Marxist Theory and Strategy: Getting Somewhere Better

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Panitch ◽  
Sam Gindin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
New Institutions

The first three sections of this lecture address the need for better historical-materialist theorisations of capitalist competition, capitalist classes and capitalist states, and in particular the institutional dimensions of these – which is fundamental for understanding why and how capitalism has survived into the twenty-first century. The fourth section addresses historical materialism’s under-theorisation of the institutional dimensions of working-class formation, and how this figures in explaining why, despite the expectations of the founders of historical materialism, the working classes have not, at least yet, become capitalism’s gravediggers. While recognising that a better historical materialism along these lines will not necessarily provide us with a gps route to a socialist world beyond capitalism, it does suggest a number of guidelines for socialist strategy, with which the lecture concludes. This includes the need for building new institutions capable of defining, mobilising and representing the working class broadly, as well as recognising that the types of parties that can transform working classes into leading agents of social transformation have yet to be invented. A strategic priority must be to start anew at creating the kinds of working-class political institutions which can rekindle the socialist imagination, and develop the socialist capacities to get there.

scholarly journals Rethinking the Category of Class: Tempora Multa of the Plural Subject

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 171-192
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Key Aspects

This article attempts to rethink the Marxist category of class in response to criticism of the progressivist conception of history. The Marxism of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has typically run into a problem arising from the fact that accepting the proletariat as the subject of history makes any political action aimed at social transformation superfluous. From a political viewpoint, the concept of the subject of history either implies that the working class will spontaneously carry out its historical task without any intervention, or requires the dictate of the party to act as a revolutionary vanguard for the working class. Many theorists (Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Daniel Bensaïd, Massimiliano Tomba, et al.) have pointed out that emancipatory politics should abandon the idea that history is linear and that it has a particular subject. Does this then mean that the concept of class itself should be discarded? Althusser’s concept of the social whole as a weave of multiple temporalities allows us to take a new look at the problem of class in Marxist theory and political practice by understanding class as neither essence nor structure, but rather as a conflictual social relation and a political concept. Based on the works of Edward Thompson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Étienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Cinzia Aruzza, etc., the author demonstrates that the multi-temporal structure of capital means that class contradiction cannot be confined to the matters of production because class struggle unfolds at all levels of surplus value creation — production, exchange, reproduction and circulation of capital taken as a whole. Moreover, other social movements — feminist, anti-racist, migrant, etc. — lead to a redefinition of key aspects of class subjectivity related to the concepts of productive labor and exploitation. With left-wing politics now in crisis, class struggle also entails a struggle for recognition that the problem of class is a political one.

scholarly journals Historical Materialism and the Writing of Canadian History: A Dialectical View

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-60
Author(s):  
Bryan D. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Canadian History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract Surveying the historical writing in Canada that has adopted the approach of historical materialism, this paper presents a new perspective on Marxist theory and its relevance to the study of the past. It both links Canadian historical materialist texts to a series of important international debates and suggests the significance of dialectics in the development of Marxism's approach to the past.

scholarly journals Modernity as “passive revolution”: Gramsci and the Fundamental Concepts of Historical Materialism

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Passive Revolution

Abstract The recent revival of interest in Marxism within and beyond the academy has led to various proposals for contemporary reconstructions of historical materialism. This article proposes that the work of Antonio Gramsci could provide the basis for an historical materialist interdisciplinary research programme today that is capable of engaging productively in dialogue with other traditions of thought, while respecting their (and its own) differences. The article focuses in particular on Gramsci’s development of the concept of “passive revolution,” arguing that his integration of elements from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach permits him both to break with various “determinist” deformations of Marx's thought while at the same time insisting upon the integrity of Marxist theory, as a tradition of thought capable of renewal through self-criticism. It proposes that Gramsci's thought offers resources for an explanatory historical narrative of modernity focused upon the political moment as the dialectical unity of “structure” and “agency”.

Reply to Elster on “Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory”

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Functional Explanation ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
Textual Basis

In this chapter, the author responds to Jon Elster's criticism of his use of functional explanation in his account of historical materialism. Elster rejects the association between Marxism and functional explanation, arguing that there is no scope for functional explanation in social science. He therefore concludes that the Marxist theory of society and history should abandon functional explanation and that it should, instead, draw for its explanations on the resources of game theory. The author offers an explanation of historical materialist theory that he attributes, on a textual basis, to Karl Marx, and that he articulates and defends in his book Karl Marx's Theory of History. He asserts that game theory cannot replace functional explanation within Marxist social analysis and that it has no place at the heart of historical materialism, alongside functional explanation.

