including midwifery and medicines. Free burial.
Graduated income and property tax for defraying all public expenditures, to the extent that they are to be paid for by taxation. Inheritance tax, graduated according to the size of the inheritance and the degree of kinship. Abolition of all indirect taxes, customs, and other economic measures that sacrifice the interests of the community to those of a privileged few.

(Yes, its the demands put forward by the German Social Democrats in their 1891 Erfurt Program. Ah, smell the progress!)

Radical Political Thought (draft syllabus for the fall)

2010-08-22T14:42:00.004-04:00

I still need to fill in a couple supplementary readings, but here's the basic outline of the class...

Course Description:

Radical political thought is a moving target. What seems radical in one setting or era may seem conservative in another. This course sets out from the hypothesis that what has marked radical politics, at least for some time, has been the effort to revolutionize culture, or to create and sustain a revolutionary culture (where ‘culture’ encompasses ideology, common sense, and everyday habits and practices, as well as art, literature, and popular entertainment). Culture has been the field of battle either because it is the weakest link in the chain of oppression, or, contrariwise, because it is the condition of the reproduction of the whole structure of society and the state. Culture war and cultural revolution are both the preparation for revolution and the means of securing and extending an accomplished revolution.

Our investigation will be divided into three sections. In the first, we will be concerned with the nature and strategy of revolutionary political thought and action, as these were articulated by the explicitly Marxist revolutionary movements of the first half of the 20^th century. What makes a position or tactic revolutionary? What is the difference between revolution and reform? What is revolutionary theory, and what role does it play in political and social revolutions? In the second, we will turn to the neo- and post-Marxisms of the latter half of the 20^th century, and will be especially concerned with the criticisms of humanism that emerged from the decolonizing movements, the feminist movements, and the movements surrounding the events of May ’68. In the third, we will come up to the present, in the guise of four figures of radical politics that are very much at play in the world of today: Chomsky, Foucault, Virno, and Tiqqun/The Invisible Committee.

Reading Schedule:

September 2 Introduction

Labour Day, September 6

September 7 Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution?, I & III (pp. 1-6)

September 9 Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution?, VII & X (pp. 6-12)

Supplement: excerpts from The Accumulation of Capital

September 14 Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, I-II (pp. 1-11)

September 16 Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, III (pp. 11-17)

Supplement: “The Historical Meaning of the Innner-Party Struggle in Russia”

September 21 Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, IV (pp. 18-30)

September 23 Mao, “On Contradiction,” I-III

Supplement: “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”

September 28 Mao, “On Contradiction,” IV-VII

September 30 Fanon, “On Violence”

Supplement: Gramsci, “War of Position and War of Maneuver”

1^st paper due, October 5

October 5 Fanon, “On Violence”

October 7 Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis”

Supplement: Anonymous [attributed to Althusser], “On the Cultural Revolution”

Thanksgiving, October 11

October 12 Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis”

October 14 Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis”

Supplement: A. Badiou, “The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?”

October 19 MacKinnon, “Desire and Power”

October 21 No Class

October 26 MacKinnon, “Of Mice and Men”

October 28 Foucault/Chomsky Debate

2^nd paper due, November 2

November 2 Foucault/Chomsky Debate, and begin Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim”

November 4 No Class

November 9 Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim”

November 11 Virno, Multitude Between Innovation and Negation, I.1 (pp. 11-24)

Supplement: Virno, “Natural-Historical Diagrams”

November 16 Virno, Multitude Between Innovation and Negation, I.2 (pp. 25-42)

November 18 Virno, Multitude Between Innovation and Negation, I.3 (pp. 43-65)

November 23 Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, 1-31 (pp. 11-64)

November 25 Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, 32-47 (pp. 67-112)

Supplement: Castellano, “Living with Guerilla Warfare”

November 30 Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, 48-85 (pp. 115-193)

December 2 Grand finale

CFP: Roundtable on Marx's Capital

2010-08-16T15:06:00.003-04:00

2nd CFP -- note the 15 September deadline.

The Society for Social and Political Philosophy is pleased to issue a
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
for a Roundtable on Marx’s Capital

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, February 24-27, 2011

Keynote address by Harry Cleaver
Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Reading Capital Politically

The SSPP’s second Roundtable will explore Volume One of Marx’s Capital (1867). We chose this text because the resurgence in references to and mentions of Marx – provoked especially by the current financial crisis and global recession, but presaged by the best-seller status of Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Marx’s surprising victory in the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” poll – has only served to highlight the fact that there have arguably not been any new interpretive or theoretical approaches to this book since the Althusserian and autonomist readings of the 1960s.

The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, such that long “obsolete” approaches have a newfound currency, or does in mean, on the contrary, that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for?

The guiding hypothesis of this Roundtable is that if new readings of Capital are called for, then it is new readers who will produce them.

Therefore, we are calling for applications from scholars interested in approaching Marx’s magnum opus with fresh eyes, willing to open it to the first page and read it through to the end without knowing what they might find. Applicants need not be experts in Marx or in Marxism. Applicants must, however, specialize in some area of social or political philosophy. Applicants must also be interested in teaching and learning from their fellows, and in nurturing wide-ranging and diverse inquiries into the history of political thought.

If selected for participation, applicants will deliver a written, roundtable-style presentation on a specific part or theme of the text. Your approach to the text might be driven by historical or contemporary concerns, and it might issue from an interest in a theme or a figure (be it Aristotle or Foucault). Whatever your approach, however, your presentation must centrally investigate some aspect of the text of Capital. Spaces are very limited.

Applicants should send the following materials as email attachments (.doc/.rtf/.pdf) to papers@sspp.us by September 15, 2010:
• Curriculum Vitae
• One page statement of interest, including a discussion of a) the topics you wish to explore in a roundtable presentation, and b) the projected significance of participation for your research and/or teaching.

All applicants will be notified of the outcome of the selection process via email on or before October 15, 2010. Participants will be asked to send a draft or outline of their presentation to papers@sspp.us by January 15, 2011 so that we can finalize the program.

Aristotle's Politics, A.1-2

2010-07-29T16:45:00.003-04:00

...in a translation of my own devising. Notes and thoughts to follow.

Aristotle, Politics [that is: “what is proper to the citizen”]

(1252a1) Since we see that every city is a sort of community and that every community is joined together for the sake of some good – for everyone does everything for the favor of what seems to be good – then clearly, as every community endeavors for some good, doubtless (5) the most sovereign of all will endeavor for the most sovereign of all goods and the one encompassing all the others. And this community is called the city or the political community.

And so those who suppose that what is proper to a citizen and to a king and to the head of a household and to a master are all the same do not speak beautifully. For they hold that each of these is (10) distinguished by being many or few, but not by its form, such that a few would be proper to a master, more to the head of a household, and yet more to a citizen or a king, as if there were no distinction between a large household and a small city. And as for what is proper to a citizen and to a king, whenever one is set above, this is kingly, and whenever, one in part rules and in part is ruled, (15) according to the account of science, this is civic. But none of this is true.

What has just been said will become clear if we investigate according to the usual mode of inquiry. For just as in other cases what is put together must be separated until one reaches what is not put together – for these are the least (20) parts of all – so also if we look out for what lies together in the city, we will better see both how these things we have spoken about are distinguished from one another and whether it is possible to take hold of some technique regarding each of them.

If we were to observe how each of these matters was engendered from the beginning (25), just as in other cases also in this one, we would contemplate it most beautifully. First, of necessity, there is the coupling together of those who are not able to be without one another: 1) as the female and the male, for the sake of generation – for this is not from deliberate decision but, just as in the other animals and plants, from a natural bidding (30) to leave behind an other that is like oneself – and 2) as the by nature ruling and ruled, for safety. For that which is able to foresee by thought is by nature ruling and by nature mastering, but that which is able to gain this by the labor of the body is ruled and by nature a slave. Because of this, the same thing benefits master and slave.

(1252b) Now the female and the slave are distinguished by nature – for nature makes nothing in the way that smiths make the Delphic knife, poorly, but one for one; for thus would each tool bring the work to its end most beautifully, not being a slave to many works, (5) but to one. But among the barbarians, the female and the slave have the same rank. The cause of this is that they do not have what is by nature ruling, but the community comes to be the same as that of female slave and male slave. Because of this, the poets say: “It is fitting that Hellenes rule barbarians,” (Euripides, Iphegenia in Aulis, line 1400) – as if, by nature, barbarian and slave are the same.

And so from these (10) two communities the household first arises, and Hesiod rightly says in his poem: “A house, first of all, a wife, and an ox for the plough” (Works and Days, line 405) – for a poor person has an ox rather than a servant. And so the community in everything ephemeral, joined together according to nature, is the household; and Charonides calls these “bowl-mates,” and Epimedides (15) of Krete “manger-mates.”

And the first community arising from several households for the sake of non-ephemeral needs is the village. Very much according to nature, the village seems to be a colony of the household; some call these “milk-mates,” children and children of children. Because of this the first cities were ruled by kings, and the (20) nomadic peoples are still yet. For those joined together were ruled by kings; for every household was a kingship under the eldest, and thus also were the colonies, through kinship. And this is what Homer says: “each declares right for children and wives” (Odyssey, book 9, line 114) – for they were scattered; and they dwelled thus in ancient times. And because of this everyone says (25) the gods are ruled by a king, since they themselves are still now, or were in ancient times, ruled by kings, and just as humans make the gods like themselves in form, so too in way of life.

The city is the complete community arising from several villages, already having attained the limit of self-sufficiency, in a manner of speaking, coming to be for the sake of (30) life, but being for the sake of living well. Because of this, every city is by nature, if indeed the first communities were. For this is the end of those, and the nature is the end. For as each thing is at the completion of its coming into being, this we say is the nature of each, as with a human being, a horse, or a household. Further, that for the sake of which and the end is best (1253a), and self-sufficiency is also the end and best.

From these things, then, it is apparent that the city is by nature, and that the human being is a political animal by nature, and that the one without a city, through nature and not through chance, is truly low, or else superior to human being, and, just like (5) the one Homer reviled: “without clan, without right, without home,” (Iliad, book 9, line 63) – for one who is like that by nature is, just like that, one who longs for war, just as is the unyoked piece in draughts.

Because of this, clearly, the human being is more political an animal than all bees and all herding animals. For, as we say, nature makes nothing fruitlessly. Among the animals, (10) only the human being has speech. The voice is a sign of pain and pleasure, and because of this is present in the other animals – for their nature comes as far as this, to have perception of pain and pleasure, and also to signal this to one another – but speech is to make clear the advantageous and (15) the harmful, and also the just and the unjust. For human beings alone, as opposed to the other animals, have this only, the perception of good and evil and just and unjust and the others. And the community of these makes a household and a city.

(20) And the city and the household are prior to each of us by nature. For the whole is, of necessity, prior to the parts. For if you do away with the whole, neither the foot nor the hand will be, except by homonym – just as if one spoke of a stone foot or hand – for in this regard it is utterly destroyed. Everything is defined by its work and its ability, such that if, in this regard, it is no longer, it is not to be spoken of as the same, except by homology. (25) And so, that the city is prior to each is clear. For if each is not self-sufficient separately, each will have the like condition as other parts in relation to the whole; and the one who is incapable of communing, or who needs nothing through being self-sufficient, is no part of a city, like a beast or a god.

And so, there is in everyone by nature an impetus (30) towards this sort of community; and the first who brought it together is responsible for the greatest good. For just as the human being, when completed, is the best of the animals, so also, when separated from law and justice, the human being is the worst of all. For armed injustice is most dangerous, and the human being is born armed for prudence and (35) virtue, which arms are very useful for the opposite. Because of this, without virtue the human being is most unholy and savage, and the worst regarding sex and food. Justice is of the city, for justice is the order of the political community, and righteousness is a decision about what is just.

The Postmodern State

2010-06-01T10:01:00.004-04:00

Israel's attack on the flotilla of Turkish boats headed for Gaza seems to me to be an object lesson in what various neo-Marxists have been calling the transition from the state to empire.

The IDF attacked the flotilla in international waters, [and there was no preliminary attempt to turn the boats back by other means -- commando raid was the tactic of first choice][Incorrect: see update]. When the soldiers boarded, they were met with stiff resistance -- the first ones were clubbed and and least one was thrown overboard. In response to this resistance, the IDF soldiers opened fire, and 10-19 activists from the flotilla were killed. No IDF commandos were killed.

The IDF maintains a blog, where you can see their portrayal of the event. It prominently features video of the raid, showing the first commandos aboard being beaten, and photos and video showing the assortment of kitchen knives, metal pipes, and sundry other weapons deployed by the activists in their attempt to ward off the raid. The blog refers to the activists' resistance this way: "the activists on board lynched the soldiers in a planned attack."

So, an army raids vessels flying the flag of an allied state, in international waters, [with no warning,][Incorrect. See update.] and those raided are supposed to meekly surrender. If they don't, then they are guilty of a planned attack on the soldiers raiding their boats.

There is a logic to this, but it is not the logic of the law, or the legal state. It is, in the Foucauldian idiom of neo-Marxism, the logic of the norm. Israel has a policy of containment regarding Gaza. The flotilla represented a risk to that policy. It broke no laws and posed no military threat, but, as a risk, it was the object of military intervention. As an identified risk, the burden was on the activists to prove, not their innocence, but their passivity. Since they actively resisted, they had to be pacified, and retroactively proved themselves to be the risk they had been identified as. The citizenship of the activists is of no import; they could have been Israeli, or Iranian, or American, or whatever -- there is no citizenship per se in relation to states acting as imperial agencies. The only question is whether you are passive with regard to empire or pose a risk.

This same logic pervades the quasi-militarized police operations that we call the war on drugs and the war on terror. What happened in the Mediterranean is of the same form as what happens in drug raids in Indiana, or in mobilizations against protesters in Minneapolis. As Foucault says near the end of his lectures on "The Birth of Biopolitics," the "law and order" mantra of conservatives has been revealed to be a contradiction in terms -- the question is: Law or order? The postmodern state -- empire -- chooses order.

UPDATE:

I don't know where I got the "no warning" tidbit, but that's not right. The IDF announced they were boarding to search the ships. For discussions of the legality of Israel's blockade and of this raid, see here, here, and here.

UPDATE II:

Well, maybe the "no warning" tidbit was right after all. As accounts from activists have started seeping out, the raid looks worse and worse -- see here and here, for example.

Also, regarding the new status accorded "citizens" of the postmodern state, see here.

Pessimism and Anti-State Politics

2010-06-01T09:53:00.003-04:00

My comments for today's panel at CPSA:

My project is to try to flesh out a neo-Marxian politics using resources from institutional and new institutional economics. I begin from the hypothesis that human beings are evil. I try to be a little deflationary about this; when I say we are evil, I do not mean that we are malicious – though we can be – but only that we are not very good cooperators. This is because we are, at least potentially, a) prudentially rational agents, b) who act independently of one another, but c) who are dependent on one another for realizing our desired outcomes. In other words, we face the persistent threat of coordination problems.

This specter of coordination problems does not always arrive – collective action happens – but it is a real enough threat that we cannot, in principle, rule out the possibility of prudentially rational opportunism (free-riding, defection, rent-seeking, moral hazard, etc.) in our considerations of institutional design. The threat amounts to a divergence between the common good and the good achievable by the independent actions of prudentially rational agents. Any approach to collective action that does not take this threat into account in the structure and working rules it proposes for institutions seems, by that very fact, to convict itself of criminal naiveté by entrusting the entire existence of the proposed institutions to the care of good fortune alone. My essay tests various approaches to collective action by this criterion of naiveté.

Taking evil for granted allows me summarily to dismiss or bracket the spontaneous order theories offered up by admirers of market exchange from Smith to Hayek and beyond. These theories maintain either a) that collective action is pernicious, since the common good can only ever be the outcome of independent actions undertaken by prudentially rational agents, or else b) that collective action is impossible, since every conceivable institution is analyzable into the aggregate outcome of independent actions undertaken by prudentially rational agents. Both versions entail the denial of my hypothesis within the sphere of transactions governed by spontaneous order. The presence of spontaneous order within a domain means there is, for that domain, no problem of human evil, since coordination problems are either a) produced by the encroachment upon this domain of spontaneous order by some external principle (e.g., coercion) or else b) impossible. For my purpose here, I can be agnostic about the scope – either actual or proper – of spontaneous order, at least up to a point. There may be a great deal, there may be none at all; I insist only that spontaneous order does not govern the whole of the human condition. Even if the market is or should be very large, there are at least some transactions that cannot be included in it. Whatever transactions take place outside the market are within the domain of institutional order, where coordination is a problem, and evil must be taken seriously.

My next question is: can we conceive of this domain of institutional order as consisting, in whole or in part, of the state? I think not. Despite its self-proclaimed pessimism, from Hobbes to Schmitt, state theory is, it seems to me, thoroughly and optimistically moralistic, in the precise sense that the state presupposes dutiful, and hence non-opportunistic subjects. The lynch-pin of my argument here is Hobbes’ own wonderfully incisive question from Behemoth: “If men know not their duty, what is there that can force them to obey the laws? An army, you will say. But what shall force the army?” The subject’s recognition of the state as sovereign means nothing other than this: the subject alienates his or her prudential judgment to the state, pre-committing him- or herself to override the counsel of prudential rationality whenever this conflicts with the laws or decrees handed down from the sovereign. This pre-commitment is the consent to be governed that in fact grounds and makes possible the sovereign’s power of the sword, since, as the Hobbes makes clear, this “de facto” power is nothing other than the army’s own de jure consent to be governed. Consequently, the state can be no part of the institutional domain of human life for the simple reason that, being unable to rule out the possibility of prudentially rational opportunism, we cannot make the transition from the state of nature to the civil state. The only institutions available to us, on my hypothesis, are what Hobbes refers to as “irregular systems” or “leagues,” held together by nothing more than prudential rationality itself.

The question is: given how bad we are at cooperating, how are such purely prudential institutions possible?

In order to talk about institutional arrangements divorced from both the spontaneous order of the market and the moral order of the state I avail myself of the theory of the firm as it has developed from Coase through the new institutional economics of Williamson and Ostrom. The theory of the firm originated in the twin realizations that a) conducting a transaction on the market has costs, and that b) sometimes accessing the market costs more than it is worth. Once transaction costs – the time and effort it takes to enter the market – are figured into the equation, hierarchy, personal relationships, and long-term contracts – the prudential order of the firm – might be more efficient than a series of competitive market transactions. This framework might explain how a set of merely prudential institutions would arise and persist outside the sphere of the market.

However, I think there are two problems with the theory of the firm (as it is articulated by Coase and Williamson, at least).

First, both Coase and Williamson carry over to the analysis of the firm the marginal utility framework of perfectly competitive markets. This allows both to say that firms are not only more efficient than the market transactions they replace, but efficient tout court; wherever any transaction can be most cheaply carried out, that is just where it will be carried out. This just-so story is completely unwarranted, I think. Some of the very transaction costs that motivate the move to firms in the first place constitute opaque barriers to any judgment that all transactions are being carried out just where they should be. There is no reason to suppose that prudential institutions are, in any given case, better homes for the transactions they encompass than the market or other possible or actual institutions.

Second, even – indeed, especially – if firms are supposed to be efficient institutions, the threat of coordination problems would seem to militate against prudentially rational agents being able to provide themselves with such institutions, since they would constitute public goods susceptible to all the problems of supply familiar to students of collective action dilemmas. This reinforces the conclusion that existing institutions are unlikely to be efficient. The very fact that an institution exists indicates that it is probably not a rationally efficient institution.

Such institutions – organized by non-obligatory directive authority – do exist. Hence, the state of nature is not the war of all against all. Moreover, even if we have good reason to doubt they are efficient, these institutions do frequently exhibit a stability that could only signify some degree of support from opportunistic calculation. What we lack, as Elinor Ostrom has pointed out, is a “theory that would identify the mechanisms by which a group of individuals could organize themselves” into such irregular associations.

However, I do not think this lack of a theory is a problem – except, maybe, for theoreticians. Implementing the right institution for a given situation does not depend in any way on applying a theory of institutions. Indeed, I think that any such theory would have the same structure, and be inadmissible on the same grounds, as the Hobbesian theory of the state. It would, it seems to me, look something like Rawls’ original essay on “Justice as Fairness” and would comprise a principle or set of principles according to which the working rules of institutions would be formulated as rules binding for members, or meta-rules governing the proposal and emendation of institutional rules. But this framework of meta-rules or principles asks members of an institution always to interact with the prudential rules of their institution via the principles of institutions, and never to subordinate these principles to the prudential considerations motivating the particular institutional rules. This is exactly Hobbes’ move. It makes institutional membership contingent on deferring one’s prudential judgment to the principles of institutions, thereby rendering the institution a moral rather than a prudential order. This appeal from prudential to moral rationality is ruled out by my hypothesis. Therefore, I think any normative theory of institutions will, when it comes to proposing and refining institutional rules, run aground on the threat posed by prudentially rational opportunism. Only actual practices of institution formation and reform can look this human evil in the eye.

Event: After Capitalism? [Updated with reactions]

2010-04-26T13:07:00.008-04:00

This Thursday, 29 April, 2010; Salle 422, 2910 Boul. Édouard-Montpetit

13 h - 14 h Pierre-Yves Néron, CRÉUM : Public Capitalism

14 h - 15 h Pablo Gilabert, Concordia University : Socialism

15 h - 15 h 15 : Pause café

15 h 15 - 16 h 30 David Casassas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona : Property-owning Democracy

Info here. Poster here.

UPDATE:

A really nice event. About 20 lightyears from my way of approaching political philosophical problems, though. Whatever -- it's normative political theory. I don't do normative political theory. But it was also -- except, perhaps, for some of Casassas' paper -- ideal political theory. And I just can't get my head to go into that space at all. For me, political theory always departs from some very robust sense of the presently given human condition, and, because of this, I can never make heads nor tails of the leap to talking about a just society in abstraction from the concrete situation.

For example: Does the just society have neighbors? Does it have borders? If so, do these facts have any impact on what it means to be a just society? A just society has citizens; does it also have non-citizen residents? Does a just society engage in foreign trade, or does it produce all it needs? Either way, what does a just society produce? What does it need? Do trade relations or production relations ahve any impact on what it means to be a just society? Are its neighbors friendly or hostile? Does this matter for justice? Does a just society have a history? Is this history a history of justice? Does this history have any impact on the institutions of the basic structure? I just don't know how to bracket these questions in order to consider a just social order "in itself."

