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Marx and Philosophy Society |
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Marx and Philosophy
Review of Books
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Annual conference 2009 Abstracts Nicole Pepperell (RMIT, Melbourne) Recent reinterpretations of Marx's work have tended to emphasise
the ways in which Marx puts forward a critical appropriation of
concepts like teleology and totality. In many of these recent
interpretations, Marx's work is understood to involve a deflationary,
historically specific, and non-metaphysical analysis of the ways in which
capitalist societies can be said, first, to be characterised by a
particular trajectory of historical transformation and, second, to
generate certain practical phenomena that can be well-described by a concept
like 'totality'. In spite of the deflationary and anti-metaphysical emphasis
of these readings, some critics have expressed concern that even a qualified,
bounded use of categories like 'telos' or 'totality' might attribute too much
power to capitalism as a social form - and thus undermine attempts to
theorise possibilities for transformative agency. In this
paper, I explore one particular option for how to think the role of concepts
of telos and totality in Marx's mature works, while retaining the
potential for transformative agency close to the surface of our analysis.
With specific reference to the first volume of Marx's Capital, I show
how Marx zooms in and out of different layers of social experience in
the course of his analysis, moving between aspects of collective life that
are intuitively meaningful to social actors, and other aspects that can
better be described as unintended consequences of aggregate behaviour. By
focussing on this layered dimension of social experience, it becomes possible
to bring more clearly into focus how Marx could both argue that aspects of
capitalist societies possess 'totalising' qualities, without this argument in
any sense undermining the ability to think about concrete potentials for emancipatory
change. Geoffrey
Kay The title is taken from the start of the section on
'commodity fetishism' in the first chapter of Capital: A commodity appears at first sight an
extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a
very strange thing abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties. Derivatives by contrast to
commodities do not even seem obvious; from the start they appear strange. It
does not necessarily follow that because they are more complex than common or
garden commodities (financial) derivatives are metaphysically subtler and
theologically nicer. But since they are, so to speak, commodities turned
inside out, sliced and rearranged, it seems a safe assumption to make. If as
Walter Benjamim claimed 'the religious structure of capitalism [is] – not
merely ... a formation conditioned by religion, but .. an essentially
religious phenomenon [itself]' derivatives are the Eucharist of capital, its consecrated
elements. One
of the issues to which the astronomic growth of derivatives in the last
thirty years and its sequel have given a certain urgency is the economic
distinction between the real
economy and nominal factors. Is the
provenance of this distinction really William of Ockham? If so what is a
matter of medieval dispute doing setting the terms of what Ben Bernanke calls
'a central question in macroeconomics … why nominal [i.e. monetary] shocks
should have real effects?' Is it possible that an essentially medieval notion
of the real not only entered economic thought (through British moralism) but
has even found its way into Marxism as well? The aim of this paper is to
raise rather than resolve such issues, to show that there are questions concerning
derivatives which fall into the domain of Marxists qua philosophers. Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of
Western
Ontario) No concept of Marx's is more tantalizing than that
of 'species-being' (Gattungswesen).
Cryptically and fragmentarily announced in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, but largely
abandoned in Marx's later work, the idea has passed in and then, apparently
decisively, out, of fashion amongst his interpreters. But the first decade of
the twenty-first century has seen a revival of interest in Gattungswesen. What did Marx mean by species-being? Why
might the idea have a renewed relevance today? What contemporary politics
could inform, and be informed by, this reconsideration of species-being? GRADUATE PANEL: Jeremy
Cohan (NYU) This paper details how and why Marx uses the
concept of social class. First, I describe and
catalog the different classes that appear in Marx's work—proletariat,
bourgeoisie, landowners, intellectuals, finance capitalists, peasants,
lumpenproletariat, and more. With the aid of a little-known passage from
Marx's Theories of Surplus Value, I
differentiate between the essential class relationship of the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat and several other subdivisions (e.g. 'transition classes'
like landowners). The relationship between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is
'essential' for Marx both because it is vital for understanding the
particular character of capitalism and because it points to how class society
as such might be overcome. I claim (after G.A. Cohen, though with some
amendment) that class society for Marx is a situation of 'collective
unfreedom' for all classes. I counterpose
this reading of Marx to more common uses of class that focus on evoking
sympathy for the oppressed class and condemning all-powerful oppressors. Marx
was convinced that 'class' described the unfreedom not only of the oppressed
class, but of all those involved in the
class relationship. I demonstrate this through a sustained engagement
with examples spanning from The Holy
Family to Capital where Marx
characterizes the bourgeoisie as unfree. Marx's attention to the proletariat is
not due to the mere fact of its oppression, but because of its political
potential to end class itself. The abolition of classes, rather than
fulfilling the interests of an oppressed group, or even bringing 'power to
the people,' is at the core of Marx's treatment of class. Claiming that
Marx's unique and complex way of seeing class is too often bowdlerized and
forgotten, the paper ends by calling for the renewal of a Marxian analysis
and politics that imagines the end of class itself. David
Marjoribanks (Kent) Marxism
is often thought to have a 'moral deficit'. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example,
in After Virtue, has argued that
Marxism has suffered from 'grave and harm engendering moral impoverishment'.
