In this issue our first document is Samir Amin's reflections on culture and ideology in the contemporary Arab world. Characteristically, Amin puts forward several strong theses about the rise of what has been called "Islamic fundamentalism" in Arab nations. He begins with the claim that the dominant culture in the world, that which informs and permeates both centers and peripheries, is "capitalist culture." Amin is quick to add that it is mistaken to see the dominance of "western" culture and the reactions against it as outside the framework of the prevailing culture of world capitalism. In Amin's view, it is the "submission of both the political and ideological realms to the logic of the economic one" that has stamped global culture as primarily capitalist. This thesis has direct bearing on Amin's consequent argument that the forms of ritualized traditionalism that are today frequently labelled Islamic fundamentalism are neither simple holdovers from precapitalist societies nor resistances to contemporary occidentalism. In these current movements to revive and perpetuate Islamic "tradition," Amin finds the signs of the polarization of the world capitalist economy and the firmly ensconced peripheral condition of the Arab world. That is, while capitalism as a global economic and cultural system is oriented toward universalism and unity, it is a polarized capitalism in which there continues to exist a "deep contrast between its centers and peripheries." This polarization, then, has had an unmistakable effect on the various projects in the third world, and of course among Arab nations, to "catch up" through various projects of "modernization" since the nineteenth century. The effect on culture of both this polarization and the resulting failure of successive modernizing projects has been the failure in the realm of Arab culture to successfully reconcile faith and reason, a goal, Amin notes, that was in fact often achieved in the premodern tributary cultural "metaphysics" of the Islamic world The tendency for faith and reason to remain irreconcilable and for Islam to be increasingly reduced to ritualistic traditions by its most fervent adherents even those committed to its renewal and renovation—is not, Amin thinks, a defect inherent in Islam itself but reflects more accurately the current cultural schizophrenia of the Arab world, whose peripheral position within the global capitalist economy prevents it from completely absorbing the forms of culture and politics that are found within the capitalism of the centers.

In Amin's estimation, the cultural revolution that could fully reconcile faith and reason in the best fashion of historic Islam and produce a "true interpretation of religion" is impeded by the fact that most Arab countries remain subordinate within the world division of production and trade—at best they have achieved the status of a "compradorial bazaar." Thus, as Amin sees it, it should come as no surprise that with the blocked development of capitalist modernization, popular struggles in the Arab world should today take the form of an affirmation of Islamic cultural identity rather than an assault against what he terms the "real" conditions that confer peripheral status.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy continues to arouse the imagination and interest of many thinkers on the Left. One sign of this is the frequent reference to their 1985 work in articles published in R, including a full-length treatment by Landry and MacLean (Winter 1991) of Laclau and Mouffe's presumed relapse into the economism of classical Marxism. We have noticed that most critics of their work have fallen into two broad camps: those who reject Laclau and Mouffe's epistemological stances, their critique of economistic Marxism, and their use of Althusserian overdetermination to structure their notion of articulated subjects and political practices, and those who, focusing on Laclau and Mouffe's theoretical innovations; think that they have not succeeded either in breaking with Marxian orthodoxy or in avoiding the indeterminancy of political action with their amorphous notion of radical democracy. Jonathan Diskin and Blair Sandler can be said to found a third camp here, one that appreciates and is inspired by Laclau and Mouffe's antieconomism and epistemological "relativism" but that also roundly criticizes Laclau and Mouffe for their ultimately damaging displacement of "the economy" from their work. Diskin and Sandler's article is a crucial essay for RM's readers. For they forcefully show that Laclau and Mouffe are guilty of uncharacteristically shoddy thinking when it comes to the concepts and methods of Marxian economics, something that has mostly escaped the notice of most other critics. While Laclau and Mouffe's critique of Marxian political economy involves a rejection of the central concepts of "class" and "labor power as commodity" because of their necessary essentialism and misspecification, Diskin and Sandler show in contrast that Laclau and Mouffe have extremely faulty understandings of these concepts and their effects. Laclau and Mouffe's "threefold recomposition of the economic space" built on these faulty understandings require, say Diskin and Sandler, "the abandonment of particular concepts as essentialist things in themselves" (a bizarre position for those who advocate the reopening of all "sutures" in social theory and believe that all concepts take on meaning only in their articulation with others), the resort to supposedly "empirical" notions of the economy, as in Laclau and Mouffe's recurring references to something, now entirely untheorized, called capitalism (see Gibson-Graham in RM, Summer 1993, for a compelling critique of such totalizing "empirical" conceptions of capitalism), and the "renaming of capitalist relations of production and socialism as essentially political concepts." It is perhaps this last point that is most striking since, as Diskin and Sandler argue, it is through this move that "the economy" disappears only to reappear as a manifestation of power and politics. Diskin and Sandler oppose Laclau and Mouffe, then, on the latter's power essentialism and ill-informed rendering of the economic concepts in Marxism. Their message, clearly stated, is that "reopening the sutures" along lines pioneered by Laclau and Mouffe is not only desirable and possible for Marxian political economy, but has been happening to good results in the nondeterminist Marxist economic discourse that has frequently appeared in the pages of RM and elsewhere.

The hope that Frigga Haug had entertained, that with unification the socialist -feminist movement in Germany would experience a considerable boost, was dashed when she found that the socialist patriarchy that had arisen in the paternalistic state of the east had not been conducive to and had left dilatory effects on the realization of the wishes and needs of women for free and liberated development, This highlighted, for her, the enduring quality of women's oppression, albeit under diverse modes of production. In the wake of the collapse of socialist alternatives and the seeming total hegemony of capitalism, Haug has set herself here the task of reconsidering the ways in which capitalist patriarchy, now the reality of both Germanys, is reproduced. Haug elaborates her understanding that the gender rela. tions that determine women's oppression are relations of production. But Haug makes it clear that she is not arguing for a simple reduction of gender to the demands of the economy. As she develops her analysis through reliance oh literary and artistic texts and then social observations, Haug finds that capitalist patriarchy can best be viewed as a "model of civilization" rather than a "mode of production." As a result, Haug traces the antecedents and effects of oppressive gender relations through the spheres of economy, morality, politics, sexuality, philosophy, culture, and much else comprising such a model of civilization. Key to her view is the overdetermination of male domination and the capitalist mode of production, which she regards as always already gendered in terms of male privilege and superiority. One of Haug's key insights is the argument that time in capitalist market and production activities—the requirement of saving time in the name of efficiency and therefore profit—is rendered discursively and lived as male while the care of humanity and the needs of love are seen as time-consuming, often wasteful, and relegated to women who are thereby subjugated by this patriarchal arrangement. Such arrangements are conjoined to other symbolic orderings marking women's oppression, such as the hierarchy of moral values according to gender in which women experience morality as a question of their bodies and sexuality while moral virtues for men are referred to the public arenas of economics and politics. Haug leaves off with the following claim: the oppression of women in capitalist patriarchy cannot be found to originate in any one sphere as women see that "always and everywhere they find themselves in gender relations." Nothing short of a transformation of the entire model of civilization will suffice to make life, as Haug puts it, "truly human."

By now the prevalent voices in feminist historiography of the early years of interaction among Marxism, the European social democratic movement, and feminism have arrived at the conclusion that, from the outset, Marxism was at best cautious about and at worst hostile to feminism. This verdict, pronounced frequently without careful attention to the historical record, as Gary Roth and Anne Lopes contend, is based on the view that from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century Marxism was primary obsessed with class, its manifestations, and its political consequences and therefore treated the issue of women's emancipation as a side issue. One consequence of this verdict, Roth and Lopes lament, is the unwarranted conclusion that Marxism in its essence has never been particularly useful to understand and advance struggles over gender equality and women's liberation. As an example of Marxism's inabilities and irrelevance, some feminist historians cite the inevitable conservatism to which eady Marxian socialist activists and writers, such as August Bebel and Clara Zetkin, were led as a result of being blind to (or uninterested in) the specificity of the women's movement because of Marxian class exclusivity. Roth and Lopes point out that this teleological rendering of the interaction between the early socialist and feminist movements in Europe neglects the "multiple paths that developed within Marxism's feminism, not all of which sacrificed the 'women's question' to the social question." Roth and Lopes produce a different reading of this period, especially of the different contributions that Bebel and Zetkin made both to deepening Marxists' understanding of the intersection of class and gender and to the unfolding historical events in which, by the 1 890s, there had occurred a sharper separation of the women's movement and socialist activism than had existed earlier. Roth and Lopes are especially concerned to rewrite the historical accounts of Bebel and Zetkin, their relationship, and, most importantly, their differences; these accounts have been at the center of feminist research into how and why Marxism, by the turn of the twentieth century, was more antagonistic to the women's movement than in previous decades. Roth and Lopes depict Bebel to be more open to challenging traditional gender roles for women and according the "bourgeois women's movement" an important place in socialist politics than was Zetkin, at least by the 1890s. Roth and Lopes argue that, at the height of her influence, Zetkin had turned to a "harsh 'proletarian line' vis-a-vis bourgeois feminism," in contrast to Bebel's own positions, which had been the inspiration for many of her past views. Thus, while Zetkin moved toward "a more conservative and traditional understanding of gender," this move was neither inevitable nor derived from the breakthroughs that other Marxists, such as Bebel, had achieved on the "women's question." Roth and Lopes conclude that while Bebel's story "has been a lost moment within history . . . it refutes rather than confirms the antifeminist essentialism often attributed to Marxism." This counterhistory has been little appreciated, and its unearthing by Roth and Lopes is intended to pose an alternative to the so-called "unhappy marriage" that has been attributed to the historic relations between Marxism and feminism.

The charge that Marx's historical method is shot through with ethnocentrism is one that has been around for many years and was, during the 1970s and '80s, a major impetus to the emergence of a new Marxist anthropology. The charge is by now familiar: Marx's deployment of a "stage theory of history" necessarily weds him and other Marxists to a teleology in which modern capitalist or socialist societies are judged "more developed" and therefore superior to so-called premodern ones. And Marx's historical materialism privileges production in the dominance and or determinance of all aspects of social reality. Philip J. Kain contends that both of these charges have depended on a misreading of Marx's own writings and a misuse of his arguments. Kain especially wants to address the criticism put forward by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose influential book Culture and Practical Reason set forth the view that Marx's "productivism" denies the dominance of symbolic order and therefore culture in nonmodern societies. Interestingly, Kain accepts Sahlins's claim (that symbolic order is indeed primary) but then goes on to show that this view is already presaged by Marx in his privileging of what today we call, following T. S. Kuhn, a "paradigm" for understanding the "concrete for thought" in investigating both modern and premodern societies. From Kain's perspective, Marx's method is not ethnocentric because its privileging of a modern paradigm is only concerned to ascertain and analyze differences between modern and premodern societies, not to rank them in strict hierarchical fashion. Moreover, Kain asserts that Marx in fact granted both primacy to the realm of the symbolic in his brief discussions of premodern societies, albeit through the lens of modernity, and superiority to (some) premodern forms of values, ethics, and social arrangements in envisioning a future socialism. In putting forward his defense of Marxism against the charge of ethnocentrism, Kain engages the related work of some of the editors of this journal (Amariglio, Resnick, and Wolff) and poses his own solutions to the puzzle of societal causation and historical determination to our own adherence to "overdetermination," which, as he notes, provides an alternative basis to resist the charge of ethnocentrism. Readers then may find of special interest and may judge for themselves the virtues and weaknesses of these somewhat competing responses to what Kain and we agree is the mostly unwarranted claim that Marxism today is still burdened with reenacting in theory the historical degradation of nonmodern societies.

