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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