(Hell, even Plato didn't bracket these questions; the consideration that really gets the construction of the city in speech undrway in the Republic is the consideration that the city will be one of many, will have neighbors, and must be prepared to defend itself against them.)

Anyway, a very nice event anyway...

Two links

2010-04-24T09:58:00.004-04:00

I'd like to say more about both of these at some point, but...

The Contemporary Condition

and:

the entire run of Cahiers pour l'Analyse, the locus classicus of '60s poststructuralism, is now on-line.

"Accelerate the Contradictions": Notes Towards a History

2010-04-23T10:23:00.004-04:00

A correspondent asked me about the origin and history of the phrase "accelerate the contradictions." Here's what I managed to dig up:

It is one of the less common of several variant phrases: "heighten (or sharpen, or develop) the contradictions"; "accelerate (or heighten, or develop) the crisis"; etc. (I chose it because I like how it sounds.)

The earliest use of any of these variants that I know of is by Marx in his "1844 manuscripts." Discussing the development of English political economy after Adam Smith, Marx writes:

It is therefore another great achievement of modern English political economy to have declared rent of land to be the difference in the interest yielded by the worst and the best land under cultivation; to have [exposed] the landowner's romantic illusions – his alleged social importance and the identity of his interest with the interest of society, a view still maintained by Adam Smith after the Physiocrats; and to [have] anticipated and prepared the movement of the real world which will transform the landowner into an ordinary, prosaic capitalist, and thus simplify and sharpen the contradiction [between capital and labour] and hasten its resolution. Land as land, and rent as rent, have lost their distinction of rank and become insignificant capital and interest – or rather, capital and interest that signify only money.

There is also a passage in Hegel's Logic (paragraph 961) that clearly has all of the elements:

Intelligent reflection, to mention this here, consists, on the contrary, in grasping and asserting contradiction. Even though it does not express the Notion of things and their relationships and has for its material and content only the determinations of ordinary thinking, it does bring these into a relation that contains their contradiction and allows their Notion to show or shine through the contradiction. Thinking reason, however, sharpens, so to say, the blunt difference of diverse terms, the mere manifoldness of pictorial thinking, into essential difference, into opposition. Only when the manifold terms have been driven to the point of contradiction to they become active and lively towards one another, receiving in contradiction the negativity which is the indwelling pulsation of self-movement and spontaneous activity.

Neither of these texts, however, employ the phrase in the sense it came to have in 20th century Marxism -- promoting revolution by making the current state of things more intolerable. Rosa Luxemburg comes closer in Reform or Revolution (1900):

In other words, when evaluated from the angle of their final effect on capitalist economy, cartels and trusts fail as “means of adaptation.” They fail to attenuate the contradictions of capitalism. On the contrary, they appear to be an instrument of greater anarchy. They encourage the further development of the internal contradictions of capitalism. They accelerate the coming of a general decline of capitalism.

As had August Bebel before her in Woman and Socialism (1879):

Since one industry furnishes the raw material to another and one depends upon the other, the ills that befall one must affect the others. The circle of those affected widens. Many obligations that had been entered upon in the hope of prolonged favorable conditions cannot be met, and heighten the crisis that grows worse from month to month.

But these texts don't suggest accelerating or heightening contradictions as a revolutionary strategy, but only as part of the process of capitalist development.

Lenin comes closer, in "The Heritage We Renounce" (1897):

The enlightener believes in the present course of social development, because he fails to observe its inherent contradictions. The Narodnik fears the present course of social development, because he is already aware of these contradictions. The “disciple” [of dialectical materialism] believes in the present course of social development, because he sees the only earnest hope of a better future in the full development of these contradictions. The first and last trends therefore strive to support, accelerate, facilitate development along the present path, to remove all obstacles which hamper this development and retard it.

So maybe the folk wisdom that attributes the strategy of accelerating the contradictions to Leninism is more or less correct!

Philosophy among the humanities

2010-04-07T09:35:00.011-04:00

I usually try to avoid commenting on these sorts of things, but I'm feeling surly this morning...

Jason Stanley, a philosopher at Rutgers, has an article in Inside Higher Ed bemoaning the fact that philosophy is alienated from the rest of the humanities. This is a distillation of various complaints Stanley has aired in recent years on Brian Leiter's blog (which writings can be perused here). He forwards three bits of evidence for this sorry state of affairs:

Philosophers don't win the big prizes in the humanities -- MacArthur grants, Guggenheim fellowships, ACLS New Faculty fellowships -- at the same rate as historians and other humanists. (The numbers with which he backs this up are questionable.)
"Most American humanists are unclear about how the debates of philosophers are supposed to fit into the overall project of the humanities. We are ignored at dinner parties, and considered arrogant and perhaps uncouth." (I'm not sure why Mr. Stanley's unpopularity at dinner parties is an interesting topic for IHE.)
"To add insult to injury, the name of our profession is liberally bestowed on those teaching in completely different departments." (By which he means, horror of horrors, that "Many academics use the term "philosopher" not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time [i.e., the time of academic philosophers like Mr. Stanley], but rather as a certain kind of honorific [for anyone] who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline.")

As is clear from these rather odd complaints, the title of Stanley's piece ("The Crisis of Philosophy") is misleading. The crisis of philosophy is not a crisis in philosophy. Professional philosophy in the Anglo-American world is doing just great, thank you very much. The crisis of philosophy is rather a crisis in the humanities. As Stanley makes clear by his insistence that Nietzsche and Zizek are the outside of a line of continuity running from Aristotle through Spinoza and Kant and up to Saul Kripke and David Lewis, and his further contention that the six MacArthur fellows in philosophy (Rorty, Scanlon, Cavell, P. Churchland, Kolakowski, and Shklar -- he ignores the six philosophers who have won MacArthurs under other headings [Vlastos, Cartwright, Kristeller, Fox Keller, Hawkins, and Moses]) are "an odd group," the real complaint is that humanists don't pay attention to or honor the sort of philosophy that Stanley considers central to the profession.

That may be. But I think it is weird for Stanley to complain about it, or to think that this is a defect in the humanities. Does the work of Lewis or Kripke or Frege have any relevance for your average humanist? As Stanley admits elsewhere, the philosophers he knows tend not to be humanists themselves, or to have "wisdom and insight about the human condition." He explicitly includes moral philosophers in this judgment. As he writes:

It's clear to me why (say) someone working in metaphysics is not likely to have more insight into the human condition than the average mortal. It's because many people working in metaphysics are captured principally by the problem of working out the consistencies of an abstract problem space with only dubious connections to how we live our lives. Moral philosophers tend as a whole to be exactly the same as metaphysicians, except they have chosen a somewhat different problem space to explore the logical relations between theses.

What is there for a humanist to take interest in here? Why should the logical relations among theses in a problem space be of any concern to a historian, anthropologist, or student of literature?

My own feeling is that the way in which many philosophers -- and, in particular, your run-of-the-mill, mainstream, analytic philosophers -- pose their problems and lay out the theses to be examined is utterly disconnected from anything that is a recognizable part of my day to day life. The problems defined by previous generations of (mainstream academic) philosophers have spawned partial solutions which have given rise to sub-problems which have been formalized in various ways and this continuous process has resulted in a rather arid and extremely technical set of "problem spaces" that do not seem to an outsider to hold any potential for yielding "wisdom and insight about the human condition." Now I don't necessarily have a problem with that; taking anything seriously for very long is bound to give rise to technical and obscure issues. But it is truly bizarre to complain that humanists don't appreciate the inner workings of professionalized philosophy.

Less bizarre but more problematic is Stanley's penchant for speaking on behalf of "we" philosophers. (Leiter does this all the time, too.) On the one hand, Stanley wants to insist that mainstream analytic philosophy is absolutely open and diverse because, for example, it "clearly does not place any limits upon the conclusions that can be defended in its journals." On the other hand, this very formulation maintains the substantive notion that philosophy is all about a neutral and universal methodology (a set of logical and argumentative tools) that is merely applied to different ends. I look at the history of philosophy, and at the current crop of professional academic philosophers, and I don't see a "we." I see a host of fundamental disagreements, not so much about conclusions as about what sort of activity philosophy is in the first place. Aristotle and Hobbes did not agree about a neutral methodology while disagreeing about conclusions. Same goes for Heidegger and Lewis. That's what I like about philosophy -- nothing can be taken for granted, it's open conflict on all possible fronts, including meta-fronts and meta-meta-fronts.

In other posts, Stanley is much more open to these sorts of issues. What he seems consistently to elide is the difference between philosophy as a profession -- as an academic specialization or "discipline" -- and philosophy as this possibility of open conflict on all fronts. Despite his claim, philosophy is not the oldest discipline, because it is not a discipline at all. Philosophy has only very intermittently been captured by the academy. It happened for a while in Medieval Europe. It happened for a while in Enlightenment Germany. It has been the rule during the 20th century. There is no reason to expect that it will remain the rule for very long.

Stanley and Leiter systematically confuse the academic profession of philosophy (within which they, unlike me, occupy elite positions within the mainstream) with philosophy as such (within which they are, like me, just johnny-come-lately epigones and amateurs). When they say "we philosophers" they are speaking as elite academic professionals but think they are speaking as philosophers as such. And when Stanley complains about humanists lack of concern for the former, he has no one to blame but himself.

How Straussian Marxism Is Possible

2010-03-29T10:11:00.003-04:00

“Moral indignation is no affair of political philosophy. It constitutes no part of philosophy.”

-- Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, p. 1.

[Blog subtitle edited to better reflect actual content.]

Market Providentialism

2010-03-23T14:19:00.003-04:00

Some guy over at the American Enterprise Institute claims that the fact that air pollution has dramatically improved since 1980 is proof that the catastrophic predictions made by early environmentalists were wrong (and, hence, we ought to ignore all those dire predictions being made by environmentalists now, natch). As others point out here and here, this analysis neatly ignores the fact that environmental activism led to government regulation led to averting the predicted consequences of inaction.

This would not be especially noteworthy except that a similar line of "thought" can be found all over the place among those who feel that the market will provide. Running out of oil? No worries -- as the price increases, entrepreneurs will be motivated to innovate new extraction methods, new energy sources, more efficient engines, etc. (I've written a bit about this before, discussing some things said by John Romer, husband of Obama's chief economic advisor, Christina Romer.)

This providentialism always ignores the non-market activism that precedes and motivates the market activity that "solves" the problem in question. There's always a sticky point where Cassandras start screaming and marching and demanding change, and the market providentialists have a hard time fitting these Cassandras into their narratives of this, the best of all possible worlds.

The Anti-Political Pathology of the American "Left"

2010-03-22T20:45:00.004-04:00

I haven't linked to anything Glenn Greenwald has written in a very long time. This is partly because I have not been paying nearly as much attention to US politics since Obama's election. This is partly the recoil from paying way too much attention to everything in the lead-up to the election, and partly an attempt to inoculate myself against the mind-numbing depression caused by the daily ups and downs of the political "conversation" in the US. My dad works for a senator, and I can see the toll taken on him by the ceaseless chatter and clatter of the thousands of little Don Quixotes at work slaying the dragons of their political opponents, and by the nauseating stew of opinion and analysis served up by the news media. I sort of made up my mind that the guy I wanted to win had won, and I wasn't ready to be disheartened by attending to the daily atrocities committed by the best-guys-available-at-the-time.

But here is a link to something Glenn Greenwald has written.

His basic claim is that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party sucks at politics. They suck at politics because they are incapable of making a credible threat to vote against the tiniest incremental improvement on some issue where they would like to see major reform. Their mantra is, "Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good," but the effect is that the "better than nothing" becomes the enemy of the good. The HCR debate has guaranteed that the Obama administration will never make any major moves to placate progressives within the party because they know full well that the progressives will always back them no matter what. The progressives have destroyed any leverage they might have had with the administration because they have proven themselves unwilling to sink the health care bill, even though it lacks any of their "must have" provisions.

First of all, I think this analysis is spot on.

Second, I think it can be generalized to cover much of the dynamic that obtains between (relatively) liberal and (relatively) conservative blocs in most major political debates in North America. In short, liberals suck at politics because they aren't willing to accelerate the contradictions. The notion that things might have to get worse in order to get better, and that a responsible effort to make things better therefore has to accept making things worse as a valid strategy -- this is beyond the pale of most liberal thought.

If the anti-war "left" had decided to make life really hard for Bush, they could have. Obstructionism is obviously not an entirely lost art in US Congress, and those opponents of the war who had the misfortune of not being elected members of the legislature could have been infinitely more extremist in the expression of their opposition to the war than they were. But that would have entailed making life worse for people other than Bush as well -- soldiers, one's fellow citizens, one's family, etc. It would have meant taking on board the responsibility for causing deaths, even. Being anti-war could not be passed off on one's conscience as being anti-killing, or anti-suffering, or the like. It would mean taking a decision against a concrete policy or act, rather than against only abstract generalities. (If you've decided to oppose this war, then nothing prohibits you from making war against those who would take us into this war, but if you have "decided" to oppose War, there is very little you can do to stop any actual war, which will always be a concrete course of action, carried out by people with guns.)

This unwillingness to make things worse in order to get what you have decided upon as your goal means the progressive left will always get steamrolled by those who are willing to say "Give me what I want or I'll destroy something both of us care about."

An exercise in classification

2010-03-12T14:36:00.003-05:00

Regarding and proposing solutions to coordination problems of various sorts (assurance games, prisoners' dilemmas, and the like):

Stalinists believe in the state, not in entrepreneurs.
Libertarians believe in entrepreneurs, not in the state.

Keynesians believe in both.

Communists believe in neither.

The Left and Liberal Government (After Foucault)

2010-03-04T11:54:00.005-05:00

Foucault's lectures on "The Birth of Biopolitics" have been rattling around in my head. I think they present a real challenge for the Left, in the sense that they articulate the lack of what Foucault refers to as a socialist governmentality. In fact, on might even say that, in the West, there is currently no governmental alternative to liberalism. What does this mean?

Well, first we should set aside the sense in which "liberalism" names a partisan position in North American electoral and cultural politics. Liberals in this sense tend to embrace liberal government for some issues (drugs, abortion, etc.) while rejecting it for others (minimum wage, environmental regulations, etc.). There is no neat fit between the mode of government and partisan identification, even if there are discernible patterns.

Likewise, I think it is necessary to set aside the sense in which "liberalism" names a theory of state legitimation. In this sense, liberalism asks the question: When is it obligatory that I obey a coercive power? To which liberalism answers: When that coercive power is necessary (and sufficient?) to secure a sphere of equal liberty for myself and my fellows, who are equally obligated thereby to obey. This morality of power and obedience -- basically, the social contract tradition -- has some relationship with liberal government, but is not identical to it. Hobbes offers a liberal legitimation of the state, but not a liberal theory of government. Smith proposes liberal government, but not a liberal legitimation of the state. (Foucault talks about this as the "strategic" difference between "revolutionary" (natural rights, social contract) and "radical" (utilitarian) strands within liberalism. The difference is strategic because the two strands can support one another in various ways, but are not reducible to moments in a dialectical unity.)

Liberalism as a mode of government names the technology of power that governs a natural-social phenomenon by establishing a normal range of incidence and keeping the phenomenon within this range by means of state action on the environmental variables that tend to affect incidence. In other words, liberal government accepts the thing to be governed as an ineliminable (natural) fact of the social world, and, rather than trying to forbid or otherwise abolish it, manages it indirectly by affecting those variables that encourage or discourage it by appealing to individuals' interests. In short, liberal government is economic government, government that understands and respects the economic incentives that produce harmful or unpleasant phenomena, and tries to manage problems by restructuring the incentives.

Now, when things are put in these terms, it seems, in fact, that liberalism is the only governmental game in town. The Right has a moral discourse and an effective political rhetoric, but no independent art of government. The Left has a critical discourse, but neither an effective political rhetoric nor an art of government. Mainstream liberalism has government all locked up -- but has neither a critical nor a moral discourse, and is largely lacking in the political rhetoric department, too! (Hence, the sorry state of the Democrats in the US and the Liberals in Canada, both of which must pin there hopes of electoral success almost entirely on the incompetence of their Rightist competition.)

This is a problem for the Left in that, aside from the momentous problem of, y'know, actually taking power, we have no independent practice of government by which we might wield the power of the state should it somehow fall into our hands. There are, of course, distinctive ends we would like to achieve, but when you ask: How would we go about, e.g., redistributing land, establishing a basic income, etc? the only answers that seem forthcoming are: a) a magical faith in the will of the people (a simple decree, anyone?) and b) ask the economists.

Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

2010-02-11T12:09:00.005-05:00

MARX AND PHILOSOPHY REVIEW OF BOOKS

Announcing the launch of a new online review of books covering Marxism and philosophy
First batch of reviews now online
New reviews added regularly
Part of the redesigned Marx & Philosophy Society web site
Edited by Sean Sayers and members of the Society

For reviews and to subscribe go to marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks

Basic Income Conference

2010-02-04T09:38:00.003-05:00

Thursday, 15 April and Friday, 16 April, 2010, at Universite de Montreal. The full program, as well as more information, can be found here. Basic income is probably the only policy in the world advocated by communists, Rawlsian liberals, and Sarah Palin (as governor of Alaska, she presided over the only operating basic income program in existence, the state oil revenue grants).

I don't know the precise form of basic income guarantee advocated by all of the speakers at the conference, but it is certainly worth differentiating between the negative income tax advocated by neoliberals and neo-classical economists (of which the US earned income tax credit is an instance) and the basic income guarantee, which would be unconditional (except, perhaps, ofr citizenship), and hence not means-tested or tied to employment.

Echoes of Historical Materialism

2010-01-21T09:36:00.008-05:00

So, obviously, substantive posts have been a bit scarce of late. I'd like to turn that around, both because and by means of the HM conference I attended in NYC last week. Because: it was one of the very best conferences I've ever attended, and certainly the very best Lefty, is-it-academia-or-is-it-activism sort of conference I've ever attended. By means of: I'm hoping it will be easy enough for me to half report on, half respond to what I saw and heard there, and generally to spin the experience out into a set of reflections on this, that, and the other.

First up: the matrix of historicisms.

This is an attempt to present in a more articulate manner the introductory remarks to my paper on Virno and Aristotle, which were marred by my inability to remember how to draw a simple matrix on the chalkboard.

My talk was to have been, to some extent, concerned with the “family politics” of communists – the friends and enemies, lineages and filiations, by which we construct our identities. In asking about and proposing to discuss Aristotle’s communism, I wanted to avoid – or at least postpone drawing – the seemingly foregone conclusion that Aristotle was in his day, and is even now one of the preeminent anti-communists: critic of Plato’s communist scheme, defender of private property and slavery, basing his entire ontology on the “substance” of the landed proprietor. Either he is no ancestor at all, or, if some distant consanguinity must be admitted, then it must just as surely be renounced, and any holdings that come down from it sold off, used up, or simply abandoned to the elements. Besides, the anti-communists seem more than happy to enshrine Aristotle alongside their honored dead.

However – and this is the first complication – there are several distinct anti-communist Aristotles, each of whom is anti-communist by way of a distinct proxy for communism. Murray Rothbard’s Aristotle is anti-communist because his empiricism and pluralism are supposed to be anti-Platonist. Here, communism is figured as an extreme form of authoritarian rationalism. Ayn Rand’s Aristotle is anti-communist because his realism and elitism are supposed to be anti-Kantian. Here, then, communism is figured as an extreme form of Christian subjectivism. Leo Strauss’s Aristotle is anti-communist because of his proto-Machiavellian pessimism about the possibility of justice. Hannah Arendt’s Aristotle, on the contrary, is anti-communist because he is anti-Machiavellian in his non-instrumental understanding of political discussion. Obviously, then, there is no agreement among anti-communists as to what communism itself amounts to, and hence no agreement about just which aspect of Aristotle is supposed to align him with their cause. Communism is “bad,” and Aristotle, being “good,” must be a natural ally in the struggle against communism.

Amongst socialist and communist authors, similarly – and this is the second, and more interesting, complication – Aristotle’s situation tends to vary depending upon a prior determination of the character of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular, it seems to depend upon how capitalism and anti-capitalism are situated in history. To employ a simplifying schematism, it seems to me that you can force anti-capitalists to answer two questions about history and classify them on the basis of their answers.

Question 1: Is the anti-capitalist movement an attempt to realize a break in history that has already occured at some point in the past?

Question 2: Would the victory of the anti-capitalist movement constitute or presuppose a break in history that is yet to come?

Answers can be plotted in a matrix:

"Modernists" (Hans Blumenberg, Deleuze perhaps, and certainly many Deleuzians, Negri at times) see the struggle against capitalism as the struggle to extend or realize the historical rupture that inaugurated modernity. The problem with capitalism, then, is that it represents a lingering past. Since Aristotle is almost certainly part of this pre-modern past that lingers on and must be overcome, Aristotle is an enemy of modernists. (Marx's exhortation to let the dead bury their dead might be the fountainhead of this progressivism.)

"Catastrophists" (Horkheimer and Adorno anyone?) see history as monotononous and relentless and devoid of promise, and see the overcoming of capitalism as the unprecedented inauguration of something new, a break with all that has come before. (Marx's claim in the 1859 Preface that the end of capitalism will mark the end of pre-history might be read as precedent here.)

"Dialecticians" (Murray, Meikle, Postone, Arthur, and even Althusser at times) see capitalism as the manifestation of a historical rupture that must itself be suppressed, dismissed, repeated, or otherwise cancelled. The era of capitalism is an interregnum. Use-value romantics reside here, but so do most of the folks I most admire. Not all of them are Catholic, but a rather large percentage are. These are the friends of Aristotle, who was the first to criticize exchange because it abstracts from concrete usefulness.

