Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

Assessing the Effects of the Grundrisse in Anglophone Geography and Anthropology

Abstract: Selections of the Grundrisse were translated into English beginning in 1964; a full translation did not appear until 1973. Anglophone Marxian social science has changed dramatically since then; this article attempts to assess the role of the Grundrisse in these changes, focusing specifically on anthropology and geography. In geography the effects are most apparent in the work of David Harvey, who was among the earliest Anglophone social scientists to undertake a full reinterpretation of Marx in the light of the Grundrisse. I identify four insights that can be seen in Harvey's writings and elsewhere in recent human geography, but whose relation to the Grundrisse is not often acknowledged. In anthropology, the effects of the Grundrisse are perhaps even more pronounced but also more complex and obscure; nonetheless, a similar, and similarly under‐acknowledged, influence can be discerned, especially in historical anthropology and recent studies of value. I suggest that the Grundrisse's translation into English has facilitated a convergence of anthropology and geography, and that critical ethnography in this vein is needed to grapple with the financialization of everything, in which commodification is only a preliminary step.     

From the ‘spirit of capital’ to the “spirit” of capitalism: The transition in German economic thought between Lujo Brentano and Max Weber

I dedicate this essay to the memory of the late Wolfgang Mommsen—the subject would have been congenial to him. It is one of a series of offshoots from a central project: a scholarly edition of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic with commentary. When I first told Prof. Mommsen of my plan in 1994 he looked me full in the face and gave a characteristic growl: “All that work!” Here was a man who knew what he was about. My thanks to Ross McKibbin and Keith Tribe for reading this paper in draft.

The article begins by examining Max Weber's relations with Lujo Brentano, much the most important “precursor” to Weber in the field of economics. In particular, Brentano conducted a form of parallel inquiry into the rise of ‘the spirit of capital’ in England 35 years before Weber looked for the origins of “spirit” of capitalism there, and the contrast between these two ideas casts much light both on Brentano and on Weber's Protestant Ethic. This personal history leads into a broader history of the transition in German economic thought between the 1860s – the formative decade for Brentano but also the era of Marx's Capital – and that of Weber's generation coming to maturity c.1890. Marx and Weber remain the two great canonical thinkers and original minds; but any authentic historical comparison between Marx and Weber must take in Brentano. The essence of the contrast between the generations is that between Weber's novel conception of an ethical ‘capitalism’, and the materialism and naturalism underpinning Brentano's and Marx's ‘capital’, although Weber and Brentano are alike as liberals, democrats and bourgeois.     

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

Kojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.     

CLASS OR COMMUNITY? MARX,THE RUSSIAN COMMUNE,AND CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY

This article explores the relationship between class and community through a discussion of peasant struggles and the commune during the Russian Revolution. Doing so, we show how Marx's class‐oriented reflections on community can help us to understand the role that the peasantry plays (or should play) in processes of social transformation. This enables us, first, to understand the relevance of communal forms for Marx, who believed that communitarian ways of life were crucial for overcoming a value‐based society. It is, in fact, a mistake to divide Marx's intellectual trajectory into two periods: a categorical Marx, who authored Capital and critically analyzed the classical theory of value, and a phenomenological, empirical Marx, who in the last years of his life abandoned writing Capital and focused instead on studying the Russian peasantry. Second, it enables us to discuss new externalist visions, such as postcolonial and decolonial theories, which postulate that the subordination of contemporary peasant communities is rooted in epistemology, culture, and local power relations. These theories are related to the old social‐democratic canon, which conceives of social classes as preconstituted entities and of capital as a parasitic externality that is incommensurable with social dynamics. The experience of the Russian peasantry calls into question all externalist and ontological perspectives.     