Nietzsche as an agitator for radical mass political action? Nietzsche as an invaluable guide to inciting anticapitalist cultural and political practice in the postmoder period? Yes, says Steven Cresap to both of these queries. And, in his article, Cresap sets out to demonstrate his affirmation of Nietzsche as a "social engineer" by his novel rereading of the Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche's early career as a Wagnerian cultural romantic. Cresap places Nietzsche's conception of Wagner-inspired tragedy within the context of a broader issue: the question of the possibility for cultural forms, most especially artistic practices, to incite political action—in the wake of the collapse of modernity and its many projects—to join culture with transgressive activism. Cresap notes in the modernist projects, including Marxism, the clear belief that knowledge and reason are the only sure guide to overcoming the dehumanization and alienation of life under capitalism. With this "logocentrism," Marxists have underestimated the effects that nonepistemic expressions of discontent and/or solidarity, such as appear in popular cult activities, formal and informal rituals, and artistic modes may give rise to in formulating collective resistances to capitalism. Cresap discovers in Nietzsche's portrayal of what he termed Dionysian and Apollonian cults/art worlds and their later recombination in Wagnerian tragedy a decisive theoretical presentation of how such nonepistemic cultural forms can give rise to collective action. Cresap shows how, for Nietzsche, the synthesis of music (the prototypical Dionysian form) and visuals (the Apollonian form) in operatic tragedies portends such radical possibilities. Tragedy—"that form which most radically questions the viability of the individual in its isolation"—represents to Nietzsche the possible overcoming of the inaction that the separation of Dionysian "rapture" from Apollonian "redemption" or even their simple conjunction may enact. Nietzsche's theory of culture, portrayed in the Birth of Tragedy, is one that, as Cresap puts it, "helps us appreciate the inertia and dynamism inherent in cultural forms" and may point a way out of the "postmodern escapism" that he feels has dominated our current cultural life.

It is Kalyan K. Sanyal's contention that Marx's section in Capital on primitive accumulation has never been accorded the theoretical status it deserves. In the first entry of our Remarx section, Sanyal claims that primitive accumulation has been read as a historical addendum to the main theoretical argument regarding the structure and "laws of motion" of the capitalist mode of production. To read Marx's section this way, Sanyal believes, is to rob it of its theoretical standing as an analysis of what he terms "capital as power," a concept that he thinks would shed light on the processes of capitalist production and exploitation as they especially affect the third world. Sanyal's original formulation has it that the section on primitive accumulation explains how capital confronts "classless subjects" (capital's precapitalist "other") that do not comprise the "interior" of the capital-wage relation and instead are outside of this relation. Primitive accumulation, as a consideration, for example, of the capitalist state's active role in the forcible expropriation of precapitalist peasants, is a theory of the profound impact of the power of capital on its "others,'—what Sanyal calls the "annihilation of precapital"—and must be viewed as theoretically complementary (and not subsidiary) to the theory of the capitalist exploitation of its "own" subjects. Sanyal extends this theory to the question of the economic development of the third world, which for a long time was seen as the complete destruction by capital of its precapitalist other. Yet, he argues that such annihilation has in fact not come to pass; precapitalism now appears to be permanently entrenched in the third world, and capital's relation to it is one of incorporation rather than destruction (he sees the most recent discourses on poverty in the third world and the movement away from identifying development with accumulation as ideological expressions of this new relation). In this "failure" of primitive accumulation, capital now is faced with the task of appropriating and reproducing precapital (i.e., "internalizing" the other), not destroying it. In Sanyal's estimation, then, reading the section on primitive accumulation as a discourse on capital as power lays the theoretical groundwork for his conclusion that the world hegemonic pretensions of capital require it today to "represent" its precapitalist other and to accommodate it within its own spheres of ideology and economy—integrating "commodity and community"—because annihilation, at least for the time being, is deemed impossible.

For those who believe that capitalist commodity production in late capitalism lacks ingenuity and resilience, consider the recent spate of "transparent commodities." These goods, such as Crystal Pepsi and clear Ivory dishwashing liquid, are being produced without dies or color additives and marketed as "environmentally friendly." Marc Kipniss sees in this development a creative trumping of the fetishism of commodities. For not only do these clear goods function as all capitalist commodities and therefore "appear" as "a very trivial thing, easily understood," to use Marx's formulation. As Kipniss shows in his Remarx contribution, they further fill in the empty commodity space—devoid of all specific social content (i.e., the conditions of their production) with a new meaning, that of transparency itself. Kipniss reveals the double transparency of these commodities as they now appear as something pure and natural. The equation of transparency and purity, Kipniss argues, has become increasingly possible with the self-absorption of consumers in purifying domestic space (a task accorded, as in the past, to housewives) and one's body as a way of keeping out the impurities and excrescences (pollution, AIDS, racial others, etc.) of our decaying social fabric. Kipniss is aware, then, of how capitalist producers and their adpersons have been able to exploit environmentalism and ecological signifiers and to convert them into the necessary meanings for a whole range of new commodities. Kipniss concludes that this new development articulates commodities and their conditions of existence in contemporary capitalism as an "ideological fantasy . . . of immaculate production," a fantasy, he sadly adds, that is enlivened by the desire of individuals to find elixirs "the consumption of which might magically ward off or decrease the global, extensive miasma existing outside individual control."

Rick Wolff's brief review of David Bakhurst's Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy draws startling parallels between the philosophical disputes regarding modernism and postmodernism in Western philosophy and related debates over Marxist philosophy occurring before, during, and after Stalin in the Soviet Union. Wolff credits Bakhurst with having brought to light a remarkable set of complex philosophical thinkers and treatises that, not unlike the most important Western Marxist theoreticians, such as Gramsci and Althusser, were reworking classical epistemological and philosophical premises and moving toward decidedly "postmodern" positions on knowledge, subjectivity, causality, and much else. As a case in point, and a central figure in Bakhurst's book, there is the work of Evald llyenkov. Wolff sees Bakhurst to have detailed llyenkov's writings as "a stunning example of the richness, current relevance, and innovations that were achieved inside Soviet philosophy." Ilyenkov, Wolff notes, was a leading voice in Soviet philosophy whose reconceptualization of the material/ideal dualism in classical Marxism led him to "a systematic rejection of the reductionisms . . . that were prevalent within Soviet thought generally." Wolff concludes his approving review of Bakhurst's book with the insight that the very dominance of Marxism within the Soviet Union and the reactions to its own impasses may have allowed for the critique of modernity "sooner and perhaps more deeply" than in the noncommunist West.

The Editors

In this issue Andriana Vlachou's essay on the different uses and misuses of concepts of elass in the building of socialism in China continues our running interest in the debates over the past history and current direction of one of the few remaining examples of "actually existing socialism." Vlachou's article follows in the vein of previous papers in RM (Gabriel and Martin, Spring 1992; Resnick and Wolff, Spring 1990; and Lippit, Spring 1993) in which the fear is expressed that the past analytical and practical mistakes of Chinese communists have led to the present situation where capitalism seems poised to explode into dominance. Vlachou's valuable contribution here is her demonstration that from the onset of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, there has been great vacillation on the concept of elass, its determinants, and its effects as they apply to the transition to and securing of socialism. Vlachou shows that during much of the socialist experiment, elass has alternatively been defined in terms of property, power, or ideology. As a result, she claims, the absence of attention to collective forms of surplus production and appropriation have meant that the possible growth of communism in its economic aspects has often been sacrificed to the equalization of power relations, the abolition of private property, and/or to the creation and spread of the correct communist mentality or party line. While Vlachou regards these other processes as potential conditions of existence for communal appropriation, she notes that, in the hands of the Chinese communist leadership, these elements were seen to be the ultimate determinants of class, class struggle, and the socialist path rather than the "overdeterminants" of class and of each other. Vlachou provides a historical chronology in which one can see leading Chinese theoreticians, like Mao Zedung, grasping in one moment of history the problems attendant upon reductionist concepts of class and in the next moment resorting to viewing class and the construction of socialism as wholly determined in the last instance by one or another essential aspect of society. So, while Vlachou applauds Mao and others for moving away in the Great Leap Forward and in the Cultural Revolution from the prior identification of socialism with the abolition of private property, and from the judgement that all that was needed to achieve communism was the free development of productive forces, she also notes that by placing culture, consciousness, and politics "in command," Mao and other leaders retained reductionist notions even while they complexified the conceptions of class and socialist transformation. Vlachou does not rest in pointing out these reductionisms; for each historical phase in the Chinese experiment, she traces the troubling social and economic consequences that their retention brought about. Her final view is that whatever gains Chinese communists have achieved, and these have been many, the historical record may show that the inability to carry out a fully nondeterminist class analysis has been costly to the degree that the future of China as a socialist regime is now highly in doubt.

The six poems by Juan Cameron bear the marks of their location in time and space. Cameron, a Chilean who eventually emigrated to Sweden as a political refugee, constantly takes us back to the days before and after the overthrow of the Allende regime in 1973 and the gruesome days of the Pinochet dictatorship. While his poetry is often Iyrical and frequently tinged with acerbic wit, the overall effect is one of haunting memory and wrenching sadness, as friends and names and streets are lost in shadow, fall to earth, or are consigned to the wind. In the poems we publish here, Cameron retraces many steps in his quest to avoid having his memory and the existence of his comrades "being covered by oblivion." It is a wonder, then, that in the loss which accompanies many of the poems here, Cameron can sometimes find "the circle that brings the green again" or light out with friends to "go up to the festival of the exile," armed now with a bottle of wine, to "all sing together the Internationale." Once again, we are indebted to Cola Franzen, this time for her immaculate English translations of Cameron's engaging poems.

The infamous phrase "the negation of the negation" has seemed to many contemporary Marxist theoreticians as just so much Hegelian hocus-pocus with which Marx unfortunately mystified his more important historical insights. Christopher I. Arthur cites the primary occurrence of this phrase in a well-known passage on "the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation" at the end of volume one of Capital and carefully investigates the possible meaning and significance of this double negation in Marx's treatment of the historical transition both to and from capitalism. Arthur does not follow other thinkers, Engels included, who sought to claim for Marx's use of the phrase the status of a summary of the actual historical processes by which capitalist commodity production and forms of capitalist private property came into existence and also by which this same capitalism had produced the conditions for its own inevitable supersession. Instead, Arthur argues that the concept of the negation of the negation describes a logical—not concrete historical—relation between a totality (capitalist commodity production) and its constituent moments. Arthur looks very closely at the puzzle posed by Marx's use of the double negation to describe what he terms the self-destruction of individual property by capital in its original appearance and the consequent self-destruction of capitalist private property by the reemergence of individual property in communism. While Arthur notes that this puzzle cannot be solved by simply seeing here Marx's description of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and then from capitalism to socialism—as Arthur points out, Marx's historical analysis certainly contradicts the notion that primitive capitalist accumulation was the result of the "self-destruction" of the property of small artisans and independent farmers—he does believe that the solution to the puzzle resides in seeing Marx's discussion of the double negation as a presentation of the necessary logic of the self-production and reproduction of capital. In this discussion, capitalism "breaks the essential unity of the producer with the conditions of production" that constituted precapitalist social relations, therefore separating labor from "its" own individual property but then, by socializing the means of production and bringing workers together, creates the conditions whereby workers can be "reunited" with "their" property under communism. Arthur's proposed solution, then, is to read the negation of the negation as a description of what he terms the "inneraction" of capital considered as a totality and not as the empirically grounded historical account of the external interaction of the various aspects of this totality (capital and labor, and so on). Arthur ends his exacting inquiry with the claim that exposing the structural dialectic comprising capital's self-production and eventual self-destruction—the negation of the negation—while not identical with the empirical identification of the processes leading to or away from transition is "nonetheless fundamental to its explication."

