Pub Date : 1994-03-18DOI: 10.4337/9781849806305.00009
L. Panitch
This essay suggests that those who want to install a "transnational democracy" in the wake of the nation state allegedly having been bypassed by globalisation simply misunderstand what the internationalisation of the state really is all about. Not only is the world still very much composed of states, but insofar as there is any effective democracy at all in relation to the power of capitalists and bureaucrats, it is still embedded in political structures which are national or subnational in scope. Those who advance the nebulous case for an "international civil society" to match the 'nebuleuse' that is global capitalist governance usually fail to appreciate that capitalism has not escaped the state but rather that the state has, as always, been a fundamental constitutive element in the very process of extension of capitalism in our time.
{"title":"Globalisation and the State","authors":"L. Panitch","doi":"10.4337/9781849806305.00009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/9781849806305.00009","url":null,"abstract":"This essay suggests that those who want to install a \"transnational democracy\" in the wake of the nation state allegedly having been bypassed by globalisation simply misunderstand what the internationalisation of the state really is all about. Not only is the world still very much composed of states, but insofar as there is any effective democracy at all in relation to the power of capitalists and bureaucrats, it is still embedded in political structures which are national or subnational in scope. Those who advance the nebulous case for an \"international civil society\" to match the 'nebuleuse' that is global capitalist governance usually fail to appreciate that capitalism has not escaped the state but rather that the state has, as always, been a fundamental constitutive element in the very process of extension of capitalism in our time.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1994-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127279383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One comes across the strangest arguments these days. If you happen to be interested in Marxist thought, whether as history of ideas or as ideas of history, you find yourself quite regularly surprised. You may find yourself startled even, at the character of some of what you encounter. I offer here a modest compilation of examples, with accompanying critical commentary. The principles governing the compilation are few. Examples are all from writers of the Left and from writings of the 1980s. Seven broad types of argument are reviewed; each type prominent within contemporary socialist discussion - though I make no claim to their being exhaustive of the genre of criticism they represent. Together, the assembled examples provide a kind of snapshot of something, that is all. The sequence of them is interrupted here and there by a digression.
{"title":"Seven Types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism","authors":"N. Geras","doi":"10.5840/GFPJ19911417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/GFPJ19911417","url":null,"abstract":"One comes across the strangest arguments these days. If you happen to be interested in Marxist thought, whether as history of ideas or as ideas of history, you find yourself quite regularly surprised. You may find yourself startled even, at the character of some of what you encounter. I offer here a modest compilation of examples, with accompanying critical commentary. The principles governing the compilation are few. Examples are all from writers of the Left and from writings of the 1980s. Seven broad types of argument are reviewed; each type prominent within contemporary socialist discussion - though I make no claim to their being exhaustive of the genre of criticism they represent. Together, the assembled examples provide a kind of snapshot of something, that is all. The sequence of them is interrupted here and there by a digression.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1990-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115524709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1990-03-18DOI: 10.1215/9780822378419-009
F. Jameson
Linguistics has a useful scheme that is unfortunately lacking in ideological analysis: it can mark a given word as either 'word' or 'idea' by alternating slash marks or brackets. Thus the word 'market', with its various dialect pronunciations and its etymological origins in the Latin for trade and merchandise, is printed as /market/; on the other hand, the concept "market", as it has been theorized by philosophers and ideologues down through the ages, from Aristotle to Milton Friedman, would be printed market'. One thinks for a moment that this would solve so many of our problems in dealing with a subject of this kind, which is at one and the same time an ideology and a set of practical institutional problems, until one remembers the great flanking and pincer-movements of the opening section of the Grundrisse, where Marx undoes the hopes and longings for simplification of the Proudhonists, who thought they would get rid of all the problems of money by abolishing money, without seeing that it is the very contradiction of the exchange system that is objectified and expressed in money proper and would continue to objectify and express itself in any of its simpler substitutes, like work-time coupons. These last, Marx observes dryly, would then simply turn back into money itself, and all the previous contradictions would return in force.