A Negative Geography of Necessity

Abstract: One of the many unfortunate results of the long‐lived misconception that Marx was a “determinist” is a lack of engagement with his ideas of necessity and negation. Reading the Grundrisse's famous comments on the annihilation of space by time, I trace the Hegelian roots of these concepts to show that for both Marx ahd Hegel, negation is the very act of critique itself, and necessity is properly understood not as the force of history, but as the object of historical explanation–what makes things the way they are and not another. It is therefore crucial to critical geography's efforts to identify the possibilities for social change, for that analysis must be predicated on an understanding for how things have emerged in their present form, i.e. the one we have to work with. I argue that a negative geography of necessity is the essential basis for anything we might call a communist geography, a geography of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”.     

Riding the Dialectical Waves of Gay Political Economy: A Story from Birmingham's Commercial Gay Scene

In this paper I aim to contribute to work addressing the relationship between dissident sexuality and gay political economy by providing a reconfigured Marxist exploration into the ambivalence of commercial gay space. Through the application of a central theme from Marx's Grundrisse—the civilising influence of capital—I propose a means to move beyond an Althusserian view of commercial gay space as a contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony, to that of a capitalist embodiment of constraints and radical possibilities. Focusing on the commercial gay scene of the UK's second largest city, Birmingham, and the survival of a monthly British Asian gay club night therein, I explore the dialectical waves of capitalism. These waves drive conditions which both differentiate identity‐based production/consumption to the assimilative relations of exchange value, and accommodate moments of cultural creativity that feed off this continual differentiation and escape its economic relations in the formation of radically new use‐values.     

The Absence of Macpherson and Strauss in Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment

SUMMARY

Pocock's Machiavellian Moment is monumental in its erudition, and thus one may be surprised that Pocock virtually ignored Macpherson's Political Theory of Possessive Individualism in his assessment of seventeenth-century political thought, and ignored Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli. Pocock noted that ‘the schools of Marx, Strauss and Voegelin concur’ in holding Locke to be a bourgeois or possessive individualist. Pocock elaborated a paradigm of republicanism as civic humanism as a contrast to liberalism as possessive individualism. Pocock seemed to accept tacitly Macpherson's and Strauss's view that Locke inverted the Aristotelian view of property as a means to political participation, whereby politics became a means to the protection and accumulation of property. Macphersonian scholars have criticised Pocock for misinterpreting the function of property in the Atlantic republican tradition and Straussian scholars have criticised The Machiavellian Moment for its failure to distinguish ancient from modern republics, and for Pocock's failure to appreciate the epochal significance of Machiavelli's call to master fortune or dominate nature through technique. But it is questionable whether or not it is incumbent on an intellectual historian to address present preoccupations about capitalism or global technique.     

Simone Weil's Political Theology

This article suggests that Simone Weil's political theology is characterized by the idea of labor and the event of laboring. I begin by arguing that her thinking is shaped by a materialist reading of Christianity that employs Marx's concepts — labor, capital and alienation — to examine the political implications of three theological ideas, fall, slavery and sin. Next, I suggest that although laboring should be understood as a creative endeavor, Weil argues that it is always conditioned and constrained by a force she terms social matter. This constraint produces what Marx called alienation and Weil will refer to as enslavement (and even sin). Finally, I contend that Weil's idea of labor — and its call for a minimization of constraint — provides a counter-force to social matter. I conclude by suggesting that Weil's labor provides a different way of conceptualizing not just the political subject, but political theology itself.     

The Piketty phenomenon: why has Capital become a publishing sensation?

Why has Piketty's Capital become a publishing sensation? Not for revolutionary findings; its message that western societies have experienced increases in inequality of income and wealth over the long term is hardly new. Of the several reasons discussed in this article, attention is paid in particular to the book's timing and its claim to reveal the laws of income and wealth distribution in western societies. Had the book been published before 2008 it would have been much less successful. Piketty's revelation of the big trends and their underlying logic helps to objectify, legitimize and offer a kind of catharsis for surging middle‐class anxieties during the Great Recession. These anxieties have been further intensified by evidence that over 90 per cent of the increase in disposable income in the United States has accrued to the top 1 per cent of the population in the past several years, and a not much lower percentage to the top 1 per cent in Britain. In the conclusion it is argued that if Piketty's forecasts are even remotely accurate, capitalism will lose its core claim to legitimacy.     

