In this issue our first document is Samir Amin's reflections on culture and ideology in the contemporary Arab world. Characteristically, Amin puts forward several strong theses about the rise of what has been called "Islamic fundamentalism" in Arab nations. He begins with the claim that the dominant culture in the world, that which informs and permeates both centers and peripheries, is "capitalist culture." Amin is quick to add that it is mistaken to see the dominance of "western" culture and the reactions against it as outside the framework of the prevailing culture of world capitalism. In Amin's view, it is the "submission of both the political and ideological realms to the logic of the economic one" that has stamped global culture as primarily capitalist. This thesis has direct bearing on Amin's consequent argument that the forms of ritualized traditionalism that are today frequently labelled Islamic fundamentalism are neither simple holdovers from precapitalist societies nor resistances to contemporary occidentalism. In these current movements to revive and perpetuate Islamic "tradition," Amin finds the signs of the polarization of the world capitalist economy and the firmly ensconced peripheral condition of the Arab world. That is, while capitalism as a global economic and cultural system is oriented toward universalism and unity, it is a polarized capitalism in which there continues to exist a "deep contrast between its centers and peripheries." This polarization, then, has had an unmistakable effect on the various projects in the third world, and of course among Arab nations, to "catch up" through various projects of "modernization" since the nineteenth century. The effect on culture of both this polarization and the resulting failure of successive modernizing projects has been the failure in the realm of Arab culture to successfully reconcile faith and reason, a goal, Amin notes, that was in fact often achieved in the premodern tributary cultural "metaphysics" of the Islamic world The tendency for faith and reason to remain irreconcilable and for Islam to be increasingly reduced to ritualistic traditions by its most fervent adherents even those committed to its renewal and renovation—is not, Amin thinks, a defect inherent in Islam itself but reflects more accurately the current cultural schizophrenia of the Arab world, whose peripheral position within the global capitalist economy prevents it from completely absorbing the forms of culture and politics that are found within the capitalism of the centers.

In Amin's estimation, the cultural revolution that could fully reconcile faith and reason in the best fashion of historic Islam and produce a "true interpretation of religion" is impeded by the fact that most Arab countries remain subordinate within the world division of production and trade—at best they have achieved the status of a "compradorial bazaar." Thus, as Amin sees it, it should come as no surprise that with the blocked development of capitalist modernization, popular struggles in the Arab world should today take the form of an affirmation of Islamic cultural identity rather than an assault against what he terms the "real" conditions that confer peripheral status.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy continues to arouse the imagination and interest of many thinkers on the Left. One sign of this is the frequent reference to their 1985 work in articles published in R, including a full-length treatment by Landry and MacLean (Winter 1991) of Laclau and Mouffe's presumed relapse into the economism of classical Marxism. We have noticed that most critics of their work have fallen into two broad camps: those who reject Laclau and Mouffe's epistemological stances, their critique of economistic Marxism, and their use of Althusserian overdetermination to structure their notion of articulated subjects and political practices, and those who, focusing on Laclau and Mouffe's theoretical innovations; think that they have not succeeded either in breaking with Marxian orthodoxy or in avoiding the indeterminancy of political action with their amorphous notion of radical democracy. Jonathan Diskin and Blair Sandler can be said to found a third camp here, one that appreciates and is inspired by Laclau and Mouffe's antieconomism and epistemological "relativism" but that also roundly criticizes Laclau and Mouffe for their ultimately damaging displacement of "the economy" from their work. Diskin and Sandler's article is a crucial essay for RM's readers. For they forcefully show that Laclau and Mouffe are guilty of uncharacteristically shoddy thinking when it comes to the concepts and methods of Marxian economics, something that has mostly escaped the notice of most other critics. While Laclau and Mouffe's critique of Marxian political economy involves a rejection of the central concepts of "class" and "labor power as commodity" because of their necessary essentialism and misspecification, Diskin and Sandler show in contrast that Laclau and Mouffe have extremely faulty understandings of these concepts and their effects. Laclau and Mouffe's "threefold recomposition of the economic space" built on these faulty understandings require, say Diskin and Sandler, "the abandonment of particular concepts as essentialist things in themselves" (a bizarre position for those who advocate the reopening of all "sutures" in social theory and believe that all concepts take on meaning only in their articulation with others), the resort to supposedly "empirical" notions of the economy, as in Laclau and Mouffe's recurring references to something, now entirely untheorized, called capitalism (see Gibson-Graham in RM, Summer 1993, for a compelling critique of such totalizing "empirical" conceptions of capitalism), and the "renaming of capitalist relations of production and socialism as essentially political concepts." It is perhaps this last point that is most striking since, as Diskin and Sandler argue, it is through this move that "the economy" disappears only to reappear as a manifestation of power and politics. Diskin and Sandler oppose Laclau and Mouffe, then, on the latter's power essentialism and ill-informed rendering of the economic concepts in Marxism. Their message, clearly stated, is that "reopening the sutures" along lines pioneered by Laclau and Mouffe is not only desirable and possible for Marxian political economy, but has been happening to good results in the nondeterminist Marxist economic discourse that has frequently appeared in the pages of RM and elsewhere.