{"title":"Postmodernism and the Market","authors":"F. Jameson","doi":"10.1215/9780822378419-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378419-009","url":null,"abstract":"Linguistics has a useful scheme that is unfortunately lacking in ideological analysis: it can mark a given word as either 'word' or 'idea' by alternating slash marks or brackets. Thus the word 'market', with its various dialect pronunciations and its etymological origins in the Latin for trade and merchandise, is printed as /market/; on the other hand, the concept \"market\", as it has been theorized by philosophers and ideologues down through the ages, from Aristotle to Milton Friedman, would be printed market'. One thinks for a moment that this would solve so many of our problems in dealing with a subject of this kind, which is at one and the same time an ideology and a set of practical institutional problems, until one remembers the great flanking and pincer-movements of the opening section of the Grundrisse, where Marx undoes the hopes and longings for simplification of the Proudhonists, who thought they would get rid of all the problems of money by abolishing money, without seeing that it is the very contradiction of the exchange system that is objectified and expressed in money proper and would continue to objectify and express itself in any of its simpler substitutes, like work-time coupons. These last, Marx observes dryly, would then simply turn back into money itself, and all the previous contradictions would return in force.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1990-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115021588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1990-03-18DOI: 10.4324/9781315251196-19
E. Wood
We live in curious times. Just when intellectuals of the Left in the West have a rare opportunity to do something useful, if not actually world-historic, they - or large sections of them - are in full retreat. Just when reformers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are looking to Western capitalism for paradigms of economic and political success, many of us appear to be abdicating the traditional role of the Western left as critic of capitalism. Just when more than ever we need a Karl Marx to reveal the inner workings of the capitalist system, or a Friedrich Engels to expose its ugly realities 'on the ground', what we are getting is an army of 'post-Marxists' one of whose principal functions is apparently to conceptualize away the problem of capitalism.
{"title":"The Uses and Abuses of 'Civil Society'","authors":"E. Wood","doi":"10.4324/9781315251196-19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315251196-19","url":null,"abstract":"We live in curious times. Just when intellectuals of the Left in the West have a rare opportunity to do something useful, if not actually world-historic, they - or large sections of them - are in full retreat. Just when reformers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are looking to Western capitalism for paradigms of economic and political success, many of us appear to be abdicating the traditional role of the Western left as critic of capitalism. Just when more than ever we need a Karl Marx to reveal the inner workings of the capitalist system, or a Friedrich Engels to expose its ugly realities 'on the ground', what we are getting is an army of 'post-Marxists' one of whose principal functions is apparently to conceptualize away the problem of capitalism.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1990-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115362182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1989-03-18DOI: 10.4324/9781315251196-17
Ernest Mandel
Revolutions are historical facts of life. Almost all major states in today's world are born from revolutions. Whether one likes it or not, our century has seen something like three dozen revolutions - some victorious, others defeated - and there is no sign that we have come to the end of the revolutionary experience. Revolutions have been, and will remain, facts of life because of the structural nature of prevailing relations of production and relations of political power. Precisely because such relations are structural, because they do not just 'fade away' - as well as because ruling classes resist the gradual elimination of these relations to the very end - revolutions emerge as the means whereby the overthrow of these relations is realized. From the nature of a revolution as a sudden, radical overthrow of prevailing social and (or) political structures - leaps in the historical process - one should not draw the conclusion that an impenetrable Chinese wall separates evolution (or reforms) from revolution. Quantitative gradual social changes of course do occur in history, as do qualitative revolutionary ones. Very often the former prepare the latter especially in epochs of decay of a given mode of production. Prevailing economic and political power relations can be eroded, undermined, increasingly challenged or can even be slowly disintegrated, by new relations of production and the political strength of revolutionary classes (or major class fractions) rising in their midst. This is what generally characterises periods of pre-revolutionary crises. But erosion and decay of a given social and/or political order remains basically different from its overthrow. Evolution is not identical with revolution. One transforms dialectics into sophism when, from the fact that there is no rigid absolute distinction between evolution and revolution, one draws the conclusion that there is no basic difference between them at all. The sudden overthrow of ruling structures is, however, only one key characteristic of that social phenomenon. The other one is their overthrow through huge popular mobilisation, through the sudden massive active intervention of large masses of ordinary people in political life and political strugg1e.
