Pub Date : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2251334
McKenzie Wark
A reading of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as a class both of “vulgar” Marxism and vulgar transgender writing. The novel is a learning text for the reader in both transmasculine life and militant working-class life. It takes the form of an autofiction, given that both militant workers and trans people need their life stories (auto) to be something other than confessional (fiction) as a matter of survival. The essay concludes by calling for a vulgar Marxist studies that attends to both the form and content of common, everyday, earthy, “vulgar” proletarian life.
{"title":"Toward a Vulgar Transgender Marxism","authors":"McKenzie Wark","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2023.2251334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2251334","url":null,"abstract":"A reading of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as a class both of “vulgar” Marxism and vulgar transgender writing. The novel is a learning text for the reader in both transmasculine life and militant working-class life. It takes the form of an autofiction, given that both militant workers and trans people need their life stories (auto) to be something other than confessional (fiction) as a matter of survival. The essay concludes by calling for a vulgar Marxist studies that attends to both the form and content of common, everyday, earthy, “vulgar” proletarian life.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135902518","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 : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2241359
Neil Levi
This essay examines some senses in which we might think of Brecht’s Marxism as vulgar, placing particular emphasis on his interest in the vulgar as vulgate: the teaching of practical knowledge in the common tongue. The essay then contrasts Brecht’s vulgar Marxism with his concept of crude thinking, arguing against Walter Benjamin’s influential interpretation of the concept to claim instead that if we examine how Brecht presents crude thinking in his 1934 Threepenny Novel, we see that for him, crude thinking is not something to be emulated and learned; it is ultimately fascist thinking. Yet precisely because it is an anomalous moment in his work, diametrically opposed to his vulgar Marxism, crude thinking also gives a glimpse of a different Brecht who would have recognized how European fascism has recapitulated European colonialism and reckoned more adequately with the psycho-political mechanisms and force of racialized identification and projection.
{"title":"Vulgar, Crude, Foolish: Brecht, Teaching, Fascism","authors":"Neil Levi","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2023.2241359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2241359","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines some senses in which we might think of Brecht’s Marxism as vulgar, placing particular emphasis on his interest in the vulgar as vulgate: the teaching of practical knowledge in the common tongue. The essay then contrasts Brecht’s vulgar Marxism with his concept of crude thinking, arguing against Walter Benjamin’s influential interpretation of the concept to claim instead that if we examine how Brecht presents crude thinking in his 1934 Threepenny Novel, we see that for him, crude thinking is not something to be emulated and learned; it is ultimately fascist thinking. Yet precisely because it is an anomalous moment in his work, diametrically opposed to his vulgar Marxism, crude thinking also gives a glimpse of a different Brecht who would have recognized how European fascism has recapitulated European colonialism and reckoned more adequately with the psycho-political mechanisms and force of racialized identification and projection.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135902528","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 : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2251333
David Sockol
AbstractThis essay examines Georgi Plekhanov, founder of the Russian Marxist movement and a supposed exemplar of “vulgar Marxism.” It analyses Plekhanov's formulation of a Marxist aesthetic, interrogating the widespread image of Plekhanov's “vulgar” focus on economic determinism and his neglect of cultural forces' influence on revolutionary praxis, locating him instead within a fuller history of Marxist thought. A contextualization of Plekhanov's fin-de-siecle writings on art demonstrates that these texts were effectively a component of his contemporary polemics against critics of Marxist theory, and that within them he was pursuing his polemical agenda of criticizing Kantian philosophy and defending Marxist materialism. These dual aims manifested in Plekhanov's rejection of the Kantian notion of aesthetic disinterestedness and a stress on the formative role class conflict exerted on artistic creation, ultimately resulting in his formulation of an original aesthetic theory prescribing political commitment and thus mobilizing artworks towards revolutionary ends.Key Words: AestheticsGeorgi PlekhanovRevisionist DebateRussian MarxistsSocial Movements
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Pub Date : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2251336
Peter Kulchyski
AbstractThis analysis of Karl Marx centers one of his earliest political writings, the 1842 commentary on the Rhine Province Assembly debate on the Law on Thefts of Wood, to show an anthropological thread in his writings and this thread’s relevance to the struggles of Indigenous gathering and hunting peoples in the contemporary historical conjuncture. This “bush Marx” or “Marx for primitives” consistently engaged in a deep structural linguistic subversion, challenging ethnocentrism by turning Eurocentric concepts on their head.Key Words: AnthropologyEthnocentrismEurocentrismIndigenous RightsKarl Marx Notes1 Or of E. P. Thompson’s (Citation1993) conception, especially in his essay on the imposition of time and work discipline and his extensive discussion of the deployment of customary rights by those struggling against dispossession
{"title":"Marx for Primitives","authors":"Peter Kulchyski","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2023.2251336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2251336","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThis analysis of Karl Marx centers one of his earliest political writings, the 1842 commentary on the Rhine Province Assembly debate on the Law on Thefts of Wood, to show an anthropological thread in his writings and this thread’s relevance to the struggles of Indigenous gathering and hunting peoples in the contemporary historical conjuncture. This “bush Marx” or “Marx for primitives” consistently engaged in a deep structural linguistic subversion, challenging ethnocentrism by turning Eurocentric concepts on their head.Key Words: AnthropologyEthnocentrismEurocentrismIndigenous RightsKarl Marx Notes1 Or of E. P. Thompson’s (Citation1993) conception, especially in his essay on the imposition of time and work discipline and his extensive discussion of the deployment of customary rights by those struggling against dispossession","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135902827","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 : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2251332
Lars T. Lih
In early 1915, Lenin engaged in a polemic with former comrade and by then longtime foe Aleksandr Potresov over the best way to account for the failure of the Second International’s response to the outbreak of European war. Potresov presented a unitary portrait of the Second International as nonrevolutionary, whereas Lenin countered this portrait with a bipartite model of fundamental conflict existing within the Second International, between “Opportunism” and “Revolutionary Social Democracy”. A decade later, Stalin adopted Potresov’s unitary model of the Second International—a major cause of the dominance of this model today. Rather than a conflict within the Second International between over-all Opportunism and Revolutionary Social Democracy, Stalin instead portrayed a conflict between the Second International’s opportunism and what he called Leninism. Realizing that Stalin’s portrait of Leninism is actually Revolutionary Social Democracy in disguise can introduce us to a forgotten historical reality.
