Contents

In this issue

Marcus Green draws our attention to the concept of the “subaltern,” which was borrowed from Gramsci and is now widely used (constituting, according to the author, a veritable “popuular enterprise”) in discussions of politics and history in India, South America, Ireland, and many other contexts. What Green finds problematic is that the concept is “often misunderstood and misappropriated” because it is “rarely defined or systematically analyzed within Gramsci’s own work.” Green provides a useful corrective to much of the existing literature, by examining the development of the concept over time, from Gramsci’s pre-prison writings (such as the “Southern Question”) through the entire Prison Notebooks (not just the Selections), and locating it in the general trajectory of Gramsci’s thought (in conjunction with other key concepts, such as civil society, the state, and hegemony). While recognizing that Gramsci’s work on subalternity remained an unfinished project, Green demonstrates that Gramsci did succeed in laying the cornerstones for carrying out a Marxist history of subaltern social groups and formulating an actual strategy—encompassing both ideology and practical politics—that would “liberate subaltern groups from their subordinated existence.” Eric Schocket organized a lively and wideranging symposium on the relationship between Marxism and working-class studies at the May 2001 conference organized by the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. We are pleased to be able to publish essays from that symposium, along with Schocket’s introduction and a transcript of the discussion that followed the formal presentations.However ironically, neither the resurgence of interest in class nor the institutionalization of working-class studies represents an increased acceptance of Marxism. In Schocket’s view, multiculturalism and idententarian social theory are perhaps even more responsible for highlighting and placing such concerns on the academic table. What, then, is the role of Marxism in working-class studies? What does Marxism have to offer in creating a language appropriate to this incipient field?

Barbara Foley delivers her answers to these questions in the form of 10 propositions, which run from a critique of social identity (“class is a social relation. . .not—or at least no primarily—a subject position”) to a set of clear-cut teachings (concerning the nature of ideology, the role of racism and sexism in capitalism, the existence of a unified ruling class, and much more). The challenge, Foley argues, is to use this Marxism to remake working-class studies into a project of “class studies.” For Laura Hopke, too, these are “exciting times” for analyzing the potential role of Marxism in working-class—including sweatshop—studies. But furthering that project needs to confront both the negative and positive dimensions of U.S. exceptionalism: on one hand, the fostering of anti-Marxism in American Studies; on the other hand, the need to appreciate an important history of radicalism among artists (such as photodocumentarians Lewis Hine and Ben Shan) who, while perhaps indifferent to Marxism, provide insight into the “power of tropes such as the loner, the open road, the search for community, the distrust of factory life, even the construction of the immigrant as Other.”

Jack Metzgar, for his part, considers Marxism to be a potential liability for working-class studies—because it fails to capture the “dizzying diversity of actually existing working-class life” but especially because the academics who conduct working-class studies are not themselves “working class.” Metzgar believes that practitioners of working-class studies need to understand themselves better as a class in order to participate in creating a cross-class coalition, an endeavor in which Marxism can be “a part, but in principle it cannot and must not be the whole.” Bill Mullen sees existing working-class studies as being founded on several “anti-Marxist assumptions” that limit the field in a manner analagous to the limits placed by capitalism on the working-class itself. Mullen’s claim is that “more, not less Marxist analyses and methods” would assist working-class studies in negating the kinds of academic and disciplinary boundaries that can lead to “antiworking class sectarianism,” inside and outside the academy. Michael Zweig also understands that Marxism—as a theory of class, defined in terms of relationships of power—should play a central role in working-class studies. Zweig argues against using the “jargon of Marx” (for a variety of reasons, including the fact that “people who are not Marxists have vital contributions to make”), in favor of focusing on the “lived experience” of class, in production and the wider society.

The ensuing discussion returned to many of the issues raised in the symposium papers. The relevance of Marxist concepts and categories in carrying out working-class studies, the use of Marxist terminology in teaching about capitalism and class struggle, the relationship between academic discourse and lived experience, the appropriate definition of class—the fact that these issues are being raised and discussed and are subject to wideranging and penetrating debate attests to the vitality of Marxism within and for the project of working-class studies.

Like Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg in an essay published earlier this year (see their Remarx essay in the Spring 2002 issue of RM), Thomas Lemke argues that Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality is not inconsistent with a Marxist critique of contemporary neoliberal society; indeed, in their view, it provides a necessary supplement to that critique. Lemke begins by exploring the central place the problem of government assumes in Foucault’s work. In linking technologies of the self with technologies of domination, governmentality fulfills three tasks: it offers a view of power beyond either consenus or violence; it connects the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state; and it serves to distinguish power from domination. Lemke then demonstrates how Foucault’s work can be used to move beyond existing criticisms of neoliberal government. Instead of accepting the dualisms offered by neoliberalism—thus “confronting knowledge to power, state to economy, subject to repression”—Lemke explains that governmentality provides a way of rejecting such dualisms: by seeing neoliberal rationality as a particular “politics of truth,” in which the exercise of power is “rational”; by recognizing how neoliberalism does not represent the retreat of the state but, rather, the creation of new technologies of government; and, finally, by understanding how neoliberal forms of government constitutes a continuum, which extends from traditional state practices government through to modes of self-regulation. In the end, governmentality makes it possible to criticize neoliberalism “as a political project that endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists.”

