Karl Marx

Nietzsche’s psychological theory of the drives calls into question two common assumptions of ideology critique: 1) that ideology is fetishistic, substituting false satisfactions for true ones, and 2) that ideology is falsification; it conceals exploitation. In contrast, a Nietzschean approach begins from the truth of ideology: that capitalism produces an authentic contentment that makes the concealment of exploitation unnecessary. And it critiques ideology from the same standpoint: capitalism produces pleasures too efficiently, an overproduction of desire that is impossible to sustain (...) indefinitely. Nietzsche’s concept of the drives (Trieben) is grounded in his theory of the will to power. In contrast to Freud’s view that drives aim at satiation, pleasure through stimulus reduction, in Nietzsche’s view, they aim primarily at the “feeling of power” and the “happiness of high tension.” Nietzsche sees the desire for satiation as a symptom of weakness, a secondary, contingent aim that is incompatible with the fundamental drive to sustain and heighten the feeling of tension that accompanies strong desire. While the Freudian subject desires satisfaction, the Nietzschean subject is paradoxically frustrated by satisfaction, finding happiness in desire sustained by resistance and tension. If individuals desire desire as such, then exploitation and immiseration are not necessarily incompatible with their happiness. Consequently, we must reject the view that ideology is fetishistic: capitalism does not depend on an ersatz satisfaction in the commodity, a transferal of value from quality to quantity, use value to exchange value. Capitalism authentically satisfies desire precisely through its exploitative economic structure. The independence and unpredictability of the value of commodities and the immiseration of laborers produces discontents that enhance rather than frustrate desire. By continually introducing new, initially inaccessible commodities, then overcoming their inaccessibility through overproduction, capitalism sustains and intensifies desires. It promotes happiness not by satisfying wants but generating them, feeding the desire for desire, for the intensity of feeling that the brief pleasures of satiation would destroy. The commodity is not, then, a fetish, not a false satisfaction or aim, but a means, a prop that supports and sustains satisfaction as continued desire. Consequently, we must also reject the view that ideology is falsification: capitalism’s efficient production of happiness obviates the need to conceal its nature. Individuals tolerate capitalism not out of ignorance of exploitation but indifference to it; they prefer real happiness to a merely possible justice that might come at its expense. The critique of ideology must begin by acknowledging its truth. Rather than deny the real satisfactions of capitalism, it must demonstrate that they are unsustainable. (shrink)

It is common to assimilate Marx’s and Spinoza’s conceptions of democracy. In this chapter, I assess the relation between Marx’s early idea of “true democracy” and Spinozist democracy, both the historical influence and the theoretical affinity. Drawing on Marx’s student notebooks on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, I show there was a historical influence. However, at the theoretical level, I argue that a sharp distinction must be drawn. Philosophically, Spinoza’s commitment to understanding politics through real concrete powers does not support with Marx’s (...) anti-institutional conception of true democracy. And as a matter of social theory, the gap between civil society and the state which so troubles Marx is a development of modernity that has not entered Spinoza's premodern field of view. Marx’s true democracy was also influenced by his study of Rousseau, and theoretically, it is just as close if not closer to Rousseau as to Spinoza. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. This article reconstructs and defends Theodor Adorno’s social theory by motivating the central role of abstract domination within it. Whereas critics such as Axel Honneth have charged Adorno with adhering to a reductive model of personal domination, I argue that the latter rather understands domination as a structural and de-individualized feature of capitalist society. If Adorno’s social theory is to be explanatory, however, it must account for the source of the abstractions that dominate (...) modern individuals and, in particular, that of value. While such an account remains undeveloped in Adorno, Marx provides resources for its development, in positing the constitution of value neither in production nor exchange alone, but in the social totality. This article argues that Marx’s account is compatible with Adorno’s, and that it may be used to render Adorno’s theory of domination more credible on explanatory grounds. (shrink)

Review Essay of G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978, 2000).

Karl Marx’ın 1844 Ekonomik ve Felsefi Elyazmaları onun yabancılaşma kavrayışını anlamak açışından oldukça önemli bir metindir. Bu metinde dört farklı yabancılaşma türünden söz edilir. Ancak, Marx’ın bu yabancılaşma biçimlerine ilişkin açıklamaları incelendiğinde, aslında bunlardan birinin, türsel yabancılaşmanın, daha temel olduğu ve diğerlerinin de bu yabancılaşma biçiminden kaynaklandığı ortaya çıkar. Türsel yabancılaşmanın temel yabancılaşma biçimi olduğu iddiası, hem Marx’ın emeğin yabancılaşmasının özel mülkiyetin nedeni olduğu iddiasını temellendirmeyi hem de yabancılaşmanın sadece kapitalist sisteme özgü bir olgu olmadığını göstermeyi olanaklı kılar.

