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In this issue David Shumway challenges contemporary Marxists to rethink their conception of consumer culture. Moreover, in order to understand the "actual historical uses to which people have put the things which they desire, purchase, and enjoy," the advocates and practitioners of a Marxist cultural studies need both to relinquish their traditional understanding of commodity fetishism and to focus their attention on the use-value of the objects of consumption and the desires with which they are associated. In his essay, Shumway expresses his appreciation for the work of such important thinkers as Sut Jhally, Laura Mulvey, Wolfgang Haug, and Theodor AdorNumber But he takes issue with what he regards as their overemphasis on exchange-value and the fetishistic nature of commodities, especially the extent to which such conventional interpretations have tended to privilege reification, mystification, and false consciousness. (But see the novel discussion of the role of commodity fetishism by Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari in the Fall 1989 issue of RM. Shumway argues instead for an analysis of the social construction of use-value of the sort that Richard Ohmann pioneered in Selling Culture (1996). Not only does such an analysis promise a new and different understanding of the historical and social life of things but it will also assist Marxists and other radicals to overcome what Shumway calls "the futile position of opposing or seeming to oppose the desires of the working class for their fair share of consumer goods."
Was Antonio Gramsci the first postmodern thinker in the Marxist tradition? Can his work be described as moving beyond modernism, or is there some sense in which his discussions of history and hegemony presage approaches later developed by Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault? Esteve Morera does acknowledge that Gramsci posed questions and formulated theses on topics ranging from cultural politics and the history of subaltern groups to language and the relation between power and truth that have indeed been echoed in postmodern writings of recent decades. However, in his view, a more comprehensive reading of the Prison Notebooks demonstrates that Gramsci utilized theoretical strategies that have little in common with what Morera takes to be the central "discursive" turn of postmodernism. It is a testament to Gramsci’s "critical modernity" that a debate about his position between modernism and postmodernism exists at all. Morera is careful to show that Gramsci’s extended treatments of objectivity and hegemony led him to question received concepts of ideology, science, history, the body, and much else, and in this sense to presage the kinds of issues and concerns raised in postmodern critiques of post-Enlightenment philosophy and social theory. Yet, he is also quick to point out that the existence of such similarities should not obscure the gulf that otherwise separates Gramsci’s approach from some of the main trends of contemporary postmodernism (witnessed, in Morera’s view, in the most recent work of the Subaltern Studies project). In particular, Morera finds that certain modernist concepts and strategies— such as epistemological realism, integral history, dialectics, teleology, and so on— are fundamental to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, historical blocs, the role of subaltern subjects, and so on, that represent his legacy to contemporary Marxism.
The complex relationship between postmodernism and Marxism is also the back ground for the next article, by Michelle Mawhinney. However, Mawhinney’s approach involves reading Marx in a manner that locates an ethical potential—specifically, an ethics of nonidentity that is often associated with postmodernism—in the very logic of dialectical materialism. Mawhinney launches her analysis with a discussion of the paradox of authenticity in the modern context: the contradictory process according to which the desire for self-identity (the compulsion to discover and safeguard the "truth" of the self) is dependent on the need to create the oppositional "other" (all that is out side the truth, all difference) as a condition of identity, thereby deferring the possibility of self-certainty. Not surprisingly, the tensions associated with the problem of authenticity are also present in Marx’s writings, but Mawhinney refuses the usual interpretation according to which Marx is said to have found the "solution" of the progressive fulfillment of an authentic humanity through his conception of the mastery of nature and self-realization through labor. Instead (or, perhaps, in addition), Mawhinney focuses on the negative or "agonistic" moment in Marx’s approach, the extent to which the process of "self-making" is open-ended and nonteleological, which is accompanied by a recognition of the tendency to impose closure upon identity in specific historical and social conjunctures. It is this positing of both difference and sameness, of maintaining the radical "alterity" of otherness and theorizing the concrete homogenizing and totalizing effects of capitalism, that, in Mawhinney’s view, creates not a final reconciliation but, rather, an ethical promise of nonidentity.
Both Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Roland Emmerich’s film Independence Day offer related representations of the political anxieties, messianic historicity, and possibilities of political transformation that are present in the world today. That is the provocative argument made by Philip Wegner in his wide ranging essay on political pedagogy titled, in a phrase borrowed from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, "A Night-mare on the Brain of the Living." Combining insightful readings of such popular cultural texts as The Simpsons and recent science fiction films with insights drawn from leading Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers, from Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Frederic Jameson to Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Lyotard, Wegner demonstrates the ways in which the narrative structure of Emmerich’s 1996 film of alien invasion provides an immediate, lived sense of the pressing problems and perspectives created by the current sense of political paralysis that are theorized in Derrida’s much-debated (in RM and elsewhere) volume on Marx. For Wegner, one of the key tasks facing politically engaged intellectuals today is to recover the "messianic specters haunting the closure of our own present" that can be glimpsed in popular texts such as Independence Day and, at the same time, to respond to the challenge posed by Gramsci (and echoed more recently by Etienne Balibar): to participate in the process of imagining and creating the concrete political agencies that represent the only real possibility—albeit without guarantees—of creating a new and better society.
