Open Marxism

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

qui a Bergamo siamo in stato d'assedio ma la vita continua. Stanno sbocciando i bulbi di tulipano che ho comprato ad Amsterdam a ottobre. E si fanno lezioni in videoconferenza. Meglio di niente per salvare l'anno scolastico. In allegato un primo bilancio sulla pandemia e una riflessione sulle epidemie, facilitata dalla mia antica passione per l'evoluzionismo e la genetica. Tra qualche giorno finirò un pezzo un po' più lungo e che si potrebbe dividere. Ciao. Michele

Resumo: Buscou-se analisar, de forma breve, elementos históricos, teóricos e políticos que consubstanciaram o trânsito da relação entre Karl Marx e a economia política. Para tanto, destacou-se a relação dos sentidos das categorias de trabalho abstrato e de força de trabalho com o evolver dessa dinâmica, demarcado por três momentos centrais: uma crítica de teor filosófico e moral; a aceitação da teoria ricardiana dos salários; e uma assimilação crítica, propulsora de uma análise econômica inovadora. Palavras-chave: Karl Marx. Economia política. Força de trabalho. Trabalho abstrato. (Abstract: We tried to analyze historical, theoretical and political elements that composed the transit of the relationship between Karl Marx and political economy. To do that, the relationship between the meanings of the categories of abstract work and the labour power was highlighted with the evolution of this dynamic, marked by three central moments: a critique with philosophical and moral content; the acceptance of the Ricardian theory of wages; and a critical assimilation, propelling an innovative economic analysis. Keywords: Karl Marx. Political economy. Labour power. Abstract work.)

€ 17,00 Q uando nel 1932 furono pubblicati gli appunti che il giovane Marx aveva preso un secolo prima a Parigi dalle sue letture di economisti e di filosofi, questo evento editoriale fu salutato con grande entusiasmo. Una cosa curiosa, se si considera che i cosiddetti Manoscritti economico-filosofici del 1844 costituiscono materiali di lavoro in cui le osservazioni critiche affiorano da lunghe trascrizioni di autori più o meno noti. Eppure essi provocarono una profonda revisione dell'immagine che fino allora si era avuta dell'autore del Capitale. La definizione dell'essenza umana come vita produttiva, l'analisi del rovesciamento che subisce a causa dell'alienazione del lavoro, la prospettiva di un comunismo umanistico -ecco alcuni temi da cui furono attirati gli intellettuali progressisti fino agli anni Sessanta e Settanta. I seguaci dell'ortodossia marxista, nei paesi dell'est, tentarono di rimuovere lo scandalo dei Manoscritti, declassandoli a peccato di gioventù di un giovane hegeliano imbevuto di idealismo. Ma in Occidente, e anche tra i dissidenti dei paesi comunisti, divennero la bandiera del marxismo critico. Ora però siamo giunti a un punto in cui non sembra più possibile usare senza cautele le categorie di alienazione e di essenza umana a cui la diagnosi dei fenomeni di spossessamento di sé ha fatto inizialmente riferimento. Questa nuova edizione italiana dei Manoscritti, condotta sulla base della nuova edizione storico-critica Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA 2 ), vuole dare un contributo a tale riflessione attraverso il vasto commento che accompagna il testo e che lo rende finalmente intellegibile appieno. K arl Marx (1818-1883) è stato uno degli ultimi geni enciclopedici dell'età moderna.

Braverman's analysis of the changing division of labor is crucial for understanding the impact of the neoliberal assault on higher education on academic labor. Much like Taylorism a century ago, adjunctification of the faculty, online education, and data driven planning are rationalizing academic labor. Teaching is being " unbundled " and its components parts automated, outsourced, and transferred to a growing middle level administration. As a result, faculty are becoming " just-in-time, " deskilled, disempowered, contingent labor. This newly emerging new division of labor is fundamentally transforming higher education. No longer merely subject to commercialization, academic labor is being reorganized to resemble the interchangeable contingent work that is ubiquitous throughout the labor market. To resist these developments it is necessary for faculty to study the new division of academic labor in order to devise new organizing tactics and strategies, such as the systemwide local and Metro organizing models.

