Contents

In this issue

In this issue class revolution is discovered in a perhaps unlikely context: the paid domestic labor of African-American women. Analyzing the changing economic relationship between African-American women and white households, from the end of slavery to the late 1970s, Cecilia Rio uses the concepts of Marxian class analysis and a wealth of empirical evidence to demonstrate that African-American women were historical agents of a fundamental class transformation. Over the course of that period, Rio finds African-American women struggling against feudal exploitation by whites and, especially after World War II, successfully creating the conditions for self-employment. Along with the radical change in the form of surplus appropriation—since, with independent commodity production, African-American women appropriated their own surplus labor in domestic service instead of suffering from feudal exploitation by white feudal “masters”—the pattern of surplus distribution was also transformed. Now, self-employed African-American domestic laborers distributed the surplus they appropriated from themselves mostly within the African-American community, instead of having the surplus circulate for the most part within the white community as had been the case when they were employed as feudal servants. The surplus they produced as independent “household technicians” increasingly flowed to family members, churches, civic organizations, and unions, and national organizations like the National Committee on Household employment. Of course, the novel “freedom” of self-employment created its own set of contradictions “within the mind, body, and spirit of each domestic worker.” While some thrived as independent producers, others worked themselves to exhaustion, and still others rejected self-employment in favor of capitalist wage-labor. Still, Rio wants us to see within these ongoing conflicts the role that African-American women have played—and continue to play—in “strengthening their own communities and resisting feudal exploitation and racial oppression.”

Zana Briski and Ross Kaufman's film Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids, which was awarded the 2005 Oscar for best documentary, appears to satisfy the requirements of political art—exposing the lives of the marginalized and victimized children of Calcutta's sex-workers and empowering the children by giving each of them a camera to tell their own story. However, the fact that the film perpetuates “neocolonial documentary conventions,” ignoring local organizing efforts and offering images of white saviors, provoked Jesal Kapadia to create Telegraph, a work of video art that aims to disrupt the “rhetoric of documentary immediacy.” The essays by Kapadia and Svati P. Shah, along with still images from Kapadia's video, point toward a different form of political and artistic engagement, one that refuses liberal norms of “humanitarian benevolence and solidaristic identification.”

We will soon have to bid “farewell to the Humanities”—and, with them, the very idea of the university. Unless, Xiaoying Wang warns us, we resist the current trends that are undermining the “purposefulness without purpose” of free intellectual inquiry. Wang's trenchant analysis of the current situation in the humanities (especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, but spreading to other countries as well) focuses on the extent to which the humanities have succumbed to an economic rationality associated with capitalist markets. The result has been, on one hand, to reinforce the purposelessness of the humanities (since the culture industries, especially television and cinema, are much more “useful” for capitalist growth), and, on the other hand, to create a new set of purposes (which are purely internal, such as the quantitative assessment of professional publications and the creation of a hierarchy of academic privilege). In Marxian terms, what has transpired is that the qualitative dimensions of the labor of those who work in the humanities has been eclipsed in favor of the quantitative aspects of that labor—in short, the duality of concrete and abstract labor has become onesided, reduced to the abstract ability to produce. Continued production in the humanities is increasingly measured by student enrollments and numbers of publications, thus creating a Faustian bargain with university administrators and university presses. Wang also charges postmodernism—the “deconstruction of logic by rhetoric”—with reinforcing this situation; in place of the search for truth which postmodernism has abandoned, the “only conceivable point is to advance one's career.” While Wang makes no attempt to offer solutions, his analysis should give pause to all scholars who are wittingly or unwittingly involved in the undermining of the humanities and of the idea of the university.

The latest in our series of book symposia, coordinated by Jack Amariglio for the 2003 Marxism and the World Stage conference, focuses on the culmination of a project of class analysis of the Soviet Union that Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff initiated in the first issue of RM (with an essay on various forms of communism). Here, Victor Lippit, Satya Gabriel, and Jonathan Diskin offer appreciative commentaries that highlight the novel method and conclusions of the book that emerged from that project, Resnick and Wolff's Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR.

Lippit begins by expressing his sense of the high standard established by Resnick and Wolff's approach to nonessentialist class analysis and the pathbreaking nature of their explanation of the “rise, contradictions, and collapse” of the Soviet Union in class terms. But Lippit also expresses a number of concerns: whether, for example, contra their commitment to overdetermination, Resnick and Wolff attribute to class “the central role” in making sense of Soviet state capitalism; whether or not it is appropriate to jettison entirely the idea of classes as social groups; and, finally, whether the term capitalism adequately captures the “core issues” in the Soviet Union. Gabriel, for his part, underlines Resnick and Wolff's conclusion that capitalist exploitation prevailed in the Soviet Union and that, over the course of its history, there is little evidence of communism. He also observes that what they offer is a “story of opportunities lost”: if, instead of being mesmerized by the power of industrialization, the Soviet leadership had had a vision of liberating workers from exploitation, the USSR would have been a very different kind of society. For Diskin, Resnick and Wolff's book is more than a simple application of the established categories of Marxian class analysis; in examining new forms of capitalism and communism, it “raises questions about exploitation and collectivity that spill beyond the structures of the text.” In particular, Diskin encourages us to push further in making sense of the ways notions of value, collectivity, and forms of representation play a role in constituting the appropriation of surplus labor—not only to make sense of the Soviet Union but also for creating communist class structures elsewhere.

