Shopping cartHistorical Materialism
Volumes & issues:
-
Materialism in Ancient Greek Philosophy and in the Writings of the Young Marx
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
What is the young Marx's attitude towards questions of psychology? More precisely, what is his attitude towards the human mind and its relationship to the body? To deal adequately with this issue requires a consideration of the relationship between Marx and Feuerbach. It also requires some discussion of the thought of Aristotle. For the views of Feuerbach and the young Marx are (in some respects) not at all original. Rather, they represent a continuation of a long tradition which derives ultimately from ancient Greek philosophy, and especially from the philosophy of Aristotle. As is well known, Aristotle's thought with respect to questions of psychology are mostly presented, by way of a critique of the doctrines of the other philosophers of his day, in his De Anima. W.H. Walsh has made the perceptive observation that Aristotle's views might be seen as an attempt to develop a third approach which avoids the pitfalls usually associated with the idealism of Plato, on the one hand, and the materialism of Democritus on the other. It might be argued that there is an analogy between the situation in which Aristotle found himself in relation to the idealists and materialists of his own day and that which confronted Marx in the very early 1840s. For, like Aristotle, Marx also might be seen as attempting to develop such a third approach. The difference is simply that, in the case of Marx, the idealism in question is that of Hegel rather than that of Plato, and the materialism is the ‘mechanical materialism’ of the eighteenth century rather than that of Democritus. This obvious parallel might well explain why Marx took such a great interest in Aristotle's De Anima both during and shortly after doing the preparatory work for his doctoral dissertation – the subject matter of which, of course, is precisely the materialist philosophy of the ancient Greek atomists Democritus and Epicurus.
-
Vygotsky on Language and Social Consciousness: Underpinning the Use of Voloshinov in the Study of Popular Protest
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
The term ‘Bakhtin Circle’ is used to refer to a group of Russian thinkers centred around Mikhail Bakhtin in the years following the 1917 Revolution. The group's prime concern was with the importance of questions of language-use in social life, and with the way in which language-use registered conflicts between social groups and classes. Prominent members, as well as Bakhtin himself, included P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov. Between 1929, when a number of members were arrested, and his death in 1975, Bakhtin continued to work on the issues which had occupied the group.
-
Marxism, ‘Manufactured Uncertainty’ and Progressivism: A Response to Giddens
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
In a series of writings in recent years, Anthony Giddens has pursued two broad interconnected themes: reflection on the future of radical politics in a world in which, it is claimed, received political ideologies of Right and Left are exhausted; and, analysis of the character of what Giddens calls ‘second-phase’ modernisation. The connection between the two themes is straightforward: it is because the world has changed in profound ways that radical politics cannot be continued in the old way. Both of these themes are analysed at length in Beyond Left and Right. In this work, Giddens describes a long-run shift in our relationship to social and technological change manifest in the advance of ‘manufactured uncertainty’ or risk. This has been accelerated by a (more recent) shift from ‘simple’ to 'reflexive’ (or ‘second-phase’) modernisation which is a compound of a related series of developments during the post-war period – the ‘social revolutions of our time’ (globalisation and the rise of a posttraditional reflexive social order).
-
Marx's ‘Truly Social’ Labour Theory of Value: Part II, How Is Labour that Is Under the Sway of Capital Actually Abstract?
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
In the first part of this two-part article, I argued that, unlike the asocial classical (Ricardian) labour theory of value, Marx's labour theory of value is a ‘truly social’ one. In fact, it is a purely social one. Marx's theory of value is nothing but his theory of the social forms distinctive of the capitalist mode of production. Thus, we may speak of those forms as value-forms, the (generalised) commodity, money (in its several forms), capital, wage-labour, surplus-value and its forms of appearance (profit, interest, and rent), and more. The labour that produces value, then, is labour of a peculiar social sort. This thought is entirely foreign to the classical labour theory of value, and, likewise, to Marxist accounts of value theory that mistake it for a radical version of Ricardian value theory. The gulf between the classical and the Marxian labour theories of value is wide.
-
The Interconnection of Systematic Dialectics and Historical Materialism
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
This paper discusses some recent developments in the Marxian theory of value, called value-form theory, which have gone along with a methodological shift from a linear logic and historical dialectics to a dialectical logic and systematic dialectics. In order to appreciate these developments within the Marxian paradigm, it is useful to make two introductory remarks: first, on some peculiarities of Marxian discourse and, second, about discrepancies in Marx's Capital.