In the sphere of contemporary Marxian considerations of aesthetics, Fredric lameson may hold pride of place in determining the contours of current debate. Jameson has conducted much of his extensive review and critique of modern and now postmodern aesthetics through his "dialectical" readings of several key figures in Western Marxism, most particularly Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno. In his detailed, appreciative account of lameson's dialectical aesthetics, Christopher Wise explicates lameson's "sublation" of Lukacs and Adorno in the attempt to rescue their considerable theoretical innovations from the trash heap of history to which they have been tossed by many poststructuralist and postmodem critics. Wise shows that lameson, throughout his career, has produced readings of Lukacs and Adorno that recast their famous and often vitriolic "debates" over the historical and practical aesthetic and cultural virtues and vices alternatively of modernism and realism in terms of the more common efforts of both to provide an ultimately historical horizon within which aesthetic movements and their attendant forms can been understood, enacted, and/or opposed. Perhaps the most striking feature of Jameson's renditions of the continuing importance of both Lukacs and Adorno, as Wise tells it, is their elaboration of concepts of totality, representation, and subjectivity that both sidestep and even trump current postmodern refusals of the same. Thus, Wise guides us through lameson's elegant maneuvers whereby Lukacs's concept of totality is seen not only to elude its current conflation with totalitarianism, but in point of fact emerges as a primary means to recover meaningful social existence in the face of the annihilation of meaning and subjectivity produced by totalizing and detotalizing forces alike. Lukacs's form of totalization, then, reemerges in Jameson's hands as "authentically subversive" of the postmodern world, of "consumer society" in which "experience has solidified into a mass of habits and automatisms." In a similar vein, Wise presents lameson's analogous repositioning of Adorno's project to "objectify" aesthetics (or at least to "desubjectify" it in the face of living in late capitalist society, in which alienation is no longer recognized and resisted since it has become the objective condition par excellence for subjectivity) while maintaining some last moment for aesthetic creation by the subject. Jameson here, as Wise argues, sees in Adorno's project a path through the Scylla of "the archaic subjectivity of bourgeois philosophy" and the Charybdis of "the fragmented subjectivity of postmodernism." Following this path allows us to envision a new "noncentered subject," one that does not disappear along with the realms of history and sociality but, instead, represents their very necessity. Wrapping up, Wise acknowledges approvingly lameson's dialectical demonstrations that the discursive conditions for thus thinking and practicing differently in the days of late capitalism already lie within the Marxian tradition itself, or at least within the still unfinished projects of Lukacs and Adorno.

Toni Calasanti and Anna Zajicek view the legacy of the critical theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse through the lens of contemporary socialist feminism. In their opinion, the major ideas of Adorno et al. can be constructively reworked by bringing to bear upon them socialist feminism's successful efforts to make the real "struggles and wishes of the age" the basis for an immanent, negative dialectical critique. In Calasanti and Zajicek's view, the key contributions of Adorno-et al. to socialist feminism include the emphasis on self-reflexivity as the basis for an oppositional epistemology, the perception of the varied forms of domination of the "totally administered society" of late capitalism, the effects of commodity fetishism in reifying individual actions and social relations, the understanding of the destructive split between public and private spheres, a conception of the family as either a site of instrumental rationality and oppression or a site of resistance, and much else. Yet, ironically, they believe that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School unfortunately resembles in its basic "abstractness" the very one-sidedness and inability to grasp concrete and contradictory experiences and struggles that Adorno et al. excoriated and attributed to the effects of the pervasive ideology of commodification. By neglecting the oppressions, experiences, and knowledges of women, the critical theorists blunted severely the radical concreteness of their own negative critique of capitalist society. Calasanti and Zajicek interpret current socialist-feminist research as showing decisively that the specific experiences of women in both public and private spheres and certainly the personal perceptions and emotions of these same women provide precisely the epistemological self-reflexivity that could ground the historically determined immanent critique of modern patriarchy and capitalism that Adorno et al. suggested but did not produce. By "listening and learning from all women about the oppressive conditions women experience, attending to one another's view of social reality, and using these experiences and views to guide and inform knowledge" and clearly informed by critical theory, today's socialist-feminists reveal the complex and diverse forms of cooperation and conflict among and between women according to race, class, sexual preference, and ideology in families and workplace sites (including the home). Thus, Calasanti and Zajicek show that the contributions of Adorno et al. in the last analysis are not rejected by socialist feminists but, instead, are being rewoven into a "new tapestry of critical theorizing."

Howard Sherman puts forward here a defense of what he terms the "relational approach to political economy." Such an approach is characteristic of the best efforts over the past 30 years of critical Marxists to free themselves and socioeconomic analysis from the various forms of reductionism that have been the hallmark of both orthodox Marxism and the dominant neoclassical economic tradition. Sherman notes that there has been little weakening in the individualist methodology underlying neoclassical economic thought. In fact, in recent years, such methodological individualism has not only served to determine the protocols and procedures of most mainstream academic economic thought, but has affected the work of some Marxist economists, as can be seen in the defense of individualism by the Analytical Marxists as the guiding microfoundational principle for all social science. At an opposite pole, Sherman warns of the continuing temptations and dangers of the class reductionism of "Stalinist" Marxism which, in his view, reifies the importance of collective entities, such as classes, in the determination of all aspects of social life. Rather than seeking once again to find the key initial principle upon which political economy can be built, Sherman distinguishes the relational approach in its commitment to seeing social causation as a constantly interacting set of diverse and irreducible processes. Sherman provides brief examples of how such an approach can illuminate the ways in which ideas, institutions, forces of production, and relations of production mutually constituted one another historically in the rise and demise of the Soviet Union. Sherman concludes that critical Marxists would be better served by treating the relational approach as a methodological guide to political economy rather than entombing it—in contrast to neoclassical and Orthodox Marxism—in the form of a general model with its necessary laws of motion of society and economy.

In their lifetimes, Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa were despised by liberal elites because they operated, or so it seemed, at the margins of civility and thereby violated the race and class norms that structured the United States after WWII. In his contribution to the Remarx section, Frank Annunziato considers the ideological grid through which, in the post-Reagan/Bush era, both Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa could be reclaimed as cultural icons if not mythical heroes for American liberalism. Annunziato sees the films released in late 1992 on Malcolm X and Hoffa as prime examples of how, in an era of heightened class exploitation, the exacerbation of race hatred, and continuing violence done to women, Hollywood filmmakers have been able to transmute these forces into the longstanding American obsession with representations of power and religion. The Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa that emerge from Spike Lee's film on Malcolm and David Mamet's screenplay on Hoffa are marred, says Annunziato, by the transformation of such complex characters into near gods whose actions and internal makeup are portrayed without doubts, contradictions, and remorse. The presentation of Malcolm and Hoffa as redolent of power—dripping both power and often blood from every por~is viewed by Annunziato as the means by which these "working-class heroes" are both deprived of their humanity and their politics and are hence converted into religious symbols.

Annunziato notes that while Spike Lee's Malcolm is miraculously converted from evil (his life as a junkie and pimp—and here is where women are largely allowed into Lee's film) to unadulterated good, mostly by his "recognition" of the existence and power of racism and his commitment to combat it "by any means possible," Hoffa is portrayed throughout his life as inexplicably and wholly absorbed in acts of extreme brutality and violence, from which his leadership of the Teamsters and their loyal following is shown to completely derive. Thus, while religiosity and the ideology of power work to totalize these films (even Lee's adept handling of racism reduces to a question of power and to a degree, perhaps, morality), the consequences and effects of class exploitation and gender (and race, in the Hoffa film) are largely expunged and leave no discernible trace in the Hollywood versions of Malcolm's and Hoffa's lives. As Annunziato points out, these excisions would be more understandable if it hadn't been for the fact, well documented, that class exploitation, race, gender, and even leftism played crucial roles in the paths and politics that Malcolm and Hoffa both pursued. Annunziato, then, finds both of these films to ultimately "reduce the oppositional qualities of Jimmy Hoffa and Malcolm X to make their reconstructed personalities fit comfortably into the nation's conventional and dominant consciousness."

The so-called crisis of Marxism—whose manifestations range from the abandonment of socialist goals and institutions throughout much of the world to the by-now familiar complaint that Marxian thought is thoroughly outdated and superseded by more compelling modes of explanation and praxis—has given rise to various projects of reconstructing Marxism. Since the seventies and eighties, new versions of Marxism have been produced in the traditional social sciences that are meant to avoid if not solve the problems of earlier, discredited forms of Marxian social theory. In his review of Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober's 1992 book Reconstructing Marxism, George DeMartino focuses on one of the salient differences of various approaches within current Anglo-American social science to reconfigure Marxian theory in order to make it a powerful tool of social analysis. DeMartino points out that for Wright et al., the reconstruction of Marxism that they endorse is one that seeks to finally bring to fruition the longstanding hope that Marxism could render scientifically its main theoretical and historical propositions. DeMartino argues that Wright, Levine, and Sober's strong adherence to the types of argumentation and evaluation of claims that emerged in the seventies and eighties out of what is known as Analytical Marxism shapes the notions of science and the forms of explanation that they are willing to accept as appropriate reformulations of Marxian thought. Thus, while Wright et al. conduct a critical review of the work of such thinkers as G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer, their basic agreement with the work of these main Analytical Marxists on the need to construct Marxian social theory as a consistent set of logically sound and empirically testable hypotheses using current "accepted" methods by mainstream social scientists outweighs minor disagreements on such things as the need for "methodological individualism" as the proper "microfoundation" for social analysis. DeMartino contrasts the views of Wright et al. on the issues of what would make Marxism scientific and whether this is indeed desirable or necessary if Marxian theory is to be useful and distinct with those of two other current schools of thought within the social sciences: the critical realism of much British Marxism which follows from the work of the philosopher Roy Bhaskar and the postAlthusserian Marxism of which this journal (or at least the work of its editors) represents a notable example. In criticizing Wright et al. for either neglecting or dismissing out of hand the contributions to reconstructions of Marxian theory of these two vibrant schools of contemporary Marxism, DeMartino calls into question what he sees as the essential premise of their work—the idea that only a turn to modern empiricist conceptions of science are legitimate and requisite for Marxism to rebuild itself. DeMartino suggests, in conclusion, that despite Wright, Levine, and Sober's important interventions, their call for such a "scientific" turn may do more to "distract Marxism from the discovery of new, compelling, and potent insights and practices" than to induce these very changes.