In the final symposium essay, Resnick and Wolff take the opportunity to respond to many of the issues raised by their interlocutors, thereby clarifying and extending their analysis. They take up Lippit's concerns by defending the need for a framework that distinguishes the various dimensions of class analysis: processes of surplus labor appropriation and distribution, social groups, consciousness, struggle, and so forth. As for the relationship between rapid industrialization and class transformation posed by Gabriel, Resnick and Wolff note that Lenin, too, was concerned about whether the attempt to “catch up” with the West would postpone a class transition to communism, a problem that was dissolved by Stalin and other Soviet leaders by seemingly equating industrialization with socialism. Finally, Resnick and Wolff underscore the importance of the questions posed by Diskin but ultimately defend their analysis. What matters in their approach is who first receives and distributes surplus labor: “is it the surplus-producing workers themselves—however they may be organized in representational or other ways—or is it others?” Their conclusion (which, they note, changed over the course of their investigation), is that, in the case of the Soviet Union, industrial and agricultural workers eventually came to be exploited by state capitalists.
An economy of words to produce an anti-economy of meaning. The purpose of Stephen Ziliak's second set of haikus, like the first (which was published in volume 14, number 3), is to use the delicate simplicity of an ancient form of poetry to mock and challenge the modern “science” of economics. No one is spared—from Marxists, who always see the next crisis of capitalism just around the corner, and the prophets of globalization, who glorify cheap products but overlook unemployment, to econometricians, who place economic and social analysis in an epistemological stranglehold, and academic economists of all sorts, who will do anything to get their work published in highly ranked journals. Seventeen syllables that challenge the elaborate pretensions of business as usual.

While Georg Simmel may have considered his Philosophy of Money to be heavily indebted to Marx and Marxism, and both Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin drew heavily from Simmel's work, today there is little in the way of a sustained dialogue between Simmel's work and the Marxian tradition. Graham Cassano seeks to reinitiate such a dialogue by excavating the various elements of what he considers to be Simmel's epistemology of exchange. He begins by explaining the way that Simmel arrives at, and seeks to mirror in his own writing style, a conception of truth that is essentially relative or relational, an epistemology that eschews foundations and essences. Hence, Cassano concludes, Simmel has a “fondness for the paradox and the fragment.” At the same time, Simmel perceives an increasingly “objective culture,” a cultural totality that stands opposed to the isolated fragments of individual subjectivity, like machinery to the worker within capitalist production. Cassano reads Simmel's Philosophy as an attempt to pose—and explain as a problem inherent in the modern human condition—this contradiction between the contingency of truth and the “apparently necessary … production of this apparently absolute objectivity.” Simmel's proposed solution, “ironic objectivity,” is his way of proposing an absolute beyond accepted appearances in order to resist, and to carry out a cultural criticism of, the reified totality of a capitalist social order. His goal, like Marx's, was to preserve the possibility of imagining and creating a different world.

Spinoza's conception of natural and political existence is also fundamentally relational and, because it recognizes the “affective” condition of the social body, Hasana Sharp believes that his work is useful in our current circumstances: to show how the “politics of fear” associated with the war on terrorism ultimately undermines democratic institutions. At the heart of Spinoza's ethics is the idea that human beings are fundamentally incomplete and dependent beings, “necessarily subject to the passions,” whose bodies and minds are constituted by a field of affects that arises from within a system of social relationships, institutions, and practices that exceed any individual's control (which Etienne Balibar refers to as “transindividuality”). These passions can be both joyful and sad, leading to both increases and decreases in one's capacities. Fear is one of the sad passions, which engenders a “superstitious” form of subjectivity that breeds both narcissism and paranoia. At the social level, this can lead to a dangerous situation, in which those in power are governed by their fear of the masses and the masses themselves exhibit and suffer from fear of the other. As Sharp sees it, the war on terrorism has cultivated a politics of fear that has displaced the more joyful affects, such as those entailed by public reasoning. Such a politics also poses a threat to the power structure itself since it undermines democracy and produces an “aggregate of highly resentful slaves.” In the end, the strengthening of democratic impulses and institutions depends on “our ability to transform networks of terror into networks of joy.”