{"title":"Airbrushing Out Revolutionary Social Democracy: Lenin, Stalin, and Potresov on the Second International","authors":"Lars T. Lih","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2023.2251332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2251332","url":null,"abstract":"In early 1915, Lenin engaged in a polemic with former comrade and by then longtime foe Aleksandr Potresov over the best way to account for the failure of the Second International’s response to the outbreak of European war. Potresov presented a unitary portrait of the Second International as nonrevolutionary, whereas Lenin countered this portrait with a bipartite model of fundamental conflict existing within the Second International, between “Opportunism” and “Revolutionary Social Democracy”. A decade later, Stalin adopted Potresov’s unitary model of the Second International—a major cause of the dominance of this model today. Rather than a conflict within the Second International between over-all Opportunism and Revolutionary Social Democracy, Stalin instead portrayed a conflict between the Second International’s opportunism and what he called Leninism. Realizing that Stalin’s portrait of Leninism is actually Revolutionary Social Democracy in disguise can introduce us to a forgotten historical reality.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135902546","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 : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2251343
Yahya M. Madra
This essay’s exploration of the adjective “vulgar” and its function in the Marxian field begins with a debate between Abba Lerner (1903–82) and Maurice Dobb (1900–76), which foregrounded the vulgar in Marxism as a problem of economic method. The signifier thus functions as a portal to associated questions: the status of the adjective “vulgar” in Marx and Engels’s discourse; value theory’s role in the constitution of division and difference in the economics discipline; analytical Marxism’s place as a response to the crisis of Marxism in the twentieth century; the politics of market socialism or the role of markets (if any) in socialism; the necessity of mediation under any form of division of labor and the implications for Marx’s notion of associated production; and the possibility and promise of an affirmative take on the vulgar in the context of a postcapitalist pragmatics of participatory and democratic planning.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-14DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2241369
Oktay Özden
AbstractThis essay presents a critical analysis of Özgür Orhangazi’s Türkiye ekonomisinin yapısı (The structure of the Turkish economy). The book examines the last four decades of the Turkish economy, accounting for its place in the global capitalist system and focusing on the radical effects of the liberalization of capital mobility in 1989. Moreover, the book describes the growth model of the Turkish economy over the last two decades, consisting of three components: high dependency on foreign capital inflow, debt accumulation, and construction-oriented growth. This review finds that the book lacks in its examination of the internal dynamics of capitalism in Turkey, especially concerning the evolution of the two branches of the Turkish bourgeoisie: construction capital, which is the extension of commercial capital; and industrial capital, which has made its mark on the history of capitalism in Turkey. Class struggle inside the bourgeoisie has in fact shaped the last century of economic and political history in Turkey.Key Words: Capital MobilityConstruction-Oriented GrowthDebt AccumulationForeign Capital InflowTurkish Economy
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Pub Date : 2023-08-31DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2241345
Edward Baring
This essay reads Georg Lukács’s early thought in light of his vexed relationship to the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Though Lukács criticized Kautsky as the archetypal “vulgar Marxist,” Lukács’s larger project of promoting “class consciousness” follows from Kautsky’s own political and pedagogical work. For Kautsky, Social Democratic intellectuals had to transmute proletarian “class instinct” into class consciousness by disseminating a simplified version of scientific socialism, transmitting the conclusions but not the method of Marxist thought. But because Lukács had defined “vulgar Marxism” as the forgetting of Marx’s method in favor of his conclusions, “vulgar Marxism” turned out to be both the precondition and an obstacle to proletarian class consciousness and thus to revolutionary action. The essay then reads Lukács’s changing understanding of the role of the party as a response to this impasse: a response that can help us understand the heterogeneous tradition of “Western Marxism.”
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