En su libro On the Nature of Marx’s Things Jacques Lezra hereda otro Marx, y otro materialismo. Un materialismo aleatorio, un materialismo de la contingencia dinámica de Marx y sus “cosas”. Tal “corriente subterránea” del materialismo aleatorio es excavada por Lezra en su desvío por las cartas, cuadernos y notas “privadas” de un joven Marx que trabajaba en su tesis de doctorado. Siguiendo el hilo necrofilológico de Lezra, que se topa con Lucrecio y sus “cosas,” encontramos que, paralelamente, Marx también (...) busca un concepto de ciencia en su tesis: lo que tentativamente nombramos ciencia de la contingencia. Ciencia, no ya disciplinaria, que abre la posibilidad de una alianza con el materialismo performativo de Karen Barad que desplaza el humanismo de los “nuevos materialismos” desde una reflexión critica que piensa a la par de otra ciencia de la contingencia, también de cierta herencia lucreciana, con la cual Marx no llegó a pensar: la mecánica cuántica. (shrink)

Irfan Ajvazi's forthcoming book from Idea Books (July, 2021): -/- "In Defense of Karl Marx seems the politics of the Left, the criticism of neo-liberalism, and the capitalist class of the powerful tyranny who brings inequalities and the discrimination of Working Class and the Workers. From the conception of freedom, Irfan looks the Politics of Neo-liberalism , Capitalism, and the Tyrannies as a destructive force in the ideological struggle, The Book calculate the economics of the communism and the History of (...) Philosophy, with a Hegelian Dialectics and Lacanian theory mixing also the rational argument of Spinoza and Kant.". (shrink)

Eco/logical R/evolution, is the story of mankind, told with words of a great and wonderful subjective odyssey, the never-ending quest; for objective truths and collective Eudaimonia. The author raises the issues; of political weakness and widespread confusion, about logical analytical errors, of which we find many of in Old Marxist Ideology. As a conscious effort, is thus made, to expel the mental subjugation of Platonic Idealism, away from the clenches Aristotelian Realism, and its bastard offspring; Old Historical Materialism. The book (...) identifies, in the works of Darwin and Marx, a wide range of worrying philosophical incompatibilities, such that are clearly found; in their respective theories and research methodologies. -/- We hereby propose; that a New Marxist Philosophy of Science, stands a probable chance; at unifying the Natural and Social Sciences. As the convergence of truths is manifest, thus, it is mapped out in detail by the author, out of necessity. It invokes, a Marxist Metaphysical Identity, for the sole purpose off; presenting a teleological framework, for New Marxist Theory. -/- NOTE: Reader must look up each word in a dictionary, which they see on both sides of the "/" when found in the middle of a word. (shrink)

Se trata, como su nombre lo indica, de 14 tesis elaboradas en diálogo con los dos más importantes libros sobre estética de Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez. El propósito es ir acercando respuestas a la pregunta sobre la especificidad de los valores estéticos. El texto, que fue publicado originalmente bajo el título “14 tesis sobre los valores estéticos”, en 1999 (Cuadernos Valeológicos, Serie: Valores, 1999, núm. 7, pp.1-42) ha sido revisado y actualizado para la presente edición.

In this paper we compare Kierkegaard’s and Marx’s views on social reform. Then we argue that Kierkegaard’s own reasoning is consistent with the expression of neighbor-love through collective action, i.e. social reform. However, Kierkegaard’s approach to social reform would be vastly different than Marx’s. We end by reviewing several questions that Kierkegaardian social reformers would ask themselves. Our hope is that this exploration will provide helpful insights into how those who genuinely love their neighbors ought to seek the common good (...) through collective action. (shrink)

What follows is an attempt to question the ways of how Engels coined the term “dialectics” in his Dialectics in Nature. My focus is directed by an interest in re-reading Engels’s undertaking from the perspective of his much-celebrated and downplayed Plan 1878. I would like to make clear from the outset that, by Engels’s dialectics, the Plan 1878 and Dialectics of Nature, I refer neither to a complete and compact account of dialectics nor to the list of contents of Engels’s (...) work nor to a “book.” Rather, I occupy myself with a “work in progress” that reached some stage of maturity at the end of 1870s (documented in a plan), and a work before it posthumously became a “book.” In this regard, a couple of remarks seem to be in order. (shrink)