Mainstream political thought promises that globalization has ushered in and lent support to a new wave of democratization around the world. Steve Ellner’s contrary view is that, at least in the case of Latin America, neoliberalism has a “deplorable record on the political front.” In shifting the focus from globalization to the national level, Ellner finds that neoliberal-style democracy (in Peru, Venezuela, and elsewhere) has strengthened presidential power and undermined “countervailing institutions” such as political parties, congresses, and trade unions. He doesn’t argue, however, that centralism is the root cause of the distortions (as do many, conservative and liberal, political scientists). Instead, Ellner wants to shift attention to socioeconomic developments that are often left out of the discussion—such as the growth of the so-called informal economy, increased foreign ownership, and growing income inequality. Moving beyond the formal trappings of democracy toward a future “reconstruction and deepening of democracy” will depend especially on the ability of political parties, social movements, and trade unions to include and represent the the members of the informal economy, “who have grown the most in numbers and have been the most victimized by neoliberal policies.”

In the latest contibution to the Globalization Under Interrogation series, R. Radakrishnan begins by embracing the “ambivalence” and “tension” expressed in the earlier essay by Arif Dirlik, which so successfully launched the discussion of globalization in our pages. But Radakrishnan wants to push further, in order to uncover the “determinate geopolitics” built into the “indeterminacy of globalization.” For him, the only defensible version of globalization is one that is carried out in the name of the third world, in the name of the “most vulnerable, the weakest, and the least powerful elements,” both out there and within. But this raises “certain complications”—such as nationalism, the indigenous question, cultural hybridity, representation, intentionality, and so on. Ultimately, Radakrishnan argues, the panoply of questions that surround the processes and representations of globalization devolves onto one: “how to create the one world out of the many?” The answer lies, he suggests, in posing this question not from within the dominant discourses but, rather, from the perspective of the subaltern.

Haiku is the poetic form par excellence of condensed, lyrical and enigmatic, thoughts and observations about the world. Here, Steve Ziliak offers a series of pertinent and provocative haikus about economics—from Lord Robbins (whose claim to fame is the definition of economics as the efficient allocation of scarce resources) to Allan Greenspan; the celebration of profits, the invisible hand, and rational “economic man”; the sentiments of Adam Smith’s “other” book that are routinely ignored; the morality of supply curves and equilibrium; and much more. It may be difficult (most would say, impossible) to make economic discourse poetic but it is certainly possible, as Ziliak clearly demonstrates, to use poetry to penetrate the myths that circulate in the world of the Econ.

Enrique Dussel’s article on the four drafts of Capital, along with Fred Moseley’s introduction, appeared in the Spring 2001 issue (volume 13, number 1). Here, we publish Patrick Murray’s response to Dussel’s work, along with a rejoinder by Moseley. Murray begins from the proposition that, when it comes to Marxian value theory, there is an important difference between “traditional Marxism” (which Murray refers to as Ricardian Marxism) and a line of engagements that stems from the work of I. I. Rubin, Roman Rosdolsky, and others, which “flows against the dominant current of interpretation.” For Murray, the advocates of the traditional approach fail to grasp “the dialectical nature of Marx’s concepts,” thereby downplaying the significance of Marx’s “real starting point,” the theory of commodity exchange, and focusing exclusively on the theory of surplus-value as the “heart and soul of Marx’s critique of capitalism”—which leads them, Murray argues, to advocacate market socialism. Moseley responds to Murray’s critique by arguing that the theory of surplus-value and the theory of exchange are both central to Marx’s work and that Marxian value theory provides a quantitative theory of prices (which are determined by values), a point that he believes is missing from Murray’s account. What Murray and Moseley do agree on is that Dussel’s scholarship on the various drafts of Capital have contributed to improving the quality of discussion and debate on the key concepts of Marxian value theory.

Two reviews conclude this issue. Ricardo Duchesne critically examines the bold claims contained in The Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood. In Duchesne’s reading, Meiksins Wood sets out to defend, 20 years later, Robert Brenner’s definition of capitalism as a system of compulsion and his theory of the transition to capitalism in England based on the imposition of economic leases by feudal landlords. While Duchesne is generally sympathetic with Wood’s settling of accounts with a wide variety of non-Marxian conceptions of opportunity as the central characteristic of capitalist markets, he raises two fundamental issues that run counter to the Wood/Brenner approach: first, recent research indicates that the rise of agrarian capitalism in England should be attributed to the activities of freeholding and copyholding tenants (rather than feudal landlords); and, second, Marxian treatments of the transition to capitalism need to move beyond the “Eurocentric presumption” of the uniqueness of England or Europe with respect to China and the rest of Asia.

Richard Wolff suggests that readers of RM will be able to put to good use the critique of global capitalism developed—with “humor, sarcasm, and surgical dissection”—by Vivienne Forrester in The Economic Horror. However, Wolff also argues that the author’s “studied distance from Marxism” weakens her theoretical framework and the political implications of her analysis. He contrasts Forrester’s conception of unemployment as the central problem of capitalism, which invites state intervention to increase employment, to the critique of capitalist exploitation, which means challenging the conditions and consequences of capitalist class structures, including capitalist employment.

The Editors