The hope that Frigga Haug had entertained, that with unification the socialist -feminist movement in Germany would experience a considerable boost, was dashed when she found that the socialist patriarchy that had arisen in the paternalistic state of the east had not been conducive to and had left dilatory effects on the realization of the wishes and needs of women for free and liberated development, This highlighted, for her, the enduring quality of women's oppression, albeit under diverse modes of production. In the wake of the collapse of socialist alternatives and the seeming total hegemony of capitalism, Haug has set herself here the task of reconsidering the ways in which capitalist patriarchy, now the reality of both Germanys, is reproduced. Haug elaborates her understanding that the gender rela. tions that determine women's oppression are relations of production. But Haug makes it clear that she is not arguing for a simple reduction of gender to the demands of the economy. As she develops her analysis through reliance oh literary and artistic texts and then social observations, Haug finds that capitalist patriarchy can best be viewed as a "model of civilization" rather than a "mode of production." As a result, Haug traces the antecedents and effects of oppressive gender relations through the spheres of economy, morality, politics, sexuality, philosophy, culture, and much else comprising such a model of civilization. Key to her view is the overdetermination of male domination and the capitalist mode of production, which she regards as always already gendered in terms of male privilege and superiority. One of Haug's key insights is the argument that time in capitalist market and production activities—the requirement of saving time in the name of efficiency and therefore profit—is rendered discursively and lived as male while the care of humanity and the needs of love are seen as time-consuming, often wasteful, and relegated to women who are thereby subjugated by this patriarchal arrangement. Such arrangements are conjoined to other symbolic orderings marking women's oppression, such as the hierarchy of moral values according to gender in which women experience morality as a question of their bodies and sexuality while moral virtues for men are referred to the public arenas of economics and politics. Haug leaves off with the following claim: the oppression of women in capitalist patriarchy cannot be found to originate in any one sphere as women see that "always and everywhere they find themselves in gender relations." Nothing short of a transformation of the entire model of civilization will suffice to make life, as Haug puts it, "truly human."

By now the prevalent voices in feminist historiography of the early years of interaction among Marxism, the European social democratic movement, and feminism have arrived at the conclusion that, from the outset, Marxism was at best cautious about and at worst hostile to feminism. This verdict, pronounced frequently without careful attention to the historical record, as Gary Roth and Anne Lopes contend, is based on the view that from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century Marxism was primary obsessed with class, its manifestations, and its political consequences and therefore treated the issue of women's emancipation as a side issue. One consequence of this verdict, Roth and Lopes lament, is the unwarranted conclusion that Marxism in its essence has never been particularly useful to understand and advance struggles over gender equality and women's liberation. As an example of Marxism's inabilities and irrelevance, some feminist historians cite the inevitable conservatism to which eady Marxian socialist activists and writers, such as August Bebel and Clara Zetkin, were led as a result of being blind to (or uninterested in) the specificity of the women's movement because of Marxian class exclusivity. Roth and Lopes point out that this teleological rendering of the interaction between the early socialist and feminist movements in Europe neglects the "multiple paths that developed within Marxism's feminism, not all of which sacrificed the 'women's question' to the social question." Roth and Lopes produce a different reading of this period, especially of the different contributions that Bebel and Zetkin made both to deepening Marxists' understanding of the intersection of class and gender and to the unfolding historical events in which, by the 1 890s, there had occurred a sharper separation of the women's movement and socialist activism than had existed earlier. Roth and Lopes are especially concerned to rewrite the historical accounts of Bebel and Zetkin, their relationship, and, most importantly, their differences; these accounts have been at the center of feminist research into how and why Marxism, by the turn of the twentieth century, was more antagonistic to the women's movement than in previous decades. Roth and Lopes depict Bebel to be more open to challenging traditional gender roles for women and according the "bourgeois women's movement" an important place in socialist politics than was Zetkin, at least by the 1890s. Roth and Lopes argue that, at the height of her influence, Zetkin had turned to a "harsh 'proletarian line' vis-a-vis bourgeois feminism," in contrast to Bebel's own positions, which had been the inspiration for many of her past views. Thus, while Zetkin moved toward "a more conservative and traditional understanding of gender," this move was neither inevitable nor derived from the breakthroughs that other Marxists, such as Bebel, had achieved on the "women's question." Roth and Lopes conclude that while Bebel's story "has been a lost moment within history . . . it refutes rather than confirms the antifeminist essentialism often attributed to Marxism." This counterhistory has been little appreciated, and its unearthing by Roth and Lopes is intended to pose an alternative to the so-called "unhappy marriage" that has been attributed to the historic relations between Marxism and feminism.