{"title":"The Marxist Case for Revolution Today","authors":"Ernest Mandel","doi":"10.4324/9781315251196-17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315251196-17","url":null,"abstract":"Revolutions are historical facts of life. Almost all major states in today's world are born from revolutions. Whether one likes it or not, our century has seen something like three dozen revolutions - some victorious, others defeated - and there is no sign that we have come to the end of the revolutionary experience. Revolutions have been, and will remain, facts of life because of the structural nature of prevailing relations of production and relations of political power. Precisely because such relations are structural, because they do not just 'fade away' - as well as because ruling classes resist the gradual elimination of these relations to the very end - revolutions emerge as the means whereby the overthrow of these relations is realized. From the nature of a revolution as a sudden, radical overthrow of prevailing social and (or) political structures - leaps in the historical process - one should not draw the conclusion that an impenetrable Chinese wall separates evolution (or reforms) from revolution. Quantitative gradual social changes of course do occur in history, as do qualitative revolutionary ones. Very often the former prepare the latter especially in epochs of decay of a given mode of production. Prevailing economic and political power relations can be eroded, undermined, increasingly challenged or can even be slowly disintegrated, by new relations of production and the political strength of revolutionary classes (or major class fractions) rising in their midst. This is what generally characterises periods of pre-revolutionary crises. But erosion and decay of a given social and/or political order remains basically different from its overthrow. Evolution is not identical with revolution. One transforms dialectics into sophism when, from the fact that there is no rigid absolute distinction between evolution and revolution, one draws the conclusion that there is no basic difference between them at all. The sudden overthrow of ruling structures is, however, only one key characteristic of that social phenomenon. The other one is their overthrow through huge popular mobilisation, through the sudden massive active intervention of large masses of ordinary people in political life and political strugg1e.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1989-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115910426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1982-02-03DOI: 10.14452/MR-033-09-1982-02_3
Ajit Singh
Assuming that the next general election produces a Labour majority, the over-riding objective of the next Labour Government must in my view be the creation and maintenance of full employment. Few socialists will question the validity of this purpose in today's circumstances. In this essay, I shall argue two propositions: first, that it is a realisable objective within the existing framework of a parliamentary democracy. However, in view of the state of the economy which a Labour Government is likely to inherit, major institutional changes in the functioning of the mixed economy will be required, heralding a significant shift in the balance of power between labour and capital. Secondly, I shall argue that a Labour Government, and only a Labour Government, is now capable of restoring full employment without jeopardising or seriously eroding the fabric of the current democratic order. Finally, I shall examine the question whether this single-minded pursuit of full employment in the short and medium term by a Labour Government is also likely to further the long-term goal of socialism in Britain.
{"title":"'Full Employment Capitalism' and the Labour Party","authors":"Ajit Singh","doi":"10.14452/MR-033-09-1982-02_3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-033-09-1982-02_3","url":null,"abstract":"Assuming that the next general election produces a Labour majority, the over-riding objective of the next Labour Government must in my view be the creation and maintenance of full employment. Few socialists will question the validity of this purpose in today's circumstances. In this essay, I shall argue two propositions: first, that it is a realisable objective within the existing framework of a parliamentary democracy. However, in view of the state of the economy which a Labour Government is likely to inherit, major institutional changes in the functioning of the mixed economy will be required, heralding a significant shift in the balance of power between labour and capital. Secondly, I shall argue that a Labour Government, and only a Labour Government, is now capable of restoring full employment without jeopardising or seriously eroding the fabric of the current democratic order. Finally, I shall examine the question whether this single-minded pursuit of full employment in the short and medium term by a Labour Government is also likely to further the long-term goal of socialism in Britain.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1982-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131441772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1980-03-18DOI: 10.1080/07393148108429531
F. Block
Neo-Marxist analyses of the state and politics now centre on the vexed question of the 'specificity of the political'. What is the degree to which politics and the state have independent determining effects on historical outcomes? Can the state or the people who direct the state apparatus act as historical subjects? The questions are critical because without a clear set of answers, it is impossible to develop a consistent theory of the state.