"Natural Historians" (Virno, Althusser at other times) don't believe in historical ruptures, epochal befores and afters. The break between capitalism and communism is not a break between histories (eras) so much as a break within every history. The field of history is not, on this approach, subject to the sorts of progressions, leaps, or returns that characterize the pro- and anti-modernization stances taken by those situated in the other quadrants of the matrix. Because communism is not a referendum on modernity, Aristotle is not subject to valorization or condemnation for his proto- or anti-modern tendencies. Instead, there is a certain freedom to approach Aristotle – or any other thinker, for that matter – in a non-reductive way. What Virno says of Simondon could be said also of Aristotle: “At a certain point it is necessary to take leave of him and proceed alone (just as we must depart from many other ‘friendly’ thinkers). We do so with gratitude for his help but without nostalgia or regrets.”

Historical Materialism: 2nd North American Conference

2009-12-12T19:40:00.002-05:00

Historical Materialism, Second North American Conference
January 14-16 2010, New York City

Opening Plenary Thursday January 14th, 7pm
Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 5th Avenue
New York, NY

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!
www.hm2010nyc.org

Please join us for the second North American Historical Materialism Conference, beginning the evening of January 14th, 2010. Founded in 1997, the quarterly Historical Materialism (HM) journal is among the foremost publications of critical Marxist theory in the world, known for both its breadth as well as its intellectual rigor. Following upon successful conferences in London and Toronto, the New York City conference – the first ever in the US – will provide a lively space for scholars and activists to critically engage theoretical, historical, and practical issues of crucial importance to the movement for a world beyond capitalism.

The ongoing economic crisis continues to disrupt political and business establishments across the planet and inflict suffering upon millions in the form of mass unemployment and food shortages. Despite the popular expectations raised by a new presidency, U.S. imperial ambitions appear locked in place. The existential threat of climate change looms. Economic, political, military and ecological crises intersect as they intensify, making the world a much more dangerous place— but also one in which the space for theory and practice aimed at challenging capitalism, and exploring systemic alternatives, has grown.

The conversations between those who seek to both interpret and change the world have become more urgent. Some are attempting to piece back together the neo-liberal or Keynesian paradigms of the past, while others are re-discovering Marx – Marx the prophet of crisis, Marx the communist theorist, even Marx the materialist philosopher of nature, anticipating the ecological perils of modern capitalism. The need to innovate and critically engage with the traditions of Marxist thought has taken on a new importance.

In organizing the first US Historical Materialism conference we hope to open a space for critical, rigorous and boundary-pushing theory, to explore and provoke our understanding of capital and anti-capitalist alternatives with a critical eye to the traditions of the past, while confronting the crises and struggles unfolding around us.

Panels Include:
The Future of the Radical Left / Theories of the Developmentalist State / Witch-Hunting and Enclosures / Philosophy of Finance / Race and Labor / The Politics of Oil / Communism and Catastrophe / Women, Work and Violence / Theories of Exploitation / Ecology and Crisis / The Problem of Organization / Commons and Subjectivity / Capitalism, Slavery and the Civil War / Communization / Sexuality and Marriage / Fetishism and the Value Form / Marx’s Theory of Money / Post-Operaïsmo / Crisis Theory…

Confirmed speakers:
Anna M. Agathangelou, Stanley Aronowitz, Gopal Balakrishnan, Benjamin Balthaser, Banu Bargu, Deepankar Basu, Karl Beitel, Riccardo Bellofiore, Aaron Benanav, Jasper Bernes, Paul Blackledge, George Caffentzis, Dana Cloud, Patricia Clough, Gérard Duménil, Hester Eisenstein, Sara Farris, Silvia Federici, Robert Fine, Duncan Foley, Benedetto Fontana, Maya Gonzalez, Paul Heideman, Nancy Holmstrom, Matt Huber, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Andrew Kliman, Sabu Kohso, Michael Krätke, Tim Kreiner, Deepa Kumar, David Laibman, Neil Larsen, Paul Le Blanc, William Lewis, Geoff Mann, Paul Mattick, Michael McCarthy, Annie McClanahan, Geoffrey McDonald, Alan Milchman, Simon Mohun, Gary Mongiovi, Fred Moseley, Justin Myers, August Nimtz, Bertell Ollman, Melda Ozturk, Ozgur Ozturk, Mi Park, Nina Power, Nagesh Rao, Jason Read, John Riddell, William Clare Roberts, Heather Rogers, Sander, Anwar Shaikh, Hasana Sharp, Tony Smith, Jason E. Smith, Richard Smith, Hae-Yung Song, Marcel Stoetzler, Lee Sustar, Peter Thomas, Massimiliano Tomba, Aylin Topal, Alberto Toscano, Ben Trott, Ramaa Vasudevan, Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Chris Vials, Marina Vishmidt, Joel Wainwright, Victor Wallis, Paul Warren, Evan Calder Williams, Ted Winslow, Christopher Wright

Conference supported by:
The Center for the Study of Work, Culture and Technology
SpaceTime Research Collective
Haymarket Books

Progressive Marxism vs. Negative Marxism

2009-12-08T18:42:00.004-05:00

There was a book launch session for Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy at the Historical Materialism conference in London on 28 November. Meade McCloughlan and Nick Gray gave papers responding to the book. Their papers can be found here.

Gray's response chracterizes my contribution, together with those of Moishe Postone, Chris Arthur, and Patrick Murray, as "negative Marxism," in the sense that the four of us stress the discontinuity between Marx's project and the modern project of enlightenment, especially as the latter is represented by Kant and Hegel. Alternatively, we are negative Marxists because we think Marx's critique of political economy is also a critique of Hegel, insofar as, according to our readings of Marx, Hegel's spirit is isomorphic with capital. On either version of the characterization, we set ourselves apart from "progressive" Marxists who see Marx as augmenting, radicalizing, or otherwise furthering the modern project.

I think this is an astute way of drawing what is perhaps the major line of demarcation in the field of Marxism/Marxology. Moreover, I'm happy to embrace Gray's nomenclature. Negative Marxism is hereby emblazoned upon my standard!

What are the technocrats supposed to be doing, again?

2009-12-05T16:22:00.003-05:00

Dean Baker:

If Bernanke Did Not Know the Fed's Mission, Would That Be News?
Not at the WSJ, nor it seems anywhere else. Yesterday, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke referred to the "our dual mandate, which is growth and inflation." In fact, the dual mandate is full employment (defined as 4.0 percent unemployment) and price stability. Presumably Bernanke had unemployment in mind when he said "growth," but it striking that he would not use the right term. The two are of course not synonymous.

Here's a better explanation of the dual mandate than the Wikipedia entry Baker points to.

UPDATE: More grist for the mill here.

Libertarian or Maoist?

2009-11-29T12:26:00.002-05:00

A new quiz show! Everyone can play! Can you correctly match the ideology to the statement? (No cheating! Follow the links only after guessing!)

1.

Promoting equality of the sexes...

by excluding women from citizenship. Notice that her husband, who presumably shares her religious views, is already a citizen.

2. (via this wonderfully fun book)

Grandiose causes need new-style arguments. For example: hijab must be banned; it is a sign of male power (the father or eldest brother) over young girls or women. So, we'll banish the women who obstinately wear it. Basically put: these girls or women are oppressed. Hence, they shall be punished. [...]

Or, contrariwise: it is they who freely want to wear that damned headscarf, those rebels, those brats! Hence, they shall be punished. Wait a minute: do you mean it isn't the symbol of male oppression, after all? The father and eldest brother have nothing to do with it? Where then does the need to ban the scarf come from? The problem in hijab is conspicuously religious. Those brats have made their belief conspicuous. You there! Go stand in the corner!

Either it's the father and eldest brother, and "feministly" the hijab must be torn off, or it's the girl herself standing by her belief, and "laically" it must be torn off. There is no good headscarf. Bareheaded! Everywhere! As it used to be said-even non-Muslims said it-everyone must go out "bareheaded."

How'd you do?

Comments on Cohen

2009-11-28T13:56:00.003-05:00

Here are the comments I delivered yesterday as part of the Cohen symposium:

Analysis Terminated? Towards a Post-Analytical Marxism

Or: What Can Bullshit Marxists Learn from G. A. Cohen?

I never encountered Jerry Cohen, the man. I only knew G. A. Cohen, the author of important and influential books and essays in analytical Marxism. Jerry Cohen, so I’m told, was playful, funny, kind, and generous. The G. A. Cohen I knew was dead serious – if also capable of wit – harsh in his judgments, and quite intimidating. He was also incredibly sharp and really knew his way around Marx. I read his work – everything relevant to the study of Marx, that is – when I was in Amsterdam working on my dissertation on Marx’s concepts of labor. I found some of it helpful for my project, much of it ever so slightly disagreeable, and all of it rather less enticing than the Althusser I was reading at the same time. Nonetheless, even in my youth I recognized that Karl Marx’s Theory of History was the most formidable exposition of that other kind of Marxism, the attempt to make sense of Marx in the terms and by the conventions of Anglo-American academic philosophy and social science. I took Cohen much more seriously as a Marxologist than I did Jon Elster, for instance (indeed, footnote references to Elster in my dissertation included a parenthetical “sic!” after the title of his book, Making Sense of Marx). It was quite apparent to me that Cohen was seeking to clarify what Marx wrote precisely because he was convinced that, in rough outline at least, Marx was right: right about history, right about society, right about capitalism and the need to overcome it. His was not my kind of Marxism, but it seemed to me an intellectually honest, respectable, and challenging kind of Marxism, nonetheless.

I don’t think Cohen would have had the same judgment of me. In the introduction to the 2000 edition of Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen recollected that “before others taught me to call what we were doing ‘analytical Marxism,’ it was my own practice to call it ‘non-bullshit Marxism’” (KMTH, xxv). He admits that the term is “aggressive,” since “when you call what you do non-bullshit Marxism, you seem to imply that all other Marxism is bullshit.” He seems for a moment to undercut this aggressiveness by conceding that “there exists Marxism which is neither analytical nor bullshit,” but this concession has a sting in its tail, for he concludes by naming this non-analytical, non-bullshit Marxism “pre-analytical Marxism,” and declaring that whenever “pre-analytical Marxism encounters analytical Marxism, then it must either become analytical or become bullshit” (KMTH, xxv-xxvi). Since my Marxism encountered Cohen’s analytical Marxism in 2003, and did not, after that encounter, become analytical, then it seems that I have been, for the last six years or so, a bullshit Marxist. Hence, the alternate title for this talk. Since I nonetheless find much to respect and value in Cohen’s work on Marx, I want to press his definition of and commitment to analysis, and to see whether or not it makes sense to proclaim myself – not to mention numerous others who are similarly situated vis-à-vis Marxist theory – a post-analytical Marxist.

To that end, I want to do what Cohen claimed in 2000 he and his fellow analytical Marxists never did, put analysis in question. The first task will be to get clear on just what analysis is, on Cohen’s account. It has both a broad and a narrow sense, and I will proceed to challenge each sense, beginning with the narrow one, anti-holism. I will argue that, in the narrow sense defined by Cohen, analytical Marxism is not actually analytical. That is, it is committed to a certain sort of holism. Then I’ll move on to discuss the broader sense of analysis, which is opposed to “dialectical reasoning,” something Cohen does not actually think exists. In other words, Cohen takes analysis to be identical to reasoning as such. I think there are good reasons for resisting this view, and that Marxists in particular ought to be wary of it. In order to show why this is so, I will enter into the realm of Cohen’s Marx interpretation. I think that Cohen makes a number of observations about Marx and Marx’s project that can actually be read as motivations for a post-analytical Marxism.

I
On Cohen’s telling, “The fateful operation that created analytical Marxism was the rejection of the claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own” (KMTH, xvii). This rejection can be seen to take two forms, one of which is necessary and sufficient to constitute analytical Marxism, the other of which is a not entirely necessary augmentation of the first, and therefore constitutes something like a hyper-analytical Marxism. One can be an analytical Marxist without being hyper-analytical. The necessary form of the rejection is the rejection of “so-called ‘dialectical’ thinking,” and I will turn to this later. The more exacting sense in which “much” work in analytical Marxism rejects any special Marxist methodology is the sense in which analytical thinking “is opposed to what might be called ‘holistic’ thinking” (KMTH, xvii). My contention in this section is that Cohen’s work does not meet this more exacting sense of (hyper-)analyticity. However, contra Elster, this is not because of Cohen’s reliance upon functional explanation, for I shall further argue that Elster’s rejection of functional explanation is at least as “holistic” as is Cohen’s acceptance of such explanation. Indeed, I think anti-holism simply fails as a criterion of (hyper-)analyticity.

To begin, Cohen defines the narrow sense in which analytical Marxism is analytical as “its disposition to explain molar phenomena by reference to the micro-constituents and micro-mechanisms that respectively compose the entities and underlie the processes which occur at a grosser level of resolution” (KMTH, xxiii). I want to call attention to the three metaphors intermingling in this statement. Of course, there is 1) the metaphor of parts and whole (molar, constituents, compose) that naturally attends a discussion of holism, but there are also, alongside this, 2) a metaphor of comparative size (micro-, grosser), and 3) a metaphor of structural levels (underlie). I think the metaphor of structural levels goes along with most any effort at explanation, and that it meshes unproblematically with either of the other two metaphors. That which underlies has an explanatory primacy with regard to whatever it underlies. However, I think the inclusion of metaphor 2, the metaphor of comparative size, suggests more than it illuminates. It introduces the notion that explanatory primacy belongs with the smallest constituent parts and/or mechanisms. I think there are good reasons to resist this suggestion, and that purging this metaphor from the canon of analytical Marxism reveals that whatever anti-holism there is in its program, it is only an anti-one-particular-sort-of-holism.

Taken seriously, the metaphor of comparative size would suggest a program of thoroughgoing physical reductionism, but of an extremely old-fashioned, Democritean kind. That is, it suggests that the being, characteristics, and activity of everything big and complex is to be explained by the being, characteristics, and activity of basic, “atomic” constituents. To explain something, on this model, just is to show how it is an epiphenomenon of the atoms. Regardless of how widespread or defensible such a model might be in the sciences more generally, it seems out of place here, for two reasons. First, it suggests that only a reduction of social science to physical science would satisfy the (hyper-)analytical Marxists, but nothing aside from the metaphor of comparative size indicates that they held this view. Secondly – and this is the crux of the matter for me – it suggests an essential and direct proportion between smallness and simplicity. This suggestion illicitly supports Elster’s contention that his methodological individualism is an advance over Cohen’s functional explanations because, among other things, although the individual agent remains to some extent a black box, it is a smaller black box than the economic structure. This notion of a smaller black box expresses in a condensed form everything I find worthy of suspicion in the metaphor of comparative size, for it assumes what it is supposed to support, that a decrease in the size of the explananda is a decrease in the amount of explaining left to do. In the social scientific context, the claim that social structures and processes are, ultimately, to be explained in terms of the beliefs, desires, and actions of individual persons cannot rest on the observation that persons are smaller than societies.

Alongside this misleading metaphor of comparative size, Cohen also offers up the real reason for preferring that explanations of social phenomena be couched in terms of individual agents. Comparing current social science to thermodynamics before statistical mechanics – that is, to a descriptive science that as yet lacks a mechanism for explaining the regularities it observes and predicts – he avers that “to claim that capitalism must break down and give way to socialism is not yet to show how the behaviors of individuals lead to this result. And nothing else leads to that result, since behaviors of individuals are always where the action is, in the final analysis” (KMTH, xxiv; my emphasis). I take Cohen’s pun seriously. It suggests that individual agents are the loci of social scientific explanation because they are agents, not because they are individuals. Society is not a thing composed of lots of smaller things; it is a structured complex of material and social relations, a complex that is enacted by the agents it relates. (Hyper-)analytical Marxism is invested in methodological individualism, I contend, because it is committed to the explanatory priority of agency over relations, the notion that how we relate to one another is determined by what we do.

I think there is quite a bit of – admittedly somewhat circumstantial – evidence that Cohen maintained the primacy of agency over relations. I’ll only point to his endorsement of Marx’s claim that “material relations are only the necessary forms in which [human beings’] material and individual activity is realized.” Note that, since relations are the necessary forms in which individual activity is realized, the explanatory primacy of agency over relations does not imply any commitment to the existence of agency outside or otherwise independent of relations. Just as, according to Cohen, every base needs a superstructure, agency needs relations, and gets the relations it needs because it needs them.

Now, whatever one might say for or against this thesis that agency has explanatory primacy over relations, it is not, I think, a consequence or expression of anti-holism, that is, of any sort of thoroughgoing program of reductionism. It does coincide with a denial that society is an agent, a denial which implies that society is not a whole of a certain sort. But this goes hand in hand with identifying an irreducible whole in the individual human agent. Individual behavior is where the action is; action is not to be found at either a grosser or a more microscopic level of resolution.

On this reading of Cohen’s work, it seems to me that bullshit Marxists actually have a claim to be more (hyper-)analytical than the (hyper-)analytical Marxists, since post-Althusserian continental Marxism has been just as opposed to any holism of the individual subject as it has been to any holism of society or of class. In short, if (hyper-)analytical Marxists seek to explain every social process and structure by reference to the beliefs, desires, and actions of individual human agents, continental Marxists seek to explain the constitution of individual human agents, together with their beliefs and desires, out of the material relations in which they always already find themselves. Both seem to me to be valid and important avenues of research. It’s not clear to me that analyticity or anti-holism is the most appropriate criterion for differentiating them.

II
By way of turning to the broader or more basic sense in which analytical Marxism is supposed to be analytical, I want to advance the notion that, in fact, bullshit Marxism has been, for at least fifty years, busy thinking through certain problems that Cohen’s re-articulation of Marx indicates but does not really explore. There are two problems that particularly interest me: the problem of theory and practice indicated by Cohen’s concept of fettering, and the problem of ontology indicated by Cohen’s concept of power. In both of these cases, Cohen’s theoretical return to the historical materialism of the Second and Third Internationals is helpful primarily insofar as it clarifies why continental Marxism moved away from that paradigm in the first place. That is, I want to read Cohen as motivating theoretically the move to bullshit Marxism that was originally motivated practically by the rise of Stalinism.

a. fettering

In Cohen’s construal of historical materialism, 1) the forces of production underlie and explain 2) the relations of production – i.e., the economic structure – which, in turn, underlie and explain 3) legal and political institutions (the superstructure). The forces of production are natural or material powers, the relations of production are social powers, and the legal and political institutions are juridical rights and duties. One of Cohen’s most important contributions to Marx scholarship is his rigorous attention to the difference between natural and social powers, on the one hand, and to the difference between social powers and juridical rights and duties, on the other.

According to Cohen’s historical materialism, the underlying trajectory of human history is the expansion of the natural power of humanity. That is, despite all local and temporary setbacks, there is a tendency for the forces of production to grow (in Cohen’s parlance, the forces develop). However, since the productive forces produce use-values, of which there is no common measure, the development of the productive forces is measured by “the amount of the day which remains after the laboring time necessary to maintain the producers has been subtracted” (KMTH, 61). The core of historical materialism, then, is this historical tendency of surplus material power to grow.

Historical materialism is scientific because it is explanatory, because it maintains that the historical development of the productive forces explains the form taken by the dominant relations of production, that is, by the economic structure of society. Economic structures that allow or encourage this development in natural power win out over those economic structures that hamper this development. Hence, any post-capitalist economic structure must be better able to produce surplus material power than is capitalism. As Foucault said to Chomsky, the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie because it wants to and can, not because it is just. (I’ll return to this.) Hence, also, social revolutions can be premature, just in the case where the forces of production are not developed enough to support the relations of production introduced by the revolutionaries. In other words, social or economic power – i.e., the dominant economic structure – is functional for natural power, and takes the form that is compatible with the current level of development of the latter.

Except, that is, when it is not and does not. For it is also true that, as Cohen puts it, “the production relations are capable of fettering, that is, restricting the use and development of the productive forces” (KMTH, 41). During any period of time when fettering is occurring, “[d]ysfunctional relations persist” (KMTH, 161). Cohen generally ignores this dysfunctional state of affairs – indeed he announces that he will generally ignore it (KMTH, 161) – but it seems to pose a significant difficulty for his construal of historical materialism, at least in that theory’s practical comportment. (That the theory is supposed by him to be practical is evident in his claim that “scientific socialism” is “the study of the nature of, and the route to, socialism, using the most advanced resources of social science” [KMTH, xxvii].) For, during periods of fettering, the relations of production are not explained by their functionality for the forces of production on hand, since they are dysfunctional given those forces. Hence, during periods of fettering – and it must be noted that Cohen thought that at least the US was in such a period (KMTH, 297) – the perseverance of the economic structure, if it is to be explained at all, must be explained by something other than the material powers, as these are defined by Cohen. The material powers at hand are incompatible with the economic structure at hand, and call for a new economic structure, and yet the economic structure persists.

This state of affairs – and, again, Cohen thought it to obtain presently, at least in the US – seems to throw us back on the other explanation Marx offers for historical change, the class struggle. Cohen claims that this cannot be explanatory in the final instance because reference to the class struggle does not tell us “why the strong were strong and the weak weak” (KMTH, 148). This is certainly fair. Nonetheless, once you admit that fettering occurs, you must also admit that while fettering is occurring – and hence during revolutionary periods – the status of the class struggle is irreducible to the level of development of the forces of production, and so there must be other forces, other powers, that enter into the equation. Nothing but contesting the current relations of production will tell whether those social powers will fall. In short, the very concept of fettering indicates that taking the epochal view of the determination of economic structure by forces of production is inappropriate for the political and social struggle to transform that economic structure. Waiting for the forces of production to burst their fetters is like waiting for Godot.

I don’t think I’m saying anything that is contrary to Cohen’s own declarations. Nonetheless, I do think that Cohen’s historical materialism cries out for what it does not itself supply, and that his thumbing his nose at appeals to “determination in the last instance” and other such “opaque ideas” is no help. The functional explanation of social power by natural power breaks down right where those who are concerned not to interpret the world but to change it begin their work of thinking and acting. I think this has far reaching consequences, to which I will return after a closer consideration of Cohen’s understanding of power.

b. power

Cohen rather famously attempts to purge all legalistic language from the definitions of the various relations of production, and hence from the definition of the economic structure, replacing it with “a distinct language of effective powers” (KMTH, 216). The point of so doing is to articulate “a method of conceiving the economic structure which excludes from it the legal, moral, and political relations of men” (KMTH, 235). This conception is in the service of a “general explanatory thesis […] that given property relations have the character they do because of the production relations property relations with that character support” (KMTH, 226). If production relations explain property relations (and other legal, moral, and political categories), then production relations cannot include or be defined in terms of property relations (or other legal, moral, or political categories).

