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Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution? A Belated Response to Eric Hobsbawm
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Ten years ago, Eric Hobsbawm presented his Deutscher Lecture on 'Can We Write the History of the Russian Revolution?' This essay argues that Hobsbawm articulated a perspective on the Russian Revolution that was shared by a much wider audience on the Left after the fall of the Soviet Union and that many of these arguments continue to resonate today. Placing the contours of the historiographical discussion of the Russian Revolution within a broader political context, I argue that Hobsbawm has underestimated the extent to which the standard academic accounts intentionally have marginalised Marxist interpretations. Hobsbawm's own ambivalence toward the October Revolution and his lack of clarity on the origins of Stalinism are not supported by the latest empirical research and concede much ground to strident anti-Marxists. Rather than refuting the Marxist classics, new evidence from the archives of the former Soviet Union actually offers substantial support. The renewed academic attacks on the Russian Revolution, including the deliberate omission of evidence that support the Marxist interpretation, should be challenged rather than embraced by socialists.
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The Multitude and the Kangaroo: A Critique of Hardt and Negri's Theory of Immaterial Labour
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Hardt and Negri's theory of immaterial labour provides a socio-economic foundation in the contemporary world for the philosophical and political elements of their thought. Although there has been considerable engagement with Hardt and Negri's work, the socio-economic dimension of their thought has received little sustained attention. This is certainly true of their theory of immaterial labour. This article aims to remedy this oversight. It presents and scrutinises Hardt and Negri's concept of immaterial labour and its putative hegemony. It then examines the depiction of the world of paid work in advanced capitalist societies with which the theory is associated and looks at three alleged consequences of the rise of immaterial labour. It concludes that this dimension of Hardt and Negri's thought is profoundly flawed, that immaterial labour cannot play the role they wish to assign it in their theory, and that this failure suggests the importance of a different method of developing theory from that employed by Hardt and Negri, along with so many other contemporary writers.
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Editorial Introduction
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Historical Materialism has previously published a significant number of studies from the contemporary 'Marx Renaissance'. Roberto Finelli's intervention into the debate over Chris Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital' provides an opportunity to consider the international reverberations of this movement and its political presuppositions and consequences. Working in a very different tradition of Marxism, Finelli's interpretation of Marx has decisive similarities with Arthur's reading of the importance of Hegel's Logic for the conceptual structure of Capital. Yet whereas Arthur argues for a 'direct homology', Finelli proposes a heuristic 'analogy'. The different conclusions reached by the two theorists reflect different orientations, both theoretical and political. Comparison to theses of the Italian workerist tradition and other contemporary readings of Marx suggest that these differences are best comprehended in a political rather than solely intellectual register. Despite their differences, these various research projects are in agreement regarding the necessity of deriving concrete strategies for the contemporary socialist movement from theoretical debate.
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Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital'
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This intervention concerns the different statute of abstraction in Marx's work. By means of a critical confrontation with Chris Arthur's work, Finelli presents his thesis of the presence of a double theory and fuction of abstraction in Marx's work. In the early Marx, until the German Ideology, abstraction is, in accordance with the traditional meaning of this term, a product of the mind, an unreal spectre. More exactly, it consists in negating the common essence belonging to labouring humanity and projecting it, as alienated universal, into the idea of philosophy, into the state of politics and into the money of the market. In the later Marx, the nature of abstraction is, rather than mental, practical. It is directly related to the quantity without quality of capitalist labour, and it is the product of the systemic connection of machines to labour-power. In contrast to Arthur, Finelli maintains that practical abstraction in the Marx of Capital is not located in the zone of exchange and the market, where there is the mediation of money. On the contrary, it is located in the zone of production, which, for Marx, is a social ensemble not mediated by money but by relations of technological domination.
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Political Marxism and Value Theory: Bridging the Gap between Theory and History
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This article proposes a reading of value theory firmly entrenched in the historicist framework of political Marxism; one which gives precedence to social relations and historical development over abstract logic and formal models. It argues that Marx's theory of value can be read as elucidating how social norms are being unwittingly created under capitalism by contrast with precapitalist societies. The article is divided into two sections. The first examines the two main ways in which value is considered within Marxism and highlights the problems that can emerge when taking into account the issue of the specificity of capitalism. The second section offers an alternative formulation of value theory grounded in the notion of alienation. This leads to the conclusion that the idea that value is shaped by labour refers to a political fact about decisions concerning the organisation of the labour process, rather than an economic fact about the expenditure of labour in the process of production. Value reflects the class struggles over the labour process and the norms that govern social life, rather than an embodied quantity of socially necessary labour-time expended within the labour process.
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The Political and Symbolic Economy of State Feudalism: The Case of Late-Medieval Flanders
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The article examines social, economic, political and symbolic relations and exchanges within late-medieval state structure, with a specific focus on the fifteenth-century county of Flanders under Burgundian rule. The author applies and elaborates Jean-Philippe Genet's concept of 'state feudalism' as a more centralised, political articulation of the feudal mode of production, in which state taxes and the redistribution of surplus-product among the ruling classes play a key role. What historians have come to call the 'modern state' arose within a social and political system which influenced in its turn the further development of the state as a network of relationships. Making use of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of 'capital' and 'symbolic exchange', the article constructs a model representing the different relations between the prince, his officials and 'political society'.
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Editorial Introduction to Louis Althusser's 'Letter to the Central Committee of the PCF, 18 March 1966'
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As an accompaniment to the translation into English of Louis Althusser's 'Letter to the Central Committee of the PCF, March 18th, 1966', this note provides the historical and theoretical context necessary to understand Althusser's 'anti-humanist' interventions into French Communist Party policy decisions during the mid-1960s. Because nowhere else in Althusser's published writings do we see as clearly the political stakes involved in his philosophical project, nor the way in which this project evolved from a 'theoreticist' pursuit into a more practical one, the note also argues that the letter is of importance to Althusser scholars, to historians of Marxist thought, and to those interested in the relevance of Althusser's work to contemporary Marxist philosophy.
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Letter to the Central Committee of the PCF, 18 March 1966
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Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico. Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico
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La Révolution rêvée: Pour une histoire des intellectuels et des αuvres révolutionnaires 1944–1956
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Achieving Our Country: Leftist ought in Twentieth-Century America; Philosophy and Social Hope; Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies
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Parecon: Life After Capitalism
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The Value of Marx, Marx's 'Capital'
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Statism
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Notes on Contributors
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