The Editors

In this issue Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff continue their project (begun in RM, Summer 1993) of investigating the class structure that mostly characterized the USSR during its 70-plus-year reign. Resnick and Wolff weave a fascinating tale in which the battle to establish "socialism" in the Soviet Union turned out to be the means by which the private capitalism of the pre-1917 era was supplanted by a "state capitalism" which, in turn, was ultimately rejected and replaced once again by the current movement back to private capitalism. Resnick and Wolff produce a new history of the Soviet Union in which they read the debates over state versus private Control of enterprises, industrial policy, rural transformation, and much else about the Soviet economic structure during this century as evidence of a stunning neglect of the prevalent state capitalist class processes as they partly constituted all spheres of Soviet life. As they argued in their earlier piece, the reason for this neglect has primarily to do with the conflation of the abolition of private property and the setting up of central planning with a communist class process. Resnick and Wolff show here that various supposedly "noncapitalist" forms of power and property, including worker management and social ownership of productive property, were at times intact in the Soviet Union, but clearly not in the service of communism. Rather, the capitalist exploitation of industrial workers by the Council of Industrial ministers was aided and abetted by some moves to "democratize" industrial decision making, by the elimination of private ownership, by the administering of commodity production and value relations through state rather than market institutions, and, perhaps most harmfully, through the ideological obliteration of the Marxian concept of class in the name of the victory of socialism. Resnick and Wolff's unique empirically grounded perspective positions them to see the recent downfall of the Soviet Union as the (perhaps temporary) failure of state capitalism to avoid the crises of surplus production and distribution that had emerged most forcefully by the 1970s, but that had successfully been resisted or postponed during the preceding 20 years. The current move back to private capitalism does not, therefore, represent the decisive historical defeat of communism that is trumpeted by both right and left critics today since, in Resnick and Wolff's words, "the almost tragicomic truth is that a century of hot debate over socialism/communism versus capitalism masked a set of oscillations from private to state to private capitalism."

As the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe recede now into the background after the initial flush of public exhilaration at the end of the Cold War, it is interesting to consider the cultural, economic, and political conditions that have translated the supposed struggles for self-determination into the veritable "Americanization" of Eastern Europe. Such a consideration serves as the backdrop for Reinhold Wagnleitner's spirited investigation of the similar cultural imperialism practiced to exquisite success in Central Europe after World War II. As Wagnleitner contends, the victory of Western and specifically American cultural ideals in Germany and Austria proceeded not as "a by-product of the political, military, and economic successes of the United States in Cold War Europe" but, rather, as the ideological conquest of Central Europe via the Hollywood film. Wagnleitner shows that a whole generation of Germans and Austrians, as well as the British, French, and Italians—allies and enemies alike—were virtually created in their tastes and lifestyles by the images and forms of consumption and display that were the stock-in trade of Hollywood films after the war. In telling this saga, Wagnleitner reveals the forms of mutual cooperation and antagonism that existed between the U.S. Army and other agencies of occupation and pacification and the U.S. film industry, as the Army relied increasingly on Hollywood for its propaganda efforts, and as film moguls, in too, depended upon the power of the Army and the U.S. governmment to provide the American film industry with nearly monopolistic control of the production and distribution of cinema in Central Europe. So, while the American governmment was declaring "hooray for Hollywood" as it began the process of "denazifying" Germany and Austria, the film industry was shouting "whoopie for Washington" as American film companies were able to reap monopoly profits and hegemonize their markets largely because of the deliberate destruction and control, through U.S. policy, of their cinematic competitors in the zones of occupation. For Wagnleitner, the results of this symbiotic process for Central Europeans was the "lack of control over the creation and dissemination of cultural capital; loss of sovereignty over the production of those images, which have probably become the prime movers and media of cultural self-interpretation and self-definition in the twentieth century." As the present-day Eastern European self-identity seems increasingly to be "made in America," Wagnleitner's entertaining reminder of the earlier success of U.S. cultural diplomacy and propaganda in Central Europe in creating a culture redolent with "capitalist consumption ideologies" requires a closer look at the ways in which the more recent "velvet revolutions" may, too, have been scripted in Hollywood.

Carole Stabile revives the notion of "class interests" in her stinging criticism of the postmodern tendency in Western feminism. As Stabile contends, the move to subsume the materiality of women and their bodies to the realm of discourse has had the result of privileging the particular activities, perspectives, and interests of one group of people in contemporary capitalist societies, that of intellectuals. Stabile chides feminists who follow the train of thought about power and politics a . postmodern politics of "radical democracy"—that has all but erased the traces of class experiences, positions, and forms of struggle in women's lives today. Stabile makes her case by finding the distinctive class interests that are served by the attack on class, the economy, essentialism, and materialism—that is, on the Marxist tradition in social thought and political action—in the work of Judith Butler and other leading postmodern feminist thinkers. For Stabile, feminists within the academy have disinherited class because, in the hands of Marxists, it supposedly downplays race and gender difference (again within the sphere of intellectual activities). In her eyes, this move belies the forms of capitalist exploitation and a. oppression, including those specific to women not privileged enough to avoid such exploitation, that are secured by the focus on the world of discourse and not on everyday material life. Stabile uses as an example of the mistakes in politics that are the consequence of feminism neglecting the materiality of class (and also race) in the lives of many women the reaction of well-placed feminists to the Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown debacle in 1992. As Stabile aptly reminds us, Quayle's attack on the single-parent status of the fictional TV character Murphy Brown came not only within the context of an abstract discussion of "family values" but, more insidiously, in response to the rioting in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict. Stabile regards as a prime example of the displacement to the realm of discourse of what should have been condemned by feminists as a ruse to disguise h the real conditions of poverty and neglect for poor women and blacks the too willing response to the skewering of Murphy Brown of many feminists who called for an expansion of the definition of what counts as a family. The cynical and misguided attempts by some feminists, in expanding this definition, to treat single parenting as a question of either choice or circumstance—and, therefore, according to Stabile, granting these "options" an equal standing—hid the fact that it is only a rewarding choice for those women whose class status protects them from the vicissitudes of capitalist exploitation. Thus, Stabile warns, contemporary feminism is in danger of allying itself with the forces that support a vast array of women's economic oppression by eschewing for feminist theory and politics the concept of class and the politics of class-interested subjects.

In the ongoing debates surrounding the different historical onsets of modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century, the issue of demarcating clearly between a regime of "productionism" and then later "consumerism" has been central. In his essay, Bruce Pietrykowski argues forcefully that no such clear-cut historical rupture between the modern and postmodern can be adduced. Writing as an economist, Pietrykowski shifts our attention away from the more familiar question of the modern or postmodern status of contemporary economic theory and method to the less explored problem of ascertaining the character of the lived experience of economic agents, especially in their current exalted role as consumers. Pietrykowski finds inspiration for his own study of this lived experience in the - work of the "regulation school" of Michel Aglietta and in recent discussions of a so-called post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation. Following in the path of the regulation theorists, Pietrykowski claims that a veritable transition from mass produced techniques of production ("Fordism") to those informed by small-scale, batch production and "just-in-time" methods of inventory control and goods delivery has in fact occurred in tandem with a transformation in the role of consumers and their patterns of consumption. Yet, in crucial departure from the regulation school and others who wish to link decisively the historical emergence of postFordism with postmodern culture (here tied together by the sobriquets "consumerism" or "society of the spectacle" or even "late capitalism"), Pietrykowski shows that modern and postmodern cultural elements and modes of consumption simultaneously have occurred within both Fordist and post-Fordist regimes of capital accumulation. For example, Pietrykowski presents evidence that many of the elements of "fast capitalism" and "ephermerality, fragmentation, juxtaposition, surface, and depthlessness" that are currently attributed to post-Fordism and postmodernism can be clearly seen in the rise of consumer services and the particular aesthetics or designs—he discusses the design features, spatial arrangements, and service orientation of early twentieth-century gas stations and department stores—that attended these services during the supposed heyday of Fordism in the United States. One important and concluding implication of Pietrykowski's argument is that, while it may be useful to distinguish between Fordist and post-Fordist regimes of production and consumption, economists and others would do well to recognize that "the legacy of postmodern influences may well extend back beyond the political economic crisis of the 1970s" and, hence, may suggest "shifting boundaries between the modern and postmodern."

We are happy to include here several works as excerpts from the exhibition "This is my body: this is my blood" that was mounted in conjunction with the conference "Marxism and the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities" in November 1992 organized by Rethinking MARXISM at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. By means of introducing and presenting the works selected here by the curators of the exhibition, Susan Jahoda and May Stevens, we quote from several contributions to the catalog from that exhibition. In our Foreword to the catalog, we stated that "the human body has been embraced as the subject for this exhibition because the body mediates the crises and possibilities of our social, political, and personal lives." Fleshing out (so to speak) such a mediation, the writer and artist Robert Blake sees the body in contemporary society as the "contested site where state interests are most determined to control reproduction, nakedness, sexuality, and are equally mobilized to restrict representation." Adding to this the appropriate context then for the exhibition's focus on the body, the well-known art critic and activist Lucy Lippard noted that "as racism, anti-semitism, and homophobia ooze through the cracks in disintegrating global structures, as artists desperately seek their places among the ruins and the sprouts, and as the U.S. Supreme Court hypocritically confirms a woman's right to her body and makes it impossible for most women to exercise that right, the theme is all too timely." The specific focus in the exhibition and in several of the entries reproduced here on the particular status and representation of women's bodies and their more recent dispersion provoked Lippard's reflection that "the autobiography and narrative that underlay much . . . feminist art have reappeared in the 90s, but now they are re-informed by the shifting and wildly diverse grounds of 'multiculturalism'." The desire of the participating artists to situate representations of the body in mass and popular culture but also to shed light on their own politically informed processes of artistic representation without compromising their works' integrity led Lippard to conclude that "they put their ideas and others' bodies on the line. " This line of sight is further illuminated by Blake who views the common terrain of the artwork presented here and in the original installation to be "the representation of otherness through visual and Iinguistic projects." The transgressive character of the work, then, is attributable to a "breech of silence" about the body as the different entries taken as a whole, in Blake's words, "chart wounds, differences, openings, breaks, refusals, recollections, collective and individual sites of resistance." We thank all involved in the F organization of the exhibition and catalog and the participating artists for allowing us to present some of the results of this highly successful and provocative show to our readers.

At least since the rise of the Western New Left in the 1960s, and certainly since the publication in 1985 of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, theoreticians of "radical democracy" have chastised orthodox versions of Marxism for their disabling class essentialism, political vanguardism, and apocalyptic vision of social upheaval. The current sharp opposition of radical democracy, often drawing quite heavily from Western liberal traditions, to Marxism has relied extensively, lay Stone notes here, on a rejection of Marxism's frequent recourse to positivist forms of explanation and to totalizing notions of social change and revolutionary activity. One of the primary sources for this rejection, Stone explains, is an appreciation of post-Hegelian phenomenology and hermeneutics with its emphasis on the importance of the intersubjective (and therefore pluralistic and ever-changing) conceptions of perception and the related idea that one's thoughts and actions are always situated within particular cultural, theoretical, and political "traditions" (thus eschewing illusions of a "revolutionary break"). Stone shows that the neglect of Marxism's more phenomenological and therefore dialectical moments has ironically led many Marxists to assert the primacy of "scientific" knowledge, class struggle, and revolutionary ruptures over the plurality of perception, the recognition of the "situatedness" and transitoriness of all perspectives and subjective/political identities, and the transformation of traditions, especially those of contemporary liberalism, from "within," as it were. Thus, Stone believes that such "post-Marxist" advocates of radical democracy as Laclau and Mouffe have hit the mark in preferring to wed phenomenology's insights into discursive and cognitive pluralism (now linked to strategic political pluralism) with Gramscian notions of hegemony and "historic bloc" in order to articulate a theory of radical political action which—in their view, contrary to contemporary Marxism—is simultaneously open-ended and determined. While Stone joins other radical democrats in imagining "Marxists abandoning Marxism as an ideology proper and appropriating and resituating important elements of contemporary Marxist theory within a hermeneutically structured radical democratic terrain," he does hold out the prospect that Marxism can revive the more dialectical, antipositivist, and liberal humanist values and elements of its own tradition in order to reform itself in the direction of radical democratic theory and politics.