Instead, production relations are defined in terms of power, of being “able to φ, where ‘able’ is non-normative” (KMTH, 220). Cohen seems to be at pains, however, to avoid any sort of ontology or physics of these social powers. Hence, he claims that his “definition of production relations does not stipulate how the powers they enfold are obtained or sustained” (KMTH, 223), and that “your power is what you are able to do, regardless of what makes you able to do it” (KMTH, 234n1). And yet I cannot see why he should be so reticent, since it would seem that some account of the sources and concrete forms of social power would go a long way towards both a) clarifying the distinction between natural and social powers that undergirds the distinction between forces and relations of production, and b) pointing the way to some explanation for the persistence of dysfunctional relations of production.

This is the path taken by continental Marxists when they turned to analyses of the culture industry, of hegemony, of the reproduction of labor-power in ideological state apparatuses, of technologies of discipline and security, of the organization of labor in Taylorism, Fordism, and post-Fordism, and so forth. Many of these investigations also encompassed returns to early modern philosophy – to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza, especially – in order to flesh out an ontology of modern social power. The point was to explain the sorts of phenomena that Cohen merely points to: that, in modern societies, “rights screen powers” (KMTH, 225); that “might [i.e., power] frequently needs right in order to operate or even to be constituted” (KMTH, 231); that, hence, social powers “are sustained by the law, morality, and the state” (KMTH, 235); that “[c]apitalist society propagates and reinforces ignorance of power” (KMTH, 244); etc. It seems quite obvious to me that, while the historical materialism defended by Cohen brings these phenomena into view, nothing in Cohen’s definitions of natural or social powers helps us explain them.

Here, as in the case of fettering, Cohen exhibits a frustrating tendency to fall back on something like common sense at just the point where his explanatory project ceases to explain. It’s just obvious that legal systems and codes of morality help stabilize relations that would otherwise rest solely on force. But, to borrow a line of analysis Cohen uses to discuss fetishism, laws and norms don’t stabilize social powers autonomously. Stabilizing power does not inhere in laws and norms, but is delegated to them by other forces and powers. What is missing in Cohen, then, is any effort to naturalize law, morality, and the state, in the way in which Marx tried to naturalize the commodity and capital. That is, what is missing is the dual attempt to a) trace the power of law, morality, and the state back to natural powers, and b) trace the origin of the separation of these powers from their natural base back to the operations of that base. If the state’s power is really rooted in coercion, to make up an example, why does coercion take the form of the state, rather than being directly and transparently expressed as coercion? Cohen quotes Marx’s Grundrisse: “The bourgeois economists have a vague notion that it is better to carry on production under the modern police than it was, e.g., under club-law. They forget that club-law is also law, and that the right of the stronger continues to exist in other forms even under their ‘government of law” (Grundrisse, 88; KMTH, 225). What I am protesting in Cohen is his inattention to the problem of explaining the origin and operation of these other forms of the right of the stronger, and his corresponding blindness to what is actually going on in the continental Marxists he ignores and or dismisses.

c. the ‘necessity’ of analysis

It has been noted that both Althusser’s and Cohen’s work – the two landmarks of post-war Marxist philosophy – coincided with the greatest period of crisis in the Marxist labor movement and revolutionary program (excepting only the collapse of the Soviet system, if this latter can be separated from the crisis of the ‘60s and ‘70s). And yet, as Grahame Lock notes:

Cohen's book shows no signs of having been written in this context of crisis.
Rather, it was written as, and has been received as, a more or less purely
philosophical treatise, in a quite traditional sense of this phrase: as a work
to be read and assessed in abstraction from any consideration of its possible
roots in or impact on the political and ideological situation. (“Louis Althusser
and G. A. Cohen: A Confrontation,” Economy and Society 17:4 (1988), 501)

This appearance seems quite essential to Cohen’s work, and seems to me to be of a piece with what he refers to as the broad sense in which analytical Marxism is analytical. Cohen was committed to a set of values (“socialist values”), about which we are bound to hear more today, and he was committed to analysis as the form of reason as such. Marxism, as a movement, as a tradition, as a set of problems and texts, as a set of critical theses about capitalism – this was secondary. But if analytical Marxism is necessarily committed to analysis, if “it is always Marxism, not analysis, that is in question” (KMTH , xxiv), then it seems that one cannot be committed to Marxism without being a bullshit Marxist. Cohen compares this to turning Marxism into a religion, but doesn’t say what differentiates a commitment to a tradition or movement from a commitment to a set of values, or why the former is religious, while the latter is not. (Given his late appreciation of Christianity, perhaps there is no difference.)

Perhaps it all comes back to the title of Cohen’s book. Cohen set out to clarify and defend a theory of history, but nowhere does he clarify or defend his decision to read Marx primarily as a theorist of history. Cohen seems to suppose that the socialist movement finds its origin and justification in a theory of history, rather than the other way around. In actual history, the theory of history Cohen defends seems to have served primarily as a motivating myth, a means by which workers could transcend the opportunistic and purely economic struggle for better wages, safer workplaces, etc., and become political subjects with a world to win. (Lars Lih’s work on Lenin’s relation to German social democracy is illuminating on this point.) In other words, the theory of history was a weapon in the sense Marx meant when he wrote that “theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” This notion that the struggle is primary, and that theory is something that emerges from and finds its end in the struggle, seems alien to Cohen’s work. And that is why I don’t lose a lot of sleep over the fact that I’m a bullshit Marxist. Nonetheless, precisely because Cohen recapitulates a certain history in the realm of theory, I would only second the assessment of Althusser's friend and student, Dominique Lecourt, who, in reviewing Cohen’s book, wrote that it is “one of those books on Marx, which are so rare, whose grandeur consists in their forcing the reader to rethink the whole structure of Marxism, from the philosophical foundations up, even if he goes on to draw conclusions diametrically opposed to those which the author proposes.”

G.A. Cohen In Memoriam: A Critical Celebration of His Life and Work

2009-11-23T08:52:00.008-05:00

This Friday, 27 November 2009, 10am - 4pm
McGill University, Old McGill Room, Faculty Club

Programme:

Joseph Carens (Toronto) "Motivation and Equality in Cohen"

Jurgen De Wispelaere (CRÉUM) "Cohen in the Real World? Equality, Justice and Social Institutions"

Pablo Gilabert (Concordia) "Cohen on Socialism, Equality, and Community"

Jacob T. Levy (McGill) "Cohen on the Tasks of Political Philosophy"

William Clare Roberts (McGill) "Analysis Terminated? Towards a Post-Analytical Marxism"

Daniel Weinstock (CRÉUM) "Cohen and Cohen on Jokes"

I don't know that this is the actual order in which we'll be speaking* -- an earlier version of the program had Roberts and Levy going first and second. Regardless, come for the whole thing.

By the way, I feel a little odd being the only person who didn't include Cohen's name in the title of his talk, but if it makes a difference, my talk also has an alternate title: "What Bullshit Marxists Can Learn from Cohen." (You can tell, perhaps, why that is not on the program.)

* UPDATE: The "definitive" schedule:

10h/11h30
William Clare Roberts: Analysis Terminated? Toward a Post-Analytical Marxism
Joseph Carens: Motivation and Equality in Cohen

11h45-13h15
Jacob T. Levy: Cohen on the Tasks of Political Philosophy
Jurgen De Wispelaere: Cohen in the Real World? Equality, Justice and Social Institutions

13h15-14h30
Lunch break

14h30-16h
Pablo Gilabert: Cohen on Socialism, Equality, and Community
Daniel Weinstock: Cohen and Cohen on Jokes

CFP: Roundtable on Marx's Capital

2009-11-10T19:17:00.003-05:00

Via the Society for Social and Political Philosophy:

The SSPP is pleased to issue a CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS for a

Roundtable on Marx’s Capital

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, February 24-27, 2011

Our second Roundtable will explore Volume One of Marx’s Capital (1867). We chose this text because the resurgence in references to and mentions of Marx – provoked especially by the financial crisis, but presaged by the best-seller status of Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Marx’s surprising victory in the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” poll – has only served to highlight the fact that there have not been any new interpretive or theoretical approaches to this book since Althusser’s in the 1960s.

The question that faces us is this: Does the return of Marx mean that we have been thrust into the past, such that long “obsolete” approaches have a newfound currency, or does in mean, on the contrary, that Marx has something new to say to us, and that new approaches to his text are called for?

The guiding hypothesis of this Roundtable is that if new readings of Capital are called for, then it is new readers who will produce them.

Therefore, we are calling for applications from scholars interested in approaching Marx’s magnum opus with fresh eyes, willing to open it to the first page and read it through to the end without knowing what they might find. Applicants need not be experts in Marx or in Marxism. Applicants must, however, specialize in some area of social or political philosophy. Applicants must also be interested in teaching and learning from their fellows, and in nurturing wide-ranging and diverse inquiries into the history of political thought.

If selected for participation, applicants will deliver a written, roundtable-style presentation on a specific part or theme of the text. Your approach to the text might be driven by historical or contemporary concerns, and it might issue from an interest in a theme or a figure (be it Aristotle or Foucault). Whatever your approach, however, your presentation must centrally investigate some aspect of the text of Capital. Spaces are very limited.

Applicants should send the following materials as email attachments (.doc/.rtf/.pdf) to papers@sspp.us by September 15, 2010:

Curriculum Vitae
One page statement of interest in the Roundtable. (Please include a discussion of the topics you would be willing to explore in a roundtable presentation. Please also discuss the projected significance of participation for your research and/or teaching.)

Ben Fowkes’ translation of Capital (Viking/Penguin, 1976) is the official translation for the Roundtable, and should be used for page citations. However, applicants are strongly encouraged to review either the German text of Capital (the 2nd edition of 1873 is the basis for most widely available texts) or the French translation (J. Roy, 1872-5), which was the last edition Marx himself oversaw to publication; both of these are widely available on-line.

All applicants will be notified of the outcome of the selection process via email on or before October 15, 2010. Participants will be asked to send a draft or outline of their presentation to papers@sspp.us by January 15, 2011 so that we can finalize the program.

In order to participate in the Roundtable (but not to apply or to be selected), you must be a member of the Society in good standing. You can become a member of the Society by following the membership link at: http://www.sspp.us/

We're All Israeli Now

2009-10-30T11:36:00.005-04:00

...and it has nothing to do with the easy availability of good falafel.

I just watched Waltz with Bashir (an excellent movie, by the way), and was struck by the contemporaneity of the depiction of Israel's 1981 invasion of Labanon. The catch-all extension of "terrorist" was central to this feeling, I think. But I would go further and say that Israel is now, in many respects, the exemplar of the West, in the way that the US used to be, and Britain was before that. The striking difference is that previous exemplars have also been military hegemons, even if exemplarity and hegemony have not been completely synchronous. Israel remains a client state of the US militarily, but nonetheless articulates in the sharpest way the experience of being Western at the current moment. It is ideologically hegemonic without being militarily or economically so.

What I mean is that the Occupied Territories, the terrorist, the border wall, the settlements, the car bomb -- all originally Israeli phenomena -- are now archetypes of Western life in the same way that cowboys and Indians, the frontier, and the goldrush used to be. What it is to be European or American now takes its reference, to some critical extent, from what it is to live in the midst of enemies who are at once akin to you and alien, and whose mode of life and struggle confound the partitions between secular and religious, military and civilian, national and international, which confounding leads us to question the very reality of those seemingly foundational distinctions in our own societies.

One of the fairly explicit lines of thought advanced by one character in the movie is that Israel has such a hard time remembering and facing up to its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre because the whole complex of mass murder and camps is overwhelmed by the memory of the Holocaust. According to this argument, there is among Israelis a massive psychic investment in seeing themselves as the victims of the camps, an investment that makes it impossible to see and recall their complicity with anything that resembles the camps in any way.

Regardless of whether this is a good or bad descriptive account of the Israeli psyche, it suggests to me in the context of the present that one of the reasons for Israel's new centrality to Western consciousness is the liberal repudiation of violence. To whatever extent liberalism cannot acknowledge its own complicity --not an accidental or mistaken involvement, but an essential and necessay participation -- in the violence of the past, neither can liberal Westerners see or recall the violence of the present as their own.

"Conservatives" -- bad liberals, authoritarians -- are thus so far necessary for the Western liberal psyche that if they didn't exist they would have to be invented. Conservatives do the things that liberals can then repudiate as merely accidental to Western liberalism. This sort of point is made by liberals about conservatives all the time: that no failure of conservatism is possible, since failure can always be attributed to insufficient conservatism. But this is just one more sign that "conservatives" are liberals in the broad sense; the same structure of repudiation is endemic to liberalisms left and right. Every liberal liberal says they wouldn't bomb Afghanistan, wouldn't invade Gaza, wouldn't target Hamas leadership with missile strikes, wouldn't build a wall, wouldn't hold people without due process, etc. But every liberal liberal who has the chance to do otherwise ends up doing all of these things -- perhaps with greater circumspection than would a conservative liberal, but doing them nonetheless.

To be Israeli, in this sense, means to struggle with self-recognition in this way, to hate and condemn what one does, and yet not be able to do otherwise.

Notes from Texas

2009-10-22T18:19:00.002-04:00

Just turned on the TV in my hotel room and caught 5 minutes of Glenn Beck mixing architecture criticism -- he's for real American architecture, like the Chrysler Building -- with a discourse about how imperfect but truthful and transparent politicians are better than those perfect, shiny politicians who only reflect their surroundings and want universal healthcare. Or something.

Anyway, that was interesting to behold, but then the commercial break came. First was an ad for Tax Masters, telling you that if you haven't filed tax returns in years you should hire them to stand between you and the IRS so that the feds treat you with respect and decency.

Then there was an ad for some mysterious quicky face-lift procedure that ended with the tag-line: "In these hard economic times, you should invest in yourself!"

Next up, G. Gordon Liddy hawking gold, the amazing commodity whose price goes up but doesn't come down! In these hard economic times, you need to keep inflating the price of GG's gold stash (which he admits he bought ten years ago)!

Holy shit.

Correspondence Received

2009-10-18T15:03:00.005-04:00

From my inbox:

Dear William Clare Roberts:

Your paper entitled, "Post-Modern Aristotles: Strauss, Arendt, Virno" was recently listed on SSRN's Top Ten download list for HPT: Ancient (Topic) and HPT: Post-Modern (Topic). To view the top ten list for the journal click on its name HPT: Ancient (Topic) Top Ten and HPT: Post-Modern (Topic) Top Ten and to view all the papers in the journals click on these links link(s) HPT: Ancient (Topic) All Papers and HPT: Post-Modern (Topic) All Papers.
As of 10/16/2009 your paper has been downloaded 20 times. You may view the abstract and download statistics at: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1449691.

My ego is kept in check (barely) by the facts that a) 20 is not a very large number and b) my bete noire Brian Leiter has the top three spots in the all-time top ten for postmodernism, with over 1800 downloads spread over those three papers.

On Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-10T10:17:00.005-04:00

I think a lot of the commentary on Obama's peace prize is well off the mark. The major theme, from the left and the right, from the major pundits and my facebook friends, is that Obama hasn't done enough to deserve this prize. After all, Obama has only been President for a few months, still presides over two wars, one of which is escalating, and, while he has made some gestures towards international diplomacy on several fronts, the critics left and right are fond of saying that he has only given a few good speeches, and hasn't actually done much.

I think this is analysis is wrong-headed for two reasons. First, the Nobel Peace Prize is as much about encouraging and supporting agents of peaceful change as it is about recognizing already accomplished deeds. Several commentators have quoted the statement of former Nobel Committee chair Francis Sejersted:

The prize [...] is not only for past achievement. [...] The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.

In other words, the Nobel Committee is, by confering this award, endorsing and encouraging Obama's efforts at international diplomacy, especially in the Middle East and regardign nuclear nonproliferation. They like the direction Obama is heading, and they want him both to succeed in the endeavors he has undertaken and to take his diplomacy further. Whether or not this success and expansion of diplomacy takes place, the Nobel Committee has done the only thing they can to make it so. That is both a legitimate use of the prize and a fairly taditional one.

Ronald Krebs, the author of the Foreign Policy essay I linked to above, lumps aspirational bestowals of the prize in with bestowals upon intranational dissidents and activists in order to conclude:

When the Nobel Peace Prize rewards past accomplishments, it is to be welcomed -- not because it changes the world, but because it celebrates and reaffirms liberal ideals. But in the increasingly frequent cases in which it is bestowed for actors' aspirations and in which it seeks to promote democratic political change, winners beware.

First of all, I don't see anything especially liberal about Alfred Nobel's charge that the prize be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Modern liberalism has never been especially opposed to standing armies (republicans and communists are the ones who worried about those), and international fraternity and peace congresses are the purview of no particular political philosophy. But whatever. The more important things to note are that 1) the award to Obama seems to fit Nobel's intention quite well (except for that abolition or reduction of standing armies thing), and 2) all of Krebs' data regarding the perverse effect of the prize pertains to the promotion of democratic political change, not to aspirational awards per se.

This brings me to the second reason the dominant take is so wrongheaded. Without a doubt Obama's biggest accomplishments to date have been speeches, especially the Cairo speech. This is what Obama does -- he talks, and he listens to others talking, and he talks in such a way that his audience knows he has listened. Far from being negligible, this is actually a very big deal. I have mentioned this before; Obama is good at politics because he is good at talking to people who are not like him. Not to go completely Arendtian, but speaking is the substance of political action. There is no divide between "giving speeches" and "doing things," and those who think there is reveal themselves to have a technocratic, antipolitical streak.

This is why diplomacy is interesting -- in a world full of nation states given over largely to technocratic administration, one of the only spaces given over to political action is the diplomatic arena. In his "Critique of Violence," Walter Benjamin indicated "the conference, considered as a technique of civil agreement," as one of the only venues for the deployment of purely discursive means of agreement, unalloyed with any violence. Although it would be a stretch to say that any conference with the executive of the US, holder of more military might than the rest of the world combined, is unalloyed with violence, it remains true that diplomacy, giving rise as it does to no law, and employing the whole range of linguistic communication, seems more political and less violent than anything else in the world right now. And if the reemergence of this power, after the last eight years in which diplomacy seemed to vanish from the face of the earth, does not merit a Nobel Peace Prize, I'm not sure what does.

Promisory note

2009-10-01T20:32:00.002-04:00

Among the posts I've been meaning to write but haven't yet:

What it means to call Marx an Aristotelian
Sohn-Rethel 101: why don't more people study this guy?
Why liberals are lucky George Bush was in the White House on 9/11 (it's not what you think...)
How Aristotle can help us think about political violence
Why I'm a member of the surreality based community

There, now I've put those out there, and will either: a) feel a nagging obligation to actually write what I have promised, or b) feel relief from my nagging guilt because I've at least confessed.

CFP: Politics of Hope/Politics of Fear

2009-09-21T10:08:00.003-04:00

Via the Society for Social and Political Philosophy:

FOR THE SOCIETY’S MEETING TO BE HELD IN CONJUNCTION WITH
The Eastern APA (American Philosophical Association) in 2010

The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

Politics of Hope / Politics of Fear

Hobbes famously wrote, “The passion to be reckoned upon is fear.” The connection thus established between the state and fear has been the basis not only of various political regimes, but of political theory by philosophers such as Spinoza, Hegel, Arendt and Massumi. In an age of color-coded warning systems, terrorism, and pandemic disease, the essential link between fear and politics seems beyond dispute, and demands investigation: How does fear work? Does it always reinforce authority, as Hobbes imagined? Can there be a revolt of fear? What is the connection between the fear that the masses fear and the fear they evoke in the corridors of power? More importantly, what remains of fear’s opposite, hope, in this Hobbesian world? How can hope function in a world overrun by fear? Does hope require a vision of a better world? Is there anything beyond the relation of hope and fear, a politics beyond the vacillation of these affects? For this panel we invite papers that examine either the “politics of fear” or the “politics of hope” in terms of both broad theoretical discussions (including examinations of the politics of the affects and imagination) and specific investigations into regimes of fear and hope.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2010 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2010). The APA Conference scheduled for December 27-30, 2010, in Boston, MA.

Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY.

Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to: papers_AT_sspp.us

CFP: Politics and Ontology

2009-09-21T10:05:00.004-04:00

Via the Society for Social and Political Philosophy:

FOR THE SOCIETY’S MEETINGS TO BE HELD IN CONJUNCTION WITH
SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) in 2010

The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

Politics and Ontology

We seek to explore and challenge the hypothesis that all political theory presupposes an ontology. From the presumption of universal rationality, to the potency of class consciousness, to the privileges shaped by the social existence of race, gender and sexuality, political order always is or implies an ontological order. In many respects, the ontological question is the political question. Struggles for political change are as much about the expansion (or contraction) of shared ontological categories as they are about the rewriting of legislation or the redistribution of power and resources . The traditional allocation of rights, for instance, has been determined almost entirely on the basis of who, or what, one is presumed to be. While ontology and politics share a long, interconnected history, for much of modern history the connection between them has been downplayed or denied, since liberalism is premised on bracketing such supposedly insoluble and inherently conflictual metaphysical questions. In recent decades, however, this has changed. The explicit investigation of political ontology has taken center stage and, as a consequence, what we understand to be political or ontological has changed as well. Politics is no longer limited to the state, but permeates all of social existence to include the terrain of imagination, emotions, and representation. Ontology is no longer an ultimate foundation, but is constituted through relations of power and affects. In the works of such authors as Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Giorgio Agamben, William Connolly, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, and many others, the subject of political ontology has surfaced in an array of new formulations. For this panel, we invite papers that extend this investigation or that challenge this resurgence, both within the context of work that has already been done and in anticipation of work yet to be conceived.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2010 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2010). The SPEP Conference is scheduled for October 2010, in Montreal, Canada.

Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY.

Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to: papers_AT_sspp.us

From Postmodernity to Aristotle

2009-09-10T21:23:00.002-04:00

Here are some thoughts about what it means to live in postmodernity, taken from an essay I'm writing. I claim to identify three problems faced by "we postmoderns" which might motivate a return to the ancients, and especially to Aristotle. Thoughts?