This article examines Jacques Derrida’s work of self-reflection on his own teaching practice by using as a guiding thread the problematics of reproduction in the seminars of the 1970s. The first part of the article examines the sequence of seminars taught by Derrida at École normale supérieure from 1971 to 1977 to show how the concept of reproduction is deconstructed by Derrida across several seminars. Derrida systematically demonstrates, across several themes and fields (sociology and economy, biology and sexuality, art, technique, (...) ontology, and so on), that the critical recourse to the concept of reproduction (for instance, in its Marxist form) risks being complicit in the reproductive system it criticizes. The deconstructive motif of débordement is introduced to problematize this onto-logic of re-production. The second part of the article analyzes more specifically the unpublished seminar “GREPH, le concept de l’idéologie chez les idéologues français” (1974–75), in which Derrida examines the seminar function, his role as a teacher, and his own situation within the French educational system. In particular, Derrida offers a deconstructive critique of the reproductive effects of teaching, and of the institution of philosophy inasmuch as it functions as a reproductive machine. This work of deconstruction is done in the seminar notably through readings of Marx, Engels, and Althusser, with special attention to the concepts of ideology, reproduction, and sexual difference. (shrink)

Marxism has found its home in the academic world in various disciplines: economics, philosophy, sociology, and political science. An under-appreciated area is Marxist accounting. At first, this seems like a rather strange field in which to develop the theories of Marxism, but Rob Bryer, in his book Accounting for Value in Marx’s Capital: The Invisible Hand, has brought attention to Marxist accounting and its necessity for understanding Marxist theory. This is relevant not only to those who study accounting but to (...) all who have an interest in Marxism’s basis for value and, even more importantly, the labour theory of value as a whole. (shrink)

Estudio de la visión marxiana acerca del ser humano a partir de las categorías alienación y praxis.

El trabajo parte de una descripción y definición de la "teoría de la colonialidad/decolonialidad" (TCD), fundamentando porqué así debe llamarse esta propuesta. A continuación se aborda la relación de la TCD hacia herencia teórico-práctica de Marx, haciendo énfasis particular en las razones y sin-razones de su crítica al eurocentrismo de Marx. Se abordan los fundamentos del eurocentrismo de Marx, la validez de conceptos como los de "centro" y "periferia" en el estudio del sistema capitalista mundial, la existencia histórica de eurocentrismos (...) de derecha y de izquierda y el por qué, a pesar de su propio eurocentrismo, la recuperación de Marx es importante para la construcción práctica de una sociedad poscapitalista y poscentrada. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to analyze, clarify, and reconstruct the concept of class consciousness by developing a dialectical account of political agency at work in the concept. I defend a dialectical account of agency, that includes both the way in which individuals come together to form groups, but also the capacity of a collective to transform social conditions. I argue that this account of political agency is necessary in order to understand the possibility of social transformation or change. I trace the (...) development of the relationship between consciousness and agency in the early tradition of Western Marxism, focusing primarily on the account of class consciousness given by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness. Against his account of the world historical agency of a unified proletariat, however, I defend Theodor Adorno’s insistence on nonidentity, and the importance of unreconciled groups in capitalist society. In order to understand these groups, such as the vanguard, party, or proletariat, we must understand the way in which individuals form groups, as well as their inherent collectivity. -/- My account of the political agency at work in the concept of class consciousness is broadly speaking pluralist. I argue that a multiplicity of methodologies is needed in order to arrive at a complete picture of the concept. I defend an account of class consciousness that is neither reductive nor deflationary with respect to other dimensions of social domination. This class forward approach seeks to build intersectional political coalitions in order to undertake revolutionary action. Successful revolutionary social transformation is never guaranteed in advance; however, the concept of class consciousness, reconstructed through the lens of political agency, offers conceptual resources to address the problems of today, for the sake of a better tomorrow. (shrink)

The following is a critical reconstruction of the collaboration between Bauer and Marx between 1839 and 1842. The turbulences in the period in question reveal themselves in Marx’s thought as well as in his relationship with Bruno Bauer. Correspondingly, Marx’s detours, false paths, dead ends and abandoned work are therefore made the focus of this study. The ambivalent initial relations between the two of them, which both made their collaboration possible and hindered it, clearly go back further than 1841, when (...) Bauer was not yet an atheist and was still a proponent of church doctrine. This was the Bruno Bauer that Marx had come to know in the Doctor’s Club. We then meet Bauer the atheist at the end of 1839 or perhaps the beginning of 1840, as he was planning a comprehensive attack on orthodox theology and wanted Marx to fight on his side. This attack continued in Bauer’s Trumpet and in Hegel’s Doctrine. (shrink)

