Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Much of the recent discussion in social theory about the nature of value under capitalism stems from the work of Antonio Negri and the Italian autonomist tendency. This paper offers a classical Marxist response to Negri's Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse by locating points of disagreement with Negri's reading of the notebooks Marx compiled in preparation for writing Capital. In the Grundrisse, Marx engages in rare speculation about the future of capitalist development, speculation that Negri interprets as a departure from Marx's other works and uses to re-theorize the socialist project. The debate with Negri in this paper addresses his redefinition of the Marxist concept of value and develops a foundation for situating rhetorical and material agency in the struggle against capitalism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Marx's 1850s writings on non-Western societies, especially those on India, are far better known than his post-1872 ones. The later writings, some of them still unpublished, lend support to the notion that Marx moved away from the unilinear and somewhat Eurocentric perspectives that are often cited in critiques of his work. Unfortunately, some of these late writings are still unpublished, although there are plans to issue them as part of the new Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2). This paper surveys Marx's extensive 1879-82 writings on non-Western and pre-capitalist societies and gender, concentrating on his notebooks on Indonesia and ancient Rome, which will be published for the first time in MEGA2.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper argues three things. First, that race must be considered more closely and more seriously as a factor in American labor “exceptionalism.” Second, that it is possible to understand race and racism not simply as tools of capitalism or as the result of capitalist exploitation, but as independent variables for the course of American labor history; race in America is part of the culture and its national traditions. Third, and intertwined with these previous two, this paper argues for the usefulness of an analysis comparing the ideas of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill on the function of race differences in working class formation. Mill’s view of the effects of race and race-like structures is not entirely different than Marx’s, but in approaching the problem without the burden of an inevitable socialist revolution, it allows for a more direct appreciation of the cultural substrate of racism and its role in American labor “exceptionalism.”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Faculty of Reason In Marx and Rawls
Jake Noland
Texas A&M University

Abstract

If we were to construe the model of moral reasoning Rawls presents in A Theory of Justice more broadly as a general model of the conditions for, and process of, free reasoning, we would find a model strikingly similar to that assumed and employed in Marx’s historical inquiry. Examining this similarity is useful because it facilitates a critique of Marxian approaches to social science. Though their projects are vastly different, we find in both Marx and Rawls an assumption that the faculty of reason can be exercised ahistorically and apart from any consciousness of the particular agent’s place within a tradition. In fact, for both of these philosophers reason is a faculty whose exercise is not only not dependent upon the particular identity of the person exercising it but is actually hindered or distorted by the particularity of this individual. Marx’s version of historical inquiry involves assumptions about the way the faculty of reason is exercised both in those persons who are the objects of the historian’s study and in the historian himself. The ability, which Rawls necessarily assumes to obtain, to reason as if one were in the original position is the same ability Marx must exercise in order to recognize the condition of alienation and false consciousness in which the masses live. Marx’s method of inquiry into history requires this ability to free oneself from tradition-bound consciousness and reason freely. Without this ability his attempt at a purely empirical science of history is doomed to failure. Marx qua social scientist must be freed from any particular paradigm of consciousness for him to describe the world as it “really is.” The idea of a universal, free self with the ability to create and enjoy a course of life must be coherent and intelligible for Marx’s conclusions about persons’ alienation from their essence to be convincing. Without the strength of these conclusions, his contentions about the proper objects of historical study are unsupported because these conclusions are what establish material conditions as the proper objects of the historian’s attention. If the proposed similarities hold, then we can use the more explicit and elaborate Rawlsian explanations of these accounts of reason and freedom as well as the substantial commentary on Rawls’ original position to aid our appraisal of Marx’s position.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A practical alternative to "anti-fetishist" social and political critique based on a phenomenology of thing relations that replaces detached critique with concrete intervention.