The first problem of postmodernity that I would identify is the eclipse of the rule of law. Despite the resonance this might seem to have with a definitively liberal political discourse generated out of the Bush presidency, I am not referring to any empirical violation of the law, or even to the explicit Hobbesian argument that the chief executive is not bound by the law. Postmodernity is not marked by the return of extra-legal rule – tyranny or dictatorship – which was certainly a familiar-enough phenomenon during the reign of the modern consensus. Rather, to be postmodern is to suspect that the rule of law is, strictly speaking, nonsensical. The problem is conceptual, not empirical, as it were. The landmarks are not Guantanamo Bay and John Yoo, but Wittgenstein’s reductio ad absurdum of the notion of “applying” a rule, or Benjamin’s argument that all law is founded on and enforced by an essentially non-legal recourse to violence. The rule of law seems to be impossible to think, to be a sort of oxymoron. The universality of the law seems incommensurable with the singularity of the scene of its application. Hence, denizens of postmodernity feel the need for something like what Aristotle calls φρονησις, a sort of political wisdom or judgment that proceeds otherwise than by applying rules. This is the first call to return to Aristotle.

Moreover, postmodernity can also be characterized by the eclipse of the modern distinction between public and private. The division proposed by the liberal tradition, according to which the ends of action are private, while the means to those ends become public insofar as they impinge upon one another, seems to have lost its purchase. Again, the problem is not empirical; the liberal paradigm is founded upon diagnoses of and remedies for the empirical tendencies of the state to impose ends on its citizens and of those citizens to trespass on one another’s liberty. The postmodern problem arises when it seems that those very remedies only accelerate the tendencies they are supposed to check. We are forced, repeatedly, to choose between tendencies toward privatization and tendencies towards politicization that are equally merciless and asymptotically totalizing. The market increasingly subsumes not only the non-governmental institutions that are supposed to be the conservative bulwark of civil society – clubs, churches, families, universities – but even the very state functions – policing, soldiering, administering law, and even writing legislation – that are most central to public affairs. On the other hand, since everything seems to affect everyone (as revealed by the very cost-benefit analysis that articulates the calculative logic of privatization), everything seems to fall within the purview of administration and regulation by the state, or at least of political debate. Consequently, we postmoderns feel the need to rediscover some principle that would demarcate and harmonize the arenas of common being and private life. This is the second call to return to Aristotle.

Finally, postmodernity is marked by what I would call the eclipse of autonomy. Modernity was the era of the serene certainty that only those laws or norms were binding for a person which that person could be considered to have authored. We postmoderns, by contrast, experience a profound disquiet about the origin, force, and appropriateness of rules or norms, a disquiet that is not comforted by inquiring into whether we might ourselves have authored the rules and norms we obey. In fact, one lesson that could be drawn from the mid-to-late-20th century conjunction of a) rebellions against and flights from secular organizations of all kinds, and b) the metastatic growth of enthusiastic, fundamentalist, and evangelical churches of all stripes is this: the more we are told that we can, do, and/or should construct our own sets of rules or norms, the more oppressive and paralyzing such norms feel. We no longer trust ourselves with ruling ourselves. In this situation, the old questions – What is it to rule and to be ruled? Where do rules come from? Who should rule? – are questionable and interesting once again. This is the third call to return to Aristotle.

Things I didn't know (part of an infinite series)

2009-09-08T16:50:00.002-04:00

Strauss is sexier than Arendt. That's what I learned at APSA. Who'da thunk?

CFP: Hegel After Spinoza

2009-08-20T12:20:00.001-04:00

Hegel After Spinoza: A Volume of Critical Essays
Edited by Hasana Sharp and Jason Smith

Call for Papers

The names Hegel and Spinoza have come to represent two irreconcilable paths in contemporary philosophy. This opposition has taken different forms, but has its roots in mid- to late-20th century French philosophy. Althusser announced that he required a “detour” away from Hegel and through Spinoza in order to arrive at a genuinely materialist Marxism. Pierre Macherey staged a careful deconstruction of Hegel’s claim to have superseded Spinoza’s system in Hegel ou Spinoza, which concomitantly served as a defence of Spinozism against the Hegelianism dominant in France in the 1960s and ‘70s. Among the most influential articulations of this antagonism are the polemics of Deleuze celebrating the immanent and vitalist thinking of a materialist tradition beginning with Lucretius and passing through Spinoza to the present, to which he opposes the logic of totality, negativity, and contradiction found in Hegel. Spinoza, for Deleuze and others, stands for a rejection of negativity and lack as the foundation of philosophical and political thought, and as a salutary alternative to the negativity (in both the logical and existential senses) associated not only with Hegel, but with Hobbes, Freud, Sartre, Heidegger, and Lévinas as well. Feminists have likewise celebrated Spinoza as providing a joyful alternative to a tradition that emphasizes anxiety, mortality, and combat. This opposition, in its various expressions, underscores that reading Hegel has always been and remains a political act.

We are seeking essays to contribute to an anthology on the relationship between Spinoza and Hegel that move beyond the stalemate of current debates in continental philosophy. The title we have proposed for this collection points toward a horizon that no longer opposes a “bad” Hegel to a “good” Spinoza; we seek essays that indicate how contemporary readings of Spinoza—no longer the thinker of absolute substance, but of immanent causality, singular connections, transindividuality, and the multitude—might illuminate otherwise less visible threads in Hegel’s thought, and open the way to a re-reading of Hegel, beyond the institutionalized figure we take for granted. How might a productive and mutually enlightening encounter be produced between these two great systematic thinkers? What political possibilities are opened up by reading Hegel and Spinoza as useful contrasts rather than moral alternatives? The anthology will be published in a series that treats historical topics in light of contemporary continental thought. We are open to a broad range of topics within this rubric, but are especially interested in new readings that avoid simply recapitulating either the pantheism controversy in 19th century Germany or the French polemics of the 20th century.

Please send papers of 7,500-10,000 words to
Hasana Sharp (hasana.sharp_at_mcgill.ca) or Jason Smith (Jason.Smith_at_Artcenter.edu) by 15 June, 2010.

Arendt In a Nutshell

2009-07-11T11:40:00.004-04:00

Marx is wrong! (What Marx said.)

For example:

World alienation, and not self-alienation, as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age. Expropriation, the deprivation of certain groups of their place in the world and their naked exposure to the exigencies of life, created both the original accumulation of wealth and the possibility of transforming this wealth into capital through labor. (The Human Condition, 254-5)

I know from her letters to Jaspers that Arendt found Marx extremely frustrating ("a pain in the neck" are her words). Maybe it was the anxiety of influence...

UPDATE:

I guess Hanna Pitkin said much the same:

Although its [Arendt's criticism of Marx] overall thrust may well be valid and is surely defensible, its detailed formulations are almost always mistaken, sometimes blatantly so. Arendt’s account of Marx, moreover, leaves out about half of that admittedly inconsistent thinker, and what is missing from her Marx remarkably resembles Arendt’s own ideas in The Human Condition, particularly about the social.

(The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 115.)

What sort of activity is exchange?

2009-06-24T13:44:00.004-04:00

I've been reading a bunch of Arendt, and, in light of my recent re-reading of Sohn-Rethel, I've noticed something both odd and, I think, revealing about Arendt's understanding of the vita activa--she completely overlooks commodity exchange as a distinctive form of activity.

Arendt's overall project, post-Origins of Totalitarianism, is centered around a rearticulation of active or practical life as of principles and a dignity separate from but equal to that of contemplation. I'm very sympathetic to this project, at least in such broad outlines. I'm especially attracted to her recognition of the fundamental plurality of activities, which sets her apart from all the mythologies of utilitarianism and rational choice action theory. However, I've always been nagged by a sense that her effort to separate out the various modalities of active life--labor, work, action--was itself a bit of a simplification or homogenization. However, nagging doubts do not an assessment make. Now I feel like I'm on somewhat more solid ground. Let me lay out the indicators of the problem:

Arendt's only prolonged discussion of exchange (that I know of) is in the "Work" section of The Human Condition (pp 159-67). The discussion is situated as it is because Arendt thinks that the exchange market is the public sphere corresponding to and growing out of work or fabrication, the making of persistent objects of use or artifacts. In Arendt's words, "homo faber, the builder of the world and the producer of things, can find his proper relationship to other people only by exchanging his products with theirs" (160).

But she immediately introduces a consideration that flagrantly contradicts this proper fit of the market to the artisans as producers. The sentence I just quoted continues by "explaining" this propriety; the artisan finds his proper relation to others in the exchange market "because the products themselves are always produced in isolation" (160-1). This sounds strange, I think, because we immediately think of assembly lines, factories, and cooperation when we think of production. Arendt has an explanation for this--basically, the division of labor within a process of production she associates with labor, the reproduction of life, and the conquest of production by the division of labor is therefore the subordination of work to labor--but I'll leave that aside for now. I think the plausibility of her insistence on the solitude of the artisan can be rescued by reference to such commonplaces as "too many cooks spoil the broth," and the certainty that doing anything "by committee" is sure to be a disaster from the standpoint of the quality of the end result. The work, for Arendt, is characterized by a singleness of intention and attention, and hence the artisan qua artisan is alone.

But for precisely this reason, the people who meet in the market are not artisans qua artisans, as Arendt herself recognizes. "The people who met on the exchange market, to be sure, were no longer the fabricators themselves," she writes; "when homo faber comes out of his isolation, he appears as a merchant and trader and establishes the exchange market in this capacity" (162-3). Therefore, she also claims that exchange value cannot be grounded in any "specific human activity" (164).

So, Arendt, it seems to me, is caught in the uncomfortable position of affirming both that exchange "develops without break and consistently" from "the world of the craftsman and the experience of fabrication" (166) and that this exchange presupposes a change in the personae and a dissociation from any actual activity of making things.

This is where Sohn-Rethel can meaningfully supplement Arendt. The recognition that commodity exchange is a separate mode of activity, and a specific from of human interaction, undermines the assumption that Arendt shares with the utilitarians and economists from whom she so radically diverges otherwise: the assumption that a generalized "utility" can be unproblematically extrapolated from the concrete uses of the objects we make. This presumptive link between use and utility is the unthought ground of modern economics, and exposing the absence of any such link is the ongoing task of the critique of political economy.

Religious ideology, political ideology

2009-06-18T09:19:00.003-04:00

Man, it's hard to figure out what's going on in Andy McCarthy's head. I'm not sure why I do this, but sometimes I go over and read the National Review Online blog. I did so this morning, and the first thing I ran across was this post by McCarthy. After going through what he considers to be the relevant range of opinions about the situation in Iran, he closes with this:

Considerations of Islamic ideology have been discouraged in this country since 9/11 — lest we detect a nexus between Muslim doctrine and Muslim terror. Consequently, there is general ignorance about the Islamic political program (Islam is not just a religion, it is a comprehensive socio-political program [my emphasis]). But for a few nettlesome differences (like equality for women and hostility to homosexuals), the Islamic political program — especially the totalitarian version regnant in the Islamic Republic of Iran — is something the American Left would be very comfortable with. Obama understands this, and I think it is a better explanation for his solicitude toward Khamenei than any hope of reversing Iran's nuclear ambitions.

I'm not even going to say anything about the bizarro-world claims that litter the unbolded parts of this paragraph (though they are instructive, I think, of how far removed we are from any robust ideological consensus in the US at the moment).

I was just struck by McCarthy's notion of what a religion is. Islam is, horror of horrors, a comprehensive socio-political program! Certianly, religions differ in the extensiveness of their socio-political doctrine. To my (extremely limited) knowledge, Buddhism doesn't have a lot to say about the institutions and methods of rule. Among western religions, there is a commonplace division made between Christianity (a religion of faith) and Islam and Judaism (religions of law). Both of the latter are thought to have far-reaching consequencs for the mode of life and social organization of adherents, in a way that Christianity does not. I think it is very odd, to say the least, that McCarthy would say that Islam is comprehensive in its socio-political teachings while ignoring its fellow religion of the law, Judaism. On what basis does McCarthy think Islam is more comprehensive in its legal teaching than Judaism?

But aside from this, theocracy is not restricted to religions of law. There have been theocratic regimes based in Christianity (Catholic and Protestant--though I don't know of any Orthodox theocracies...) and Buddhism (pre-Chinese Tibet). Claiming proximity to god as warrant to rule is pretty close to a universal temptation among us human beings. I would think (again, this is arm-chair history of the most egregious sort) that when and where a particular religion becomes theocratic in its aspirations has more to do with external factors than with the content of its holy texts and teachings. Paul told Christians to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's when they were a tiny and dispersed community, but this did not prevent popes from crowning emperors and leading armies a millenium later. Looking at the Torah or the Koran or whatever will not tell you a) how political a religion can become or b) how extensively and intensively its adherants will live holy teachings as a set of practices.

Moreover, I'm pretty taken right now with Foucault's thesis about government: that the Christian pastoral introduced a practice of government into European life that is without precedent, and that this pastoral form has permeated the modern state in the guise of what the Germans call the Polizei (the administrative and regulatory enforcement arms of the government). Thus, if you set aside the question of theocracy--that is, the directly religious form of the state--you must still consider the myriad other ways in which a religion (a set of practices of worship) can imply, shape, and sustain political, legal, and social practices and institutions that are not explicitly or directly religious.

In short, if McCarthy wants to consider Islamic ideology, he should go right ahead. But he's not off to an auspicious start.

A Short Essay in Self-Criticism

2009-06-10T09:47:00.006-04:00

So I have slightly mixed feelings about my essay in Marx and Contemporary Philosophy. Of course I'm thrilled to share space with so many of my Marxological heroes--Meikle, Postone, Murray, Carver, and Arthur, especially--from whom I have learned so much over the years. And I am quite happy with many aspects of the essay. And yet...

The root of the problem is that I'm re-reading Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labor for the first time since I was writing my dissertation. Unfortunately, I read it in German the first time, and apparently I didn't understand it nearly as well as I thought I did. It turns out that Sohn-Rethel should have influenced me far more than he did, and exactly on those questions with which the newly published essay is concerned. In other words, just as this essay is venturing out into the world on its own, I am looking up from my desk and crying, "Wait! You're not ready! Please let me make you a bit more presentable!"

Here's the issue: Understanding Marx's account of capital hinges on understanding the differences between exchange-value and use-value, and between abstract labour and concrete labour. Marx is adamant that exchaneg abstracts from use-value, and that, therefore, use-value plays no rule in the determination of the magnitude of value. Instead, the magnitude of value is determined by the abstract labour-time necessary to produce the commodity under given conditions. Thus, everything that is distinctive about Marx's approach gets off the ground here, where use-value and exchange-value part ways, and abstract labor-time appears as the substance of value. This is where all liberal economists (and most Marxist economists!) lose the thread (all of two pages into Capital). The question is, how does exchange abstract from use-value?

In my paper, I try to answer this question in what I guess could be called a phenomenological manner. I argue that the agents in exchange act as if use-value didn't matter, and that this "acting as if" amounts to a practical abstraction from use-value, which is intensified when a) labour-power becomes an object of exchange and b) is employed within a capitalist production process.

In the essay I waffle a bit on how intentional this abstraction is. My "as if" construction allows for the possibility that the consciousness of the agents does not apprehend what they do. But I also say things to the effect that we "disregard" the use-value of commodities in exchange, or "ignore" thereby the particular usefulness of labor. These formulations suggest, if not full consciousness, at least a sort of intentional structure to the practical abstraction.

In contradistiction to my rather muddled language, Sohn-Rethel is crystal clear: the abstraction from use effected by the practice of exchange is completely unconscious, and the furthest thing from the minds of the participants in exchange. Exchange excludes use in the sense that I can't exchange what I am using, or use what I am exchanging. This brute, physical abstraction from use is the original abstraction, and, according to Sohn-Rethel's analysis, contains all manner of counter-factual norms that structure the practice of exchange apart from any conscious or half-conscious intention. In fact, he even insists that the practice only works if the participants don't pay attention to the abstractions performed by it. I'm not sure I'm convinced by this bit, but he seems to think that exchangers have to think about use-value in order to practice an abstraction from use-value.

Regardles of this last point, I think Sohn-Rethel is invaluable for outlining a performance of abstraction that can proceed without any reference to a determining intentionality. My formulations in the just-published essay lend themsleves to an idealistic (that is to say, ideological) acount of exchange relations arising from conscious subjects. And that idealism of the act is worthy of endless criticism.

The One Product You Need

2009-06-09T11:09:00.004-04:00

Out now:

Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy
Edited by Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor

This collection of articles brings together the latest work of some of the world’s leading Marxist philosophers, along with that of a new generation of young researchers. Based upon work presented at meetings of the recently founded and fast-growing Marx and Philosophy Society, it offers a unique snapshot of the best current scholarship on the philosophical aspects and implications of Marx's thought.

CONTENTS:

PART I: MARX AND HIS PREDECESSORS
‘The Entire Mystery’: Marx’s Understanding of Hegel; J.McCarney
Karl Marx’s Philosophical Modernism: Post-Kantian Foundations of Historical Materialism; M.McIvor
Marx, the European Tradition, and the Philosophic Radicals; S.Meikle

PART II: MARX AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Marx’s Theory of Democracy in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State; G.Daremas
Marx and Conservatism; A.Collier
Forms of Right, Forms of Value: The Unity of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s Capital; R.Fine

PART III: MARX ON LABOUR, MONEY AND CAPITAL
Species-Being and Capital; A.Chitty
Labour in Modern Industrial Society; S.Sayers
The Concept of Money; C.Arthur
Value, Money, and Capital in Hegel and Marx; P.Murray
Abstraction and Productivity: Reflections on Formal Causality; W.Roberts

PART IV: 20TH CENTURY MARXISM
The Subject and Social Theory: Marx and Lukács on Hegel; M.Postone
Multiple Returns: Althusser on Dialectics; J.Grant
The Rationality of Analytical Marxism; R.Veneziani

PART V: MARX AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
Marxism and Feminism: Living with your ‘Ex’; T.Carver
After Postmodernism: Feminism and Marxism Revisited; G.Howie

Wait, what was that? Go back just a bit...

"Abstraction and Productivity: Reflections on Formal Causality; W.Roberts"

Hey, that's me!

Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault?

2009-06-05T19:13:00.001-04:00

Most of these are pretty easy if you've been around the block ... but the resemblance is uncanny.

Strauss Contra Neoconservatism

2009-05-13T09:52:00.006-04:00

I'm working on a paper that, in part, involves a discussion of Strauss. Hence, I've been reading quite a bit of the fellow of late. I'm also going to be chairing a panel at APSA that will include Nicholas Xenos, Anne Norton, and Shadia B. Drury, all of whom have written anti-Strauss books (all of them, generally, arguing for a connection between Strauss and the Bush-era right in America). Given the repeated attempts to link Strauss to the neoconservative practices of extra-legal executive action, I thought the following passage from On Tyranny--Strauss is responding to Eric Voegelin (p. 180)--was interesting:

To stress the fact that it is just to replace constitutional rule by absolute rule, if the common good requires that change, means to cast doubt on the absolute sanctity of the established constitutional order. It means encouraging dangerous men to confuse the issue by bringing about a state of affairs in which the common good requires the establishment of their absolute rule. The true doctrine of the legitimacy of Caesarism is a dangerous doctrine. The true distinction between Caesarism and tyranny is too subtle for ordinary political use. It is better for the people to remain ignorant of that distinction and to treat the potential Caesar as a potential tyrant. No harm can come from this theoretical error which becomes a practical truth if the people have the mettle to act upon it. No harm can come from the political identification of Caesarism and tyranny: Caesars can take care of themselves.

This passage uses precisely the sort of Straussian argument that his liberal critics find so pernicious--some truths are better kept quiet--in order to defend the sanctity of the rule of law. It is better not to admit that extra-constitutional rule might be necessary and even salutary in certain extraordinary situations because such an admission, while true, makes it more likely that extra-constitutional rule will be exercised in completely non-extraordinary conditions. And such an argument has obvious affinities with a liberal argument against legalizing torture: even if torture would be necessary in the "ticking time bomb" scenario, the torturer-hero of such a situation will be able to break the law to do what is necessary. You can't encode the state of exception in a rule without making the exception the norm.

From a liberal point of view, the problem with neoconservatism is that it makes the state of exception into the normal state of affairs. But that is precisely Strauss's criticism of Voegelin's theory of Caesarism. So, maybe liberals should make peace with Strauss, eh?

UPDATE: I was sloppy in my assimilation of Anne Norton's thesis to those of Drury and Xenos. Norton draws sharp distinctions between Strauss, students of Strauss, and Straussians. She is very critical of Straussian neoconservatism, but does not link Strauss himself to the neoconservative project, and generally casts Strauss as infinitely superior to Straussians and as critical (avant le lettre) of many of their positions and practices.

Learning to Play the Game

2009-05-02T09:47:00.003-04:00

Unemployed Negativity has a great post on what we really teach our students. Here's the punchline:

For most students college is bureaucracy 101. This education, the education [in] how to follow rules, bend rules, and keep up appearances is perhaps what will best serve them as future employees. What I wonder is how they learned to learn this; I suppose that it is the lesson of all education.

It remids me of Jacob Levy's response to one of the more recent "those-kids-nowadays" moans that periodically well up from the professoriat. I'll let the two of them do all the talking on this point.

Anti-Delong: Postscript

2009-04-28T15:51:00.003-04:00

In my last post I didn't touch on DeLong's other "explanation" for Marx's errors. I'll do this quickly--it's a minor thing, in some ways, but telling.

DeLong thinks Marx and Engels were led astray by the spectacle of hardship in pre-1850 Manchester, which he claims was not representative of England as a whole. He then writes:

Parliament began to regulate conditions of employment in the 1840s. Parliament began to regulate public health in the 1850s. Parliament doubled the urban electorate in 1867, just as volume 1 of Capital was published. Parliament gave unions official sanction to bargain collectively in the 1870s.

Has DeLong read--heck, has he even heard of--Chapters 10-15 of Capital? Marx was hardly unaware of these developments. Moreover, he even has a theory about their cause. He chalks them up to the working class getting organized! Parliament did not swoop down from on high bearing gifts--working class struggle predates and motivates all legislative victories, on Marx's account.

