Pub Date : 2022-12-15DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20222025
Niklas Plaetzer
Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality traces a global history of revolutionary institution-building as ‘theory in action’, pushing radical democracy beyond an ontology of the political. This contribution aims to clarify the place of ‘insurgent institutions’ in Tomba’s work and suggests that an unresolved tension persists between insurgent universality as popular institutions on the one hand, and as a negative dis-ordering on the other. Exploring the promise and limitations of ‘insurgent institutions’ in light of their durability, its first part reads Insurgent Universality alongside Santi Romano, the legal pluralist whose concept of the institution Tomba adopts. Secondly, the article turns to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of authority and Miguel Abensour’s discussion of ‘insurgent institutions’ as two potentially helpful accounts of democratic practice within durational time. Where Tomba remains focused on constellations between moments of rupture, Arendt and Abensour offer a politically generative understanding of durability specific to radical-democratic institutions.
{"title":"How to Make the Moment Last?","authors":"Niklas Plaetzer","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality traces a global history of revolutionary institution-building as ‘theory in action’, pushing radical democracy beyond an ontology of the political. This contribution aims to clarify the place of ‘insurgent institutions’ in Tomba’s work and suggests that an unresolved tension persists between insurgent universality as popular institutions on the one hand, and as a negative dis-ordering on the other. Exploring the promise and limitations of ‘insurgent institutions’ in light of their durability, its first part reads Insurgent Universality alongside Santi Romano, the legal pluralist whose concept of the institution Tomba adopts. Secondly, the article turns to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of authority and Miguel Abensour’s discussion of ‘insurgent institutions’ as two potentially helpful accounts of democratic practice within durational time. Where Tomba remains focused on constellations between moments of rupture, Arendt and Abensour offer a politically generative understanding of durability specific to radical-democratic institutions.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47045364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-15DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20222027
V. Seth
Through an engagement with Massimiliano Tomba’s work Insurgent Universality, this paper explores the possibilities and limitations that reside at the heart of historical thinking.
通过与汤巴的作品《反叛的普遍性》的接触,本文探讨了历史思维核心的可能性和局限性。
{"title":"History and its Discontents","authors":"V. Seth","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222027","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Through an engagement with Massimiliano Tomba’s work Insurgent Universality, this paper explores the possibilities and limitations that reside at the heart of historical thinking.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46157764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-14DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20222024
Aldo Beretta, R. Fritzl
Insurgent Universality offers a novel attempt to access history through a problematisation of the notion of universalism. Its main argument is based on three notions articulated in revolutionary events: temporalities, universality and insurgency. In this article we review their theoretical aspects, comment on their limitations, and outline potential reformulations.
{"title":"Temporalities, Universality and Insurgency: On Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality","authors":"Aldo Beretta, R. Fritzl","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Insurgent Universality offers a novel attempt to access history through a problematisation of the notion of universalism. Its main argument is based on three notions articulated in revolutionary events: temporalities, universality and insurgency. In this article we review their theoretical aspects, comment on their limitations, and outline potential reformulations.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42226879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20222071
Bryan J. Parkhurst
This paper explores the question: does unfree labour produce value? The paper does not answer the question. Rather, it contends that, no matter how Marxists answer the question, they end up either (1) relinquishing the view that labour is the only source of value or (2) appealing to an apparently bogus distinction in order to hang on to the view. Both of these alternatives will be unacceptable to the orthodox Marxian economist. For the choice is between jettisoning the labour theory of value and thus giving up on Marxian orthodoxy, or else frankly conceding that one’s orthodoxy is baseless and dogmatic.
{"title":"Unfree Labour and Value Productivity: Challenges for the Marxian Labour Theory of Value","authors":"Bryan J. Parkhurst","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222071","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper explores the question: does unfree labour produce value? The paper does not answer the question. Rather, it contends that, no matter how Marxists answer the question, they end up either (1) relinquishing the view that labour is the only source of value or (2) appealing to an apparently bogus distinction in order to hang on to the view. Both of these alternatives will be unacceptable to the orthodox Marxian economist. For the choice is between jettisoning the labour theory of value and thus giving up on Marxian orthodoxy, or else frankly conceding that one’s orthodoxy is baseless and dogmatic.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44584478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-08DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20221838
Emmanuel Barot
Being and Nothingness argues that in the master–slave dialectic Hegel had a ‘brilliant insight’ contra solipsism, to the effect that each self-consciousness depends on other consciousnesses. Against Hegel, however, Sartre claims that the separation of the for-itself remains an insurmountable ‘scandal’ and that collectivity can at best exist as a ‘de-totalised totality’, never as Subject. In a confrontation with Hegelian Sittlichkeit, Notebooks for an Ethics extends this analysis to the historical modalities of the mutual recognition of freedoms. A ‘concrete ethics’ must be ‘revolutionary socialist’, centrally concerned with ‘the dialectic of the ends and means of revolution’. Finally, Sartre’s analysis of the dialectic of society and the state in the Critique of Dialectical Reason explains why sovereignty can never be the embodiment of an imaginary Subject. Sartre thus ultimately occupies a highly distinctive middle ground between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s critique of Hegel. A fulcrum of the argument, focused on Notebooks for an Ethics, consists in a comparison between Sartre and Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours.