2. CAN THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM BE ANTIHUMANIST?

This essay argues that to understand Foucault's attraction to neoliberalism, we must understand the elective theoretical affinities that he perceived between this current in economic thought and one of the central elements of his own philosophical project: the critique of humanism or “anthropologism” (that is, the tendency in modern thought to sift all knowledge through human knowledge). Specifically, the essay examines moments in Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures when Foucault clearly refers to the arguments of his earlier work, The Order of Things, the locus classicus of his philosophical antihumanism. In particular, Foucault claimed that economists of the Chicago School developed a theory of labor that escaped the limitations of the “anthropological” theory of labor associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. He also interpreted the notion of homo oeconomicus and Smith's idea of the market's “invisible hand” as critiques of the characteristically modern attempt to make transcendental claims on the basis of human nature. The essay concludes by asking if Foucault's philosophical antihumanism provides an adequate vantage point from which to critique contemporary capitalism.     

Jack Goody: The Anthropology of Unequal Society

In almost four decades Jack Goody has published a score of books seeking to explain the divergence of Africa from the Eurasian continent, and latterly to refute historical claims of western superiority to Asia. Since the millennium, he has sought to clarify his own vision of modern capitalism at a time when western hegemony is coming under pressure from globalization. Yet this achievement has not received the recognition from anthropologists that it deserves. This article, in reviewing six books published during the last decade, makes a case for reassessing Goody's project from the mid-1970s until now. It singles out two books for special attention, The Theft of History and his latest volume, Metals, Culture and Capitalism. A consistent theme of his recent work is to juxtapose his own account of the history of western capitalism with those of Marx, Weber and other writers in the classical tradition of social theory. Jack Goody remains to this day an anthropologist whose sensibility was formed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork. But he knew that, if he aspired to throw light on the human predicament as a whole, he would have to become a world historian too.     

Cronies,economic crime and capitalism in Putin's sistema

The books included in this review article are essential for the understanding of what I call Putin's sistema—the governance model that originated in the Soviet system but has transformed and adapted to global change. Each book tackles, from a different angle, the issues of Russia's transition and suggests ways to describe its political consequences. The books all attempt to identify some underlying logic or organizing force in a Russian society that has emerged through weak institutions. Although I join the authors in their criticisms of the ‘transition paradigm’ and its ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of democracy’ formula, transformations of the Soviet sistema seem to resonate with the ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of capitalism’. Perestroika can be seen as an ‘opening’ in shaking the foundations of sistema; Yeltsin's era as a ‘breakthrough’; and Putin's regime as the ‘consolidation’ of capitalism but with its distinct characteristics.     

Further Forms of Faithfulness

Abstract

In light of recent rehabilitations of the theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo by Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Zizek and others, the present essay examines whether that doctrine can or cannot be a resource for the critique of capitalism. Agreeing with Nancy and Zizek that the doctrine can be of use in the critique of capitalism, the essay takes up their discussions and adds to them by analyzing the relationship between the doctrine and Marx's treatment of human agency and capitalism. By situating Marx's philosophy in relation to Aristotle's and Hegel's discussion of the infinite, I contend that, despite Marx's overt rejection of creation ex nihilo, human activity is conceived by him according to it, and that capitalism, as he presents it and as supplemented with Nancy and Zizek, can be understood to be a "decreation" of the worldhood of the world.     

Technology and crisis; Marx,Schumpeter and beyond

Observing that the notion of economic crisis per se has, from its origins, been closely tied to the idea of technological progress, this article examines the roots and development of this liaison in Marx, Schumpeter and the recent contribution of Freeman, et al. (1982). A concept (the Third Sector) is proposed for the relation between the structural evolution of economic organization and technological progress; this concept is developed through a critique of Marx and Schumpeter in the light of contemporary economic circumstances, and as complementary to the more technology‐generic “new technology systems” approach of Freeman, et al. In conclusion it is found, on a cursory examination, that the organizational changes implied by the Third Sector are corroborated by the evolution of technology‐based multinational corporations, while echoing Marx and Schumpeter in their possible consequences for economic crisis in the 1980's.     

