The Scientific Connotation and Practical Implications of the Marxist Concept of Happiness

Happiness is an unchanging topic, and the question of human happiness is the most important concern of Marxist philosophy, and the achievement of the common happiness of all human beings is the starting point and the anchor point of Marx and Engels’ scientific worldview and methodology. Then, it is of great academic value and practical significance to correctly understand the theoretical connotation and spiritual essence of Marxist concept of happiness.

From the Death to Rebirth of Religion: Evolution of Leszek Kołakowski’s Thought in the Context of the Question: “Who Is Man?”

In his numerous books and articles, Leszek Kołakowski brought up a number of topics in the fields of the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy. His work offers valuable insights into problems revolving around Karl Marx’s philosophy, social philosophy, and the philosophy of religion, to mention but a few. In all these areas of thought, the Polish philosopher centres his focus on the fundamental question of man. The present paper is aimed at discussing Leszek Kołakowski’s contribution to the philosophical debate on this topic. The evolution of Kołakowski’s views is traced from the Marxist concept of man which, after a certain period, is discarded by the philosopher in favour of a religious concept, to be confronted again with a liberal theory. Kołakowski is not uncritical about any of the conceptions, which testifies to the profound complexity of every attempt to gain insights into the very essence of the human being which, irrespective of the doctrine or perspective taken for interpretation, escapes clear-cut definition. However, despite the lack of unambiguous definitions Kołakowski recognises that the sole point of reference in any attempts to gain an understanding of the human condition in culture is religion.

Revision of the neo-marxist concept of the “political spectacle"

The article presents an analytical revision of the neo-Marxist concept of the “political spectacle”, in which the main position of political neo-Marxism is formed.There is a possibility of political choice within the framework of the real absence of a political alternative (the political alternative is illusory) in the Western political process. The revision is carried out in two stages: a theoretical revision of the concept (a postpositivist check for falsifiability and a proposal for ways of theoretical development) and an empirical revision of the concept (a positivist check for verifiability). Verification of the neo-Marxist concept of “political spectacle” is carried out on the material of political forces in European Parliament. The verification method is the content analysis of the program documents of the “European Parties”.The article proves that the neo-Marxist concept of “political spectacle” is not theoretically correct enough and does not correspond to the current empirical material. First, the concept proceeds from the normativist view of the manipulative domination of capitalism and thus does not take into account the coordinated functioning of the modern bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Secondly, the example of the 2019 European Parliament elections shows that anti-capitalist forces are present in the Western electoral process and politics. The author concludes that it is necessary to update the neo-Marxist concept of the “political spectacle” on new theoretical grounds. The starting point of the updated concept is the following: the “political spectacle” of capitalism begins after the anti-capitalist forces become the structural elements of the reproduction of capitalist hegemony. On new theoretical grounds, the potential of the concept of “political spectacle” can be directed not to fix the political alienation of Western society, but to explain the capitalist political space as a system that can adaptively accumulate its own systemic deviations (fluctuations).

What is “Restrained” by the katechon? The Finitude of the State in Conservative and Socialist Thought

The concept of katechon (“that which withholds”), essential to both the theological tradition and modern political philosophy, originates in Second Thessalonians by Paul the Apostle. This withholding force which resists the coming of the end times has often been identified with the Roman Empire (and later with the Christian imperial state), the latter seen as a protected space that enabled the spread of the Good Tidings. This mission of containment, on the one hand, endowed the state with a sacred character, but on the other, it marked the state's finitude and imperfection. By withholding time, the katechon does not remove but preserves contradictions and heterogeneity, accepting its incompleteness as the burden of its own mission. In its secularized form, the restraining state conceives of society as an antagonistic space of struggle and conflict, and the function of political power is linked to the establishment of a temporal equilibrium with historically contingent and relative forms. In conservative thought, the katechon state guards society from unifying equality and rationalization, and individuals from the illusion of perfection and moral harmony. The understanding of the state as a force that rises above the disparate elements of society and preserves it against its inherent chaos was also at the core of the Marxist concept of the state. This article, based on a wide range of authors (T. Hobbes, K. Marx, K. Schmitt, K. Leontiev, D. Agamben) will consider conservative and leftist interpretations of the state, which accept and develop the idea of katechon and its interpretations not directly connected with the concept of state power.