{"title":"Sartre’s Engagement with Hegel and Trotsky","authors":"Emmanuel Barot","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20221838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20221838","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Being and Nothingness argues that in the master–slave dialectic Hegel had a ‘brilliant insight’ contra solipsism, to the effect that each self-consciousness depends on other consciousnesses. Against Hegel, however, Sartre claims that the separation of the for-itself remains an insurmountable ‘scandal’ and that collectivity can at best exist as a ‘de-totalised totality’, never as Subject. In a confrontation with Hegelian Sittlichkeit, Notebooks for an Ethics extends this analysis to the historical modalities of the mutual recognition of freedoms. A ‘concrete ethics’ must be ‘revolutionary socialist’, centrally concerned with ‘the dialectic of the ends and means of revolution’. Finally, Sartre’s analysis of the dialectic of society and the state in the Critique of Dialectical Reason explains why sovereignty can never be the embodiment of an imaginary Subject. Sartre thus ultimately occupies a highly distinctive middle ground between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s critique of Hegel. A fulcrum of the argument, focused on Notebooks for an Ethics, consists in a comparison between Sartre and Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49450555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-08DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20222093
L. Sève
Lucien Sève (1926–2020) was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of the Parti Communiste Français. An indomitable opponent of both structural and humanist Marxism, his 1973 article reprinted below represents the core of his conception of alienation. For Sève, whilst the mature Marxism of Das Kapital is fundamentally distinct from the speculative humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts in placing capital, not abstract labour, at the heart of alienation, this reinforces, rather than replaces, the role of alienation at the centre of Marx’s mature thought, and hence of Marxism itself.
{"title":"Marxist Analysis of Alienation (1973)","authors":"L. Sève","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222093","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Lucien Sève (1926–2020) was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians of the Parti Communiste Français. An indomitable opponent of both structural and humanist Marxism, his 1973 article reprinted below represents the core of his conception of alienation. For Sève, whilst the mature Marxism of Das Kapital is fundamentally distinct from the speculative humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts in placing capital, not abstract labour, at the heart of alienation, this reinforces, rather than replaces, the role of alienation at the centre of Marx’s mature thought, and hence of Marxism itself.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41709688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-07DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20221938
F. Manning
Although Marx dubbed landowners one of the ‘three great classes’ of modern society, the most prominent Marxian and socialist thinkers of capitalism and land over the past century – from Lefebvre to Massey to Harvey – have implicitly or explicitly argued that landowners are not capitalism’s ‘third class’, and that the social relations of land are marginal or contingent to the mode of production as a whole. Through assessing the work of Marxist geographers, political economists, value-form theorists, and others who have dismissed the class-status of landowners and blurred the line between ground rent and interest, this article argues that the theory of the landowning class is fundamental to the understanding of the totality of capitalist social relations, as well as to developing more incisive analyses of struggles around housing, land, and movement today.
{"title":"A Defence of the Concept of the Landowning Class as the Third Class","authors":"F. Manning","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20221938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20221938","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Although Marx dubbed landowners one of the ‘three great classes’ of modern society, the most prominent Marxian and socialist thinkers of capitalism and land over the past century – from Lefebvre to Massey to Harvey – have implicitly or explicitly argued that landowners are not capitalism’s ‘third class’, and that the social relations of land are marginal or contingent to the mode of production as a whole. Through assessing the work of Marxist geographers, political economists, value-form theorists, and others who have dismissed the class-status of landowners and blurred the line between ground rent and interest, this article argues that the theory of the landowning class is fundamental to the understanding of the totality of capitalist social relations, as well as to developing more incisive analyses of struggles around housing, land, and movement today.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49354413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-11DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20222352
Panagiotis Sotiris
Passive revolution is one of the most debated notions to come out of the Prison Notebooks. It belongs to the notions that have been used as ‘established’ descriptions of historical and political sequences. However, a reading of Gramsci’s texts suggests that passive revolution is not a ‘historical phase’ and is not limited to the historical interpretation of a particular historical period. Nor is it part of an historical ‘canon’ that would suggest that, in the absence of a ‘proper’ Jacobin revolution, the only alternative is passive revolution. Rather it points to the experimental character of the Prison Notebooks and Gramsci’s confrontation with the profound changes in state apparatuses (and hegemonic apparatuses) and practices of politics and hegemony after WWI, in particular the new ‘mass’ forms of politics and ideological interpellation, and his attempt to elaborate a strategic–theoretical thinking suited to revolutionary politics in such a context.