This text was prompted by a forum discussing the legacy of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, twenty-five years after its publication. In this short essay, I explore the book’s influence on the fields of Marxism, post-Marxism, and beyond. With the problematic of heritage and legacy in mind, I raise the questions of sexual difference and dissemination as that which comes to interrupt the genealogical logic of inheritance understood as filiation and reproduction. I show that Derrida’s book, besides questioning reception and (...) influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida’s numerous engagements with Marx and Marxist thought in a series of unpublished seminars from the 1970s. This is done more specifically through a reading of an unpublished seminar from 1974-1975, dealing with the Marxian concepts of ideology and division of labor – which Derrida interrogates more particularly in relation to sex, sexuality, and sexual differences. This text was published in the section "Ambivalent Promises—Reproductions of the Subject: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part IV", Contexto Internacional, 42 (1), pp. 125-148. (shrink)

Marx’ın yapıtlarında ahlaki bir kaygı taşıdığı ve bu doğrultuda bir etik teorisine sahip olduğu düşüncesi günümüzde tartışılmaya devam eden bir meseledir. Bu tartışma genellikle Marx'ın yabancılaşma, insan doğası ve kapitalizm hakkında ileri sürmüş olduğu düşünceleri üzerinden yürütülmektedir. Bu kapsamda, ilk olarak, makalede Marx’ın yabancılaşma teorisi ve bu kavramın nasıl ortaya çıktığına ilişkin tarihsel arka plan verilmektedir. Daha sonra yabancılaşma ile insan doğası arasındaki ilişkiyi kurarak, Marx'ın insan doğası anlayışının ona bir etik teorisi imkânı sağlayıp sağlamadığı tartışılmaktadır. Bu bağlamda, Marx'ın etik (...) teorisine hizmet eden evrensel bir insan doğası anlayışına sahip olduğu fikri, Louis Althusser ve Norman Geras'ın analizi ile irdelenmektedir. Yapılan tartışmalar doğrultusunda, nihai olarak, makalede Marx’ın bir etik teorisine ve ahlak anlayışına sahip olduğu sonucu desteklenmektedir. (shrink)

From Augustine’s (death) drive towards an imaginary time before speech to Marx’s drive toward an imaginary time after speech as we know it, we learn that we are always already within the bonds of the mother tongue. In the late twentieth-century, Derrida turns to both Augustine and Marx to repeat the fantasy of escaping the mother (tongue). Derrida responds to Marx’s analysis of our repeated failure to forget the mother tongue by turning to Augustine’s analysis of the mother’s touch: we (...) cannot forget the mother tongue because it is licked upon our skin. Drawing on Derrida’s relationship to Augustine and Marx on the topic of touch and language, I argue that although the bond of the mother tongue is inescapable, its very real grip upon our skin is founded upon a number of fantasies: the fantasy of the Mother, of a cut with the Mother by the Mother, which separates us from an original shared skin and binds us to the Mother tongue, the fantasy of self-articulation in the death of the Mother. I suggest that the symptoms of the fantasmatic foundation of our entrapment by the mother tongue-touch is expressed in barely perceptible glitches—a shiver passing over one’s skin, a stutter in one’s speech. (shrink)

The state of our current world has brought about a very active discussion concerning possible alternatives to our current society. In this article, I wish to consider Marx’s idea of communism as a possible alternative, by understanding it as an undetermined concept that only proposes a society without classes and private property. The thesis I will defend here is that we can meaningfully think about such an alternative through the means of Science Fiction literature. In particular, I will take Ursula (...) Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (2006) as a case study. To clarify this relation between science fiction (SF) literature and communism as a particular case of an alternative society, I will introduce some concepts of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological theory. Thus, I shall argue that in SF we can presentify in bounded phantasy an alternative lifeworld, so furnishing with content the undetermined idea, and in doing so, strengthen the belief in the possibility of such an alternative society. (shrink)

Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx and Engels’ works has been somewhat a common but rather unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a case in point. A bold line seems to shape the entire Engels debate and separate two opposite views in this regard: Engels the contaminator of Marx’s materialism vs. Engels the self-started genius of dialectical materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has (...) not enjoyed so far is a critical reflection upon the relationship between different layers of this text: authorial, textual, editorial and interpretational. Informed by a historical hermeneutic, inquiry into the elements that structure the debate on “Dialectics of Nature,” and into the different political and philosophical functions attached to it, makes it possible to relocate the meaning of “dialectics” in a more precise context. Engels’ dialectics is less complete than we usually think it is, but he achieved more than most scholars would like to admit. (shrink)

Este ensayo presenta una descripción de los escritos inéditos de Jacques Derrida sobre Marx y Louis Althusser en la década de 1970, y un estudio de conceptos como ideología, diferencia sexual, reproducción, violencia, dominación o hegemonía en perspectiva deconstructiva. Se trata de pensar en una otra economía, más allá de la economía del cuerpo propio. El artículo fue publicado en el Volumen 7 de la Revista Demarcaciones, "a 25 años de Espectros de Marx.".