The charge that Marx's historical method is shot through with ethnocentrism is one that has been around for many years and was, during the 1970s and '80s, a major impetus to the emergence of a new Marxist anthropology. The charge is by now familiar: Marx's deployment of a "stage theory of history" necessarily weds him and other Marxists to a teleology in which modern capitalist or socialist societies are judged "more developed" and therefore superior to so-called premodern ones. And Marx's historical materialism privileges production in the dominance and or determinance of all aspects of social reality. Philip J. Kain contends that both of these charges have depended on a misreading of Marx's own writings and a misuse of his arguments. Kain especially wants to address the criticism put forward by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose influential book Culture and Practical Reason set forth the view that Marx's "productivism" denies the dominance of symbolic order and therefore culture in nonmodern societies. Interestingly, Kain accepts Sahlins's claim (that symbolic order is indeed primary) but then goes on to show that this view is already presaged by Marx in his privileging of what today we call, following T. S. Kuhn, a "paradigm" for understanding the "concrete for thought" in investigating both modern and premodern societies. From Kain's perspective, Marx's method is not ethnocentric because its privileging of a modern paradigm is only concerned to ascertain and analyze differences between modern and premodern societies, not to rank them in strict hierarchical fashion. Moreover, Kain asserts that Marx in fact granted both primacy to the realm of the symbolic in his brief discussions of premodern societies, albeit through the lens of modernity, and superiority to (some) premodern forms of values, ethics, and social arrangements in envisioning a future socialism. In putting forward his defense of Marxism against the charge of ethnocentrism, Kain engages the related work of some of the editors of this journal (Amariglio, Resnick, and Wolff) and poses his own solutions to the puzzle of societal causation and historical determination to our own adherence to "overdetermination," which, as he notes, provides an alternative basis to resist the charge of ethnocentrism. Readers then may find of special interest and may judge for themselves the virtues and weaknesses of these somewhat competing responses to what Kain and we agree is the mostly unwarranted claim that Marxism today is still burdened with reenacting in theory the historical degradation of nonmodern societies.

Nietzsche as an agitator for radical mass political action? Nietzsche as an invaluable guide to inciting anticapitalist cultural and political practice in the postmoder period? Yes, says Steven Cresap to both of these queries. And, in his article, Cresap sets out to demonstrate his affirmation of Nietzsche as a "social engineer" by his novel rereading of the Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche's early career as a Wagnerian cultural romantic. Cresap places Nietzsche's conception of Wagner-inspired tragedy within the context of a broader issue: the question of the possibility for cultural forms, most especially artistic practices, to incite political action—in the wake of the collapse of modernity and its many projects—to join culture with transgressive activism. Cresap notes in the modernist projects, including Marxism, the clear belief that knowledge and reason are the only sure guide to overcoming the dehumanization and alienation of life under capitalism. With this "logocentrism," Marxists have underestimated the effects that nonepistemic expressions of discontent and/or solidarity, such as appear in popular cult activities, formal and informal rituals, and artistic modes may give rise to in formulating collective resistances to capitalism. Cresap discovers in Nietzsche's portrayal of what he termed Dionysian and Apollonian cults/art worlds and their later recombination in Wagnerian tragedy a decisive theoretical presentation of how such nonepistemic cultural forms can give rise to collective action. Cresap shows how, for Nietzsche, the synthesis of music (the prototypical Dionysian form) and visuals (the Apollonian form) in operatic tragedies portends such radical possibilities. Tragedy—"that form which most radically questions the viability of the individual in its isolation"—represents to Nietzsche the possible overcoming of the inaction that the separation of Dionysian "rapture" from Apollonian "redemption" or even their simple conjunction may enact. Nietzsche's theory of culture, portrayed in the Birth of Tragedy, is one that, as Cresap puts it, "helps us appreciate the inertia and dynamism inherent in cultural forms" and may point a way out of the "postmodern escapism" that he feels has dominated our current cultural life.

