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One Symptom of Originality: Race and the Management of Labour in the History of the United States
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In the labour-history of the US, the systematised management of workers is widely understood as emerging in the decades after the Civil War, as industrial production and technological innovation changed the pace, nature and organisation of work. Though modern management is seen as predating the contributions of Frederick Taylor, the technique of so-called 'scientific management' is emphasised as the particularly crucial managerial innovation to emerge from the US, prefiguring and setting the stage for Fordism. This article argues that the management of labour in the US has roots in the particularities of a society which racialised its labour-systems – slave and free – and thus made 'racial knowledge' central to managerial knowledge. Rather than transcending the limits of racial knowledge, the authors argue that scientific management relied on experts to know and develop 'the races' not only for the purpose of accumulating capital but also for the organisation of modern production through the first decades of the twentieth century. Such 'knowledge' became central to the export of managerial and engineering knowledge from the US to the world.
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Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective
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Marx's rethinking of the combination between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value during the 1860s is very important in order to reconsider the co-presence of different forms of historical temporality and exploitation. Postmodernism presents a picture of a plurality of historical times in which the old lies beside the modern and the sweatshop beside the high-tech factory. Because it fails to provide an explanation of the relation between these forms, postmodernism produces a false image of an 'ahistorical' present. In this article I want to show how the combination of differentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour is the most adequate image to comprehend it. The theoretical task is to show how the mature categorial structure of Capital not only does not need an historicist philosophy of history, but is in fact incompatible with it.
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The Rate of Profit and the Problem of Stagnant Investment: A Structural Analysis of Barriers to Accumulation and the Spectre of Protracted Crisis
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This paper situates the subprime crisis in the context of the performance of the American economy over the last twenty-five years. The restructuring of the US economy is briefly reviewed, followed by an examination of some of the contradictions of the neoliberal model. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the reasons behind stagnant investment, and how the US finance-led accumulation-régime has become dependent upon, and threatened by, credit-creation delinked from the financing of fixed-capital formation. I argue that while the defeat of the remnants of the New-Deal/Civil-Rights liberal-democratic coalition has provided the political context for the bold re-assertion of the prerogatives of capitalist owners, the neoliberal model has not provided a path out of problems of stagnation and growing debt-dependency that presently plague the US (and global) economy. Further, I argue that evidence suggests that the post-1982 restoration of profitability that underpinned the relative improvement of US economic performance has peaked, and that compelling historical and theoretical reasons exist to expect that the profit-rate will decline in the coming decade. This will introduce additional stresses on the current debt-structure of the US economy, triggering a period of prolonged crisis and economic dislocation. The conclusion is that the US economy faces the spectre of a protracted crisis associated with the reassertion of the falling rate of profit.
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Archaeologies of the Future: Jameson's Utopia or Orwell's Dystopia?
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This paper begins with the proposition that Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (2005) is the most important theoretical contribution to utopian and science-fiction studies since Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). It argues that Jameson's derivation of 'anti-anti-Utopianism' from Sartrean anti-anti-communism will provide 'the party of Utopia' with as good a slogan as it is likely to find in the foreseeable future. It takes issue with Jameson over two key issues: his overwhelming concentration on American science-fiction, which seems strangely parochial in such a distinguished comparativist; and his understanding of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as an 'anti-Utopia' rather than a dystopia. The paper argues that, for Nineteen Eighty-Four, as for any other science-fiction novel, the key question is that identified by Jameson: not 'did it get the future right?', but rather 'did it sufficiently shock its own present as to force a meditation on the impossible?'. It concludes that Jameson fails to understand how this process works for dystopia as well as utopia, for barbarism as well as socialism.
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Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism
Althusser: The Detour of Theory- + Show Description - Hide Description
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In the past few years there has been a renewed interest in the work of Louis Althusser, although, in some cases, this interest has been one-sided, focusing mainly on his later writings on aleatory materialism. The three books reviewed in this article, however, offer balanced and insightful overviews of the totality of Althusser's work, placing it in the wider context of Marxist political and theoretical debates and stressing both its originality and strengths, but also its contradictions.
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Poulantzas lesen. Zur Aktualität marxistischer Staatstheorie
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This review discusses a collection of papers on Nicos Poulantzas's contribution to Marxist state-theory and socialist strategy. Chapters are grouped into three subject-areas: theory and method; globalisation; political strategy. Particular attention is paid to Poulantzas's definition of the state and methodology for investigating concrete state-forms. Poulantzas gives primacy to the balance of forces between classes, which raises two questions: Should his approach be integrated with theories which emphasise the formal aspects of the capitalist state? Can power-relations other than those between classes be integrated into a Poulantzian framework?
Poulantzas's work is also relevant to the study of globalisation and supranational actors. First, his investigations of the internationalisation of capital and different fractions of the bourgeoisie help us analyse developments since the 1970s. Second, his theory of the state and its functions provide a benchmark for assessing to which degree national states have been superseded by inter-/supranational institutions such as the EU.
Regarding political strategy, the focus is on the path towards democratic socialism. Questions raised concern primarily the right mixture of struggles inside and outside the institutions of parliamentary democracy.
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Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson
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Gregory Elliott's Ends in Sight (2008) argues that Marxism is no longer a 'real movement' grounded in the historical tendencies of the present, but has retreated into being a utopian idea. Refusing to embrace anti-Marxism, Elliott controversially argues that such a position is the only realistic one that can be held by the Left in the wake of the defeat of historical socialism. In assessing this claim, this review-essay re-traces Elliott's indebtedness to the work of Perry Anderson, and notes the tension Elliott reproduces from Anderson between resignation to defeat and a realism that would scan for new signs of resistance. Elliott's closing embrace of a full-blown pessimism is criticised as inconsistent with the necessity of some consolatory 'illusions' to any radical political mobilisation. The crucial question that Elliott raises concerns the motivational power of Marxism as a political discourse, particularly once shorn of its grounding in the 'tide of history'.
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Profintern: Die Rote Gewerkschaftsinternationale 1920–1937
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Reiner Tosstorff's book gives a detailed account of the history of the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), founded in 1921 as a body associated with the Communist International. Whereas the Comintern organised the minority of workers belonging to revolutionary parties, the trade-unions were the mass-organisation of the class. Tosstorff traces the various organisational problems that attended the founding of the RILU, and the splits, alliances, manoeuvres, negotiations and compromises that characterised its early years. From 1924 onwards the RILU rapidly became no more than an appendage of the Comintern, echoing the errors and betrayals of the latter body. The book contains a wealth of historical detail that makes it the standard work on the question. It may also have contemporary relevance to the way in which Marxists relate to the post-Seattle generation of anti-capitalists.
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Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism
Immaterial Labour- + Show Description - Hide Description
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Notes on Contributors
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