The first entry in the Remarx section is Erwin Marquit's reflections on the conditions that led to the tumultuous rupture in the Communist Party of the USA in 1991. Writing as a participant-observer to the events that unfolded both leading up to and after the mass defection of many dedicated party members at the Party's 25th National Convention in late 1991, Marquit describes the direction of the official leadership, under the auspices of Gus Hall, as one that mostly subverted the basic principles of "democratic centralism," that privileged unnecessarily the organization of industrial workers rather than making central to the party's activities the question of racism and African-American equality, and that neglected critical theoretical and educational initiatives in developing distinctly Marxist views on the crisis of socialism in the USSR and much else. Marquit's particular reading of the crisis in the party leads him to a mostly sympathetic analysis of the consequent formation of the Committees of Correspondence, though Marquit notes that one of the problems that has appeared is the near abandonment, despite the presence of life-long communists and Marxists, of Marxism and Leninism as the theoretical and practical foundations for this new left-wing political organization. Though concerned primarily with the "organizational crisis" of the CPUSA, Marquit's essay raises interesting and lingering problems for all Marxists in the United States and perhaps elsewhere, such as the issue of how to conceptualize struggles for democracy and the end to race (and, we might add, gender) discrimination in relation to Marxist-inspired political movements and Marxist social theory more broadly. So, while Marquit's piece is clearly meant to intervene in political events with respect to a particular organization, it is important, nevertheless, not only as a historical document of recent Marxian left activity in the United States, but also as a concrete example with which we can retheorize the very problematic formulations that have been bequeathed to us by the CPUSA and orthodox Marxism.

The Cold War is over? Not really, says Benjamin Page, as he describes in his contribution to our Remarx section the latest economic and cultural phase of the Cold War following from the abatement of military hostilities between East and West. Using the changes that led to the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992-93 as a case in point, Page depicts the attempts by such Western-dominated international institutions as the World Bank and the IMF to impose a specifically Western agenda dedicated to the eradication of any traces of the socialist legacy in Eastern Europe. Page notes that in the former Czechoslovakia, the struggles for democracy, political freedom, and a humane socialism that coalesced in popular calls for the return of Alexander Dubcek as President in 1989 were soon blunted and displaced by projects invOlving privatization and unregulated market economics. In fact, Page contends, it was the fear and dissatisfaction with this elision of popular demands and the concern for retaining some of the material benefits of socialism that may have led Slovaks to opt for a separate republic. Page believes that Western capital and its international agents have had as their primary target in the "reform" of Eastern Europe the elimination of social programs, such as state spending on medical care, education, and the like, and any legislation or remnants of the socialist experiment, such as the fairly successful collective farms in Czechoslovakia, that stand in the way of privatization and the spread of market forces. Such moves to dismantle socialism have been underway for several years, the effects of which, by now, have been felt by many workers and others in Eastern Europe as a decline in living standards. Page believes, in fact, that while much had been promised in the way of modem capitalist concerns as the shiny-new future following from the penetration of Western interests, there is more evidence to suggest that Eastern Europe may become the source of cheap and available labor rather than an outpost of cutting edge, high-tech industry. Page extends his analysis to suggest that in this postmilitary phase of the Cold War, the real losers in the "Western agenda" may be workers across the globe since the creation of a large pool of underpaid labor in the East can and may already serve as the condition for depressing wages and resisting worker demands—all in the name of the "new competition"—in the Third World and in the West itself.

Jonathan Diskin's review of Ernesto Laclau's New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time carries forward both the theme of radical democracy developed in lay Stone's article (above) and his own past work (see Diskin and Sandler, RM, Fall 1993) on the breakthroughs and impasses of Laclau's antiessentialism. Diskin applauds Laclau's 1990 book as containing several real advances in the theory of democracy and its connection to discursive plurality, the work of which had begun with Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Specifically, Diskin points to Laclau's more elaborated understanding of the "democratic revolution" of our times as being about the forces of "dislocation" and "negativity" that have made it impossible to secure closure of any presumed objectively grounded historical event or movement in the realms of politics and society. Unlike that of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Diskin notes, Laclau's presentation of the possibilities for radical democratic thought and practice proceeds here not in direct relation to the history of Marxian political and social thought. Rather, Laclau's "manifesto" talks about any movement as democratic that "weakens" the impulse or the attempt to wholly encompass subjective identities, political opposition, and the social totality as unified, centered, and objectively determined. Diskin finds illuminating Laclau's refusal of deriving liberatory political projects and the hierarchy of privilege often accorded to this or that struggle from the supposed "nature of existence itself." Laclau's discussion of the temporary unities that can occur as a result of hegemony and antagonism rather than emerge almost naturally from the "inner logic" of some historical contradiction represents, says Diskin, a laudable endeavor. This endeavor is concerned with breaking the strong causal and logic-bound link often posited by classical Marxism between political action and the "closed discursive space" of contradiction. And yet, in Diskin's eyes, Laclau's desire to break this link falters rather noticeably when he turns to discuss the "proliferations of dislocations peculiar to advanced capitalism." Diskin sees as a serious departure from his previous antiessentialism Laclau's falling back on a seemingly "real" capitalism, replete with stages in which the latest one produces actual fragmentation in global production and commodification, as a means to deduce logically (and secure closure in the "nature of existence") the forces of democratic politics and identities. As an untheorized category, capitalism is treated by Laclau as given and, in Diskin's view, this leads Laclau to pass "from the logic of a theoretical argument to programmatic notions, suggesting that the latter can be deduced from the former." So, while Diskin sees great merit in Laclau's attempts to constitute the political and social realms complexly, he chides this otherwise careful thinker for neglecting to reconceptualize economic life in a nonessentialist manner and for producing a notion of democracy that, at times, tends towards universality because of its foundation in the historical reality of the latest phase of capitalism.

In closing, we wish to offer publicly our sincerest thanks and share with readers our sense of enormous indebtedness to one of our own. From the time that RM was simply a good idea in the mid-eighties to the present inauguration of volume 7, the production of the journal has been overseen by David Ruccio. With the completion of this issue, David has stepped down (though not from the board), and the job of production editor will now be carried out by Carole Biewener. Readers should know that along with other members of the editorial board and of our parent organization, the Association for Economic and Social Analysis, and, of course, our publisher, David has worked to format, edit, and produce every issue to date of RM (in addition to his other editorial responsibilities). David's contributions to the design, formulation, and technical processes involved in the production of RM have been innumerable and indispensable. Among other things, there is no question that had he not been willing to figure out and organize the ways in which we could produce RM ourselves through personal computers (as we did during the first 3 years of our existence), the journal could not have existed. Since we never before listed his contributions as production editor anywhere else in our pages, we wished to make clear both to David and to our readers that he has not labored in obscurity and that, to the contrary, he has always had our deepest admiration and respect for his work. We are sure our readers join us in these sentiments.

The Editors

In this issue we begin with Kenneth Surin's précis of the "marxism" of Toni Negri, Felix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze. Surin shows us that Negri, Deleuze, and Guattari go "beyond Marx" in their accounts of the present form that capitalism and the conditions for resistance to it have taken. As Surin notes, one of the crucial moments in this going beyond the letter of Marx has involved (as in the work of Louis Althusser) a turn to Spinoza, especially since Negri, Deleuze, and Guattari see Spinoza as providing a non- or antidialectical "materialist ontology of the constitution of political practice." Surin reads the work of all three radical thinkers as a response to the particular "crisis of utopia" that has enveloped western, developed nations since 1968. In this post-68 period, capitalism has now passed from a Keynesian-inspired, social democratic capitalism, in which the state and civil society could still be viewed as distinct, to an "integrated world capitalism" where the "real subsumption" of society to capital has resulted in the indistinction of capital, the state, and civil society. Negri, Deleuze, and Guattari may be joined in this view that capitalism has entered a new phase and that the dialectics of Hegelian Marxism cannot suffice to explain difference and antagonism in the present world system. They may also agree that Spinoza's "philosophy of the constitution of the structural movement of the multitude" and his physics of power, force, and opposition may be more useful than traditional Marxism in constituting a new anticapitalist political practice. But, Surin also explicates the differences between these three theorists. For instance, for Negri, the movement beyond the Marxian dialectic is grounded in the real historical conditions of capitalism and the forms of outright opposition of the proletariat to capital today; while for Deleuze, and perhaps Guattari, the objection to the dialectic is more "philosophical" and based on the view that the Hegelian notion of contradiction (borrowed by Marx) is a negation of singularity, multiplicity, and difference. In reconciling some of the differences between the three, Surin states that they share in some way the view that in "late capitalism" capital "operates in a domain where the separation between state and society can no longer be maintained" and where there is a single state/society "complex." Thus, Marxist thought must be particularly cognizant of "the production of social capital" and the dominative practices of the state (the "negative state") directed to bringing about forms of social cooperation in organizing capitalist labor processes. It is by thinking through these practices, the present limits of capital, and the politics of a countervailing force—based, in Negri's schema, on the real antagonism of the "socialized worker" to capital itself—that Marxism may now be reconstituted.

Barbara Epstein raises the issue of the apparent disjuncture of U.S. military superiority, strong patriotism, vibrant economic growth, and class mobility in the Pax Americana after World War II with the various "panics" and generalized anxiety in American culture~during the same period. Epstein looks specifically at. the fears that gripped American culture in the late nineteen forties and much of the fifties regarding the "effeminization" of males, the diminishment of masculinity and "real" sex, and the spread of male homosexuality. As Epstein notes, many of these fears were fueled by two sources: the growing psychoanalytic/psychiatric community, especially as psychiatrists were increasingly called in during World War II to pronounce on the mental health and suitability for service of young men, and the immensely popular "scandal" magazines, many of which published "psychological" and other pieces celebrating male sexual libertinism while admonishing forms of experimentation that went beyond straight sex. Epstein points out that the various panics about masculinity often converged in deducing the origins of the "problem" to "momism," the view, supported by numerous mental health professionals, that a large number of American men suffered from having overbearing, overprotective mothers. In her search for the social conditions that may have produced such panics, Epstein considers seriously the so-called "crisis of masculinity" and suggests that the anxieties that were driving Americans to worry about the "weakening" of their culture can be understood perhaps as reactions to the powerful role many women exercised within traditional family structures over the lives of their children in the face of changes in social life that took place immediately after the war (suburbanization, women's entry and then exit from the labor force, and so forth). Epstein finishes with some thoughts on how such a seeming discrepancy between "reality" and culture (similar, she suggests, to the present gap between the vastly changing roles of men, women, and families and the current hubbub over the return to "family values") can be illuminated by "the Marxist inclination to look for contradiction as a window onto hidden levels of social reality" such that "deep changes in social structure" and also "new movements for social change" are unearthed and brought to light.