In this paper I examine what this could mean, and what responses are
available to Marxists. Marxism's moral impoverishment is generally held to
consist, firstly, in its paradoxical approach to morality. Marxism has always
maintained an ambiguous relationship with morality, dismissing it as a
pernicious ideological abstraction, whilst at the same time clearly
advocating socialism not merely as a scientific prediction, but as a moral
idea. Secondly, it has been argued that Marxism's ambiguous philosophical approach
to morality has dangerous political consequences for Marxism. Steven Lukes,
for example, argues that Marxism's problematic treatment of morality led to
Marxism becoming ethically disabled as a theory, such that it found itself
unable to condemn the crimes of Stalinism. In his early Marxist phase,
contributing to the debate about Marxist humanism, MacIntyre pointed to a way
out of the moral 'wilderness', where Marxists are caught between Kantianism
and Utilitarianism. In between the Scylla and Charybdis of abstract,
ahistorical, groundless moral principle and amoral, purely 'scientific',
utilitarian Stalinism, MacIntyre sought to find a materialist ethics for
Marxism, historically conditioned and socially grounded. However, he has long
since abandoned this hope. In this paper I will contrast the prospects for
such an ethics with those for an alternative, but similarly materialist,
'post-modern' ethics. I suggest we can see Hegel and Marx as contributing to
a line of thought developed by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Foucault. Such
an approach might have the advantage that Hegelian Marxism provided – its
historicity – without the idealist and teleological 'baggage'; it might
provide a way of overcoming the political, as well as philosophical 'moral deficit'. Caleb Basnett (York University, Toronto) Marxism's preoccupation with its relation to science has often
involved neglecting the possibility of a Marxist ethics. Ethics, along with the
ethical 'subject,' have often been seen as ideological categories hostile to
Marxist science. In my paper I will argue against this position, claiming
that Marx's Capital, while often
seen as a kind of matrix for Marxist science free of ideological contamination,
in fact contains numerous descriptions of different kinds of subjects from
which an ethical project complementary to revolutionary politics can be
constructed. I examine three interrelated yet distinct forms of subject found in
Volume 1 of Marx's Capital: 1) the
subject of circulation, the legal 'person' of bourgeois society; 2) the
pre-bourgeois subject transformed into this 'person' through historical
forces; and 3) the subject of production, the laborer. While the latter two
forms of subject arise through Marx's empirical studies of history to
undermine the essentially Hegelian subject of bourgeois society, both are
described in terms of bodies and wills, concepts which, while retaining their
Hegelian stamp, for Marx transcend their origins and become something
altogether new. This empirical short-circuiting of idealist concepts involves
the fracture of the bourgeois subject. Subjects for Marx are everywhere:
indexed to the concatenating material processes that make up the world, they
harbor the possibility of its change. Insofar as these material processes everywhere
involve subjects, ethical subjects who practice the cultivation of their
potential, such as those described by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle or
Kant, need not serve the established order. Instead I argue these subjects
might through ethical practice rid themselves of that which would mutilate
their potential, radically alter the functioning of the material processes
which they compose, and in so doing, re-invent themselves as subjects. In
Marx, ethics can be revolutionary. |
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