With the desperate usurpation of global spaces under the everexpanding capitalist mode of production, the political struggle still necessitates an emancipatory class politics as aimed by Marx and Engels. This paper will be a synthesis of Marxist geographer David Harvey’s theory of capitalist production of space and MarxEngels’ notion of freedom, and their notion of emancipatory class politics. According to David Harvey, its survival as a system is through its widescale control on the production of spaces. I will first expose (...) the theory of the Marxist geographer David Harvey on how capitalism produces a space through his theory of the capitalist production of space. This necessary strategy of capitalism to own and extend to spaces is essential to its nature to increase capital and profit. According to him, capitalism always needs to expand territories to create new sources of labor, wealth, and new markets. This necessitates obtaining profits to sustain capital accumulation amidst its problem of crises. The spatial ontology of capital will be the springboard showing a possible construction of the type of freedom or emancipation that is necessary in forwarding a class politics of spatiality. In effect, emancipating the place is tied with the classical notion of the liberation of the proletariat. I conceptualize the concept of place as a signifier of the spaces that humanity produces—may it be their home, their work, or geometries of modern life—but have been put under the dictates and design of capital. Thus, I will go back to the classical notion of emancipatory politics of Marx and Engels. This synthesis combines the possibility of emancipatory class politics based on the ontology of the present capitalist production of space. (shrink)

Karl Marx states in Capital that “man, if not as Aristotle thought a political animal, is at all events a social animal” (Marx, 1992, 444). That Marx draws from Aristotle’s work has been long-recognized, but one could argue that Marx’s very conception of man—what he calls “species-being”—is a derivative of Aristotle’s theory of the good life. This article explores the Aristotelian underpinnings of Marx’s political philosophy and argues that Marx’s theory of species-being and human emancipation supervenes upon Aristotle’s theory of (...) eudaimonia. The consequence of such a rethinking suggests that the Aristotelian good life itself is possible only in the communist society of Marx’s imaginings and, as such, is a state that must be realized—whether by nature or revolution—for human flourishing. Inspired by Aristotle’s assertion that “friendship exists to the extent that what is just exists” (Aristotle, 1991a, 527), this article draws from several of Aristotle’s and Marx’s texts to situate man as an inherently social being, whose need of other men serves both to edify and realize a common end toward which the state is oriented: the life of virtuous activity performed by and in an association of equals. (shrink)

Following Freud’s analysis of the fragile line between the uncanny double and its comic redoubling, I identify the doubling of the double found in critical moments of Hegelian dialectic as producing a kind of comic effect. It almost goes without saying that two provides greater pleasure than one, the loneliest number. Many also find two to be preferable to three, the tired trope of dialectic as a teleological waltz. Two seems to offer lightness, relieving one from her loneliness and lacking (...) the complications of a third who comes in between. And yet, we learn through Marx and Freud that the double (even the double of tragedy and farce) borders on something closer to horror than comedy. -/- In the following, I would like to explore why four is funnier than two in my staging of dialectic as the doubling of the double or, to borrow a movie title from Laurel and Hardy, “Twice Two” (Roach et al. 1933a). I will begin by exploring the formulations of the double in the form of a pair of opposites and in the form of a pair of twins. The literary tropes of the double as the odd couple, on one side, and the twins, on the other, appear to serve very different narrative functions, which incite different kinds of affective responses from the audience. However, the form of the opposed double sometimes conceals the realization that the empty or fragmented content of the first is only reduplicated in the second. The “straight man” of the odd couple cannot see himself in his counterpart “the comic.” The redoubling of the double, however, forces not only the audience, but the original double on stage to confront what was already present, but unrealized, from the beginning. To illustrate this redoubling of the double within the opening of Hegel’s Science of Logic, I consider two short films by Laurel and Hardy in which the comic duo redoubles itself. The formula (2 x 2) produces a comic excess through the dialectical redoubling of there uncanny double. (shrink)

