Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183691
Edward R. Teather-Posadas
What is seen when one’s gaze falls upon the plurality of thought within economics? If one gazes from the perspective of Slavoj Žižek, of Kojin Karatani, and of Jacques Lacan, one finds a pronounced parallax within the differing perspectives of economic reality. This essay explores the application of parallax ontology—primarily as discussed in Žižek’s The Parallax View—to economic pluralism. Parallax ontology acknowledges that our conception of reality, economic or otherwise, is riven with parallax gaps, to be thought of as irreducible gaps or minimal distances between perspectives. It argues that one should consider these parallax gaps to exist within economic pluralism and to be subjects in and of themselves, a perspective that ultimately rejects any form of monism within economic thought.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183697
Michael Hillard
Influenced by the academic work of Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, the author and his close collaborator Richard McIntyre have spent four decades closely reading and contributing research to adjacent radical literatures on the empirical history of workers and capitalism. In this response to Richard McIntyre’s review of Shredding Paper, the author reveals how his own research into the story of Maine’s paper mills has developed since the 1980s, drawing out the class implications of the details embedded in a history that stretches back to the origins of Maine’s paper industry. Hillard highlights the efficacy of reading capitalist histories of focusing on subsumed classes, i.e., a “volumes 2 and 3 [of Capital] approach,” alongside the much more common “volume 1” methodology common to most radical political economy and labor history. For better and worse, this story has culminated in two generations of rural Mainers rejecting the sensibilities of neoliberal capitalism. This local class formation and particular consciousness of class contains many lessons for those who see capitalism problematically, but in the absence of an established U.S. Left, and given the cultural forces and propaganda acting upon them, this critical culture appears to have moved on.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183696
R. Mcintyre
Michael Hillard’s Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Mighty Paper Industry is both a labor history of the paper industry and a political economy of corporate governance and class struggle in the United States. As a labor historian, Hillard has compiled thousands of hours of interviews with paper-industry workers and managers. As a political economist, he persuasively argues that contests over the distribution of surplus from the 1960s forward and shifts in paper-industry ownership led to the strike wave that began in the '60s and spread to every paper mill in Maine by the late 1980s. Rapacious practices by out-of-state owners challenged workers’ moral compass as much as their material existence. Responding, paper workers developed a folk political economy and even a folk Marxism, creating the foundation for challenging working-class support for regressive economics. This review provides context for Hillard’s claim while partially challenging it in a different context, the United States steel industry.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183682
Matthew Flisfeder
This essay proposes a critique of posthumanist critical theory through the development of the category of the hysterical sublime, a concept first introduced by Fredric Jameson in his early writings on postmodernism. While some critical posthumanist theories equate representationalism with a transcendental humanism, representation is inherent to the kinds of abstractions required in theory as such. Taking up the posthumanist resistance to anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism, the concept of the hysterical sublime—as opposed to the category of the modern sublime, regarding nature—is used to convey the way that posthumanism undermines its own ethical injunctions by invoking fatalistic representations of human action. Instead, this essay defends the return to dialectical humanism as an appropriate framework for thinking the rational and material conditions required for ethical human action.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183692
Marco Rosaire Rossi
Scholars have given immense attention to Marx and Engels’s supposed disdain for rural living, but their treatment of the relationship between rurality and urbanity was far more complicated than merely an antirural bias. Marx and Engels believed that the ideal communism would reconcile town and country and create a society resembling an Owenite agroindustrial town rather than the forms of urbanity that contemporary Marxists celebrate. Understanding the significance that Marx and Engels gave to the division between town and country is critical to pointing out major defects within urban-planning ideas inspired by their thought as, within the Soviet Union, aspirations to enact their ideas of universal industrial villages created significant planning problems. In today’s predominantly urbanized world, Marxian scholars and activists must therefore reassess Marx and Engels’s assertion that the goal of communism is to eventually reconcile the division between town and county.
{"title":"Ideology and City Planning: Marx and Engels’s Reconciliation of Town and Country","authors":"Marco Rosaire Rossi","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2023.2183692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2183692","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have given immense attention to Marx and Engels’s supposed disdain for rural living, but their treatment of the relationship between rurality and urbanity was far more complicated than merely an antirural bias. Marx and Engels believed that the ideal communism would reconcile town and country and create a society resembling an Owenite agroindustrial town rather than the forms of urbanity that contemporary Marxists celebrate. Understanding the significance that Marx and Engels gave to the division between town and country is critical to pointing out major defects within urban-planning ideas inspired by their thought as, within the Soviet Union, aspirations to enact their ideas of universal industrial villages created significant planning problems. In today’s predominantly urbanized world, Marxian scholars and activists must therefore reassess Marx and Engels’s assertion that the goal of communism is to eventually reconcile the division between town and county.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42822510","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 : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183693
Yuval Eytan
It has recently been claimed that Marx’s aspiration to achieve happiness by reducing human suffering makes it possible to dismantle the conceptual walls between his approach, contemporary socialist approaches, and Eastern and Western perceptions of happiness. In contrast, this essay argues that Marx’s notion of freedom not only cannot be conceived as a means of achieving happiness but actually contradicts the possibility of happiness. The essay instead interprets the dialectical negation of the ideal of happiness in a way intended not to reinforce the walls between Marx’s approach and different worldviews but to reveal a common denominator relevant to different streams of nineteenth-century thought on this subject. Marx’s own conclusion that satisfaction is not a natural purpose of human existence originates in a dialectical approach regarding human needs that expresses radical criticism toward the hierarchical binary conception of pleasure and pain and of physical and spiritual needs.