Contingency plays a key role in much of contemporary social theory, a condition that is bemoaned by many modernist (including Marxist) thinkers. Ken Kawashima, however, locates contingency at the core of one of the central issues of the Marxian critique of political economy: the commodification of labor power. Utilizing the work of the Japanese Marxist economist Uno K?z?, especially the complex idea of muri, Kawashima interprets Marx as arguing that capital requires, and yet cannot presume the existence of, labor power as a commodity. Thus, there is a contingent encounter between the production of capitalist commodities and the exchange of labor power as a commodity. Further, the contingent terms of this encounter are inverted and experienced unequally, transferred onto one side of the exchange, the “virtual paupers” who are forced to have the freedom to sell their labor power but receive no guarantees that they will be able to do so. The seemingly random production of a “relative surplus population,” together with the changing needs of capitalists and the interventions of the state that create distinctions and competitive pressures among the laboring class, make labor power both indispensable and disposable. Yet, capital is able to transfer the costs of producing and maintaining the surplus population elsewhere—to the State apparatuses and “their shadowy satellites” that “constitute and form the contingent conditions of exchange confronted by owners of labor power.” At the same time, they create the institutional sites where the sellers of labor power are able to organize and, possibly, overturn the “inversion of the contingency immanent to the process of exchange within capitalist society.”

In the first of the two Remarx essays in this issue, Andriana Vlachou breaks from the existing terms of debate concerning sustainable development—both mainstream and radical—in order to rethink the relationship between ecology and capitalism. First, Vlachou uses the dialectical perspective of biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin to demonstrate that the attempt to ground ecological principles in nature is, at best, elusive and, certainly, epistemologically suspect. What matters is how ecological problems, and solutions to those problems, are created within a particular social order. When it comes to capitalism, there is no single outcome—since struggles of different groups of capitalists and of workers-citizens participate in shaping, directly and through the state, both the depletion of natural resources and attempts to regulate such practices—but, Vlachou concludes, both tend to take place “at the expense of working people.” And while an ecologically sustainable form of capitalism is theoretically possible, the ways current scientific research is carried out mean that solutions for only some ecological problems are being produced, and new ecological problems are being created, thereby making the “possibility of an ecologically sustainable capitalism uncertain.” Of course, there are no guarantees that a postcapitalist society will recognize the significance of environmental degradation. Vlachou does believe, however, that when workers collectively appropriate the surplus, the culture that makes communal appropriation possible will also more readily nurture the idea of ecological sustainability.

The second essay of the Remarx section, by Zeynep Gambetti and Refik Güreman, revisits the concept of totalitarianism and its relevance for our post-9/11 world. In particular, Gambetti and Güreman claim that the work of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben can be utilized to show how, contra the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the totalitarian peril is present within the liberal political orders of Empire. Starting with the notion of biopolitics—in which both the “naked fact of life” (zoe) and political life or culture (bios) are incorporated into, controlled and repressed, by the mechanisms of sovereign power—Gambetti and Güreman identify three sites of tension where biopower can become totalitarian. First, the productive dimension of biopower (which Hardt and Negri consider to be the source of a counter-empire) can be—and was, within the regimes of Hitler and Stalin—effectively managed by totalitarian politics. Second, mass migration, rather than establishing the fundamental mode of resistance to Empire, can provoke a totalitarian reaction (witness the rise of right-wing anti-immigrant movements). Third, the lack of mediation among the various (juridical, ethical, and political) poles of power can itself be the condition of totalitarianism, as exemplified in the concentration camps. For Gambetti and Güreman, these totalitarian reflexes were manifest in the 2003 Iraqi War, when Empire demonstrated its ability to “abandon its pact with democratic forces and resort to totalitarian tactics.” And, as they understand the roots of totalitarianism, the only effective resistance is not an affirmation of local struggles or rootlessness but a reorientation back to politics itself.

Two recent volumes are highly recommended for their ability to address some of the key economic, political, and cultural dilemmas of our time. The first, Vittorangelo Orati's Globalization: Scientifically Unfounded!, reviewed by Andrea Micocci, challenges the assumptions of the mainstream economic theory of international trade (based on the Ricardo-Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson model of comparative advantage). It also demonstrates both that many of the critics of the unequal consequences of international trade—from Raul Prebisch to Samir Amin—have been content to work within the confines of the same model and that an alternative theory and set of policies regulating international trade are necessary. John Rieder writes approvingly of Carl Freedman's book of essays, The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture. He draws particular attention to the first essay, which “makes a clear case for the continuing vitality of Marxist thought in well-crafted prose accessible to beginning graduate students,” and to three essays devoted to science fiction, especially Freedman's analyses of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the writings of Philip K. Dick, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Mark your calendars and make your travel plans! The dates and location of the next international gala conference, the sixth in the series sponsored by RM, have been arranged: Rethinking Marxism 2006 will be held from Thursday, 26 October through Sunday, 29 October 2006, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. We look forward to seeing you there.

The Editors