Picking up on Marx’s and Hegel’s analyses of human beings as social and individual, the article shows that what is at stake is not merely the possibility of individuality, but also the correct conception of the universal good. Both Marx and Hegel suppose that individuals must be social or political as individuals, which means, at least in Hegel’s case, that particular interests must form part of the universal good. The good and the rational is not something that requires sacrificing one’s (...) interests for the community or denying one’s particular character so as to become an equal rational agent. Very much to the contrary, the rational or the common good is nothing but the harmonious structuring of particular interests. While Section I introduces Marx’s and Hegel’s conceptions of individual and social beings, Sections II and III discuss their respective views of individuality, and Sections IV and V discuss the notion of a universal good containing individual interests. (shrink)

Focusing on the conceptual terms of the idealist-realist debate, the paper shows that the inability of the realists to recognize Marx’s idealist heritage is out of the realists’ limited understanding of the category of idealism in their reading. To prove the paper’s case, the first section starts with elucidation of Marx’s concept of epistemological idealism as read by his interpreters. It shows the actual meaning of epistemological idealism as used by Kolakowski, Lukacs, and other idealist readers of Marx. The second (...) section shows how the realists conflate the two idealisms, how the realist reading is erroneously grounded on failure to clarify the difference between the concept of ontological and epistemological idealism. The third section highlights the differences between epistemological and ontological idealism. It explains that Ontological idealism claims that idea is the fundamental reality, while epistemological idealism suggests that knowledge is dependent upon the subject. (shrink)

The question of “how one should philosophize?” is driven not only out of the desire to have a glimpse of the ideas worthy to be regarded as true, but also to address the pressing problems of the time. Marx’s humanism, as articulated mainly in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, suggests a certain thinking that addresses the latter. It is the humanism that discovers the concrete estrangement of workers from the abstraction of the political economy at the backdrop of (...) human emancipation. Heidegger, however, in the Letter on Humanism, poses critical challenge against the humanism Marx suggested. He questions Marx’s humanism (and the humanism in totality) to provide the human being direction to attain its essential humanity, and not just relegate man into inhumanity of animalitas. The paper critically examines the ideas given by Heidegger. Although Heidegger could be correct in his examination of the previous humanism, which includes Marx, how he understands the essence of man as “ek-sistence” is but a form of abstraction, an abstraction which is based in his inhuman concept of thinking. The paper does not entirely denounce Heidegger’s thinking, but appeals to recognize the dangers containing in its ambiguity and abstractness. Marx’s humanism, on the other hand, though has forgotten being, is more concrete. With this, the paper calls to repose the tasks and the questions of humanism, and directs thinking out from the dangers of abstraction to concrete understanding of human beings, their problems and solutions. (shrink)

From 1930 onwards, György Lukács considers ‘uneven development’ the typical relational form between economic progress and the corresponding evolution of other fields of human activity. In the early thirties Lukács focuses on the problem of elaborating an independent Marxist aesthetics, but then necessarily find himself having to deal with the general configuration of Marx’s alleged philosophy. The general theory illustrated in The Ontology of Social Being is where this philosophy, considered as a Weltanschauung, is given its final framework. His reflection (...) on the ‘specificity’ of the aesthetic experience, as part of the broader framework of the main fields of art, science and everyday life, is the theoretical medium Lukács used in the fifties and sixties to fine-tune the need that had arisen decades earlier to attribute Marxism with genuine philosophical universality. (shrink)

Eine der frühesten Schriften des jungen Karl Marx — die Dissertationsschrift „Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie“ — legt wichtige Fundamente für das gesamte Marx’sche Denken. In der Dissertationsschrift versucht Marx anhand des Vergleichs der antiken Naturphilosophien Demokrits und Epikurs grundlegende Erkenntnisse der theoretischen und praktischen Philosophie in einem komplexen, von Hegel inspirierten ontologischen System zu verbinden. Aus dieser kritischen Synthese antiker Naturphilosophien entsteht so eine auf Hegelschen Begriffen basierende, aber gleichzeitig reformierte Idee der Praxis. Auf diesen Grundlagen sowie mit (...) Hilfe des über die Kritik an Epikur und Hegel gewonnenen Begriffs der Entfremdung entwickelt Marx den dialektischen Materialismus der Naturphilosophie. Dem inhaltlichen Aufbau der Dissertationsschrift folgend wird in dem Aufsatz die Marx’sche Naturphilosophie diskutiert. Dabei werden die wichtigsten Begriffe des Marx‘schen Denkens, wie etwa Materialismus, Dialektik, Entfremdung oder Einheit von Theorie und Praxis in der Dissertationsschrift von Karl Marx ausgearbeitet. (shrink)