Grow or die! According to Blair Sandler, this is the fundamental message of traditional Marxist political economy regarding the "logic of capital." This message, Sandler contends, serves as the basic tenet underlying "eco-Marxism," the recent blending of "red" and "green" movements for ecologically sound, postcapitalist societies. Sandler views the "grow or die" (GOD, for short) Marxist discourse as seriously flawed, since its own inexorable logic leads eco-Marxists to conclude that capitalism and ecology are incompatible. As Sandler shows, this conclusion is built up from a particular interpretation of Marxian value theory in which all expenditures on environmentally safer production processes and commodities are seen as "unproductive" to capital and, hence, as deductions from capitalists' profits. In the GOD discourse, then, capitalists are ultimately beset by the growth of environmentalism. On the one hand, if capitalists accede to the demands made for cleaner/greener production and goods, the accumulation of capital slows down, perhaps fatally. If, on the other hand, capitalists ignore environmental concerns, then "ecopocalypse"—the eventual devastation of natural resources and the planet—will occur. From Sandler's overdeterminist Marxian standpoint, the posing of this dilemma occludes from view the possibility of "green capitalism," a situation he believes is now occurring in which some capitalists are able to maintain and even expand their capital base while engaging in environmentally friendly production. Sandler's theoretical contribution resides in his explanation of how "environmental regimes"—including the present ecologically conscious regime—overdetermine the very value of commodities, thus transforming previously "unproductive" expenditures into value-creating ones. As a result, Sandler shows that capitalist exploitation is indeed consistent with the extension of green concerns even to the realm of capitalist production itself. Sandler sees that for many eco-Marxists, the "grow or die" premise begets the inevitable conclusion that only a socialist revolution can effectively promote environmentalism. Seeing that socialism may not now be on the agenda and wishing to have something to say to other radical environmentalists, eco-Marxists have often latched on to demands to force capitalists to be more environmentally responsible. Thus, as Sandler concludes, the avoidance of the overdeterminist Marxist approach to value and nature and an adherence to "grow or die" discourse leads eco-Marxists to be complicit, mostly unwittingly, in the current spread of green capitalism.

The rapid privatization of productive property that has taken place in China under Deng Xiaoping, says Harry Williams, is only the latest in a series of retreats since the revolution from real social ownership and worker control. Williams chronicles debates ova the "property question" in postrevolutionary China and shows that the official party lines, those of the main radical critics (such as the Gang of Four), and today's reform strategies have all defined socialist ownership so as to leave property essentially in private hands. Williams contends that such leaders as Mao Zedung saw early on that state or public ownership of production facilities was only one step in the road to socialist ownership and that formal ownership did not translate into the real control of property by the masses. Yet, Williams also notes that from Mao onward the question of worker control was usually subsumed to the issue of party/cadre control and often discussed in terms of the appropriate leadership both of the party and of management positions. Williams thus contends that, in fact, throughout much of the history of the People's Republic of China, party bureaucrats were able to retain effective control over production, hence displacing most attempts to "democratize" workplaces by channeling them through existing state institutional structures. When circumstances arose that promised more radical changes in the property system, as during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the democratization efforts remained voluntaristic, mostly unorganized and, therefore, were not institutionalized. Even the later efforts of the Gang of Four to "kick up a fuss over ownership" degenerated into a clash over party leadership, despite the advances in critical thinking that led the Gang to see "socialism" in China as revisionist and subject to the rule of bourgeois economic and political right. Williams points out the irony in the fact that Dengist reformers have been motivated in their calls for extensive privatization by problems similar to those explicitly addressed by the Gang: the need for a "radical stratagem" to counteract bureaucratism and the~ lack of enthusiasm for further changes under the banner of socialist revolution. So, while Mao and the Gang of Four may have placed politics in command, and while the Dengists have replaced this with economics in command, in Williams's view, the property system has never been placed in the hands of workers. Williams's outlook is slightly brightened, however, by the writings of Chen Erjin, one of the key thinkers in the Democracy Wall movement of the late seventies. As a poignant end to his brief history, Williams finds solace and satisfaction in Chen's view that "only by placing control of production and politics in the hands of the masses, mediated by democratic institutions, can society move toward socialism."

The rethinking and revamping of state welfare policy has proceeded apace with neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and the growing prominence of feminist and other radical movements over the past twenty or more years. In a past issue (Spring 1993), Nancy Fraser documented the changes in thinking about welfare policy from the Reagan-Bush years to the Clinton administration. In this issue, Martha Ackelsberg provides an even deeper focus on the concepts of "dependency" that seem to shape the suggestions for welfare reform emanating from critics of all political stripes. Ackelsberg, though, concentrates her powers of analysis and critique on recent feminist perspectives on welfare policy, especially those that maintain the view that the economic dependence of women on men and/or the state is what is to be most avoided in any overhaul of patriarchal capitalist society and the welfare state. In reviewing the contributions and quandaries bequeathed by liberalism to recent feminist thinking on welfare reform, Ackelsberg calls important attention to the fact that, for classical liberals, the notion that economic dependence is unworthy of citizenship in a modem democracy is clearly founded on a male-centered view of independence and the right to political participation. So, while Ackelsberg does see some of the virtue in liberal feminist criticisms of the economic dependence of women on men, or on their families, or on the state, she also sees that such criticisms mostly ignore the value of unpaid female labor and the many forms of nurturing that women do within the confines of their"interdependent" relationships. Likewise, while Ackelsberg appreciates the Marxian socialist (and especially the socialist-feminist) advances in social theory that shift the focus from individual economic achievement to group-based actions and interconnections, she notes a similar recourse to economic independence or self-sufficiency for women as a solution to women's oppression. In criticizing both strands of feminist thought,~ Ackelsberg calls for a movement "beyond the dependency model" of women's poverty and the welfare system. Ackelsberg's preferred approach is one that refuses the idea that there is any meaningful distinction to be maintained between dependent and independent subjects in contemporary societies. Rather, Ackelsberg closes with her plea to revalue the different types of dependence (and not just economic dependence) that "ought to be viewed as potential sources for empowerment, rather than symptoms of powerlessness." If we follow this lead, Ackelsberg suggests, we can see welfare reform as a site within which to validate "mutuality" and to valorize, even in monetary form, "one's place as a member of an interdependent community."

It is common among historians of ideas to trace the modern concern with individual human nature and its many effects on society to the work of the seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, whose writings served as the basis and foil for the founders of classical liberalism, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, grounded his gloomy view of liberty and individual freedom on the thesis that unconstrained self-interest could only lead to "a war of every man against every man." In his article here, John Sinisi revisits Hobbes's main theses and shows how the modem liberal view of capitalist markets as the key mechanism in reconciling self-interest, social peace, and economic development is built up from Hobbesian premises. While in social and economic theory the dominant modernist tendency has been to supercede Hobbes with Smith's more sympathetic rendering of the "invisible hand" of markets driven by self-interest, there do exist neo-Hobbesian and Marxian challenges to the mainstream. Sinisi shows that there are "deep resonances" between the neo-Hobbesian and Marxian critiques of Smithian liberalism. For, as Sinisi contends, though it is the case that neo-Hobbesians begin with individual self-interest as the wellspring for all consequent human action, their view is that individuals will often and quite rationally seek to alter the "rules of the game" in order to take full advantage of their situations at the expense of others. Thus, as with Marxists, who begin of course with concepts of class and class struggle, neo-Hobbesians (most of whom, we should add, can be usually found on the far right of the political spectrum) theorize the complex intersection of economic and political institutions and struggles for power within which individuals and groups seek to use the state to receive transfers of wealth to bolster their positions. Sinisi notes that, while starting from very different points of departure, neo-Hobbesians and Marxists have a similar concern with unproductive and wasteful activities that result from the self-interested behavior of individuals and classes under capitalism. So, Sinisi concludes that, while neo-Hobbesians and Marxists may seem worlds apart on the issue of the efficacy of capitalist markets to solve such problems, their common analyses and criticisms of the use and misuse of social, economic, and political power in self-interested systems make them useful to each other as sources for intellectual stimulation and political dialogue.

Marilyn Zuckerman's poetry does not flinch at its own powerful effects. In her poem "The Cherry Orchard," Zuckerman summons up the dreary fate of a once aristocratic family (presumably the already disintegrating Prozoroff family of Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters) as the century has continued to play out in pre- and postrevolutionary Russia. Zuckerman's poem expresses the constant setbacks not just to this family but more to Russian society and to the hopes and dreams of consequent generations as revolutions have aged, become exhausted or impotent, or have simply been deferred. The poem takes the form of the tired but bitter lament of Zuckerman's narrator (Masha of The Three Sisters?), as she recounts the cycles of expectations, work, broken promises, and new bosses—but also dogged survival—that have been the life of her family and for many Russians during the modern era. The bite in Zuckerman's poem comes as the narrator resignedly notes that the Americans and others have rushed in after the toppling of the Soviet regime, leaving herself and the Russian people to find that drudgery, exploitation, and mistreatment—now linked to the demands of international capital—have not abated and instead have taken their place in a recurring dirge of declining fortune. In "Problems for Peace in the Middle East," the poem speaks through the voice of the forgotten multitude of Palestinian and Israeli women who have suffered at the hands of their warring husbands and brothers. Zuckerman conveys the harsh irony that these women—separated though they may be through forced boundaries and a geography of hate and occupation—are permitted to share silencing, physical regimentation, mandatory service for "their men," disdain and neglect, ritual mourning, and numerous other displacements. They are prohibited from "sitting at the table" where their own food is served along with deadly plans for continued warfare or with the new prospects for liberation and peace. Zuckerman employs an arid desert language, rich in the traditions of retribution and religious prescription, to depict the defiant stance of those whose recourse to mute vigil speaks louder than the parched, broken voices of their occupiers and oppressors.

We were intrigued when we received Leonard Harris's "open letter," which he wrote as a reaction and lead-up to this November's first national conference of the Radical Philosophy Association in lowa. Harris's letter, which we include here as the first entry in our Remarx section, raises in a provocative, interrogatory way many decisive issues relating to the future of socialist thought and practice. Of particular interest to readers may be Harris's insistence on facing the "underside" of socialist and most radical thinking. He touches upon and challenges, among other things, the transhistorical, universal significance of radical action; the privileged moral place in left discourse of "oppressed" groups; the romanticization of the "historically despised"; the feebleness of the nostalgic language of socialism; and the obfuscation of the terror, deceit, corruption, violence, and domination that may (must?) attend all efforts to empower the disempowered. But, what is noteworthy as well about Harris's letter, at least as we read it, is that it is written to inspire a reestimation and reconstruction of Marxism and socialist thought. Harris throws down the gauntlet by questioning whether socialism has any future "without critiques that face the role of coercion, pressure, and force encoded in every effort to reform and resituate the despised?" In printing Harris's letter here, we take the opportunity to invite RM readers to reply with brief letters of their own with hope that we will be able to select some to publish in forthcoming issues as responses to or commentaries on Harris's piece.