Globalization and the closing of the universe of discourse: the contemporary relevance of Marcuse's “Marxism”1

This paper assumes that there is something in the logic of the capitalist mode of production such that, in the words of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, it “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere,” giving a “cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” It assumes, that is, that there is an inherent tendency in capitalism to seek to globalize. Further, it is argued that one can plausibly claim that the capitalist mode of production has succeeded, or is succeeding, in globalizing against the countervailing forces of the managing state and organized labor. It is argued that this development represents, to use Marcuse's words, something like a “closing of the universe of discourse” or a “paralysis of criticism” and the emergence of a “society without opposition,” but in a context, in crucial respects, fundamentally different from that analysed by Marcuse in the 1960s.     

Cernuda,poeta de un sur imposible

This article examines the poetics that Luis Cernuda developed throughout his life in connection with its sublime illusion of a genuine Spanish south through the romantic recreation he made of his native Seville, in several texts written from exile: they are various poems of The Reality and Desire and the essays Digressions on Romantic Andalusia and History of a Book, and, above all, the autobiographical prints from Ocnos, in which Albanio's sensitive experiences reflect both the meditative elegance of Cernuda's childhood and adolescence and the utopian promise of a true relationship with the world beyond the social hypocrisy of bourgeois capitalism and the coercion of Franco's dictatorship. My intention in this article is to weave innovatively, in a consistent and documented way, the biographical events with the artistic intentions of the poet, to reveal original interpretive links between desolate reality and the desire for transcendence in his strange lyrics.     

Work,Poverty and Modernity in Mayhew's London

Mayhew's understanding of work in London has not been considered a great success. His accounts of workers were sentimental and erratic and his ambivalence to political economy prevented him from fully understanding the relationship between work and poverty. As the century progressed, it was Marx and Booth who provided systematic and sustained studies of the labour question. However, as this article argues, the circulation of facts, moral judgements and guesswork that filled the pages of London Labour and the London Poor offers a fair representation of a metropolitan manufacturing economy that was characterized by uncertainty, speculation and shifting boundaries of capital and labour. In particular, Mayhew's demonization of small masters, the working poor who set up as independent producers and whom he blamed for over-competition, drew out a contradiction in contemporary understandings of capitalism: large-scale capital and well-organized labour were seen as progressive and modern but small businesses were flexible and adaptable and were for many the only hope of escaping poverty and breaking out of the ranks of labour. As such, it is Mayhew rather than Marx or Booth that best exposes the tensions between the aspirations of the working poor and the paradigms of social investigators that insisted on distinguishing capital from labour.     

Capitalism,Crisis and Critique: Reassessing Régis Debray's ‘Modest Contribution’ to Understanding May 1968 in Light of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme

In 1978 Régis Debray argued that, rather than threatening to overthrow capitalism, the student and worker revolt of 1968 actually strengthened the mechanisms of capital accumulation in France. Today the historical significance of May 1968 continues to generate much debate and scholarly interest, yet Debray's controversial thesis is largely absent from contemporary accounts of May's impact on post-1968 socio-economic and political change. Adopting the theoretical framework of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, this article shows that Debray's work correctly highlights the ability of post-1968 capitalism to appropriate the critiques of May. In certain respects, Debray offered a prescient analysis of capitalism's ‘new spirit’ as later described by Boltanski and Chiapello. The article also explores some of the political and theoretical implications of a grave anti-capitalist threat being paradoxically turned into a source of capitalist strength. While highlighting the notable shortcomings in Debray's argument, particularly its deterministic approach, the article suggests that Debray's stimulating analysis of May 1968 instructively reveals the importance of understanding and explaining capitalism, crisis and critique together.     

Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure,Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

This essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar's Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe's novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne's and Frazar's adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system.