Verification of the neo-Marxist concept of global semi-periphery (on the example of the role of the migration factor)

Neo-Marxism world-system analysis was an effective means of the understanding of the postcolonial global order. The concepts of «core», «periphery» and «semi-periphery» reflected the dependent development of states in the global capitalist system. Capitalism structured the global order in the classical Marxist dichotomy of exploiters and exploited which can be represented with various subjects (states, groups of states, territories) and which according to neo-Marxism can’t disappear, because it reflects the essence of global antagonism. However, the realities of global development at the end of the 20th century demanded that neo-Marxism should reconsider the rigid link between the core-peripheral approach and the horizontal vision of the world: globalisation caused massive flows of migrants to highly developed countries and the gradual blurring of the boundaries between the core and periphery. There was the question in neo-Marxism which was about the ability of capitalism to preserve the core-peripheral organisation of the global division of labour. There was the idea that capitalism was able to reproduce core-periphery relations within the core states by including immigrants in the super-exploitation of labour through a covert policy of neo-racism. Such a vertical organisation of the core-peripheral model around the world, which was called dual society in neo-Marxism, would mean the formation of the global semi-periphery. The purpose of the article is to verify the neo-Marxist concept of the global semi-periphery using the example of the role of the migration factor in its formation. The study is based on UN data, as well as studies with a pronounced statistical component. According to the results of the study, it was concluded that the neo-Marxist concept of the global semi-periphery had not been verified by actual empirical material (on the example of the role of the migration factor). The available statistical and analytical data do not allow to totally confirm the neo-Marxist position that the global order under the influence of migration has been transformed and that it works in the conceptual model of a dual society. Globally, migration is not a determining factor in the widespread formation and unification of the dual method of labour exploitation within states. The quantitative data on the flow of migrants, comparative data on salaries in the countries of the core and the degree of concentration of income among certain groups of the population in the countries of the capitalist system state that the world is still largely reproduced in the horizontal core-peripheral model. Thus, there are no empirical grounds for stating the presence of a global dual society under the influence of the migration factor and consequently the presence of a global semi-periphery within the neo-Marxist approach of E. Balibar, I. Wallerstein, M. Hardt and A. Negri.

Illusioned and Alienated: Can Gig Workers Organise Collectively?

By studying the fraudulent benefits of flexibility in the ride-hailing gig economy, this article explains alienation as a condition in which workers are excluded from the product, estranged, and disadvantaged. Material estrangement, an objective aspect of alienation exemplified by arbitrary distribution of income, capitalists’ exclusive access to data, and robotic communication between Uber and their drivers, has many physiological (subjective) manifestations. Dissatisfaction, powerlessness, and isolation as subjective expressions of alienation prominently shape the prospects of collective labour mobilisation by both sparking and hindering organisational potential. Additionally, the example of workers’ re-appropriation of Uber’s app against Uber explains how modern technologies serve not only as a medium to expand capitalist interests, but enhance possibilities for labour cooperation and liberation. The proposed argumentation uses the Autonomist Marxist concept of “social factory” as a meta-framework, drawing on original ethnographic and interview data on ride-hailing Uber drivers in the gig economy.

Singing-in-between spaces: Bhooter Bhabisyat and the music transcending class conflict

This article analyses Bhooter Bhabisyat, a Bengali political horror satire, as a counter-narrative to Bengali cinema’s monocultural bhodrolok branding. The article argues that Bhooter Bhabisyat is radical in its refusal to follow hegemonic homogenizing musical styles classified into genres such as folk, popular, traditional and modern, which tend to be ethnocentric and class based with serious value judgments about the superiority of certain musical forms over others. Instead, Bhooter Bhabisyat uses a variety of distinct Bengali musical traditions to problematize the historic role of capitalist media that work to homogenize and popularize the dominant culture of the ruling classes. The hybrid songs of the film disrupt a sense of homogeneous bhodrolok class position that Bengali cinema has historically sustained. Through the strategies of musical pastiche, Bhooter Bhabisyat offers a meta-historic narrative about Bengali cinema, which makes possible a critical investigation of the cultural discourses and historical narratives that are discursively embedded within the history of filmic production, circulation and consumption. If film histories are produced by repressing differences between social groups and constructing universal identification, then foregrounding film songs as decolonial storytelling methods that reemphasize local voices and subject matters can lead to an effort to read history from below. The vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogeneous continuum has […] diluted the Marxist concept of history. (Giorgio Agamben) The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (Karl Marx)

Pero aún así: Fetichismo y renegación en la teoría de la ideología de Slavoj Žižek