Why did the white working classes in the United States and elsewhere turn to the far right instead of uniting with the raced and gendered working class to overthrow capitalism? In this paper, I bring core concepts coined by Karl Marx in conversation with Jacques Lacan to show how the far-right exploited desires and fears around subjects' fundamental non-wholeness, which the insecurities of neo-liberal capitalism have heightened, for its political gain. I explain how the far-right offered its followers several unconscious (...) fantasy objects petit a to cover over subjects' non-wholeness: first, the money fetish, which is also at the center of the American Dream, serves to secure the illusion of wholeness on earth; second, religion offers the illusion of wholeness in the sky, producing subjects who endure rather than rebel against their suffering on earth. Finally, it brands the sexed and raced working classes as inferior to uphold the illusion of the white working-class subjects as superior and whole, which further undermines the creation of a revolutionary proletariat. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to Laury Naranch’s and Mary Caputi’s discussion of my book Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism (2017). In response to Naranch, I clarify how the political subject-in-outline translates into collective political action through the figure of the Chicana working-class woman. I also explain why the proletariat, more so than the precariat, implies a radical political imaginary if we rethink this concept in the context of my idea of the political subject-in-outline. I also clarify that my (...) chapters on Marx expose how Adorno and Marx have problematic imaginations of the working-class woman, which counter their otherwise radical imaginary. In response to Caputi, I clarify the meaning of capitalism in my book and underline that we need a rigorous critique of capitalism to counter the rise of the Far Right. I also explain why the fluid subject does not have agency and why the subject-in-outline is a better way to theorize transformative feminist agency. I also clarify that my conception of feminist political subjectivity does not assume a privileged vantage point outside power structures. (shrink)

The issue on whether the epistemological view of Engels and the Marxists can be identified to Marx opens the question on what Marx’s actual view on knowledge. This debate on Marx’s epistemology is divided between realist and idealist interpretation of his texts: the former reads that for Marx knowledge is a copy of an independent reality existing outside of man, while the latter views that for the same philosopher, knowledge is in some sense constructed by the subject. This study contributes (...) to the discussion by closely reading the epistemology of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The Manuscripts contain important epistemological remarks that are subject of scholarly debate. The scope of the study aims to read the texts on their own terms, and through that, avoid the reductive readings of Marx that plague his interpretations. Through this approach, this study argues that Marx in the Manuscripts conveys an idealist epistemology based on his concept on how human need shapes human cognition. Marx further develops this idealism in the texts in his critique of political economy, where he shows that this science is grounded on the estranged need. In the end, this study underscores that the Manuscripts’ idealism shows a part in Marx’s thinking that underlines the role cognition plays to address forms of estrangements brought by the structures of private property. It highlights how Marx empowers man as capable of resolving the estrangements in the society through the development of both action and cognition. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of human dignity based on a discussion of Kant's moral and political philosophy and then shows its relevance for articulating and developing in a fresh way some normative dimensions of Marx’s critique of capitalism as involving exploitation, domination, and alienation, and the view of socialism as involving a combination of freedom and solidarity. What is advanced here is not Kant’s own conception of dignity, but an account that partly builds on that conception and partly criticizes (...) it. The same is the case with the account of socialism in relation to Marx’s work. As articulated, Kantian dignity and Marxian socialism turn out to be quite appealing and mutually supportive. (shrink)

This critical review aims to more fully situate the claim Martin Heidegger makes in ‘Letter on Humanism’ that a “productive dialogue” between his work and that of Karl Marx is possible. The prompt for this is Paul Laurence Hemming’s recently published Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism (2013) which omits to fully account for the historical situation which motivated Heidegger’s seemingly positive endorsement of Marxism. This piece will show that there were significant external factors which (...) influenced Heidegger’s claim and that, when seen within his broader corpus, these particular comments in “Letter on Humanism” are evidently disingenuous, given that his general opinion of Marxism can only be described as vitriolic. Any attempt to explore how such a “productive dialogue” could be construed must fully contextualise Heidegger’s claim for it. This piece will aim to do that, and more broadly explore Heidegger’s general opinion of Marxism. (shrink)

