Marxist geography: A personal journey

I am fascinated by Marx’s openness to learning and engagement with diverse intellectual traditions—political economic, German and Greek philosophy, utopian socialist tradition, and English literature to name a few. Marxism for me, hence, is engagement and conversations with eclectic ideas, with fidelity to the communist manifesto, and in turn, its commitment to equality and justice. In this paper, while highlighting my own journey as a student of Marx’s scholarship, I examine the key role hegemony plays in our society. Formal education, I argue, is hegemonic to the extent that it is geared at producing docile individuals, particularly from oppressed sections of the society, that internalize theories and concepts favorable to elites: it should not surprise us when the oppressed act or vote against their own interest. Yet some centers of learning are also epicenters of counter-hegemonic praxis—one such place is Jawaharlal Nehru University where I unlearn and re-learned my Marxism and began my journey as a Marxist geographer. Additionally, I examine the role of “vulgar Marxism” (unwillingness to engage with contemporary geographically specific challenges) that is often passed off as Marxist orthodoxy and argue that this has been a real threat to the spirit of the Communist Manifesto. I examine the decline of the Communist Party in Bengal in India to highlight how vulgar Marxism can subvert social justice and make the “Communist Party” unpopular.

“What Ghosts are Haunting us Today?” Slavoj Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto in Post-Pandemic Capitalist Realism. The Revolutionary Subject and Work

However controversial a topic, Marxist thought still remains the most complex tool for the critique of Capitalism. Derrida calls Marxism “hauntological”, always reappearing as a spectre of the past, always quasipresent, but also as a potential lost future. After the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the relevance of The Communist Manifesto seemed to have slowly waned, in a world that adopted the tenets of Neoliberalism partly as a defense against authoritarian regimes, and partly as a mean to converge toward the countries at the forefront of the global system, that had already accrued a massive lead in economic and social development. The Covid-19 virus has shocked the world to its core, but it remains to be seen whether it has brought about a paradigm shift or it has merely accentuated some of the past problems, while also triggering a kind of forced nostalgia for the apparent normality of a system that was already ridden with issues. Mark Fisher points out that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher 1), thus indicating the need for criticism and measures against a neoliberal monopoly on thought itself. As for Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, it remains to be analyzed whether it can revive the interest in the original text, as to begin compounding a viable alternative for a postpandemic global system that does not yet seem to fully grasp that it is running out of time.

Intertextualities in Elfriede Jelinek’s Rein Gold: Ein Bühnenessay

Elfriede Jelinek’s postdramatic stage essay Rein Gold (2012) interweaves countless texts including Richard Wagner’s operas from the Ring cycle, Karl Marx’s The Capital, and Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto as well as contemporary writings and news articles. Scholarship has so far examined the play in comparison to Wagner’s Rheingold opera, which serves as the base for the dialogue between the father Wotan and daughter Brünnhilde. This article examines intertextualities with the story of the National Socialist Underground, an extremist right-wing group that committed hate-crime murders and bank robberies, and with the exploitative history of workers, particularly women, in capitalist systems. Jelinek compares the National Socialist Underground’s attempt to violently rid Germany of non-ethnic Germans with Siegfried’s mythical fight as dragon slayer in the Nibelungenlied that created a hero who has been cast as a German identity figure for an ethnonational narrative and fascist ideas in twenty-first-century Germany.

Utopian Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch

This chapter demonstrates that George Eliot’s investigation of the early, “utopian” socialists catalyzed the writing of perhaps the most iconic of all Victorian novels, Middlemarch (1871–2). The utopian socialists (as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and their followers were increasingly known) frequently suggested that the transition to a new, nongovernmental social order hinged upon the emancipation of women. Their untimely calls for female liberation became newly salient with the coalescence, in the 1860s, of Britain’s first national campaign for women’s suffrage. This chapter’s reading of Middlemarch shows that socialist discourse provides Eliot a rich symbolic vocabulary with which to conduct her own novelistic investigation of the “Woman Question”—and to engage in a clandestine meditation on the claims of the suffragists. By incorporating socialist elements into her novel, Eliot could unobtrusively position herself in relation to the ideals and activities of this burgeoning movement—a movement in which a number of her closest friends were involved. Attending to Middlemarch’s socialist motif demystifies the novel’s shrouded origins and decodes a hitherto illegible record of Eliot’s proto-feminist aspirations which, like the early socialists’ own, were inextricably intertwined with skepticism about institutional politics. This chapter also provides a genealogy of “utopian socialism,” a category that has exerted a distorting influence on scholarship since Marx and Engels tarred their rivals with it in The Communist Manifesto.

Political motivation: A referent evaluation mathematical model

Mathematical modelling is popular in cognitive psychology because it enables clear and formal descriptions of the processes at play; yet, this approach has rarely been applied to political psychology. Here we adopt mathematical modelling to develop a theory of political motivation, which is a central concept in political psychology. The theory assumes that, in certain contexts, individuals entertain a set of representations of society, for example of the past, present and future (but also of fictive societies such as utopias). To each representation of society, an incentive value is attached which is not absolute, but (following theories of motivation in cognitive psychology) reference-dependent; namely, dependent on the context, corresponding to the whole set of representations of society. In turn, the model proposes that these subjective values determine two central aspects: a motivation for performing an appropriate political action and the ensuing political mood. We discuss the model with respect to theoretical and empirical research (and we examine Marx and Engel’s communist manifesto as an example of the latter). In short, we offer a new mathematical perspective on political motivation which emphasises the role of multiple representations of society in determining political motivation and the ensuing political mood.