Maoism refers to an ensemble of revolutionary ideas and practices inspired by the life and work of the Chinese political leader and philosopher Mao Tse-tung (1893Tse-tung ( -1976. Broadly, these ideas and practices seek to deploy militant, even violent methods to install a new radical democratic regime that is committed to the collective pursuit of dignity, freedom, and equality.

Accounts of education crises typically start out from the notion that these are derivative of economic crises. Hard times for capitalist economies – with recession and consequent shortfalls in tax takes as unemployment rises – leads to cutback in budgets for state services. The victims of these cuts are schools, colleges, universities, and students (as provision is trimmed) and staffs (redundancies, recruitment freezes and restructurings). This is The Classical Theory of Education Crisis. A critique of this perspective on education crisis is outlined in this article. Alternatively, it is argued that education crises can be crises for capital, where capitalist development in education institutions becomes threatened or terminated. Through the analysis of commodity forms, the conditions for education crises generating crises for capital are demonstrated. In this perspective, it is capital that is the victim. It is argued that when conscious attempts to go beyond existing forms of capitalist education are forged along anti-capitalist lines in alternative, oppositional educational organisations, then this poses the most threatening scenario for capital and its human representatives.

This paper critiques the purposes to which Marx’s Fragment on Machines is put in postoperaist thought. I suggest postoperaist readings wield influence on contemporary left thinking, via postcapitalism, accelerationism and ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’. Changes in labour lead proponents to posit a crisis of measurability and an incipient communism. I use the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism to dispute this. Based on an analysis of value as a social form undergirded in antagonistic social relations, I argue the Fragment’s prognosis runs contrary to Marx’s critique of political economy when the latter is taken as a critical theory of society. This theoretical claim bears implications for contemporary left political praxis.

The task of studying the impact of social class on physical and mental health involves, among other things, the use of a conceptual toolbox that defines what social class is, establishes how to measure it, and sets criteria that help distinguish it from closely related concepts. One field that has recently witnessed a wealth of theoretical and conceptual research on social class is psychology, but geographers' and sociologists' attitude of diffidence toward this " positivistic " discipline has prevented them from taking advantage of this body of scholarship. This paper aims to highlight some of the most important developments in the psychological study of social class and social mobility that speak to the long-standing concerns of health geographers and sociologists with how social position, perceptions, social comparisons, and class-based identities impact health and well-being.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037

political power. The important proponents are Luhman and Parsons. Parsons' work plays a significant part in I-Iabermas' reconstruction of critical theory. For a destructive critique of I-Iabermas, see Reichelt, "Jiirgen Habermas' Reconstruction of Historical Materialism," in Bonefeld, W. and K. Psychopedis (eds.) Tbe Politic: of Cnanye, Palgrave, London, 2000. 17 On Italian fascism's acceptance of social conflict as a constructive force that supports the stability of political power, see chapter 8 of his Faacfiiumuu o/me Rewiuion, op. cit.

€ 17,00 Q uando nel 1932 furono pubblicati gli appunti che il giovane Marx aveva preso un secolo prima a Parigi dalle sue letture di economisti e di filosofi, questo evento editoriale fu salutato con grande entusiasmo. Una cosa curiosa, se si considera che i cosiddetti Manoscritti economico-filosofici del 1844 costituiscono materiali di lavoro in cui le osservazioni critiche affiorano da lunghe trascrizioni di autori più o meno noti. Eppure essi provocarono una profonda revisione dell'immagine che fino allora si era avuta dell'autore del Capitale. La definizione dell'essenza umana come vita produttiva, l'analisi del rovesciamento che subisce a causa dell'alienazione del lavoro, la prospettiva di un comunismo umanistico -ecco alcuni temi da cui furono attirati gli intellettuali progressisti fino agli anni Sessanta e Settanta. I seguaci dell'ortodossia marxista, nei paesi dell'est, tentarono di rimuovere lo scandalo dei Manoscritti, declassandoli a peccato di gioventù di un giovane hegeliano imbevuto di idealismo. Ma in Occidente, e anche tra i dissidenti dei paesi comunisti, divennero la bandiera del marxismo critico. Ora però siamo giunti a un punto in cui non sembra più possibile usare senza cautele le categorie di alienazione e di essenza umana a cui la diagnosi dei fenomeni di spossessamento di sé ha fatto inizialmente riferimento. Questa nuova edizione italiana dei Manoscritti, condotta sulla base della nuova edizione storico-critica Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA 2 ), vuole dare un contributo a tale riflessione attraverso il vasto commento che accompagna il testo e che lo rende finalmente intellegibile appieno. K arl Marx (1818-1883) è stato uno degli ultimi geni enciclopedici dell'età moderna.