This goes back to what I previously called DeLong's belief in independent state action. It must be nice to be a neoliberal Keynesian who believes that intelligent and benevolent legislation will be the salve and the salvation of the worker--so long as it is directed by neoliberal Keynesians.

The final, ironic coda on DeLong's worship of the benevolent state is his closing line, in which he attributes Marx's late-born interest in Russia to, among other things, "the failure of the Paris Commune and the founding of the French Third Republic," without bothering to mention that the "failure" of the Paris Commune was its failure to withstand bombardment by the French Third Republic! After which, the French Third Republic demonstrated its benevolent feelings towards its working class citizens by summarily executing an estimated 30,000 of them (while arresting, deporting, and/or executing perhaps another 50,000 in the aftermath).

Anti-DeLong: Volume 3

2009-04-28T15:48:00.003-04:00

DeLong explains the "intellectual origins" of Marx's errors:

Marx's beginnings in German philosophy, and the fact that he hooked up in the 1840s with Friedrich Engels whose family owned textile factories in Manchester. German philosophy, or perhaps rather Hegel.

Oh, goody. An economist riding the Hegel hobbyhorse. This should be fun.

DeLong produces a long quotation from Chapter 1, section 4 of Capital, on the fetishism of the commodity. He proclaims that he doesn't understand it at all. Then he conflates his own lack of understanding with lack of intelligibility, and attributes it all to Marx coquetting with the modes of expression peculiar to Hegel. Uh, no. Marx does use some Hegelian terminology in Chapter 1, but most of it is earlier, prior to section 4. I don't see a single Hegelism in the quotation DeLong proffers. But ignorance is not the limit of DeLong's special powers of not understanding. To wit:

To say that "the value relation[s] between the products of labour ... have absolutely no connection with their physical properties" is simply wrong: if the coffee beans are rotten--or if their caffeine level is low--they have no value at all, for nobody will buy them.

Marx does not deny this--he says explicitly and repeatedly that commodities must be use-values in order to bear exchange-value. But he denies that the use-value has any real connection with the exchange value, in the sense of determining it. We'll come back to this.

Nobody I talk to believes that "values" are objective quantities inherent in goods by virtue of the time it took to produce them.

Brilliant methodology. First of all, the whole point of Marx's discussion of fetishism is to say that when we exchange goods in the market we don't think to ourselves, "I'm exchanging a quantity of socially average labour for an equivalent quantity of socially average labour." As Marx puts it:

Men do not [...] bring the products of their labour into relation with one another as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true; by equating their various products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it. (Capital, Fowkes translation, pp. 166-7)

In other words, Marx doesn't think that values are objective quantities inherent in goods, nor does such a belief constitute the fetishism of commodities. And he says as much repeatedly. Rather the reverse. Values appear to be subjective, to be based on our individual, idiosyncratic preferences. In fact, according to Marx, they are outcomes of the social production process, which goes on behind our backs, as he puts it repeatedly. Back to DeLong:

If the combination of my wealth and its usefulness to me makes me value it the most, then I use it--it is to me what Marx calls a use value.

Use-value in Marx means the concrete functionality of a thing--what it does, in a very Aristotelian sense. There is a persistent tendency in economic discussions of Marx to identify his "use-value" with "utility" when in fact the two are radically divergent. Use-value is function, while utility is, depending on who you're reading, pleasure or preference. DeLong seems to avoid this particular error, at least here, which is admirable. But this does not put this passage beyond criticism, since he seems to imply that I regard a particular thing as a use-value only because I do not regard it as an exchange-value. But use-value is the primitive condition, not the derived condition. Moreover, he drives this home by saying that a thing is a use-value to me only if I value it the most. This is simply not true, both according to Marx and according to, I think, any fair minded consideration of affairs. I might relate to something as to a use-value even if I don't particularly want to use it. The only consideration here is that I treat the thing as a concrete particular, and not as an equivalent to a bunch of other things. The market is not the primary human horizon. Things are useful before (ontologically speaking) they are exchangeable. Indeed, DeLong seems to recognize this in the very next sentence:

But what Marx calls exchange values are really use values to others:

Exchange-values are really use-values to others. Of course DeLong thinks he's criticizing Marx here, when Marx says the same thing. For example, at the beginning of Chapter 2, Marx writes:

For the [commodity] owner, his commodity possesses no direct use-value. Otherwise he would not bring it to market. It has use value for others. (Fowkes trans., p. 179)

DeLong detects here a toehold for The Economists' Criticism of Marx (TM):

Things have value not because of the abstraction that socially-necessary labor time is needed to produce them but because of the concretion that somebody somewhere wants to use it and has something else that others find useful to trade in turn.

DeLong thinks that the latter condition is more concrete than the former, and that they are mutually exclusive. I think he's wrong on both counts.

That somebody somewhere has a use for what I sell is abstract in two senses. First, this "somebody somewhere" is both general and futural. The items on the shelves in the grocery store don't lose their value simply because no customer is currently in the act of buying them. Value refers, in DeLong's story as much as in Marx's, to an expectation grounded in a social division of labour, an expectation about what "people" want, need, etc. Second, the exchange of some goods for other goods posits the equivalence of the goods in question, an equivalence that abstracts from the particular functions of those goods. A sandwich is for eating (this is its use-value). A book is for reading. You cannot eat a book or read a sandwich. Hence, when we say that a book and a sandwich are equivalent as values (they each cost $4.95), we are grounding value in an abstraction, whether we consider this abstraction to be "utility" (Hegel's "need in general") or socially necessary labour-time.

Moreover, there is an equivocation in DeLong's use of "because." As I mentioned above, Marx does not deny that commodities must be use-values; on the contrary, he insists that every commodity must be a use-value, and that every commodity proves that it is a use-value, and that the labour that made it was useful labour, by being exchanged. But being a use-value does not explain why something has value, or why it has as much value as it does. As Hegel says, "man, as a consumer, is chiefly concerned with human products, and it is human effort that he consumes" (Philosophy of Right, s. 196). Or, if you prefer Smith's phrase, through commerce, we all come to rely upon "the assistance and co-operation of many thousands" (Wealth of Nations, I.1). Commodities have value, from this perspective, because the represent a certain amount of effort, effort conditioned, again, by the social division of labour and the development of the means of production. Recognizing that value is conditioned by need does not prohibit recognizing that value is also conditioned by socialized labour.

But this has been the realm of honest discussion, which we must now depart for the realm of hackery. Delong continues:

The distinction between use-value and exchange-value is not something invented by or peculiar to the capitalist mode of production: it is found in all human societies, no matter how large or small, no matter what the glue that holds them together.

Marx doesn't say that the distinction between use-value and exchange-value is peculiar to capitalist society, and you cannot have paid the slightest attention to Capital and come away with this opinion. He says right away on the first page of Chapter 1 that this distinction is definitive of commodities. Commodities existed before capitalist production--I should hope that DeLong recognizes this--and so did the distinction, therefore. However, that does not mean the distinction exists "in all human societies" indiscriminately. It exists only where commodity exchange of some sort goes on. As Marx writes in Chapter 2 of Capital:

Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable by him. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals. But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities, or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become so in its internal intercourse. The proportions in which they are exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes them exchangeable is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social act. In the course of time, therefore, some portion at least of the products of labour must be produced with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction becomes firmly established between the usefulness of an object for direct consumption, and its usefulness in exchange. Its use-value becomes distinguished from its exchange-value. (translation slightly modified; my emphasis)

Then, from the misty-reaches of anthropological generalities, DeLong ricochets to the concerns of a contemporary academic economist:

...the labor theory of value [...] is simply not a very good model of the averages around which prices fluctuate. Socially-necessary labor power usually serves as an upper bound to value--if something sells for more, then a lot of people are going to start making more of them, and the prices at which it trades are going to fall. But lots of things sell for much less than the prices corresponding to their socially-necessary labor power lots of the time.

He's not even trying anymore. Marx says the magnitude of value is determined by socially necessary labour-time, not labour-power. Labour-power is a commodity, and hence has a value, and therefore cannot be the determiner of value, since what would explain its own value?

Finally, we come to the punch-line:

This matters because one conclusion Marx reaches is that markets and their prices are a source of oppression--that they aren't sources of opportunity (to trade your stuff or the stuff you make to people who value it more) but rather of domination by others and unfreedom: the system forces you to sell your labor-power for its value which is less than the value of the goods you make. And it is that conclusion that human freedom is totally incompatible with wage-labor or market exchange that leads the political movements that Marx founded down very strange and very destructive roads.

There's a funny conflation of "markets" and "wage labour" going on here, which is telling. Marx is not so much concerned with markets in general as he is with the market in labour-power. Capitalist production--and hence a society of generalized market relations--doesn't get off the ground (or stay in the air), according to Marx, unless there are a whole lot of people who don't have any "stuff" to sell, and so have to sell their labour-power. Their ability to do so on the labour market is most certainly a "source of opportunity" not to starve to death--Marx does not deny this--by selling their labour-power to those who "value it more" in the precise sense that they have a use for labour-power (since they own the means of production) that its bearers do not (since, not owning the means of production, their labour-power is useless to them).

DeLong has quite simply missed Marx's entire argument. And as convenient as it might be for him to blame this on Hegel, I think he amply betrays a real unwillingness "look at the thinker, Karl Marx, and what he actually wrote and thought."

Anti-DeLong: Volume 2

2009-04-28T10:09:00.004-04:00

According to DeLong, Marx the economist said three good, still important things, and three bad things. However, the three good, important things turn out to be either so qualified by DeLong or so attenuated in their attributability to Marx that DeLong actually gives Marx almost no credit at all. Thus, he commends Marx's insistence on capitalism's tendency towards crisis, but then adds: "However, I don't think that his theory of business cycles and financial crises holds up." He praises Marx for being:

among the very first to see that the industrial revolution was giving us the statues of Daedalus, the tripods of Hephaestus, looms that weave and lyres that play by themselves--and thus opens the possibility of a society in which we people can be lovers of wisdom without being supported by the labor of a mass of illiterate, brutalized, half-starved, and overworked slaves.

But, of course, Marx didn't think this could happen so long as technology served as fixed capital. DeLong ignores the sarcastic conclusion of Marx's discussion of the ancient dream of the statues of Daedalus:

Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him the still wiser MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity. They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another. But to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus, might become “eminent spinners,” “extensive sausage-makers,” and “influential shoe-black dealers,” to do this, they lacked the bump of Christianity.

Finally, DeLong praises Marx as an economic historian of England from 1500-1850. "Most important, I think, are his observations that the benefits of industrialization do take a long time--generations--to kick in, while the costs of redistributions and power grabs in the interest of market efficiency and the politically-powerful rising mercantile classes kick in immediately. You have to take seriously the idea that the industrial revolution did not make most or even many people better off right away." This renders toothless Marx's discussions of the struggles over the working day, the rise of industrial machinery, and the processes of primitive accumulation. In DeLong's estimation, the point is that industrialization didn't make many people better off right away, and he only nods to "the costs of redistributions and power-grabs." But Marx's point is rather that capitalization and industrialization make most people far worse off right away, so much worse off that a lot of them starve to death or die very young or spend their lives in work-houses. This is more than just tweaking the cost-benefit analysis by emphasizing the long time-lag before the benefits start to kick in.

After this, the Bad Things are rather anticlimactic, and a bit vague. Marx believed:

that "the market system simply could not deliver a good or half-good society but only a combination of obscene luxury and mass poverty."
that "people should view their jobs as expressions of their species-being: ways to gain honor or professions that they were born or designed to do or as ways to serve their fellow-human."
"that the capitalist market economy was incapable of delivering an acceptable distribution of income for anything but the briefest of historical intervals."

The second is just not true, in several ways at once. First, it turns Marx back into an ideologist--since work could never be anything other than an expression of our species-being, the problem is reduced to how people view their jobs; hence, change people's consciousness and voila! Second, DeLong has turned Marx into an advocate of the medieval guilds, which is just bizarre. Third, Marx never argued that work would become beneficence or philanthropy in communism; rather, he insisted that it must become a development of one's individuality.

The first and third are just two versions of the same complaint--that Marx saw capitalism as inherently contradictory, as crisis-prone, and as productive of misery in the same measure as wealth--but they are both confused on important points.

The first version subliminally folds the state into "the market system" as not merely an endogenous development but literally as an organ of the market. This is odd, to say the least. The problem with number three is that he turns Marx's theory of classes into a theory of income distribution. But class has nothing to do with income for Marx, except via a whole series of mediations. What makes you a member of the working class is not your income level. Certainly Marx did think that wages for the mass of workers would always gravitate towards subsistence wages, but DeLong says nothing to indicate why this is not true. Certainly, as above, state action can raise the minimum wage locally, but that is very different from raising the real minimum wage globally.

But this distinction between local and global wages pushes DeLong into the libertarian corner. If "technological progress and capital accumulation" alone are capable of raising the minimum wage and distributing wealth at the global scale, beyond the jurisdiction of any state, then why is this not also true at the local level? Or, if wages only rise globally because of the concurrence of local regulations, then what is to prevent capital flight to those jurisdictions with the lowest labour costs (precipitating a race to the bottom)? Or is everything dependent upon the good will of governments entrusting economic policy to enlightened Keynesian technocrats? If so, then Lord help us! That's not a mechanism, but a daydream, painted on the wind.

But DeLong saves the best for last. Having muddled his way through the good and bad of Marx's economics, he now gives himself the task of explaining the "intellectual origins" of Marx's errors. I'll deal with this in the third and final volume.

Anti-DeLong: Volume 1

2009-04-28T10:06:00.004-04:00

Brad DeLong is a successful academic economist. He is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley. Before Berkeley, he was an economic adviser to the Clinton administration, and before that he was an untenured associate professor* at Harvard. (You can see his CV here.) He is one of the more prominent liberal economists in the US (he refers to himself as a "neoliberal").

So when Brad DeLong writes a lecture entitled "Understanding Karl Marx," it does not represent just some guy's opinion. DeLong's understanding of Marx can be taken to be representative of elite academia, of liberalism, of contemporary economics as a discipline. Not perfectly so, of course, since theses domains are chock full of disagreement and contention, but representative enough that one can say with some confidence that whatever DeLong thinks about Marx is at least a respectable take on the fellow. And when DeLong says early in his lecture--"Let us go back and look at the thinker, Karl Marx, and what he actually wrote and thought"--one has every reason to expect a careful, scholarly examination of Marx, even if it is one with which one might have disagreements.

One would then be extremely disappointed.

DeLong's lecture is stunningly and doggedly wrong, and betrays a callous ignorance of both Marx's texts and the scholarship on those texts, all in the service of trying to convince the reader (or listener) that Marx was a silly, wrongheaded, and dangerous thinker who is dead, dead, dead so far as philosophy, politics, and economics are concerned.

I want to wade through this piece by piece. This will take a while. I'll try not to be too tedious or too humourless.

DeLong begins the substantive part of the lecture by telling us that "Karl Marx had a three part intellectual trajectory"--philosopher, political activist, economist. He doesn't have much of anything to say about Marx the philosopher, but what he does say is pretty egregious:

At the start of his career he believed that all we had to due to attain true human emancipation was to think correctly about freedom and necessity.

I would love for DeLong to point to a single text where Marx writes anything that can be construed this way, or to a single secondary source that attributes this belief to the young Marx.

He has more to say about Marx as political activist, but it's not any better. He claims that Marx had "three big ideas" as a political activist:

that capitalism replaced masked domination with naked exploitation,
that the bourgeoisie would never appease the proletariat with income-redistribution, even though it could, and
that factory work would lead to proletarian class consciousness and revolution.

DeLong doesn't think much of any of this: "I see very little in Marx the political activist that is worthwhile today." I have four rejoinders:

First, it seems pretty obvious that DeLong is basing his entire portrait of Marx's political activism upon The Manifesto. Hey, it's a great text. Still, the claims made there are: a) manifesto-esque, in that they have a hortatory and polemical thrust that make it problematic to read them simply as descriptive claims about how the world is; and b) based on an as yet immature critical appraisal of political economy, and are therefore revised and qualified in many ways by what Marx writes elsewhere. Now DeLong may think he has foreclosed this second complaint by claiming that Marx is sequentially a philosopher-activist-economist. In fact, I think my complaint points up the uselessness of the sequential narrative. Marx began his critique of political economy in 1844, and both it and his political activity persisted right up to his death. they were always inseparable, and so any serious examination of the Manifesto has to take into account Marx's shifting approaches to the questions addressed there. This is not to say that a careful reading of the Manifesto would not be a valuable and defensible way to approach Marx's political activism. But DeLong does not give us that. This can be seen from the specific claims he attributes to Marx qua activist.

Hence, second, let's look at the first of those claims:

that while previous systems of hierarchy and domination maintained control by hypnotizing the poor into believing that the rich in some sense “deserved” their high seats in the temple of civilization, capitalism would replace masked exploitation by naked exploitation. Then the scales would fall from people's eyes, for without its masking ideological legitimations unequal class society could not survive. This idea seems to me to be completely wrong. Cf. Antonio Gramsci, passim, on legitimation and hegemony. See also Fox News.

Marx certainly claims in the Manifesto that:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

But to understand this "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" as the end of ideology is just silly. The nakedness of exploitation in capitalism is not equivalent to the nakedness of power. This points to an underlying confusion about just what exploitation is.

Third, there's "could" and there's "could." The redistribution DeLong suggests that the capitalist class engage in to secure its own perpetual domination is either one that allows most wage-labourers to acquire the means of production or it is not. If it is then it spells the end of capitalism, if it is not, then it just increases the cost of labour-power, increases unemployment, and undoes itself. Certainly the 20th century saw a vast array of state interventions into trade and labour markets in order to ameliorate the class struggle and forestall revolutionary movements. Whether or not such efforts will have the necessary traction in a NAFTA-ized world market remains to be seen, but Marx's point is that within a world of free trade capitalist nations stand in the same relation to one another as competitor firms, with the same incentives to raise productivity and decrease labour costs. So long as capital is more mobile than labour--which is to say, always--local jurisdictions will compete to attract capital, and this competition will be bad for workers.

I also think that DeLong's faith here betrays his belief in something like independent state action. Marx wanted to trace all state action back to the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie because he believed that the state would only protect the workers' interests when they forced it to. Nothing about the history of Keynseanism stands as an obvious counterexample.

Fourth, and finally, DeLong thinks Marx's optimism about factory work leading to organization and class-consciousness was mistaken. He writes:

Active working-class consciousness as a primary source of loyalty and political allegiance was never that strong. Nation and ethnos trump class, never more so that when the socialists of Germany told their emperor in 1914 that they were Germans first and Marxists second.

This is a classic case of mistaking hortatory rhetoric for objective analysis. That Marx talks at times as if the revolution will be the inevitable outcome of capitalist development did not prevent him from advocating and taking part in the political work that takes nothing for granted. What DeLong fails to understand is that preaching inevitable working-class unity and revolution is a political tactic for forging working-class unity and promoting revolution. It's a performative speech act. And it was an incredibly important--and effective--one within the European social democracy movement in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

And I can think of a whole slew of instances that "more so" demonstrate other allegiances trumping class--like when the head of the German Social Democrats ordered the fascist shock troops of the Freikorps to assassinate Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, or when Stalin did just about everything Stalin did.

Still, this is all side-show--why would anyone take seriously an academic economist's judgments of Marx's political activism?--to the main concern: the assessment of Marx qua economist. I'll start looking at that in the next post.

* The original version of this post erroneously claimed that DeLong had tenure at Harvard.

In Which I Am Obliged to Comment Upon the Sudden Upsurge in Mentions of Marx

2009-04-23T15:52:00.006-04:00

According to Matt Yglesias, "Everyone's Talking About Karl Marx!" And so they are, if by everyone you mean a few folks scattered across both the ideological spectrum and the internet.

Mostly (and I freely acknowledge that this is a bit lame as an excuse for a post) I guess I want to push back against all the--what I consider to be--recycled errors and confabulations about Marx that inevitably well up in these instances. In part I'm motivated by scholastic fealty to My Man, but I'm also a bit skeptical about the utility and propriety of trotting old Moor out whenever economic growth goes negative as if to say, ah, yes, I knew this would happen, because I was forced to read Marx as an undergraduate...

Hence, I won't say anything about Leo Panitch's (rather pedestrian) piece in Foreign Affairs, since Panitch is an actual, card-carrying socialist, and so hardly needs an excuse to say "Well, you know, Marx said..."

Christopher Hitchens, on the other hand... Isn't this guy supposedly an ex-Trotsyist or something? If Hitchens is representative of Trotskyism, then I say Leon deserved that ice-pick for muddying the waters with so much "been-there-done-that" and pig ignorance. Three examples:

The term exploitation, for example, should be not a moralizing one but a cold measure of the difference between use value and exchange value, or between the wages earned at the coal face and the real worth of that labor to the mine owner.

This literally makes no sense. It starts off promisingly enough, since, indeed, exploitation is not a moralizing concept in the way it is usually taken to be by undergraduates and analytic philosophers. But how do you measure the difference--coldly or warmly--between the specific (and hence qualitative) function (use-value) of a thing and its exchange-value (quantitatively measured in some equivalent, like money)? How do you measure the difference between quality and quantity? His second attempt is a bit better, in that it replaces nonsense with vagueness. Exploitation is the use of labour (which has as its own end the production of some useful thing) for the purpose of making a profit (its "real worth" to the employer). It has nothing to do with wages, except by circumlocution.

Next:

The chapter [in Capital] on new industrial machinery opens with a snobbish quotation from John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” This must have seemed absurd even at the time, and it appears preposterous after the third wave of technological revolution and rationalization that modern capitalism has brought in its train.

Snobbish? Huh? Absurd? Uh, no. Hitchens thinks this song is about him: "I sure don't seem to work very hard, and my computer does make things so much easier," and then exprapolates to the whole population. I hate to break it to him, but humans work more since the industrial revolution than they did at any other point in history. Even the "beneficiaries" of "the third wave of technological revolution and rationalization" are those lucky folks who basically work all the time--knowledge workers who take their work home with them and are always on call via e-mail, SMS, pager, etc.