After a brief period in which the classical economic theory of "comparative advantage" in international trade was once again heralded as providing the miracle cure for the economic development of all nations rich and poor, of late a "new international economics" has appeared that has reintroduced both history and government policy as crucial components for achieving an advantage in foreign trade. As Thomas DelGiudice recounts, though, this new international economics is as blind to the role class and class struggles plays in shaping and blocking a nation's trading advantages as were earlier theories of economic development. In his Remarx piece, DelGiudice goes a distance to remedy this faulty eyesight by showing exactly how an advantage in international trade can be historically achieved through changes in the class conditions of a developing nation. Looking at the history of prerevolutionary Nicaragua and the creation of its trading advantage in cotton exports through the lens of class allows DelGiudice to reveal the means by which the Nicaraguan state in the 1950s helped create the supposedly sanguine conditions in which advanced technologies were introduced, labor productivity was increased, unit production costs for cotton growers were reduced while profits rose, and all in conjunction with the relative immiserisation of cotton wage laborers. Additionally, DelGiudice employs a detailed class analysis to show that the ability of large cotton growers in Nicaragua to gain access to sources of income in addition to "profits" through their increasing control over the "conditions of existence" of capitalist cotton growing (such as land ownership, access to credit, control over marketing, and so forth) created as well an uneven development in the cotton industry. This uneven development fostered divisions that ultimately weakened the political resistance of the capitalist class in the days leading up to the Sandinista revolution. Using Nicaragua as a good example of a nation in which export success was linked with heightened inter- and intraclass tensions, DelGiudice's main point is that without a thoroughgoing class analysis of the policies and historical conditions that promote national "gains" through international trade, observers and natives of developing nations may overlook, to their eventual peril, the class consequences of enacting such changes.

The rational-choice model of human behavior remains the favored model within the economics profession. This model—in which "autonomous" individuals are believed to choose between alternative courses of action through a deliberate attempt to maximize "expected utility"—has been influential to such a degree that, during the past fifteen years, rational-choice Marxism has been one of the prevalent forms through which Marxian social and economic theory has been rethought. Despite a lengthy history within Marxism of suspicion of any social theory that derives social outcomes from individual motives, rational-choice models now flourish not only among radical economists (in conformity with their mainstream colleagues), but also among other radical thinkers in disciplines outside of economics. But, as Carles Muntaner reminds us in his Remarx essay, rational-choice models of human cognition and action have long been criticized and rejected by practitioners in fields, such as experimental psychology, whose speciality is explaining the determinants of human behavior. Muntaner presents here an array of criticisms of rational-choice theory from fields ranging from sociology to behavioral psychology. What seems to be common to many of these criticisms is the view that rational-choice models neglect the interaction between a social "environment" and individual choice, tend to understate the effects of past interactions with or responses to the behavior of others, generally ignore the impact of "social leaming," underestimate the role of rules or nomms on behavior, and much else. In Muntaner's discussion, rational-choice models are likewise seen to be faulty predictors of group behavior or at least of individual choices within the context of collective entities. Muntaner argues that the class-based Marxism of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, among others, fumishes a better grasp of the overdetemmined relations and processes that lead to both individual and group activities. So, in opposition to the boasts that rational-choice models and game theory have greater explanatory and predictive power, Muntaner infers the relative superiority of overdeterminist Marxism from his view that it conforms far better than rational-choice models to the breakthroughs in understanding human behavior that have been produced by experimental cognitive scientists in diverse fields.

Tony Smith reviews one of Emest Mandel's most recent books, Power and Money. Smith's review consists mainly of coherently laying out Mandel's informed responses to the claims that, with the collapse of the Soviet model, Marxism and socialism have been refuted and/or shown to be unfeasible. Mandel, perhaps the leading Marxist economist in the world today, challenges directly the view that the overthrow of the Soviet system demonstrates the impossibility of ever establishing socialism as a socioeconomic system. While rejecting the idea that the Soviet Union was characterized by "state capitalism" (see the articles by Resnick and Wolff in the Summer 1993 and Spring 1994 issues on this subject), Mandel, as Smith relates, believes that the successful transition from capitalism to socialism was blocked there and congealed into some "mutant form" of bureaucratic state control. While such a thesis may be familiar to followers of Mandel's previous work, readers may be more intrigued, in Smith's rendition, by Mandel's insistence that several of the central conditions that would be necessary for his model of democratic socialism are already in place in advanced capitalist nations. Mandel's model—in which direct worker participation, workers' collectives, a kind of consumer sovereignty, free provision of basic necessities, and a multiparty political system would be combined with forms of centralized planning in preference to markets and the rule of the "law of value"—would require a shorter workday, generalized access to information, an material abundance. So, as Smith concludes, Mandel's book (which Smith calls "magisterial summary of his views") provides historical detail, hardheaded calculations, practical proposals, and a spirit of optimism for those for whom the future Marxism and socialism appears at the moment to be in doubt.

The Editors

In this issue we commence with the troubled question of the relationship between Marxian economic thought and postmodernism. In their article, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio argue that modernist epistemologies, methods of analysis, and views of social causation are clearly dominant within neoclassical, neo-Keynesian, and most Marxian economic frameworks. Yet, they believe that one can detect within each of these schools of thought "moments" in the regnant notions of cognition, behavior, subjectivity, and social determination that defy the decidedly modernist preference for order, centering, and certainty. Amariglio and Ruccio concentrate their analytical efforts on highlighting the effects of this modernist preference on Marxian economic discourse. In so doing, they juxtapose the modernist tendencies to seek foundations for economic explanation in notions of order, centeredness, and certainty against the postmodern valence of notions of disorder, decentering, and uncertainty (or indeterminacy). Amariglio and Ruccio show that many of the main conceptual oppositions that structure classical Marxian economic theory– particularly those of production versus circulation, market versus plan, and ultimately capitalism versus socialism–are characterized by the overall preference to present capitalism and its institutions as disordered, alienating, socially fragmented, mystifying, and uncertainty-producing. In contrast, classical Marxism presents socialism as a system in which the full promise of the modernist project is realized in the social orderliness, organic unification, and subjective wholeness that can presumably come about as the result of rational economic planning directed by a democratically inclined, worker-controlled state. Amariglio and Ruccio allege that much political and theoretical damage has been done by the modernist bias in Marxian thought, and they set out to show how such distinctions as that between market versus plan fall apart with the realization, for example, that markets are as constituted by the predictable repetitions of habit and tradition as plans are subject to uncertainty, disorder, and conflict. In stressing the "postmodern moments" in Marxian thought–in teasing out the notions of disorder, decentering, and uncertainty that are implicit or immanent in the oppositions that are the primary focus of Marxian economic thought–Amariglio and Ruccio contend that the modernist faith in the inherent rationality of a socialist economy must be replaced by the recognition that capitalism has no unique purchase on disorder, decentering, and uncertainty. They conclude by arguing that, in any event, these "postmodern" elements are not the obstacles for constructing a socialist economy that classical Marxism and its offspring have most often believed them to be.

The "dossier" on socialist realism and East Germany modernism prepared by Julia Hell, Loren Charger, and Katie Trumpeter consists of three separate articles preceded by a joint precis surveying the landscape of politics and literary aesthetics in the wake of the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In their prefatory remarks Hell, Charger, and Trumpeter scrutinize the current fashion in German cultural circles to dismiss the socialist-realist art and literature of the GDR as pre- or antimodern, purely polemical, politically ingratiating, complicit with official censorship and state-sponsored brutality, devoid of aesthetic sophistication, and, therefore, worthless. Even more, as the authors point out, some leading lights of German cultural criticism have rejected any "aesthetics of conviction" in their insistence that the contamination of artistic concerns by political commitment must of necessity be rejected if the debasement of culture by the politically correct standards of socialist realism and its like is to be guarded against for the future. As Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener indicate, much of the recent controversy over socialist realism and the "complicity" of its practitioners and even many left opponents of officially sanctioned East German culture is founded, ironically, on a view of socialist realism that buries its numerous contradictions and aesthetic diversity in an all-too-polemical call for the separation of politics, ethics, and culture and the purification of aesthetic production at any cost. The aesthetic elitism that declares itself to be apolitical in German literary circles in opposition to the sullied, propagandistic legacy of East German socialist realism obscures or simply obliterates the various modernist and even postmodernist strategies and lacunae that distinguished the works of some of the main figures in East German literary history. In looking at specific texts produced by these figures, Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener unearth the ways in which socialist realism can be said to have unraveled or complexified itself in the utilization of formal techniques and aesthetic practices that were, at times, neither realist nor univocal in the heroic socialist optimism that was thought to pervade representative texts, performances, and other artifacts. Trumpener’s reading of Anna Seghers’s short story written during the Weimer period, Kruger’s reflections on the different politically-informed programs and aesthetic concerns of playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Muller, and Hell’s considerations on Christa Wolf’s 1963 novel What Remains in the context of recent condemnations of her as a collaborator with the East German regime through her purported involvement with the GDR’s secret police, are all offered as alternatives to left defenses and right denunciations of socialist realism as a cultural monolith. Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener demonstrate nicely that deconstructive readings of nuanced socialist realist texts spanning the history of East Germany can be rendered if we are willing to put aside "the urge to replace the worst excesses of ‘actually existing socialist’ dogma with an equally teleological schema of a triumphant capitalist culture that treats any socialist alternative as an aberration or a joke." The authors of this dossier seek nothing less than to open up the question–thought, by some, to be dead and buried in Germany today and perhaps in the United States as well–of socialist writing, its possibilities, its historical conditions, and its contradictory effects. Toward this end, Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener expose the "ideology of modernism" that has excommunicated (socialist) politically-inspired culture in the name of bringing the former East Germany into the orb of Western liberal cultural Germany ideals. In sum, Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener advance their dossier as a "critical intervention" in hopes of resisting the current silencing of those few critics who can discern political dimensions and agendas in all forms of aesthetic modernism and who may still conceive of socialism as a practicable and honorable goal, if not a perfectly good inspiration for cultural practice.

Regina Frank’s installation "L’Adieu Pearls Before Gods" appeared in a window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art (in New York) in the fall of 1993. Frank’s exhibit consisted of a month’s worth of her sewing pearls onto a silk gown while electronic postings of the daily wages of women’s handwork around the world were flashed above her. As the curator explains in her notes accompanying the installation (reprinted here), Frank’s performance constituted a rich overdetermination in which the inequalities of women’s labor in the global nexus were combined both with the daily ritual of Frank’s purchasing bread and roses with part of the "wage" that her stitchwork would bring and with the electronic equipment that conveys the flows of capital that make possible the multinational needle trades based upon the exploitation of their mostly female labor force. Frank’s installation, depicted here in several stills and a data chart of international wages that prevailed during her performance, raises additional questions for us as well. By calling attention in her enactment to the undervaluation and the wide international disparity of wages for seamstresses and others, Frank problematizes the equally disparate and often invisible labor of "artists." In "performing" labor (in several different senses), Frank avoids the erasure of her own production by connecting it explicitly to a global network of workers. Frank additionally confounds the distinction between art and craft as her performance of needlework and its display in a museum window on Broadway make it difficult to preserve the idea that–despite their often subsistence wages and sweatshop working conditions–seamstresses, embroiderers, and others perform an activity that resides aesthetically or economically outside of the realm of "art." Nor does the artist perform an activity that resists her own insertion into a global division of labor inspired by the extension of capitalist markets. We thank the New Museum and the artist for permitting us to place before readers the traces of Frank’s intriguing performance of indictment, celebration, and solidarity.