{"title":"Revisiting the Passive Revolution","authors":"Panagiotis Sotiris","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222352","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Passive revolution is one of the most debated notions to come out of the Prison Notebooks. It belongs to the notions that have been used as ‘established’ descriptions of historical and political sequences. However, a reading of Gramsci’s texts suggests that passive revolution is not a ‘historical phase’ and is not limited to the historical interpretation of a particular historical period. Nor is it part of an historical ‘canon’ that would suggest that, in the absence of a ‘proper’ Jacobin revolution, the only alternative is passive revolution. Rather it points to the experimental character of the Prison Notebooks and Gramsci’s confrontation with the profound changes in state apparatuses (and hegemonic apparatuses) and practices of politics and hegemony after WWI, in particular the new ‘mass’ forms of politics and ideological interpellation, and his attempt to elaborate a strategic–theoretical thinking suited to revolutionary politics in such a context.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44144757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-06DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20222142
Stefan A. Kipfer, A. Mallick
This paper establishes a theoretical linkage between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. Gramsci’s critical-historicist method and its relationship to humanism, his integral understanding of Marxism, and emphasis on the moment of political practice resonate with Fanon’s articulation of the subjective and political-economic aspects of the colonial question, his activistic materialism, and his dialectically humanist universalism forged through anti-colonial struggle. Establishing this linkage presupposes engaging distinct currents of postcolonial Gramscianism in relation to each other and to the philological turn in Gramsci scholarship. In turn, a Gramsci–Fanon convergence helps elucidate the specificities of (post-)colonial contexts without elevating these into a civilisational-ontological difference. Emphasising their geographical sensitivity as a meeting point, pushing Gramsci towards Fanon helps us treat the global South and imperial heartlands relationally, in historico-geographical and specifically political terms. A Fanonian Gramsci (or Gramscian Fanon) thus allows us to tackle Eurocentrism without closing doors to a counter- or postcolonial Marxism.
{"title":"‘Stretch’ and ‘Translate’: Gramscian Lineages, Fanonist Convergences in the (Post)Colony","authors":"Stefan A. Kipfer, A. Mallick","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222142","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper establishes a theoretical linkage between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. Gramsci’s critical-historicist method and its relationship to humanism, his integral understanding of Marxism, and emphasis on the moment of political practice resonate with Fanon’s articulation of the subjective and political-economic aspects of the colonial question, his activistic materialism, and his dialectically humanist universalism forged through anti-colonial struggle. Establishing this linkage presupposes engaging distinct currents of postcolonial Gramscianism in relation to each other and to the philological turn in Gramsci scholarship. In turn, a Gramsci–Fanon convergence helps elucidate the specificities of (post-)colonial contexts without elevating these into a civilisational-ontological difference. Emphasising their geographical sensitivity as a meeting point, pushing Gramsci towards Fanon helps us treat the global South and imperial heartlands relationally, in historico-geographical and specifically political terms. A Fanonian Gramsci (or Gramscian Fanon) thus allows us to tackle Eurocentrism without closing doors to a counter- or postcolonial Marxism.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49360535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-08DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-20222073
Josep Maria Antentas
Bensaïd’s interest in Marranism is part of his broader interest in Jewish mysticism, read in a profane and secularised way, and of his search for new theoretical paths with which to renew revolutionary Marxist theory. ‘Marrano’ refers to the Spanish–Portuguese Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity in the fifteenth century and who were suspected of judaising in secret. The term has been increasingly used by many authors, including Bensaïd, in a broad sense, often as a metaphor that goes beyond the study of actual Marranos to acquire a broader meaning. Bensaïd uses Marranism to think about some aspects of political strategy and, at the same time, strategically uses Marranism to approach certain debates. The Marrano is the metaphorical and metonymic figure through which he tries to think a new internationalism that simultaneously transcends both an abstract universalism that legitimates inequalities and oppression and an anti-universalist communitarian withdrawal.
{"title":"Daniel Bensaïd’s Marrano Internationalism","authors":"Josep Maria Antentas","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222073","url":null,"abstract":"Bensaïd’s interest in Marranism is part of his broader interest in Jewish mysticism, read in a profane and secularised way, and of his search for new theoretical paths with which to renew revolutionary Marxist theory. ‘Marrano’ refers to the Spanish–Portuguese Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity in the fifteenth century and who were suspected of judaising in secret. The term has been increasingly used by many authors, including Bensaïd, in a broad sense, often as a metaphor that goes beyond the study of actual Marranos to acquire a broader meaning. Bensaïd uses Marranism to think about some aspects of political strategy and, at the same time, strategically uses Marranism to approach certain debates. The Marrano is the metaphorical and metonymic figure through which he tries to think a new internationalism that simultaneously transcends both an abstract universalism that legitimates inequalities and oppression and an anti-universalist communitarian withdrawal.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45374558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}