{"title":"Beyond Relative Autonomy: State Managers as Historical Subjects","authors":"F. Block","doi":"10.1080/07393148108429531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148108429531","url":null,"abstract":"Neo-Marxist analyses of the state and politics now centre on the vexed question of the 'specificity of the political'. What is the degree to which politics and the state have independent determining effects on historical outcomes? Can the state or the people who direct the state apparatus act as historical subjects? The questions are critical because without a clear set of answers, it is impossible to develop a consistent theory of the state.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1980-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116680073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Despite their numerous limitations, these two books should be given close attention, particularly by people who think of themselves as part of the Marxist left. Medvedev is often superficial and scrappy, especially in his second work, but both his books deal with matters of crucial importance for socialist theory and practice; and they have been written by a Russian political theorist and historian who, despite his opposition to the Soviet Establishment, sees himself as working, so to speak, from within the system. Also, Medvedev writes as a Marxist, and may be taken to represent one tendency in the socialist opposition in the USSR which is of great interest precisely because it seeks reform from within.
{"title":"Stalin and After","authors":"R. Miliband","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt810nk.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt810nk.9","url":null,"abstract":"Despite their numerous limitations, these two books should be given close attention, particularly by people who think of themselves as part of the Marxist left. Medvedev is often superficial and scrappy, especially in his second work, but both his books deal with matters of crucial importance for socialist theory and practice; and they have been written by a Russian political theorist and historian who, despite his opposition to the Soviet Establishment, sees himself as working, so to speak, from within the system. Also, Medvedev writes as a Marxist, and may be taken to represent one tendency in the socialist opposition in the USSR which is of great interest precisely because it seeks reform from within.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1973-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128938147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We are witnessing an obvious tendency towards the increasing bureaucratization of contemporary societies regardless of their social and political structures. Theorists in the West assure us that the momentum of bureaucratization is such that we now live under a managerial system which has, somewhat imperceptibly, come to replace capitalism. On the other hand, we have the huge, stupendous growth of bureaucracy in the post-capitalist societies of the Soviet bloc and especially in the Soviet Union. We are justified in attempting to elaborate some theory of bureaucracy which would be more comprehensive and more satisfying than the fashionable and to a large degree meaningless cliche: "managerial society". It is not, however, easy to come to grips with the problem of bureaucracy; in essence this problem is as old as civilization, although the intensity with which it has appeared before men's eyes has varied greatly over the epochs.
{"title":"Roots of Bureaucracy","authors":"I. Deutscher","doi":"10.1163/221023969X00024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/221023969X00024","url":null,"abstract":"We are witnessing an obvious tendency towards the increasing bureaucratization of contemporary societies regardless of their social and political structures. Theorists in the West assure us that the momentum of bureaucratization is such that we now live under a managerial system which has, somewhat imperceptibly, come to replace capitalism. On the other hand, we have the huge, stupendous growth of bureaucracy in the post-capitalist societies of the Soviet bloc and especially in the Soviet Union. We are justified in attempting to elaborate some theory of bureaucracy which would be more comprehensive and more satisfying than the fashionable and to a large degree meaningless cliche: \"managerial society\". It is not, however, easy to come to grips with the problem of bureaucracy; in essence this problem is as old as civilization, although the intensity with which it has appeared before men's eyes has varied greatly over the epochs.","PeriodicalId":364251,"journal":{"name":"Socialist Register","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1969-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127092618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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