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6830-245X Resumen: Una panorámica de la integración entre psicoanálisis y marxismo en los marcos de la primera generación de la Escuela de Frankfort. Sobre todo, desde el pensamiento de Erich Fromm y Herbert Marcuse, subrayando la diferente actitud ante el psicoanálisis por parte de ambos. Como culminación de ambos pensamientos, se presenta un resumen crítico de dos obras fundamentales de los autores, y que cristalizan la originalidad de su pensamiento. Palabras clave: Marxismo, Psicoanálisis, pulsión, libertad, interdisciplinariedad Abstract: An overview is presented of the integration of psychoanalysis and Marxism within period of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Mainly focused in the thought of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, underlining their different attitudes towards psychoanalysis. As a conclusion of both ideas, a critical resume is presented of two of the main works of these authors.

This Intervention brings the Open Marxist critical political economy perspective from the Conference of Socialist Economists into contemporary heterodox economics by critically contrasting what I term the predominant contemporary heterodox economics discourse withe Simon's Clarke conceptions of the state and economic policy. I conclude by comparing these perspectives and drawing out points that I hope ignite a debate on these issues in heterodox economics.

Controversy has arisen on the left around attempts to curb provocative expression, particularly hate speech directed at vulnerable social groups. Yet that coupling of leftism with censorship is historically recent.  Karl Marx, stemming from a converted family, was maligned both for ‘being’ and ‘looking’ Jewish. He knew all about 'powerful interests' and all about offensive speech. Yet he makes abundantly clear his rejection of censorship.  The " property right " paradigm does indeed represent the type of individual right that Marx pervasively condemns because he condemns the underlying socioeconomic interest.  But Marx also tacitly adopts a second paradigm, called here a " free speech " paradigm, to represent interests that Marx by no means rejects. For those interests —including free speech, freedom of torture, and other essential goods—Marx condemns rights not because he rejects the concomitant interests but, to the contrary, because he sees the right as betraying an utterly vital interest.

Since the 1970s, autonomist feminists have critiqued Karl Marx for failing to appreciate the sphere of reproduction as a key driver of capitalism. They have shown how unpaid reproductive work contributes to the production of surplus-value-something orthodox Marxism has refused to reckon with. This is in part because of a fetishisation of categories such as productive and unproductive labour as the theoretical building blocks of Marxism. However, if we understand Marx's critique of political economy as a method for understanding capitalism in terms of process, we are forced to rethink our understanding of categories such as surplus-value. Within current debates around the production of value under capitalism, it is useful to make an explicit conceptual distinction between where surplus-value is produced and where it is extracted. In doing so, we are foregrounding the sphere of reproduction and the key role it plays in upholding capitalist social relations.

This contrast, then, can inform the struggle against capitalism in the following ways. Firstly, it advocates for social movement unionism that transcend boundaries of production and reproduction. Secondly, it provides theoretical justification for withdrawing and disrupting reproductive labour, supporting a decentred politics of resistance outside the factory. Finally, it speaks to the importance of building autonomous movements for the production of "the commons". This paper uses examples from recent struggles in South Africa and South America to theoretically valorise the diversity of struggles that have emerged since the 1960s.

The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique (OP), and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers created a new kind of migrant justice struggle in the mid-1990s that in many ways remains at the practical and theoretical roots of much of non-status migrant organizing today. However, this essay also argues that Badiou's theoretical and political work with the sans-papiers also needs to be revised and updated in light of certain developments in more recent migrant justice struggles.