Las recientes crisis económicas han dejado en evidencia las fisuras del sistema económico capitalista y, con ello, se vuelve menester que el debate penetre en la raíz misma del sistema económico, donde se halla la fuente de los problemas. Así, cabe preguntarse hasta qué punto el capitalismo contemporáneo ha determinado el devenir histórico de las democracias occidentales. ¿Puede hablarse de sistemas democráticos propiamente tales dentro de los regímenes capitalistas modernos? A partir de la idea de democracia en Derrida y su (...) contrapunto con una crítica del capitalismo basada en Marx y Marcuse, este trabajo busca evidenciar las incompatibilidades entre capitalismo y democracia. -/- En la práctica, la democracia se trata de un esfuerzo incansable por impregnarse del espectro que es incapaz de asir por completo: permanente transparencia y movimiento, apertura a la alteridad hasta en sus propios cimientos. En el capitalismo, la objetivación de las relaciones de producción por la vía del fetichismo de la mercancía supone que las relaciones de poder económico también quedan objetivadas, asumiéndose como naturales, a-históricas y universales. Luego, la acumulación de capital y la consecuente asimetría de poder económico se traducen en relaciones inequitativas de poder político que ponen en jaque la factibilidad democrática en sociedades capitalistas. El capitalismo constituirá, así, la penumbra en la que el espectro de la democracia se desdibujará hasta, simplemente, desvanecerse. (shrink)

Our interest here will be limited to decide how we could use the philosophy of Wittgenstein to oppose Marxist theorizations. We will not imply, thus, that Wittgenstein himself made that use or wanted anybody else to make it. Our focus here is not Wittgenstein’s possible intentions against Marxism, but his implications against it. We have found five possible implications of this kind. The first one links his private language argument and Ludwig von Mises’ argument about why Marxists fail in determining (...) prices. The second one goes from that very private language argument to a liberal argument against the dictatorship of proletariat. The third is a skeptical argument for participatory democracy that undermines some of Marx’s ideas about power. Finally, the fourth and fifth implications use Wittgenstein’s philosophy against the Marxist ideas of an essential divide in society and a common human progress, respectively. (shrink)

Resumen: Tanto Perry Anderson como Alex Callinicos y Terry Eagleton han desarrollado un trabajo cultural y filosófico sobresaliente. Sin embargo, los tres han malinterpretado la obra de Ludwig Wittgenstein. La concepción de la filosofía de Wittgenstein no está en tensión con la filosofía marxista en el modo en el que ellos lo sugirieron y Wittgenstein no cometió los errores que le atribuyeron Anderson, Callinicos e Eagleton. Los marxistas se beneficiarían si consideraran más seriamente la obra de Wittgenstein porque ello los (...) ayudaría a comprender más claramente la naturaleza de los problemas epistemológicos y metafísicos como así también los ayudaría a fortalecer y complementar sus propias concepciones de las confusiones filosóficas. En este trabajo examinaré los errores de sus interpretaciones de Wittgenstein y espero también poder proporcionar alguna indicación de las razones por las cuales Wittgenstein es considerado por muchos como el filósofo más importante del siglo XX. (shrink)

Whitehead claims there is only one type of individual in the universe—the actual entity—but there are necessarily multiple tokens of this type. This turns out to be paradoxical. Nevertheless, a type of individuality that is necessarily plural because, for each token, relations to other tokens are constitutive is something familiar from ordinary language, everyday politics, and, not least, 19th century German social thought. Whitehead’s actual entity generalizes the notion of species-being we find in Fichte, Feuerbach, and Marx. The rationale for (...) the concept of species-being brings to light important social and political implications of Whitehead’s cosmology. (shrink)

The relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis has been frequently debated; nonetheless, one rarely comes upon a thoroughgoing, in-depth treatment of this connection. The Capitalist Unconscious is therefore a belated but welcome inquiry into the points of intersection between the two, a project whose contours could be traced back to the works of Marx and Freud. It is in the work of Lacan, however, that this correlation between Marxism and Psychoanalysis becomes visible. This article explores Samo Tomšič’s analysis of the logical, (...) epistemological, and political continuity of Marx’s critique of political economy and Freud’s theory of libidinal economy, meanwhile appraising the possible emancipatory potential of this project. (shrink)

Rockmore’s paper offers a nice discussion on how classical German idealism provides a plausible account of the Parmenidean insight that thought and being are identical and suggests that idealist epistemic constructivism is arguably the most promising approach to cognition. In this short commentary, I will explore the implications of adopting other interpretations of Parmenidean identity thesis, which arguably lead to different conclusions than the ones drawn by Rockmore. En route to disavow the distinction between ontology and epistemology, I argue that (...) one may adopt an approach on cognition which would be immunized to worries that prompt Rockmore’s elaboration and also embrace (at least) some of its benefits. (shrink)