{"title":"Why Not Happiness? Marx’s Notion of the Free Life","authors":"Yuval Eytan","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2023.2183693","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2183693","url":null,"abstract":"It has recently been claimed that Marx’s aspiration to achieve happiness by reducing human suffering makes it possible to dismantle the conceptual walls between his approach, contemporary socialist approaches, and Eastern and Western perceptions of happiness. In contrast, this essay argues that Marx’s notion of freedom not only cannot be conceived as a means of achieving happiness but actually contradicts the possibility of happiness. The essay instead interprets the dialectical negation of the ideal of happiness in a way intended not to reinforce the walls between Marx’s approach and different worldviews but to reveal a common denominator relevant to different streams of nineteenth-century thought on this subject. Marx’s own conclusion that satisfaction is not a natural purpose of human existence originates in a dialectical approach regarding human needs that expresses radical criticism toward the hierarchical binary conception of pleasure and pain and of physical and spiritual needs.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42531029","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 : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183683
T. Waller
This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel's account of the non-knowledge or “practical solipsism” of the subject under capitalism, critics have yet to bring a Lacanian perspective to bear on the unconscious dimension of commodity exchange. Likewise, although Lacan's early formalization of the knotting of the Imaginary and the Symbolic offers a nuanced account of the structural impersonality of the social order, its relevance for the NML theorization of the autonomization of value relations has hitherto been overlooked. Reading Lacan “with” the NML, this essay redresses these oversights through a discussion of Slavoj Žižek's interpretation of the problem of form and method in Marx and Freud, and of Michael Heinrich's exegesis of the exchange process as developed in the first volume of Capital.
{"title":"Subjects of Exchange: Between Lacan and the Neue Marx-Lektüre","authors":"T. Waller","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2023.2183683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2183683","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel's account of the non-knowledge or “practical solipsism” of the subject under capitalism, critics have yet to bring a Lacanian perspective to bear on the unconscious dimension of commodity exchange. Likewise, although Lacan's early formalization of the knotting of the Imaginary and the Symbolic offers a nuanced account of the structural impersonality of the social order, its relevance for the NML theorization of the autonomization of value relations has hitherto been overlooked. Reading Lacan “with” the NML, this essay redresses these oversights through a discussion of Slavoj Žižek's interpretation of the problem of form and method in Marx and Freud, and of Michael Heinrich's exegesis of the exchange process as developed in the first volume of Capital.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46588844","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 : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183695
Zoe Sherman
Liz Moor’s Communication and Economic Life analyzes the overlaps between communicative practices and economic actions. Economic actions can convey information and can carry a symbolic dimension. Communication practices—that is, promotion, information, narrative, and discussion—shape how people understand themselves as economic actors and also the actions they take. Moor's analysis is particularly compelling when power inequalities come to the foreground, as in her treatment of asymmetries in data mining and her treatment of how the contemporary employment system compels workers to engage in self-promoting communication.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2023.2183694
M. Tadesse, E. Erdem
The essay presents an exploratory study of the equub, a form of community-based finance that is well-established in the Ethiopian diaspora in Germany. Equubs render visible the financial expertise developed in the majority world and its circulation in diasporic space. As such, equubs exemplify the power of People of African Descent in Germany to organize against financial exclusion. The essay draws on the theory of diverse economies and its method of reading for difference to analyze the characteristics of the equub as a nonmarket financial institution, showing its praxis of building community economies and its linkages to the diverse economy at large. Processes of decommodification, collective governance, and ethical decision making around financial needs politicize finance, making the equub an interesting case of a postcapitalist-finance imaginary.
{"title":"Postcapitalist Imaginaries of Finance: A Diverse-Economies Perspective on Equubs within the Ethiopian Diaspora in Germany","authors":"M. Tadesse, E. Erdem","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2023.2183694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2023.2183694","url":null,"abstract":"The essay presents an exploratory study of the equub, a form of community-based finance that is well-established in the Ethiopian diaspora in Germany. Equubs render visible the financial expertise developed in the majority world and its circulation in diasporic space. As such, equubs exemplify the power of People of African Descent in Germany to organize against financial exclusion. The essay draws on the theory of diverse economies and its method of reading for difference to analyze the characteristics of the equub as a nonmarket financial institution, showing its praxis of building community economies and its linkages to the diverse economy at large. Processes of decommodification, collective governance, and ethical decision making around financial needs politicize finance, making the equub an interesting case of a postcapitalist-finance imaginary.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48853403","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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