El presente libro tiene como objeto de estudio un tema cuya importancia me parece manifiesto. He tratado de aproximarme a esta difícil cuestión con la mayor objetividad de que soy capaz, por lo que no he evitado los juicios personales.
Los dos primero capítulos se corresponden a un artículo, “La crítica de Marx a los derechos humanos” que apareció publicado en la revista Sistema, N.º 37, Madrid, julio de 1980; pero el texto
actual difiere en bastantes aspectos —en especial, de estilo— del
anterior.
A lo largo de este trabajo creo que puede encontrarse algunas razones para no ser marxista y muchas más para no ser antimarxista.
Pero lo que yo quisiera es que el lector no especializado encontrara
alguna razón para seguir interesándose por Marx, para leer su obra
y estudiarla, sin excesivos prejuicios.
Palma de Mallorca, 1982.
Manuel Atienza Rodríguez

One of the most important debates in contemporary social and political movements concerns the importance and value of “prefigurative politics”. Its meaning, along with its origins, is often misconstrued, and it has come under intense criticism. This article defends a strategic sense of prefigurative politics on the basis of a Marxist theory of practice. Thus it reconstructs Marx's theory of practice, clarifies the relevant meaning of "prefigurative politics", and presents three arguments for why prefigurative politics is essential to bring about a free and democratic socialist society. Prefigurative politics is important for (1) developing revolutionary subjects with the powers or real possibilities needed to organise deliberation and decision-making in free and democratic socialist ways. Secondly (2), it is important for developing revolutionary subjects with the needs or drives motivating them to institute such forms of deliberation and decision-making when able to do so. Thirdly (3), it is important for developing revolutionary subjects with the consciousness – i.e. the right knowledge, outlook, values, etc. – required to understand and implement such free and democratic modes of deliberation and decision-making. Finally, I defend this strategic commitment from three common criticisms.

Forthcoming in Constellations.

1) Este libro es, en principio, un intento de reconstruir la dialéctica de la ilustración estudiada por Adorno y Horkheimer desde la perspectiva de la crítica marxiana del capital.

2) En el pensamiento maduro de Marx, leído fundamentalmente desde Moishe Postone, encontramos toda una teoría de las formas de mediación sociales en el capitalismo. La modernidad capitalista se caracteriza por la primacía de lógicas de dominación abstractas antes que personales. Somos dominados por abstracciones reales que se mueven solas, como el propio capital que, en cuanto valor que se valoriza, constriñe las posibilidades de acción política democrática de las personas.

3) Esas dominaciones impersonales y ciegas, sin embargo, no se sostienen sin una serie de dominaciones particularistas (de clase, género y racialización) que les son co-constitutivas. Entonces, no hay dominación abstracta sin angatonismos, disputa y lucha.

4) La modernidad capitalista no es, sin embargo, solo dominación. Esta también una forma social generativa. El capital pone potencialidades emancipatorias que, de realizarse, lo negarían y superarían históricamente.

5) Esas potencialidades se encuentran en la democracia y la técnica modernas. Ambas existen bajo una forma capitalista, en la que se realizan como dominación (democracia domesticada por el mercado, tecnología que oprime trabajadorxs en la configuración material del capital fijo). Sin embargo, ambas portan las promesas incumplidas de una modernidad más allá del capital. Esas promesas nos sugieren una democracia radicalizada que se sacuda de encima el mecanismo ciego de la acumulación y una técnica nueva que profundice las posibilidades de autodeterminación colectiva a nivel de la vida material.

6) Es posible, por lo tanto, una crítica inmanente de la modernidad capitalista. Esta crítica evita las narrativas unilaterales del progreso y la decadencia. La modernidad es, como enseñan Bolívar Echeverría y Moishe Postone, ambigua: mezcla de dominación y emancipción, de opresiones terribles y aperturas de posibilidades emocionantes. El proyecto del marxismo es algo así como críticar la modernidad para realizar sus núcleos de verdad emancipatorios.