-
Mobilisation and Class Struggle: A Reply to Gall
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
When I began writing Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilization, Collectivism and Long Waves during the mid-1990s, die leadership of die British trade-union movement had already begun its romance with the class-collaborationist ideology of ‘social partnership’, successor to the ‘new realism’ of the 1980s. The Labour Party leadership was already moving to the right and was well on the road to consummating its marriage with neoliberalism, epitomised most starkly by Tony Blair's positive endorsement of two decades of Conservative anti-trade-union law. What remained of the world Communist movement was still reeling from the earth-shattering events of 1989. These developments exerted a growing influence amongst the intellectual community which studies ‘industrial relations’ (employment relations might now be a more appropriate term). Both in Britain and the US, the intellectual agenda shifted towards labour flexibility and competitiveness, variously represented in the literature as the study of labour-management ‘co-operation’, ‘social partnership’ or ‘human resource management1. Rethinking Industrial Relations was a re-assertion of the continuing relevance of Marxist theory at a time when it had become distinctly unfashionable, and it is fitting that the extended review in a recent issue of this journal should have been written by another Marxist active in the field of industrial relations.
-
Debating Mobilisation, Class Struggle and the Left: A Response to a Reply
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
John Kelly has replied to my assessment of his Rethinking Industrial Relations published earlier in this journal in a fraternal and constructive manner. Here, I wish to undertake two tasks. The first is to assess the response of other academics and writers to his book, in terms of reviews and the use of his work by others. The second is to engage with the points he makes to take the debate further forward.
-
An Interview with Slavoj Zizek
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
-
Perry Anderson and the End of History
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
In light of Perry Anderson's recent re-Iaunch of New Left Review, and the publication of Gregory Elliott's Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History, it is perhaps an opportune moment for Marxists to assess Anderson's contribution to socialist strategic thought. At the heart of Anderson's manifesto is the claim that the principal aspect of the past decade ‘can be defined as the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neoliberalism'. There is, obviously, something in this claim. However, Anderson also briefly notes, amongst other counter-currents, the labour upsurge in France in 1995, but dismisses the significance of these events with the claim that ‘capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule'. Anderson compares the context of the launch of the first New Left Review with that of the present day. He writes that, back then, a third of the planet had broken with capitalism, the discrediting of Stalinism in 1956 had unleashed a vital process of the rediscovery of authentic Marxism, while, culturally, there had been a qualitative break with the conformism of the 1950s. Today, by contrast, American capitalism has reasserted its international primacy, European social-democratic governments are implementing policies designed to follow the American model, Japan is suffering from a slump, while the Russian catastrophe has produced no popular backlash. Moreover, the Western powers have recently asserted themselves successfully in the Balkans, and, despite upsurges against capital in the 1990s, ‘no collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon’. How are socialists to respond to this diagnosis? In this essay, I want to locate the logic of Anderson's interpretation of the present conjuncture within the context of his previous strategic claims. I will argue that, while socialists will always have much to learn from Anderson, strategically his thought has systematically suffered from a form of political impressionism. This suggests that his interpretation of the present conjuncture may fail the test of history.
-
After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
In conversation with two artist friends recently, both declared that Adorno was a far more serious and productive guide to their practices than any other philosopher or aesthetician. Given their work and histories as artists – one had lived through the period of conceptual art and had been won over briefly to its arguments, the other had emerged out of its ruins — this was a surprise. Like many artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, both had fallen under the sway of Walter Benjamin, and were convinced, in their respective ways, that the dissolution of the category of Art into the forms of modern technology and everyday life was a good thing. Indeed, both artists were proselytisers for photography and its powers of social reference and communality. Discussions of art's autonomy were not on their checklist of priorities. In fact, if autonomy was discussed or thought of at all, it was denounced as a bourgeois category. Autonomy was what Clement Greenberg and modernist painters believed in, and the bane of all materialist art criticism. It was not what serious post-conceptualist artists, armed with the ‘critique of representation’ and theories of the social production of art, should be worrying about.
-
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (3 vols.) Manuel Castells
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
-
Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
-
Art in Bourgeois Society
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
-
Marxism and Human Nature Sean Sayers
- + Show Description - Hide Description
-
back to top