Third (and finally): According to Hitchens, one canot overlook the "critical shortcoming of Capital—no pricing policy." This takes two standard complaints and conflates them into one really bizarre complaint. The two standard complaints are 1) that Marx's "labour theory of value" does not predict market prices, and 2) that Marx criticizes capitalism without offering any positive program or political theory. I'm not particularly hot on either of those criticisms, but to combine them as Hitchens has is truly weird. Marx called Capital a critique of political economy. Why would anyone expect such a thing to contain some sort of scheme for setting prices?

I don't have much to say about the Yglesias post or the Crooked Timber post, but there are a couple things of note in the comments. Yglesias' post brings out the standard issue sorts of things, like "the operational details of Marxism economics are nonsense," but it also inspires some real gems. My favorite: "The most notable historical materialists in American politics today are probably the libertarians."

The CT crowd is more academic, and there's a pretty spirited back-and-forth about the merits or lack thereof of Delong's approach to teaching Marx to undergrads. Much of this hinges on Marx's effects a) within economics and b) on the political history of the 20th century. I would actually love to wade into the grass here and respond to just about everything, but I'll restrain myself to making a couple comments.

1. On commenter claims that "whereas Locke had a big impact on theory and the real world, at the end of the day Marx had just a big impact on the real world, not theory." I think this only makes a lick of sense IF you restrict "theory" to economics (and restrict that, moreover, to the Anglo-American academy). Marx had a huge impact in theory: just try understanding 20th century French or German philosophy without understanding Marx--Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Beuauvoir, Merlou-Ponty, Bataille, Fanon, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Arendt...every one of them was massively shaped by Marx. Mainstream economics was not very influenced by Marx...but then neither was mainstream patriarchalism very influenced by Locke. The object of a philosopher's criticism rarely takes the criticism to heart and reforms itself to meet the philosopher's criteria.

2. To take the other side of the coin now, I'm always bothered by this talk about theory's impact on the real world. It is especially problematic when we're talking about Marx, since, if you're taking Marx seriously at all, you have to entertain the idea that there is no such "impact." That is, insofar as theory is not already part of the real world, it can have no effect in the real world. Theory does not come to the real world from outside somewhere. People like Marx write books. Those books are read by others, in all sorts of contexts. Those acts of reading are more or less decisive for the other actions of the readers. Etc. I think it is interesting to ask what in Marx's texts allowed them to be taken up into theoretical and politcial practices so alien to the milieu in which Marx was writing, and so alien to the developed object of his theory (capital). What in Marx allows Mao to think of his practice as Marxist? That is an interesting question to me. But I don't think it is helpful to talk about the Chinese revolution as one among a series of impacts that Marx's ideas or theories had in the real world.

3. Finally, another commenter complained about the intro lecture on Marx outlined in Chris Bertram's post as follows: "How about an evaluation of Marx’s ideas? Instead of just describing certain features of Marx’s arguments, how about grappling with them – I thought this is what philosophers were supposed to do? As in, are his arguments convincing? What are their flaws, what are their strong points? To what extent did they pan out, and to what extent didn’t they?" I think this notion of "grappling with" Marx's arguments is precisely what philosophers should avoid doing in the classroom. What "grappling with" means here is "evaluating." Setting oneself up as the evaluator and judge of the past and of thinkers of the past seems like a bad way to do philosophy, especially in the classroom. It's likely to lead not to critical thinking but to self-righteousness. Let Locke and Marx evaluate us--a class that does that is a thousand times more interesting and educational, in my opinion.

This has turned into a long, rambling set of not-so-coherent musings. Brad Delong will have to get his own post, cuz there is just so much wrong it won't fit here!

Univ. of Louisiana-Lafayette to Lose Philosophy BA

2009-04-21T16:58:00.003-04:00

The Louisiana Board of Regents is recommending terminating the degree program in philosophy at the "second ship" University of Louisiana. It is one of a mass of "low-completer" degree programs facing the axe. The Committee of Regents agenda is here (WARNING: PDF). The University recommended keeping the program unconditionally:

The B.A. in Philosophy is one of only three such programs in the state. Philosophy, by its very content and essential relationships with other disciplines, is fundamentally a core discipline in any comprehensive, doctoral granting institution. As the Board of Regents Academic and Student Affairs Committee staff stated in its report at its meeting of August 25, 2004, regarding the then low-completer status of the Philosophy Program at UL Lafayette: The staff notes that ULL is ranked by the Carnegie Foundation as [a] Doctoral Intensive Institution; hence, the B. A. in Philosophy program should probably be considered as a core undergraduate offering for the University. Accordingly, the staff recommends that the program be maintained unconditionally.

The University recommendation also notes that the number of majors has tripled since 2003-04 (the last time the program was under review for its low-completion record. There are also a number of considerations of the program's instrumental value: It's cheap! It raises LSAT scores! Professional ethics!

But the Regents aren't buying it:

The staff is sympathetic with the University desire to retain this program; it is, indeed, a traditional core program of a broad-based liberal arts and sciences institution. Yet, one cannot help but recognize that Philosophy as an essential undergraduate program has lost some credence among students. This is reflected in decreasing numbers not only in this program, but others across the country. The issue is not whether Philosophy as a topic of study is an essential component of a broad undergraduate program of studies, but whether a separate and distinct degree in Philosophy is needed. To that question, the staff cannot ignore the statistics. This B.A. program has been a low-completer four out of the five times over a twenty-two year period. Repeated past efforts by the University to enhance student enrollment and completers, while well-intentioned, have not been successful and there is no compelling reason presented here why that pattern should change in the near future.

Accordingly, the staff recommends immediate termination. Currently enrolled student shall be allowed to complete their program of studies within a reasonable frame of time.

Yikes!

I notice three things:
1. One of only three philosophy BA programs in the whole state! (Tulane and LSU must be the others.)
2. The Regents completely ignore the statistics--which do indeed show an increase in enrollment and in majors, both at ULL and nationwide--in order to say that the centrality of philosophy has "lost some credence" among the students.
3. On the other hand, the University doesn't help by hanging its case so heavily on instrumental and service functions. The Regents want to turn Philosophy into a purely service department, so the University is just helping them make their own case.

Istvan Berkeley, of the ULL Philosophy Department, suggest the following:

I politely suggest that the Board of Regents be made aware that their assessment of philosophy, as a declining academic discipline, is incorrect. Any other related thoughts might also be useful. Probably the best method of doing this is to send messages to Dr. Sally Clausen, who is the Commissioner of Higher Education. Her e-mail address is sclausen@uls.state.la.us. The last time they tried to take away our major, we were able to generate a petition with over 1,500 signatures from people around the State of Louisiana. This time we do not have the time to organize such an effort. So, support from philosophers around the world would be very much appreciated. However, as the time is short, please act as soon as you can.

There you go.

CFP: Immanence and Materialism

2009-04-21T16:45:00.002-04:00

CALL FOR PAPERS: IMMANENCE AND MATERIALISM CONFERENCE

Date: 23 June 2009
Venue: Queen Mary, University of London
Call for papers deadline: 22 May 2009
All papers and enquiries to: s.j.choat@qmul.ac.uk

Keynote speakers:
Professor James Williams (University of Dundee) Dr Ray Brassier (American University of Beirut) Dr Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London)

The concepts of immanence and materialism are becoming increasingly important in political philosophy. This conference seeks to analyse the connections between these two concepts and to examine the consequences for political thought. It is possible, as Giorgio Agamben has done, to make a distinction within modern philosophy between a line of transcendence (Kant, Husserl, Levinas, Derrida) and a line of immanence (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault). If we follow this distinction, then the "line of immanence" might include Spinozist interpretations of Marx, Althusser's aleatory materialism, and Deleuze's superior empiricism. But what is the value of this work and is it useful to distinguish it from "transcendent" philosophies? Distinctions between materialism and idealism are equally complex: Derrida, for example, might as easily be classed a materialist as an idealist. And where can we place more recent work like the critiques of Deleuze by Badiou and Zizek, or Meillassoux's speculative materialism?

Papers may wish to consider the following questions:

What is materialist philosophy? How can it be distinguished from idealist philosophy, and is it useful to do so? Are all philosophies of immanence necessarily materialist?
Is it legitimate or useful to make a clear distinction between philosophies of immanence and philosophies of transcendence?
How have the concepts of immanence and materialism traditionally been conceived within political philosophy?
What, if any, are the political consequences of pursuing a philosophy of immanence?

Paper titles and a 300-word abstract should be sent by Friday 22 May 2009 to Simon Choat at s.j.choat@qmul.ac.uk, Department of Politics, Queen Mary.

Graduate papers welcome.

ME: What are people thinking when they announce conferences on such short notice?

Mad Skillz

2009-04-19T11:17:00.004-04:00

A recent list-serve post:

I am trying to help a recent recipient of a BA in philosophy get a job as a research associate in a USA policy think-tank. He needs to explain how the study of philosophy has granted him strong research, proofreading, and editing skills. Perhaps someone could suggest materials available online dealing with this?

Apparently this philosophy student learned to outsource all of his research to others who, in turn, outsource all of their research to others. I would assume that a basic operation for research associates at policy think tanks would be to use such arcane resources as libraries and "the Google" to, y'know, find shit out.

Zombie blog...

2009-04-16T10:08:00.001-04:00

...is hungry for brains...

Going Galt, the Aftermath

2009-03-13T17:21:00.003-04:00

Via a commenter over at Obsidian Wings, we get this very helpful sequel to Atlas Shrugged:

(Bob the Angry Flower archives here)

Misadventures in Advertising

2009-03-12T14:46:00.002-04:00

This has been bugging me for weeks. There is an ad for a suicide prevention hotline up on bus stops all over the city. It is a headstone engraved with the following text:

FRANCOIS
1957-1.866.555.1212

The implication, obviously, is that poor Francois lived from 1957 until he called the suicide hotline. No one at Suicide Action Montreal saw that? Might I suggest that SAM adopt the following slogan:

Want to kill yourself? Call us. We can help.

Something Borrowed and Something Annoying

2009-03-05T20:08:00.002-05:00

I don't like Andrew Sullivan much, as a writer, as a thinker, as a political commentator. Never have. Whatever. But I still like visiting his blog because he links to some really cool stuff sometimes. To wit. YouTube videos remixed into songs for Kutiman's new album, Thru You. Totally fun.

But then Sullivan writes this about the project: "The wisdom of crowds just got musical and online."

Uh, no.

Unless Kutiman is actually just the nom de tune (heehee, get it?) of the anonymous masses who appear in the videos, and who spontaneously generate these songs from the seemingly ramdom confluences of their separate projects, then, no, this has nothing to do with the wisdom of crowds. It's the wisdom of one guy. Who has a lot of talent, and even more patience. The bottom falling out of the stock market--that's the wisdom of crowds! Rousseau's ideal legislature--that's the wisdom of crowds! Sampling? Not so much.

Things I didn't know (part of an infinte series)

2009-03-05T18:06:00.002-05:00

There's a refrigerator maker called Thermador. The spelling's a bit off, of course, but I don't know how they resist making their slogan:

The revolution may not be televised, but the reaction will be refrigerated.

CFP: Marx and Philosophy Society

2009-02-14T15:17:00.000-05:00

Marx and Philosophy Society sixth annual conference
Institute of Education, London, Saturday 6th June 2009

Keynote speaker: Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario)

The Marx and Philosophy Society aims to encourage scholarly engagement with,
and creative development of, the philosophical and foundational aspects of
Marx's work. The society welcomes contributions from any philosophical or
political position.

Papers on any topic consonant with these aims are invited from postgraduate
students for a special session for postgraduate papers at the conference.
Papers should be planned to last for approximately 20 minutes.

Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words by 1 March 2009 to Sean Sayers at
s.p.sayers@kent.ac.uk.

A short essay on ethics and markets

2009-02-13T07:18:00.003-05:00

I was asked by one of my students to write a short piece for McGill Foreign Affairs Review on the question: Are ethics and the free market system irreconcilable? I thought the result was not un-worth sharing (Orwell cringes). It has just the right mix of unsubstantiated hyperbole and suggestive inscrutability.

Are ethics and the free market system irreconcilable?

Certainly not; they can be easily reconciled by the simple realization that “the free market system” is as much a figment of the imagination as are unicorns and hippogriffs. Hence, anything at all can be reconciled with “the free market system,” so long as one’s imagination is rich enough. In order to seriously consider the relationship between ethics and “the free market system,” one must get behind this fantastical construction and ask about the relationship between ethics and the real substratum of this fantasy, not to mention the relationship between ethics and the process by which this fantasy is produced. To imagine a free market system: what are the ethical stakes in such an act of fancy? I will return to this question, but first we must settle the question of where the fancy of “the free market system” comes from? What is the basis of this image in reality?

Unlike the unicorn or the hippogriff, which the imagination forms by adding together parts of real creatures to form a new whole, the imagination arrives at the free market system by subtracting something from an existent form of society. The imagined free market system is missing something essential, something without which it could not possibly be real. Having imagined this system that does not and cannot exist, we then perceive as real what we have only imagined, that is, we mistake what we actually see for our fanciful creature.

“The market” is an abstraction, but not an unhelpful one. The market is not that teeming warren of elbows and constant din where one goes on Saturday to get the best cheese for the lowest price. Rather, it is a bit of verbal shorthand for the fact that we put price-tags on lots and lots of stuff. There is a market in x if x has a price-tag on it. The market in x is a “free” market if more or less anyone in a given population can put a price-tag on x and more or less anyone can, in turn, buy x, without too much interference on either end from bureaucrats, police, or scary men in dark sunglasses and bulging jackets. Hence, a free market is always a free market in something or another: macadamia nuts, retail space, legal services. Moreover, even in this digital age when we hyperbolically pretend that space has disappeared because we can order fine Japanese teas online while sitting in our underwear in our own bedrooms, a free market is always geographically bounded, and in that sense, local. There are sites of production, sites of consumption, and avenues of transit and communication between them, all of which must be free of blockade or interference in order for the market to be free.

It has always been recognized that the existence of markets implies a very definite ethos. In order to engage in market exchange, I must recognize my partner as a free proprietor of whatever he or she brings to the exchange, having a right to possess it and a concomitant right to give it up. I must assume that he or she is attempting to get the most money or product possible in the exchange. I cannot avail myself of force or fraud. I must treat what I bring to the table as comparable with what my partner brings, such that we could arrive at a fair exchange, neither of us doing the other a favor that would impart a lasting sense of obligation. Of course, actual parties to actual market transactions might subjectively violate one or another of these strictures, but they nonetheless function as norms structuring the practice of market exchange. These norms are so far definitive of what it is to interact via the market that they constitute the recognizable character of “the good merchant”—fair, non-violent, solicitous, always on the look-out for a bargain, tolerant.

Of course, there is also the equally recognizable character of “the bad merchant”—greedy, duplicitous, money-grubbing, caring for nothing great or glorious, incapable of reverence or shame—so prominent in the popular imagination at times like now, when money managers are faking their own deaths to escape public accounting for their schemes. To some extent, this is merely the picture of someone who preserves the appearance of market ethics while violating its spirit, and to this extent it does not at all trouble the ethicality of the market, but insists upon it. The CEO who spends millions renovating his office while his underlings and customers lose their shirts is called out simply for failing to properly respect others as equal proprietors. However, the portrait of the bad merchant also contains a certain suspicion of the market ethos itself, a doubt that market ethics could ever be anything more than a minor aspect of ethics, a species of etiquette rather than ethics proper. The market must be bounded ethically as well as geographically. Some things should not be bought or sold. There are better, more important ways of interacting with others than via cash transactions. Real ethics necessarily transcends the market, since it must decide when and where the market is appropriate and when and where it is not. Thus, while the market is perfectly reconcilable with ethics, it is so reconciled only by acknowledging the limits of the market and its peculiar ethos.

The market system, however, is a different creature; it is not merely the sum of all of the free markets in the world. In order to constitute a system, markets must be linked in some self-reinforcing way. This self-reinforcing system used to be called civil society, or commercial society, or (and this is my preference) capital. So, what is the relation between capital and ethics?

Not so foreign as one might think. Ethics is just the lived experience of our relationship to our better selves. And capital pretty much has a monopoly on “better selves.” In fact, I am tempted to say that capital so completely structures our modern sense of who we are and who we should become that it is hard to conceive of any ethics other than capitalist ethics. And I just gave in to temptation. The etiquette of the merchant resembles petty-Kantianism; the other is treated as a rational actor in no need of my paternalism (in other words, buyer beware!). The ethics of capital, on the other hand, is a Pentecostal strain of utilitarianism, an enthusiastic and garrulous certainty that, whatever I do, everything will turn out for the best in the end. And the end is nigh.

To be clear, capital doesn’t tell you what you should be. That’s the beauty of it. Capital just tells you how to become whatever you think you should be. That is, it abstracts from the determinate content of the good. Wherever your treasure may lie, the ethical guidance that commercial society gives you is today what it was when Thomas Jefferson translated Destutt de Tracy’s formulation of it in 1818: “The means then of enriching ourselves is to devote ourselves to that species of labour which is most dearly paid for, whatever be its nature.” In a more modern idiom, the advice is: sell yourself. Moreover, de Tracy was up to date enough to realize that what counts is not merely the salary but also the perks. Sure, that minimum wage burger-flipping job may not seem to stack up against a partnership in corporate law, but you don’t have to mess with all that schooling, the hours are more flexible, and after the manager leaves you can pop White Snake into the boom box in back and rock out. Utility is the night in which all goods are black. The ultimate proof that all my choices have maximized my utility is that I have chosen them.

But as I said above, you can’t put the market system together with free markets and get the free market system. This is because capital implies but does not contain a third moment, a moment that makes things much messier. This moment contains the myriad processes of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—the violent appropriation of the means of production and the baptism of this plunder that allows it to be reborn as legitimate wealth, to be bought, sold, and invested. These processes require an organized state power that does more than ensure the integrity of weights and measures. They always seem to be happening somewhere else. As John Stuart Mill happily put it, “Wars, and the destruction they cause, are now usually confined, in almost every country, to those distant and outlying possessions at which it comes into contact with savages.” But the “savages” live next door, and within each of us, also. Whatever ethics is suitable for these border wars is not easily integrated into the etiquette of the market or the ethics of salesmanship. Remembering this, or forgetting it, is what is at stake in the imaginary flight to “the free market system.”

"...to choose our better history..."

2009-01-20T15:41:00.001-05:00

Happy Regime Change Day, everyone.

Conference: The Idea of Communism

2009-01-09T11:58:00.002-05:00

The Birbeck Institute for the Humanities
Birbeck University of London

On the Idea of Communism
Conference 13th,14th & 15th March

“It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do.”(B.Brecht)

The year of 1990 stands for the triple defeat of the Left: the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World. A certain epoch was thereby over, the epoch which began with the October Revolution and was characterized by the Party-State form of organization. Does this mean that the time of radical emancipatory politics is over?

In recent years, there are multiple signs which indicate the need for a new beginning. The utopia of the 1990, the Fukuyamaist “end of history” (liberal-democratic capitalist as the finally found natural social order) died twice in the first decade of the XXIst century. While the 9/11 attacks signaled its political death, the financial crisis of 2008 signals its economic death. In these new conditions, the task is not only to reflect on new strategies, but to radically rethink the most basic coordinates of emancipatory politics. One should go well beyond the rejection of the Party-State Left in its “Stalinist” form – a common place today -, and extend this rejection to the entire field of the “democratic Left” as the strategy to reform the system from within its representative-democratic state form. Much more than the debacle of the Really-Existing Socialism, the defeat of 1990 was the final defeat of this “democratic Left.”

This defeat raises the question: is “Communism” still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name “Communism”: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included. The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement. More radical questioning is needed today - this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with Communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher.

“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” (Alain Badiou)

Speakers:
Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui, Slavoj Zizek

The Suicidal Animal

2009-01-08T15:24:00.004-05:00

I really like Paolo Virno. I've been reading his recent book (Multitude Between Innovation and Negation), and enjoying it immensely. One point he stresses repeatedly in this work intersects in an interesting way with the Hegel I'm teaching right now and with something I always try to insist upon when teaching Aristotle: that human beings are the suicidal animals.

For Hegel, this is explicit and almost axiomatic. I'm teaching the Philosophy of Right, and right away in the Introduction Hegel insists that the will is first and foremost a negation or refusal. As a consequence, any positive choice we make has the form of refusing to refuse. "Yes" is always a "No" to saying "No." Because of this absolute universality of negation for the will, the being with a will--human being--is necessarily capable of suicide, of saying "No" to the whole world and hence to life itself. (Sartre really never gets much beyond these first few pages of Hegel...)

That is an interesting enough piece of philosophical anthropology, if familiar.

Virno makes what seems on its face to be a very similar argument: that, because of the negating power inherent in all language, human beings, as language users, are always confronted with the possibility of negating the humanity of themselves and others. This is what makes us especially dangerous animals for our own kind. Virno's emphasis is on humans as murderous, rather than humans as suicidal, but that difference seems less important than the fact that he locates the power of negation in language rather than in the will. I inadvertently put the entire discussion of willing in Hegel in linguistic terms--saying "Yes" or saying "No"--but I don't think Hegel does this at all. He does draw a link between language use and the ability to commit suicide later in the Philosophy of Right (I'll have to check that--I don't have my copy of the text with me). But it is not so immediate as it is with Virno. This lends Virno's anthropology a post-humanist and post-structuralist hue: Whatever being is captive to language is thereby also murderous and suicidal. This makes the modern attempt to restrain the violence of human willfulness by precisely delineating and enforcing the boundaries between wills (by means of the law and the state as law enforcer) seem less promising.

As an aside, this makes the seemingly recent interest in Hobbes' theory of language much more understandable and interesting to me. Hobbes seems like the one early modern political philosopher who really consistently and rigorously linked the problem of inter-human violence with the question of language.

But I want to skip over Hobbes and go back to Aristotle. When I teach Aristotle, I illustrate the difference between a definition and an attribution of a peculiar property by contrasting the proper definition of the human being--the animal having logos--with "the animal that can commit suicide." I think the latter does pick out human beings from all other animals on Aristotelian terms, but it nonetheless does not define human being. This is because--in part--it follows from the fact that human beings are the animals having logos, and hence does not get at the basic differential of the human form, but only at a consequence of that differential. Despite the commonplace claim that Aristotle defines human being as the political animal, I think the same point applies: we are political because we have language, so our political being does not define us, even if it is peculiarly proper to us.