Perhaps the primary object of the newly emergent queer theory has been the unabashed challenge to heterosexuality both as a practical norm (for sexuality, gender construction, and general social relations) and as a central theoretical foundation for many of the concepts of identity inherited from liberal social thought. In her overview of queer theory and the politics with which it has been linked, Rosemary Hennessy raises in particular the extent to which queer theory’s critique of heterosexuality and its prevailing social norms circumvents rather than builds upon the insights about gender, sex, and class relations that have emerged from materialist feminism. Hennessy is most concerned that while queer theory has rightly destabilized the notions of fixed (hetero- and homo-) sexual identities and practices by stressing their performative rather than expressive character, it has done so by privileging the realm of signification to the near exclusion of other determinative material processes, such as labor. In Hennessy’s eyes, much "avantgarde" queer theory, including the pathbreaking work of Judith Butler and others, has followed the now familiar post-Marxist move of driving out labor, production, and class in favor of power, desire, and language from the pantheon of ultimate, constitutive causes of "the real." As Hennessy affirms, the resulting conceptions of gender and sexuality textualize these material forces to such an extent that they make difficult, if not impossible, critical interrogations of the sexual and social divisions of labor that help to structure patriarchal control and women’s domestic labor as well as gender and sexuality inside and outside of families. In Hennessy’s view, a queer theory not engaged with the (mostly capitalist) class conditions and the forms of "private" patriarchy that help to overdetermine compulsory heterosexuality is therefore undermined in its attempts to overturn "heteronormativity," in other words, the laws and ideology that naturalize heterosexuality and treat gay and lesbian practices as either to be tolerated or repulsed. Hennessy is dubious, then, of the transgressivity of a nonmaterialist queer theory that can be easily transmogrified into performative gender bending and flexibility in sexual identities and practices and, therefore, into "an index of the discovery of new consumer markets where pleasure can be profitably appropriated and produced." Hennessy concludes by urging queer and left theorists and activists to turn to a "materialist queer theory [that] can put forward a critique of heterosexuality that does not shrink from celebrating the human capacity for sensual pleasure even as it dares to address the overdetermined relations among identities, norms, and divisions of labor."

In this issue’s Remarx section we add to our running discussion on Marxism and ecology (see, for example, Raskin and Bernow, Spring 1991 and Sandler, Summer 1994) with articles by Andriana Vlachou and Roy Morrison. Vlachou leads off with a sharp look at some of the recent attempts by Marxists inspired by ecological viewpoints to resituate Marxism on a firmer, environmentalist basis in thinking through the relations between nature, society, and human intentions and institutions. Vlachou pays particular attention to the debate between Ted Benton and Reiner Grundmann in the pages of New Left Review in the late eighties and early nineties. In contemplating this debate, Vlachou notes the untheorized and largely "mystified" notions of nature, human interests, technology, and much else that function as key concepts and points of contention between Benton and Grundmann. Vlachou takes Benton to task for substituting philosophical "realism" for Marx’s historical materialism; it is this substitution which allows Benton to treat nature and "natural limits" as "real" objects (and therefore, as brute forces to which all human intentions must somehow adhere or bend), the knowledge of which is given to observers and not discursively produced. As Vlachou recounts, Benton’s realism leads him to claim that ecological conditions and crises were underestimated by Marx, Engels, and their followers since they tended to believe in the ability of humans to dominate nature nearly at will. Yet, while Vlachou finds Benton to err too much on the side of unexamined naturalism in his ecological reconstruction of Marxism, she finds Grundmann to err to the same degree in his resort to humanism and rationalism as the means by which he introduces ecological matters into Marxism. Vlachou stakes out a different ground–one that embraces the Marxian concepts of overdetermination, contradiction, and class–to conceive of the many currents that simultaneously constitute natural and social processes into a dialectical engagement with one another. Through some brief examples, Vlachou demonstrates that the kind of knowledge of the environment that can be produced in utilizing a class theoretical viewpoint informed by the Marxian idea of overdetermination can reveal unique insights into ecological problems and their solutions that are not available to Greens through any other means.

Roy Morrison has a somewhat different focus from Vlachou on the relation between Red and Green theories and practices. Morrison is concerned with the extent to which Marxism can both lend itself to and incorporate within its own ambitions the rejection of industrialism, upon which much radical environmentalism is based. Morrison, whose experience in the Clamshell Alliance contributed to his understanding of the manifold interactions between radical thought and political action, believes that the Green analysis of the ecological crisis that attends industrialism in all of its forms ultimately can be conjoined with the liberatory, democratic impulses of Marxism. But, as Morrison states, in order for Marxism to "green" itself, it must give up its persistent exaltation of a future socialist industrial order that would free human potential through the liberation of the machine. Rather, as Morrison argues, Marxism’s encounter with environmentalism must first and foremost include both the goal of achieving ecological sustainability of both human and natural environments and the view that the social and ecological destruction of capitalist industrialism is not simply an epiphenomenon of capitalist exploitation. A Green Marxism, in Morrison’s view, must be willing to recognize the environmental and totalizing folly of replacing capitalist with socialist industrialism and must, instead, build upon democratic and local "social practices that embrace sustainability and sufficiency."

Slavoj Zizek, as Teresa L. Ebert states here, has become the latest " ‘hot’ new intellectual commodity" in left academic circles in the United States. Zizek’s reworking of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical oeuvre into a new theory of ideology is the subject of Ebert’s review of Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Ebert wastes no time in getting to her criticism of Zizek’s elision of Marxian theory and the critique of capitalist social relations by his insistence on desire and pleasure as the irreducible, "impossible kernel of the social real." Ebert bemoans this latest "idealist" transcendence of the reality of capitalist exploitation by discourse and psychoanalytic narrative. As Ebert relates, Zizek’s privileging of enjoyment as the founding moment of the real, and as the "excess" of which all other surpluses, including that of surplus-value, are merely expressions, is a form of reductionism that has recently attracted the attention of cultural critics, many of them reputedly recoiling from the reductionism of orthodox Marxism. Ebert argues that Zizek’s choice to reduce social reality to the psyche and its "effects" has hidden the constitutive nature of capitalist class relations and forces of production as a material force. In her critique of Zizek as purveying the latest style in bourgeois social theory, Ebert brings up the crucial question of the inability of postmodern discourse to think through the historical conditions of its own making and its insertion in contemporary global economic and social arrangements. Zizek’s resort to "excess" as the key register through which to read any and all aspects of the real leads him, Ebert points out, to theorize capitalism as always transcending its own limits and making itself anew in "permanent development." For Ebert, then, Zizek "completely suppresses the objective reality of surplus-value and the contradictions of capitalism as based on the exploitation and appropriation of labor." Presenting capitalism as a juggernaut that fills the entire social space through its dynamic, excessive character and championing the cause of enjoying one’s "symptom," Zizek, in Ebert’s view, ultimately refashions the bourgeois imaginary par excellence–embracing capitalism as a system within which individual pleasure is unrestricted without regard to the conditions of exploitation and oppression that it has historically brought forth.

The Editors

In this issue we begin with an interview with Cornel West conducted in May 1994 by William Olson and Antonio Callari, members of our editorial board. The conversation ranges from West’s views on the positive aspects and lacunae in Marxian theory, and the limitations and potentials of postmodern theory, to the current status of liberation theologies and the black church, and finally to the question of the increasing significance of race, especially as it affects political action. In reviewing his strong debt to the Marxian tradition, West notes the importance of Marxian political economy to highlight what he calls “the rule of capital.” Yet he believes that Marxism has frequently stopped short of providing the much-needed, detailed analyses of reification and commodification that Marxists such as Georg Lukacs and Fredric Jameson have wished to make central to Marxism’s historical project. Turning to West’s writings on such poststructuralist thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, West discusses his aim of holding on to some notion of totality even while recognizing the theoretical and political salience of poststructuralist, antiessentialist thought. Under careful questioning by Olson and Callari, West assesses his own current relation to postmodern and deconstructive thought. Here, West applauds the work of Derrida as a “thoroughgoing austere skeptic,” but he also notes that in their fixation on discourse and language, many Derrideans neglect to create the space for “reconstructive energy.” While West resists bashing deconstruction and its postmodernist cousins for purportedly making action impossible through the introduction of discourses of uncertainty, he avoids a “moral relativism” by embracing a “radical historicism” that no longer asks philosophy for “permission to act.” The conversation moves on to West’s familiar concern to view religiosity as a community project. In the process, West treats readers to brief historical lessons in the substantial role that some progressive religious communities have played in remaking the world even while more and more social institutions, including churches, get gobbled up in the ethos of the capitalist marketplace. Callari and Olson interrogate West on the meaning of his advocacy of a “politics of conversion” which incorporates an “ethic of love;” West responds by clarifying the resort to community and forms of communal agency that his notions of love and universality imply. Finally, West discusses the competing theses of the declining and/or increasing significance of race and racism in U.S. society. Here, West notes that while the economic possibilities for African Americans have been enhanced, certainly since slavery, the political use and misuse of (especially white) racialist discourse has recently increased in its extension and vitriolic force. As might be expected, West is hopeful that there is now some “real possibility for democratic regeneration.”

These days, Allegra De Laurentiis tells us, Walter Benjamin is most often regarded as a literary critic, though “a respectful reading of the texts must reaffirm that Marxism and mysticism are the two pivotal features of his thought.” De Laurentiis proceeds, therefore, to read Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History as an opportune occasion to reveal Benjamin’s immersion in both Marxist and Jewish-mystical traditions, especially as they shed light on Benjamin’s “meditations” on history. Benjamin himself defies the conventional wisdom that Marxism and messianic Judaism are absolutely irreconcilable. But, as De Laurentiis shows, Benjamin produces a novel understanding of Marxist historical materialism through his audacious claim that the Marxist approach to history would be “unassailable on the condition that it ‘enlists the services of theology.’ “ Benjamin’s unique reading of historical materialism centers on the idea that it is “redemption of the past” and not a liberatory vision of the future that enlivens Marxism’s theory of history. In particular, Benjamin finds present in historical materialism a moral obligation to the “oppressed past.” As De Laurentiis points out, Benjamin hitches his understanding of this moral obligation to what he called the “monodological view of history,” in which singular events in human history are inspirited with a transcendental and meaningful presence to be comprehended only by “a redeemed mankind.” As a means of illuminating the kind of historical knowledge toward which Benjamin aspired, De Laurentiis seeks examples (as Benjamin himself did) in the visual arts. Through a brief presentation of the photographs that Roman Vishniac shot of Eastern European Hasidic communities in the handful of years leading up to the “final solution,” De Laurentiis shows us what Benjamin could have been getting at: the seizure and arresting of a past time in the lives of an oppressed people to reveal the true essence of historical events. In De Laurentiis’s view, such a “Messianic cessation of happening”—glimpsed, for example, in the flash of time attenuated in Vishniac’s images—held for Benjamin the special possibility that the “past can now be suspended” through the revolutionary action presaged and then produced by historical materialism.

Subaltern studies have given rise, among other things, to a reconsideration of the traditional Marxian notions of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist hegemony. In the realms of cultural and political representation, the critique of “Orientalism” has determined for postcolonial subjects and theorists of the subaltern a project of constructing a “relatively autonomous space” of resistance to continued postcolonial dominance. Much of the resulting analysis and suggestions for resistance have focused on the degree to which “tradition̶