La tríada distorsión, legitimación y crítica de la realidad social se encuentra en el centro de los debates teóricos en torno a la ideología. Este artículo describe, en primer lugar, el modo en que Slavoj Žižek redefine el concepto marxista de “fetichismo de la mercancía” siguiendo el modelo de la teoría psicoanalítica del fetichismo. Se aborda luego cómo el mecanismo freudiano de la “renegación” (Verleugnung), así como los conceptos de creencia y fantasía, permiten a Žižek resolver algunos dilemas que supone la idea de distorsión ideológica. De este modo, se discute en qué sentido Žižek ofrece una alternativa a los modelos tradicionales de la legitimación en sociología y psicología social, subrayando el funcionamiento cotidiano de la ideología. Finalmente, a partir de una reflexión en torno a las articulaciones entre renegación, creencia e inconsciente, se discuten una serie de malentendidos conceptuales que supone la teoría de la ideología en Žižek. -- The triad of distortion, legitimisation and critique of social reality is at the heart of theoretical debates about ideology. This article first describes how Slavoj Žižek redefines the Marxist concept of “commodity fetishism” on the model of the psychoanalytical theory of fetishism. The article then discusses how the Freudian mechanism of “disavowal” (Verleugnung), as well as the concepts of belief and fantasy, allow Žižek to solve some dilemmas that the idea of ideological distortion entails. In this way, it is discussed in what sense Žižek offers an alternative to the traditional models of legitimization in sociology and social psychology, emphasizing the everyday functioning of ideology. Finally, based on a reflection on the articulations between disavowal, belief and the unconscious, a series of conceptual misunderstandings are discussed that Žižek’s theory of ideology involves.

REVISION OF NEO-MARXISM: THE CONCEPT OF CAPITALIST STABILITY AS EXEMPLIFIED BY THE "OCCUPY WALL STREET" MOVEMENT

The article substantiates the author's concept of "nonlinear politics of capitalism" as a political-procedural disclosure of the neo-Marxist concept of "unstable stability of global capitalism". The method of justification is the verification of the concept of "nonlinear politics of capitalism" by the empirical material of the anti-globalist protest movement "Occupy Wall Street". The essence of the concept of the "nonlinear politics of capitalism" is that the modern political order of Western states not only opposes alternative ideologies and political practices, but also uses them as a way of its own legitimization and stabilization. The study reveals that in the modern Western capitalist order there is a mystification of capitalism in the multidimensional spectrum of social conflict, where the class contradiction appears as an archaism. There is a reinforcement of anti-capitalist resistance within a model in which all anti-capitalist slogans and demands fit into the ideology of "improving the conditions of exploitation", and anti-capitalist practices legitimize capitalism as an "inclu-sive" political regime. There is a nonlinear political reaction when capitalism shows the greatest strength in those situations that threaten its reproduction the least and vice versa. Such political tactics "channel" anti-capitalist protest, making it manageable and functional for the stable reproduction of capitalism.

Sergei V. Bakhrushin at the Institute of Red Professors: Lectures on the History of the Indigenous Peoples of Siberia (1936)

The publication is to introduce into scientific use two lectures read by the historian Sergei V. Bakhrushin to his students at the Institute of Red professors in 1936. The published document thematically falls within the field of history and ethnography of Siberia. Bakhrushin’s contribution to this scholarship was significant: he provided a holistic view on the development of Siberia in the 16th–17th centuries and on situation of the peoples inhabiting it; and introduced into scientific use a rich body of archival documents. Thus, any unpublished materials from his heritage are of great interest, particularly, data on his work in the higher school. The document illustrates his manner of presenting historical material and his style of communication with his audience. Bakhrushin began lecturing to the “red professors” after his exile under the Academic Trial. In contrast to his published works and lectures, the document, being a written reproduction of oral speech, includes some errors and inaccuracies. The lectures are important for understanding historical geography and history of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. However, topical contribution of these lectures is greater: they reveal the foundations of the Marxist concept of colonization and economic development of Siberia, which turned into an interesting synthesis of Marxism and national concept of the Russian colonization of the 17th century. The document has been found in the Russian State Historical Archive (GARF). It is being published according to the modern rules of spelling and punctuation, but some errors and inaccuracies in the historical terms and toponyms are preserved and corrected in footnotes. Сommentary preceding the publication of the document is of particular importance, as it brings the source up to date and characterizes the specifics of dialogue in the communist institute in the mid-1930s.