So, in Aristotle, you have the same linkage of "having language" and "being suicidal." But--and this is where Aristotle differs from both Virno and Hegel, and where Virno suddenly appears quite modern--for Aristotle, the power to commit suicide is identical with the power to value something more highly than one's own life. That is, it is not a power of negation that makes us the suicidal animal, but an ability to see things in terms of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust. Seeing something as good contains the possibility that we will see it as better than our own lives, or than the lives of others. According to Aristotle, one always dies (or kills) for something, but Virno and Hegel would have have us believe that one can die (or kill) for nothing. That seems not a small difference.

My Research

2008-12-16T14:24:00.002-05:00

In a recent discussion with a colleague, I was asked to articulate my current research interests, and I thought it would be worthwhile to expand and write down what I said.

In the first place, I am motivated by a certain fidelity to particular figures in the history of political philosophy--Marx and Aristotle, primarily--to defend the honor and virtue of their thinking. I believe that most and the most readily accessible interpretations of these thinkers are quite strikingly bad. I find Capital and the Nicomachean Ethics to be incredibly compelling works, but when I turn to the characterizations of these works that are found in much of the secondary literature or that function as shorthand in general discussions of political and ethical philosophy, I find them to be unintelligible or incoherent or banal.

I take this mismatch to be at least in part the consequence of Marx and Aristotle standing not merely outside but in opposition to the main current of modern political philosophy that stretches from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Habermas. It is Aristotle and Marx above all others who have served that tradition as enemies the denial of whom defines and cements the community of interlocutors. The refusal of Aristotle's politcal naturalism was just as necessary for early modern theorists of sovereignty, contract, and civil society, as the refusal of Marx has been for 19th and 20th century thinkers of liberalism, proceduralism, and the legal codification of rights.

This refusal comes at a price, since the modern conceptual framework that has grown up around the artifactual state (sovereignty, general will, property, claim rights, mechanisms of enforcement, representation, personality, etc.) functions as a grid of intelligibility, a set of landmarks by which to recognize and respond to theoretical assertions, but it is a grid that is largely alien to the thought of those refused thinkers, Aristotle and Marx.

Therefore, the first aspect of my research is merely to attempt to read Aristotle and Marx on their own terms, and to develop, to the extent that I am capable, a compelling account of their political thought that begins from those points where the modern grid of intelligiblity fails to grasp them. To some extent, this involves a sort of artificial naivite, an approach to their texts that seeks to identify and begin from the phenomena they themselves begin from, instead of taking any contemporary question or recognized problem as a beginning point and then seeking an answer or resolution in Marx or Aristotle. The latter method risks importing precisely the mainstream conceptual framework that I claim makes Marx and Aristotle so difficult to understand. To this extent, then, my method of reading must owe something to a sort of Heideggerian phenomenology that seeks first the pragmata of the text being read, attempting to suspend or bracket the questions and claims of mainstream political theory (basically, contemporary liberalism).

On the other hand, however--and this leads me to the second aspect of my research--the political theories of Marx and Aristotle are not simply outside modern liberalism, they are opposed to it. Therefore, there must be points of critical contact between the mainstream discourse and the discourses produced by Marx and Aristotle. Thus, at some point, the naivite must be put aside and the project of rediscovery must become a project of critique. Once Marx and Aristotle have been rearticulated to a certain level of concreteness, I feel the need to intervene in the contemporary mainstream in order to press on certain perceived weak spots in that discourse: its lingering technocratic flavor, its reduction of politics to the state with its laws and administrative functions, its reduction of all ruling to domination or the right to coerce, its assumption that needs and desires are pre-politically and privately articulated, etc.

As a particularization of this critical project--and this is the third and final aspect of my research--I am especially interested in political violence, both as a phenomenon and as a problem for liberal/modern political theory. You could say that the whole problematic of the modern state has been organized around the hypothesis that violence could be minimized or even eliminated by being concentrated or monopolized. A daring and dubious hypothesis!

Built into the modern political problematic are a host of such daring and dubious hypotheses: that violence is identical with coercion; that violence is therefore fundamentally a problem of the will (rather than of the body, or of life, or of measure, or...); that violence is therefore essentially a problem of the borders between soverign wills; that violence can only be authorized by a prior (necessarily unauthorized) violence; that legitimate (authorized) violence is not really violence at all (so, for example, the criminal wills his or her own punishment); that, therefore, violence as such (the unauthorized--but this is redundant--violation of a will) is always wrong and is to be reduced to an absolute minimum; that the wrongness of violence consists in its injustice (rather than its immoderation, its ugliness, its...). There are surely more.

Even some of the most cogent critics of modern political philosophy--I'm thinking of Arendt here--subscribe to the identificcation of violence with coercion, which seems to me to be entirely without justification (that is, I've never found anyone who even attempts to justify this identification, which is not to say that such a justification could not be given, just that no one seems to feel the need).

I think both Aristotle and Marx (and sundry post-Marx Marxists) approach violence with very different basic assumptions, and that the perspective afforded by these different assumptions might go a long way towards rethinking the place or non-place of violence in politics. I'll try to lay out some of these differnet assumptions in future posts.

Anyway, there we are: my research interests. Any thoughts, questions, pointers, criticisms?

Radical Political Theory

2008-11-26T21:37:00.002-05:00

Another draft syllabus for Winter 2009:

POLI 364: Radical Political Thought
The Theory and Practice of Revolution

For the purposes of this course, radical political thought is understood to encompass the three revolutionary and leftist political tendencies of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Marxism, anti-colonialism, and radical feminism. Radical movements are revolutionary in that they seek to break with the liberal and capitalist political order rather than perfect that order. That is, these movements do not want a more inclusive or expansive liberal order, but desire the overturning of that order itself. They are leftist in that they do not seek to recover some pre-liberal, traditional order, but try to create something new: a post-modern politics for a post-modern society.

The particular itinerary of our investigation will follow radical movements as they have attempted to answer three questions: 1) What is revolution, and how is it to be accomplished? 2) What role does violence play in maintaining the present state of society, and what role will it play in the overthrow of that state? 3) What is ideology and how does it function? We will begin with Marx’s discussion of revolution in his mature political writings, then examine a) the revolutionary Marxist tradition, b) its assimilation and critique of Sorel’s theory of mythical violence, c) the anti-colonial appropriations of revolutionary Marxism, d) feminist and post-structuralist rearticulations of the revolutionary project, and e) the strategy of refusal articulated by the Italian Autonomia movement.

Reading Schedule:
January 6-8 Introduction
Marx, Capital, Chapter 6

January 13-15 Marx, Capital, Chapters 26, 31 & 32, and selections from the ‘Grundrisse’

January 20-22 Marx, selections from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
and The Civil War in France

January 27-29 Lenin, selections from What Is To Be Done?

February 3-5 Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution

February 10-12 Sorel, selections from Reflections on Violence
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”

February 17-19 Fanon, “Concerning Violence”

February 24-26 No Class

March 3-5 Mao, On Contradiction

March 10-12 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

March 17-19 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, Lectures One and Two

March 24-26 MacKinnon, “Desire and Power”

March 31-April 2 Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”

April 7-9 Castellano, “Living With Guerilla Warfare”
Conclusions

Keep Your Pants On

2008-11-25T07:10:00.004-05:00

This last week saw something of a collective tizzy fit on the liberal/progressive blogosphere over the fact that Obama seems poised to nominate a bunch of not-so-progressive insiders to his cabinet. The Rahm Emanuel pick caused a similar, if smaller, stir. reactions seem to run the gamut from horror through disappointment to "I told you so" and "What else did you expect."

I've touched on this before, but Obama's appeal has always been both that he is a game changer and a competent player. For this reason, I think it's a little early to be reading the tea leaves, whether to find signs of Obama selling out or to find signs that he's always been a Washington insider, centrist type (i.e., not a true progressive).

Does anyone remember the beginning of the Clinton administration? Clinton made all sorts of outsider-y, aesthetically pleasing staffing choices...and was promptly rewarded by Congress bucking him and the beltway media treating him like one of the rude mechanicals. Maybe Obama's always been a centrist technocrat, or maybe he's selling out for the sake of the power, but I really don't think anyone can tell from what has happened so far. Let the man actually do something, and then we'll see.

UPDATE:

To clarify a bit, I was not attempting to say that Obama's appointees (or potential appointees) should not be scrutinized and criticized for their past positions and actions. I'm as happy as anyone that John Brennan is out of the running for both CIA Director and DNI. The only thing I was trying to caution against was drawing conclusions about how Obama would govern and which policies he would pursue based solely on news reports about appointees.

UPDATE 2:

Nate Silver says what I tried to say, but more clearly, and even backs it up with a nifty chart.

There is, to say the least, a lot of jumping to conclusions about just which type of President Barack Obama is liable to be, by which I mean whether he'll govern from the left or the center. This speculation has been principally based on his cabinet appointments, a subject that people may be reading too much into. The initial Bush cabinet contained a number of people who could be described as moderate or center-right, including Colin Powell, Tommy Thompson, Norman Mineta, Christine Todd Whitman, Paul O'Neill and arguably Mitch Daniels and Ann Veneman. Obviously, this was balanced out to some degree by the Rumsfelds and the Ashcrofts, but it is not clear that Bush's 2001 cabinet was any more right-wing than Obama's 2009 cabinet is left-wing. Bush ran a very conservative government -- but the authority came from the top down.

Most of this discussion, moreover, has dwelt in the realm of tactics, presentation and salesmanship rather than grand strategy. One can "govern from the center" and implement a number of liberal policies -- by shifting the Overton Window a couple of panes at a time, and selling classically liberal policies as commonsensical and centrist.

The whole post is excellent.

On This Day In Idiocy...

2008-11-25T06:41:00.002-05:00

Via Andrew Sullivan I find this, in which Eric Posner argues that the Iraq War may be a humantarian success story because more people would have died had the sanctions had stayed in place for an additional 10 years.

In other news, Jeffrey Dahmer has been named humanitarian of the year, since what he did to his victims was so much less horrible than what he considered doing to them but didn't.

Also, Napolean has been awarded a posthumus Nobel Peace Prize for not starting all the wars he didn't start, and Stalin has been canonized on the basis that the population of the Soviet Union increased under his rule.

(Is Posner's argument "tongue in cheek," a la a very modest proposal? Brian Leiter thinks so, which is probably evidence of the argument's sincerity. Then again, Andrew Sullivan takes the argument at face value, which might be evidence of ironic intent. Hmmm...)

The Medium Is the Message

2008-11-23T18:01:00.003-05:00

Nate Silver has an interesting and fairly convincing post at FiveThirtyEight, arguing that modern American conservatism's dependence upon talk radio has, after almost twenty years of paying real dividends, finally begun to fatally undermine their ability to compete against a resurgent liberalism. I would have liked to analyze Silver's argument by putting it into the context of Marshall McLuhan's (another Canadian!) arguments about the material effects of media. (I once taught McLuhan in a journalism ethics class, and the students just stared blankly at me. I admit it was far from my strongest teaching outing, but I also have a pretty low opinion of journalism majors. Worse even than education majors in my humble opinion.)

Anyway, I was going to do that, but then I got sidetracked by this effort to spin out Silver's argument into a whole series of correspondances between political ideologies and communication media. There I found the following (intentionally) provocative claim:

The libertarian medium is the doctrinaire treatise (or treatise pretending to be a novel). There is no liberal or conservative equivalent to The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. There are, of course, Marxist equivalents. This is one reason why sectarian libertarians and Marxists find arguing with each other more congenial than engaging with viewpoints that have real political importance. The two sides agree on what kind of thing political debate should aim to discover: the right Book.

This seems to grasp a kernal of truth only to lose hold of it as quickly as it has grasped it. I agree that real libertarians (as opposed to glibertarians like Glenn Reynolds, et al) share many characteristics with Marxists--including a propensity to give away books for free on the internet. But I don't think it has much of anything to do with the desire of proponents of either ideology to discover "the right Book." I would say instead that libertarians and Marxists are the most rationalistic of contemporary political ideologies, and those most devoted to a robust notion of truth. Hence, both are frequently given to grand exercises of polemics and are naturally disposed to sectarian schism.

Interestingly, the other ideology most congenial to Marxists is, in my opinion, Straussianism. Interestingly, Straussians tend not to feel the same respect for Marxists. Except for Kojeve, but he was barely a Marxist anyway.

Things I didn't know (part of an infinite series)

2008-11-18T13:33:00.003-05:00

If the rejection letter I just received is to be taken at face value, Philosophy and Social Criticism is currently experiencing a glut of papers devoted to Marx and Marxism.

UPDATE: For the record, the ratios of the number of articles on Marx and Marxism (NB: based on little more than a perusal of article titles) to the total number of articles published in Philosophy and Social Criticism over the last five years are as follows:
2004: 0/43
2005: 1/45
2006: 1/39
2007: 1/42
2008: 1/44
To be sure, my essay might suck, and P&SC has fulfilled their one article per year quota of Marx and Marxism for 2008.

Call for Papers: Rethinking Marxism

2008-11-16T17:05:00.002-05:00

RM09: New Marxian Times

RETHINKING MARXISM: a journal of economics, culture & society is pleased to announce its 7th international conference, to be held at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on 5-8 November 2009.

RM09: New Marxian Times is dedicated to exploring the possibilities and challenges of Marxism for understanding and engaging with the contemporary world. Neoliberal capitalism, long criticized by Marxists and others on the Left, is now going through its own long-term economic and social crises. What new possibilities do these crises create for Marxist and other progressive ideas and visions? How does Marxism, and left-wing thought more generally, need to be rethought to respond to these challenges?

Perhaps coalescing in the financial crisis acknowledged in the autumn of 2008, these dynamics represent both a significant crisis for currently constituted capitalism and modes of governance as well as a set of challenges and possibilities for all of us concerned with working towards a non-exploitative and more equitable world.

In that light, we are seeking intellectual, political, and cultural works that address the possible contributions that Marxist ideas and forms of analysis can make in responding to the challenges of these new times. Human rights, democracy, environmental concerns, new organizing movements in South America and elsewhere throughout the globe, the growth of social activisms represented as anarchist, anti-imperialist, or in response to globalization, workers subjectivities and movements, contradictions within emerging and transitional economies, emergent nationalisms, and debt and the credit crises all represent possible areas for contributions to new thinking about the role of Marxist theories, cultures, and politics in today’s world. We strongly encourage papers that address these topics in relation to the global south.

Of course, we also understand the vital importance of analyzing history in order to help us to understand and respond to contemporary conditions. To understand the new, we must reflect upon and learn from the old. In that light, we are also interested in panels and papers that emphasize historical analysis such as the history of Marxism(s), labor history, historical analysis of academia, histories of social movements and political practices, the historical development of Marxist/Socialist feminism, imperialisms, and the historical relationships between class and race- based movements.

Since Marxism covers a wide variety of fields, from literature to public health and forms of political practice, from environmental organizing to opposing global inequality and envisioning new economic and social practice, anyone engaging with Marxism in any discipline or form of activism is encouraged to submit paper and panel proposals.

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS
Proposals for papers, films, or other formats should include:
* Paper title
* Presenter's name and contact information (mail, email, phone, affiliations)
* Brief abstract (no more than 200 words)
* Technology needs for presentation

Proposals for panels should include:
* Panel title
* Name, contact information, and paper title for each presenter
* Brief abstract (no more than 200 words) explaining the panel's focus
* Brief abstract for each paper (no more than 200 words)
* Names and contact information for any discussant(s) or respondent(s)
* Technology needs of presenters
* Title, contact, and address for any sponsoring organization or journal

The appropriate preregistration fee must accompany all proposal submissions. Unfortunately, any proposal not accompanied by the appropriate preregistration fee cannot be considered. Proposals that are not accepted will have their preregistration fees returned in full. If you are submitting a proposal for an entire panel, please make sure the preregistration fee for all members of the panel is paid.

The deadline for proposal submission is 1 August 2009.

To submit a proposal and to pay the preregistration fee, follow the instructions on the conference website: http://rethinkingmarxism.org/conf

CONFERENCE WEBSITE
All information pertaining to the conference, including paper and panel submission instructions, preregistration and on-site rates, lodging suggestions, travel directions, possible childcare arrangements, cultural events, the conference program, and much else will be posted on the conference website when details become available. The web address is: http://www.rethinkingmarxism.org/conf

Inquiries concerning the conference can be addressed to:
Vincent Lyon-Callo
Department of Anthropology, Moore Hall Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo MI 49008 Vincent.lyon-callo@wmich.edu

Call for Papers: Is Black and Red Dead?

2008-11-16T16:50:00.001-05:00

Is Black and Red Dead?
7th - 8th September, 2009

An academic conference organized and supported by the PSA Anarchist Studies Network, the PSA Marxism Specialist Group, Anarchist Studies, Capital & Class, Critique-Journal of Socialist Theory and Historical Materialism.

Hosted By: The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham

What is the political relevance of the ideological labels "anarchist" and "Marxist" in the contemporary geo-political climate? Despite recurrent crisis, the costs typically borne by the people, neoliberal capitalism continues to colonize the globe in a never ending quest for profit and new enclosures. Meanwhile, an effective political response from the left to the wars, ecological destruction, financial collapse and social problems created by capital and state has so far failed to garner the widespread support and influence it needs. Indeed, the sectarianism of the left may well have contributed to this failure.

Still, despite fracture, there have always been borrowings across the left. Most recently, post-'68 radicalisms have contributed to a blurring of the divisions between the anarchist and Marxist traditions. Traditionally regarded as hostile and irreconcilable, many of these ideas find expression in the "newest social movements", taking inspiration from the Situationists, left communists, and social anarchist traditions. The anti-statist, libertarian currents within the socialist movement have repeatedly emerged during periods of acute political and economic crisis, from the council communists to revolutionary anarchism.

Is this one such historical juncture in which dynamic reconciliation is not only welcomed but vital? To rephrase the question, what can we learn from 150 years of anti-statist, anti-capitalist social movements, and how might this history inform the formulation of a new social and political current, consciously combining the insights of plural currents of anarchism and Marxism in novel historical junctures? Indeed, to what extent have these traditional fault lines been constitutive of the political imagination? The modern feminist, queer, ecological, anti-racist and postcolonial struggles have all been inspired by and developed out of critiques of the traditional parameters of the old debates, and many preceded them. So, to what extent do capital and the state remain the key sites of struggle?

We welcome papers that engage critically with both the anarchist and the Marxist traditions in a spirit of reconciliation. We welcome historical papers that deal with themes and concepts, movements or individuals. We also welcome theoretical papers with demonstrable historical or political importance. Our criteria for the acceptance of papers will be mutual respect, the usual critical scholarly standards and demonstrable engagement with both traditions of thought.

Please send 350 word abstracts (as word documents), including full contact details, to:Dr Alex Prichard (ESML, University of Bath): a.prichard@bath.ac.uk. Closing date for receipt of abstracts: 1st May, 2009

Nineteenth Century Political Philosophy

2008-11-15T15:19:00.002-05:00

A draft version of the syllabus for my upcoming course:

Philosophy 445: Nineteenth Century Political Philosophy
Government and Society: The Rise of Political Economy

The Nineteenth Century saw the dramatic decline of the classical model of political philosophy that had dominated the previous two centuries, and had consisted largely of defining the natural rights of persons and proposing the sovereign legal framework within which these rights would be best respected. The modern political order had taken hold to such an extent that such encyclopedic articulations of that order were no longer necessary. Instead, the new century was marked by “sociological” and historical investigations into the conditions of modernity (Tocqueville, Burkhardt, etc.), polemical defenses of and attacks upon the ascendant modern order (Constant, Nietzsche, etc.), imaginative utopian schemes (Fourier, Cabet, etc.), and most importantly for the purposes of this class, increasingly elaborate and rigorous efforts to establish a scientific discourse that would amount to a social physics of this modern order. This aspirational physics of society was originally called “political economy” but came to be known simply as “economics.”

In this course, we will consider the rise of economics by observing its effect on two of the great tomes of Nineteenth-Century political thought: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s Capital. The former is, in a sense, the last of the classical articulations and large-scale apologies for the new social and political order. Hegel was deeply impressed by Adam Smith early in his life, and was deeply respectful of political economy’s claim to explain the laws of motion of modern society. In the Philosophy of Right, he writes; “Political economy is the science which must go on to explain mass relationships and mass movements in their qualitative and quantitative determinacy and complexity. This is one of the sciences which have originated in the modern age as their element” (§189). Nonetheless, Hegel was also quite critical of the civil society described and advocated by political economy, and emphasizes the necessity that other sources of meaning and community justify civil society.

Marx, on the other hand, is the consummate critic of modern society, and the subtitle to Capital is “A Critique of Political Economy.” Economics is the primary ideology of the modern world, according to Marx, mystifying and sanctifying historically and violently created relations such that they appear as natural and immutable, the destiny of human life. However, Marx’s relationship with political economy is just as complex as Hegel’s, in that he too accepts that the economic relations are very real and very determinative of modern social and political existence. Our investigations of these two works will be illuminated by supplementary readings from political economy itself. We will seek to understand the basic outlines of both classical political economy and the rise of marginal utility theory that overturned the classical model in favor of what would become neo-classical economics. We will look carefully at Hegel’s attempt to synthesize this economic model of society with classical and even ancient understandings of the political republic. Finally we will delve into Marx’s critique of political economy. The readings for this course are extremely difficult, and will therefore require patience and careful attention. Our course meetings will be spent in close, interactive examination of the texts.

Reading and Lecture Schedule:

Weeks 1-7

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Supplements:

Smith, from The Wealth of Nations
Ricardo, from On the Principles of Political Economy
de Tracy, from “Elements of Ideology”
Constant, “The Liberty of Ancients [and] Moderns”
Mill, from Principles of Political Economy

Week 8 Mid-winter Break

Weeks 9-14

Marx’s Capital

Supplements:

Jevons, “General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy”
Pareto, “New Theories of Economics”
Marshall, from Principles of Economics