Political Power and Political Economy of Media: Nicaragua and Bolivia

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 166-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Artz
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Public Access ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Working Classes

The apparent democratic shift unfolding in Latin America, from Venezuela and Bolivia to Ecuador and Nicaragua has been quite uneven. Public access to media provides one measurement of the extent to which social movements have been able to alter the relations of power. In nations where working classes, indigenous peoples, women, youth, and diverse ethnic groups have mobilized and organized constituent assemblies and other social and political organizations, political economies of radical democratic media have been introduced, communicating other progressive national policies for a new cultural hegemony of solidarity. Moments of rupture caused by social movements have introduced new social and political norms challenging capitalist cultural hegemony across the continent, with deep connections between media communication and social power revealed in every case. Public access to media production and distribution is a key indicator of democratic citizen participation and social transformation. Those societies that have advanced the farthest towards 21st century socialism and participatory democracy have also established the most extensive democratic and participatory media systems. These media reach far beyond community and alternative media forms to become central to an emerging hegemonic discourse advocating social transformation and working class power. Community media in Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador demonstrate how radical political power can encourage mass working class participation, including acquiring and using mass communication for social change and social justice.

Race, Class, and Revolution in the Twenty-First Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 440-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walda Katz-Fishman ◽  
Jerome Scott
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Twenty First Century

We analyze class, race, and revolution in the United States through Marxist theory and philosophy, and the experience and lessons from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (League) in the auto and related plants and community in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The League brought the black liberation movement to the point of production. They grasped the dialectics and interpenetration of class exploitation and racial oppression within capitalism, and the strategic centrality of white supremacy for ruling-class profit and control. Their struggle embodied the unity and interrelation of theory and practice and the necessity of becoming proletarian intellectuals. The League came to Marxism-Leninism as the theory most closely related to their practice as workers at the point of production. Armed with the weapon of Marxism, former League members stayed the course through the stages of capitalist development—from Detroit as the epicenter of global capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the technological shift from labor-enhancing to labor-replacing automation and robotization in the plants, to the deepening capitalist crisis, economic, ecological, and social destruction, and intensifying militarism and fascism in the twenty-first century. For over fifty years, they were part of the leadership of the multiracial, multinational, and multigendered working class in the 1960s, and they remain active within the twenty-first century’s rising movement. Former League members consistently lift up the strategic direction and class unity necessary for revolutionary transformation in the interests of the working class, and for the survival of humanity and the planet.

Lukács, Georg (1885–1971)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Callinicos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
Theoretical Inquiry ◽  
The Times

Lukács’ Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness) (1923) is, for both its intrinsic merits and its enormous influence, the most important work of Marxist philosophy to have appeared in the twentieth century. It sought to render explicit the dependence of Marx’s thought on Hegel’s dialectic as a means of elucidating both the distinctive character of historical materialism as a form of theoretical inquiry and its revolutionary rejection of the modes of thinking prevailing in capitalist society. Lukács’ general aim had been shared by the authors of the first philosophical reflections on Marx’s project – Engels and Plekhanov, for example, had stressed its debt to Hegel. Lukács, however, sought to draw Marx into that broad current of twentieth-century Continental thought which has drawn a sharp distinction between the methods of the physical sciences, suitable at best for analysing inanimate nature, and those of the human sciences, whose aim is to interpret human actions in the light of the thoughts which move them. Thus Lukács sees Marx as the theorist, not of the laws of the dialectic or of inevitable social transformation, but of revolutionary subjectivity, of the proletariat as ‘the identical subject–object’ of history. This was a version of Marxism which suited the times, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. As the revolutionary tides receded, Lukács found philosophical and political reasons for retreating to a more orthodox historical materialism which laid much greater stress on objective constraints and processes than his version of the early 1920s had. Yet the force of its overall argument and the quality of its individual analyses have made History and Class Consciousness a constant reference-point in subsequent discussions of Marxist theory.

Abdullah Quilliam

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Siddique Seddon
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Legal Advisor ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.

Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Prime Elements ◽  
Cultural Turn

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last fifty years has begun to ebb, sociolegal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This chapter asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and the older materialisms—both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist—that held sway prior to post-structuralism. What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies? To attempt answers, the chapter turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard—once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin—once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements—earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The chapter argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.

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