7) Sin embargo, también hay un gran potencial de catástrofe en la modernidad. Como vieron Adorno y Horkheimer, el capitalismo no configura una dominación estática con potencialidades de liberación latentes. El potencial de catástrofe de la modernidad se activa cuando, en lugar de la emancipación, triunfan movimientos que barren las libertades parciales conquistadas bajo la abstracción-valor. Los fascismos, los totalitarismos, el antisemitismo, los odios racistas, son ejemplos de este potencial de catástrofe de la modernidad. Por eso, si los proyectos emancipatorios no se realizan o quedan truncos, nos espera algo peor que un capitalismo de "business as usual". Los totalitarismos no son excepciones enloquecidas ante la política moderna, sino resultados inmanentes de su dinámica, tanto como las promesas de democracia, socialismo y libertad. Las encrucijadas de la modernidad no nos permiten, por lo tanto, descansar en la ilusión de una dominación estabilizada y esperar al futuro para realizar las promesas emancipatorias. Si la emancipación no ocurre, más temprano que tarde sobrevendrá otra vez la catástrofe.

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time.

Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.

This chapter charts the theory of the value-form found in, on one hand, the New Reading of Marx (NRM), and, on the other, Open Marxism (OM). The latter is in part an outgrowth of the former, insofar as they launch a complementary overhaul of how we think about the relationship between value, labour and capitalist society. But it also marks a critical contribution, accompanying the former’s stress on the social form of value with a stern emphasis on the concrete antagonistic social relations of class society that serve to constitute value and are contained not only logically but historically within it. By moving critically within the latter, OM helps restate the centrality of class struggle at the core of the NRM’s ‘monetary’ theory of value, facilitating an understanding of the forces that intervene in the struggle with, against, despite and beyond the value form. This has produced mutual criticisms and creative tensions between NRM and OM, leading to the complementarity of the one with the other. By bringing an understanding of the constitution of abstract social forms in continuing concrete forms of human practice and domination, OM suggests that the unfolding the value form as presented in Marx’s Capital is not simply a logical derivation but a historical process based in the forceful dispossession and separation of individuals from the means of reproducing their conditions of living in order to create a class of wage labourers. It also suggests that behind the apparent ‘non-empirical reality’ of value lie antagonistic social relations that have a real-life efficacy mediated in abstract social forms. In this, OM’s critique of the NRM is also what affords the possibility of its complementarity with, and extension of, the latter.

What is the relationship between Foucault’s concept of biopower and Deleuze’s concept of control? Despite the similarities between these two concepts, there is not a single scholarly article that solely thematizes this question, nor a comparative survey of the answers given so far. This essay aims to fill this lacuna. Drawing on Deleuze's unpublished and untranslated lectures on Foucault, the original thesis of this essay is thus that biopower and control are the same concept of power in both content and form.

Come! Unity Press was an anarchist community in New York City in the mid nineteen-seventies that based its operations on the ideas of Murray Bookchin, the organizer best known for his theory of “Post-Scarcity Anarchism.” Come! Unity Press offered free access for the publishing of literature and visual propaganda of all sorts; it attracted a wide range of the underserved and unacknowledged: Native Americans, Puerto-Ricans, blacks, gays. Despite this, and like other cultural movements before it, the project initiated “the metamorphosis of political struggle from a compulsory decision into an object of pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption” [Walter Benjamin]. Come! Unity Press was a forerunner of the consumer-oriented cultures of today. This article suggests parallels with the ideology of Cubism and the cultural program of the Bavarian People’s Republic of 1919.

Marx’s theory of alienation is of great importance to contemporary political developments, due both to the re-emergence of anti-capitalist struggle in Zapatismo, 21st Century Socialism, and the New Democracy Movement, and to the fact that the most important theorists of these movements single out Marx’s theory of alienation as critical to their concerns. Despite this renewed practical and theoretical interest, however, these and other writers have been sparing in their accounts of the normative components which the theory of alienation incorporates. Along with many recent commentators, I argue that the normative components of the theory of alienation are to be found in a notion of human development, and that a conception of the particular importance of the human species-essence plays a critical role in this respect. However, I take a different, and somewhat more detailed, tack than these previous authors in presenting a more detailed conception of human development and flourishing on the basis of Marx’s conceptions of powers and needs and comparing it to the most prominent non-Marxist theory of human development: the capabilities approach. I then show that this understanding of powers and needs, along with a notion of the particularly important human power of conscious self-directed activity, underpins the critique of capitalism Marx presents in his theory of alienation. This will allow us a better understanding of the normative components of Marx’s theory of alienation and its potential relevance and plausibility to the theorists and movements it is influencing.