There is a common belief that genuine awareness and acceptance of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (as opposed to either ignorance or denial) automatically leads one to develop political and moral positions which advocate for collective human action toward minimizing suffering for all and adapting human societies toward a fossil-free future. This is a mistake. Against the idea that scientific awareness of the facts of climate change is enough to motivate a common ethical project of humanity toward a unifying (...) good, I argue that climate change awareness can just as well equally motivate heightened divisions of humanity into anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, class-differentiated zones of competitive survival. I call this climate barbarism, and seek to explain its conceptual grounds. (shrink)

Theory as History brings together twelve essays by Jarius Banaji addressing the nature of modes of production, the forms of historical capitalism and the varieties of pre-capitalist modes of production. Problematic formulations concerning the relationship of social-property relations and the laws of motion of different modes of production and his notion of merchant and slave-holding capitalism undermines Banaji’s project of constructing a non-unilinear, non-Eurocentric Marxism.

The process commonly referred to as business-as-usual has given rise to dangerous climate change, but its social history remains strangely unexplored. A key moment in its onset was the transition to steam power as a source of rotary motion in commodity production, in Britain and, first of all, in its cotton industry. This article tries to approach the dynamics of the fossil economy by examining the causes of the transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry in the (...) second quarter of the nineteenth century. Common perceptions of the shift as driven by scarcity are refuted, and it is shown that the choice of steam was motivated by a rather different concern: power over labour. Turning away from standard interpretations of the role of energy in the industrial revolution, this article opens a dialogue with Marx on matters of carbon and outlines a theory of fossil capital, better suited for understanding the drivers of business-as-usual as it continues to this day. (shrink)

Marxism has often been associated with two different legacies. The first rests on a strong exposition and critique of the logic of capitalism, grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism as a system. The second legacy refers to a strong historicist perspective grounded in a conception of social relations that emphasises the centrality of power and social conflict to the analysis of history. This article challenges the prominence of structural accounts of capitalism by showing how (...) the tension between these legacies has played out within Political Marxism, both orientations already having co-existed, somewhat uneasily, within Robert Brenner’s original contributions to the Transition Debate. Through this internal critique and re-formulation of Political Marxism, we wish to open a broader debate within Marxism on the need for a more agency-based account of capitalism, which builds more explicitly on the concept of social relations, to recover the historicist legacy of Marxism. (shrink)

Our reply focuses on three key themes raised in the symposium. First, we discuss an enduring issue in Marxist International Relations: ‘the problematic of the international’ and the problems of methodological internalism. We examine how our interlocutors have responded to this problematic and why we consider these responses insufficient. Specifically, we suggest that the source of our disagreement is grounded in two divergent understandings of the problem of internalism itself. We then reassert the value of our chosen response to the (...) problematic – uneven and combined development. Second, we respond to the criticism that our extension ofUCDas a ‘transmodal’ general abstraction is problematic by further explicating the significance and role of general abstractions in Marxist theory – a point yet addressed by our critics. Finally, we return to the fundamental question at the core of the transition debate: what is capitalism and how do we theorise it? (shrink)

This article seeks to provide a comprehensive re-evaluation of the redistributive models of democracy advanced by Carles Boix, and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, their reception within the democratization literature, and the subsequent trajectories of their authors. Contrary to the existing literature, which commonly envisions RMDs as a unified framework, this article argues that Boix and Acemoglu and Robinson’s models should be understood as divergent theories of democratic transitions. In the aftermath of numerous criticisms, both authors have developed sharply different (...) understandings of democratization. We argue that Acemoglu and Robinson have backtracked from their original formulation toward a “Whiggish” history of the rise of liberty, while Boix has increasingly reverted to the core propositions of classical modernization theory. In the process, this article argues that RMDs have lost, and reneged on, much of their apparent explanatory power regarding transitions to and reversions from democracy. (shrink)

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, EarlyView.

This article will discuss the ongoing development of a Marxist theory of international relations. Examining the work of Hannes Lacher and that of the contributors toMarxism and World Politicsreveals an overarching concern amongst this group of scholars to engage with the central concerns of the discipline of International Relations – the nature of the state, anarchy, and war. Their analysis provides an excellent starting point for the development of a Marxist approach to international relations.

This article seeks to reinterpret the process of state and class formation in “peripheral” societies—notably Syria—through a contextualized reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire influenced by the approach of Political Marxism (PM). In light of PM’s claim that capitalism did not emerge in France until the late nineteenth century, it draws a picture of post-revolutionary French society in which the legacy of the precapitalist Absolutist state still determined the nature of ruling class reproduction and class struggle, centered on the state apparatus (...) as the principal source of appropriation. These insights on the nature of ruling class appropriation and the centrality of the state are then applied to the case of post-Ottoman Syria, uncovering parallels with class struggles in post-revolutionary France rooted in the “Jacobin” politics of a state-dependent bourgeoisie of officials and officers. It proposes to rethink the contested moments of transition in terms of “alternative modernities” that developed in the absence of generalized capitalist relations of production. (shrink)