Recent events impel us to rethink fundamentals: to bring political economy, historical materialist theory, state theory, and the theory of nations and national consciousness together, and to bear on the core questions: How mature is world capitalism today? What stadial — stage-theoretic — elements must be invoked to explain the present? A rigorous stadial approach to capitalist evolution suggests that, contrary to much popular wisdom, capitalism's conquest of the world is far from complete. This understanding does not mechanically postpone significant (...) social transformation; to the contrary, it points toward the possibility of getting a better fix on what is possible in the short term, so as to bring longer range goals into clearer focus and relevance. (shrink)

Daniel Bensaïd was prominent among the revolutionary thinkers and activists who emerged from the mass insurgency of the 1960s, a period in which anti-capitalist organisers had genuine social weight grounded in connections to broad layers of the working class and radical movements. As the neoliberal offensive developed, working-class and allied movements experienced crucial defeats that marginalised anti-capitalist theory and practice. Bensaïd developed a unique theoretical analysis of radical mobilising during the neoliberal period, at once grounded in the history of revolutionary (...) organising and audaciously open-ended in assessing the impact of capitalist restructuring and the employers’ offensive. The basis of his theoretical renewal lay in a new approach to understanding temporality that undercut any sense of socialist inevitability, and a commitment to revolutionary pluralism that was crucially located in the political sphere. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline what I take to be the most important theoretical claims and innovations of ‘twenty-first century socialism’ in Venezuela. These, I argue, consist of an emphasis on human development through popular-economy initiatives, and the importance of building popular power through the state, rather than by ignoring or fighting against it. I then present evidence on Venezuela’s Socialist Production Units, one of Venezuela’s newest state-supported popular-economy organisations. I argue that, consistent with the twenty-first-century socialism approach, SPUs are (...) sites of human development in which participants are learning to challenge capitalist social relations, while establishing new values and practices. Therefore, we can think of Venezuela’s popular economy as expressing a sharpened class contradiction.However, my case study also shows that holding hands with human development is class struggle directed against the state. This reveals a central theoretical and practical paradox in twenty-first century socialism, namely that, while nurturing initiatives that challenge capital, the Venezuelan state also emerges as an important barrier to overcoming the class relation. This, I argue, is not wholly consistent with the views of theorists of twenty-first century socialism that understand Venezuela’s popular economy as forming a new form of dual power or a parallel state, and who therefore downplay the importance of struggles against the state within the popular economy. The strategic implication is that struggles between popular-economy participants and the state cannot be avoided, and indeed will need to be fostered if the project for twenty-first century socialism is to continue. (shrink)

In his essay, Henryk Grossman made a powerful case for the continued relevance of Marxist economics. He argued thatCapitalis a fundamentally coherent whole, structured by Marx’s method of moving systematically from more abstract to more concrete levels of analysis. Despite considerable subsequent debate and research, Grossman’s account remains the outstanding contribution to our understanding of this aspect of Marx’s principal work.

In this paper I seek to establish that a widely held criticism of postmodern Marxism – that it is morally relativist and does not offer a basis for a systematic analysis of capitalism – is not warranted. I provide a systematic review of the postmodern Marxist literature in three distinct areas – value theory, class analysis of the household and state, and class justice – and I draw on these contributions to show that postmodern Marxism offers new insights into problems (...) of concern to Marxian theorists. I argue, further, that it provides the normative grounds for a class politics that is open to new alliances and new strategies for engaging in class struggle. (shrink)

This article aims to advance the historical-materialist understanding of racism by addressing some central theoretical questions. It argues that racism should be understood as a social relation of oppression rather than as solely or primarily an ideology, and suggests that a historical-materialist concept of race is necessary in order to capture features of societies shaped by historically specific racisms. A carefully conceived concept of privilege is also required if we are to grasp the contradictory ways in which members of dominant (...) racial groups are affected by social relations of racial oppression. The persistence of racism today should be explained as a consequence of two dimensions of the capitalist mode of production – imperialism and the contribution of racism to profitability – and of a social property emergent from racism: the efforts of members of dominant groups to preserve their advantages relative to the racially oppressed. (shrink)