The presence of a postmodern condition in contemporary economics involves, for Ernesto Screpanti, both the internal dismantling of the modernist systems that have long characterized neoclassical and Marxian theories and the proliferation of a wide variety of alternative, heterodox approaches. Screpanti begins by defining economic modernism in terms of certain key characteristics: a humanist ontology of social being, a substantialist theory of economic value, an equilibrium approach to economic and social structure, and a metanarrative of humankind. As Screpanti sees it, both neoclassical and traditional Marxian economics have exhibited these four characteristics, which, in turn, can be synthesized as determinism and essentialism. But, in recent decades, both theoretical traditions have suffered from problems and criticisms (such as the existence of multiple equilibria in neoclassical theory and the questioning of the lawlike status of the falling rate of profit in Marxian theory) that have exposed the flimsiness of their modernist foundations, thereby opening the door to the emergence and proliferation of a series of new—nondeterminist, antiessentialist—economic theories that exhibit significant postmodern moments. Among these, Screpanti includes neoclassical and radical institutionalism, evolutionary economics and complex systems theory, neo-Austrian theory, post-Keynesian economics, and postmodern Marxian economics. Whether or not the development of this heterodox research program will generate a new Schumpeterian "classical situation" is still an open question. Screpanti expresses his doubts about such an eventuality, but he does consider the current crisis of modernist economics to be more far-reaching than the three or four that have occurred in the last two centuries, comparable only to the period in the mid-eighteenth century that gave rise to modern economics in the first place.
The relationship between Marxism and democracy is the topic of Richard Wolff’s contribution to the Remarx section of this issue. Whereas the history of that relationship comprises a sequence of reversals and pendulum swings by Marx and later Marxists, as they variously allied themselves with or found it necessary to criticize existing democratic ideas and movements, Wolff’s goal is to break from that either/ or oscillation and to pose the question of what contributions Marxism (and contemporary Marxists) can offer to radical thinking about and practices of democracy. He begins by noting that other approaches to democracy focus on the "who" and "how" of democratic decisionmaking; Marxism (in a manner parallel to feminism and antiracism), however, involves placing something new on the agenda: what will be decided. Then, he argues that the "what" specific to Marxism involves the range of issues associated with class, the processes whereby surplus labor is appropriated and distributed. It is this class aspect of democracy that Wolff finds to be missing not only in other theories of democracy but also in the specific case of the Soviet Union, where the "transformation of the organization of surplus labor inside state industrial enterprises" was never made "an explicit object of decisionmaking, democratic or otherwise." Wolff’s alternative proposal is to include, among the issues to be decided by democratic decisionmaking, those that pertain (directly and indirectly) the class structure of society—from which different class processes will be allowed or encouraged to exist and how account can be taken of each society’s prior class history to whether or not (and, if so, in what manner) nonproducers will participate in appropriating and distributing communal surplus labor.
Ranajit Guha’s collection of essays, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, is an attempt to define the conditions and eventual failure of British hegemony as part of the larger Subaltern Studies project that emerged in the 1980s. David McInerney expresses his appreciation both for Guha’s work and for the general approach to recovering subaltern resistance that has brought together the insights and strategies of Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault. What McInerney finds troubling, however, is the role that Marx’s concept of capital plays in Guha’s explanation of the necessity of British failure in achieving the consent of the Indian peasantry. In particular, although Guha’s reading of the limits to the expansion of capital in terms of the conceptual schemes of dominance/subordination and force/consent allows him to successfully challenge British and Indian elite historiography, it also imposes unnecessary restrictions on producing knowledge of the conflicts and struggles among both the subject populations and their British rulers. McInerney thus encourages Guha and the other members of the Subaltern Studies project to rework their appropriation of Marxist categories in order to further their stated goal of building an effective anticapitalist movement.
In the second review essay, Marian Aguiar discusses the recently published "literary biography" of the Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet. Although in Aguiar’s view more successful as personal/historical biography than literary criticism, Saime Göksu and Edward Timms’s Romantic Communist provides a long overdue English-language introduction to the life and work of that remarkable literary and political figure. Aguiar recommends this biography both because of the relative neglect of Hikmet’s innovative and politically engaged poetry in the English-speaking world and also because his life coincided with historically significant cultural and political events in both Turkey and, during two periods of exile, the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century.
Finally we wish to offer publicly our sincerest thanks to RM’s outgoing Managing Editor, Jacquelyn Southern, and to welcome her successor, Helen Smith. Four years ago, when we first confronted the need to hire someone to take responsibility for shepherding the manuscripts from copyediting through production to final publication, we began a search that culminated in our finding an enthusiastic, remarkably talented, and good-natured individual who, in addition to her own graduate studies and family responsibilities, was willing to take on the job. Jackie has labored tirelessly with us, our authors, and publisher to do all that was humanly possible to make RM appear on time, while maintaining the highest standards of quality. Fortunately, Jackie has agreed to stay on as copy editor and assist Helen in becoming acquainted with the sometimes convoluted manner in which our issues are initially assembled and, for many, magically appear at some later date. We look forward to working with Helen in years to come.
The Editors