It is Kalyan K. Sanyal's contention that Marx's section in Capital on primitive accumulation has never been accorded the theoretical status it deserves. In the first entry of our Remarx section, Sanyal claims that primitive accumulation has been read as a historical addendum to the main theoretical argument regarding the structure and "laws of motion" of the capitalist mode of production. To read Marx's section this way, Sanyal believes, is to rob it of its theoretical standing as an analysis of what he terms "capital as power," a concept that he thinks would shed light on the processes of capitalist production and exploitation as they especially affect the third world. Sanyal's original formulation has it that the section on primitive accumulation explains how capital confronts "classless subjects" (capital's precapitalist "other") that do not comprise the "interior" of the capital-wage relation and instead are outside of this relation. Primitive accumulation, as a consideration, for example, of the capitalist state's active role in the forcible expropriation of precapitalist peasants, is a theory of the profound impact of the power of capital on its "others,'—what Sanyal calls the "annihilation of precapital"—and must be viewed as theoretically complementary (and not subsidiary) to the theory of the capitalist exploitation of its "own" subjects. Sanyal extends this theory to the question of the economic development of the third world, which for a long time was seen as the complete destruction by capital of its precapitalist other. Yet, he argues that such annihilation has in fact not come to pass; precapitalism now appears to be permanently entrenched in the third world, and capital's relation to it is one of incorporation rather than destruction (he sees the most recent discourses on poverty in the third world and the movement away from identifying development with accumulation as ideological expressions of this new relation). In this "failure" of primitive accumulation, capital now is faced with the task of appropriating and reproducing precapital (i.e., "internalizing" the other), not destroying it. In Sanyal's estimation, then, reading the section on primitive accumulation as a discourse on capital as power lays the theoretical groundwork for his conclusion that the world hegemonic pretensions of capital require it today to "represent" its precapitalist other and to accommodate it within its own spheres of ideology and economy—integrating "commodity and community"—because annihilation, at least for the time being, is deemed impossible.

For those who believe that capitalist commodity production in late capitalism lacks ingenuity and resilience, consider the recent spate of "transparent commodities." These goods, such as Crystal Pepsi and clear Ivory dishwashing liquid, are being produced without dies or color additives and marketed as "environmentally friendly." Marc Kipniss sees in this development a creative trumping of the fetishism of commodities. For not only do these clear goods function as all capitalist commodities and therefore "appear" as "a very trivial thing, easily understood," to use Marx's formulation. As Kipniss shows in his Remarx contribution, they further fill in the empty commodity space—devoid of all specific social content (i.e., the conditions of their production) with a new meaning, that of transparency itself. Kipniss reveals the double transparency of these commodities as they now appear as something pure and natural. The equation of transparency and purity, Kipniss argues, has become increasingly possible with the self-absorption of consumers in purifying domestic space (a task accorded, as in the past, to housewives) and one's body as a way of keeping out the impurities and excrescences (pollution, AIDS, racial others, etc.) of our decaying social fabric. Kipniss is aware, then, of how capitalist producers and their adpersons have been able to exploit environmentalism and ecological signifiers and to convert them into the necessary meanings for a whole range of new commodities. Kipniss concludes that this new development articulates commodities and their conditions of existence in contemporary capitalism as an "ideological fantasy . . . of immaculate production," a fantasy, he sadly adds, that is enlivened by the desire of individuals to find elixirs "the consumption of which might magically ward off or decrease the global, extensive miasma existing outside individual control."

Rick Wolff's brief review of David Bakhurst's Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy draws startling parallels between the philosophical disputes regarding modernism and postmodernism in Western philosophy and related debates over Marxist philosophy occurring before, during, and after Stalin in the Soviet Union. Wolff credits Bakhurst with having brought to light a remarkable set of complex philosophical thinkers and treatises that, not unlike the most important Western Marxist theoreticians, such as Gramsci and Althusser, were reworking classical epistemological and philosophical premises and moving toward decidedly "postmodern" positions on knowledge, subjectivity, causality, and much else. As a case in point, and a central figure in Bakhurst's book, there is the work of Evald llyenkov. Wolff sees Bakhurst to have detailed llyenkov's writings as "a stunning example of the richness, current relevance, and innovations that were achieved inside Soviet philosophy." Ilyenkov, Wolff notes, was a leading voice in Soviet philosophy whose reconceptualization of the material/ideal dualism in classical Marxism led him to "a systematic rejection of the reductionisms . . . that were prevalent within Soviet thought generally." Wolff concludes his approving review of Bakhurst's book with the insight that the very dominance of Marxism within the Soviet Union and the reactions to its own impasses may have allowed for the critique of modernity "sooner and perhaps more deeply" than in the noncommunist West.

The Editors

In this issue Andriana Vlachou's essay on the different uses and misuses of concepts of elass in the building of socialism in China continues our running interest in the debates over the past history and current direction of one of the few remaining examples of "actually existing socialism." Vlachou's article follows in the vein of previous papers in RM (Gabriel and Martin, Spring 1992; Resnick and Wolff, Spring 1990; and Lippit, Spring 1993) in which the fear is expressed that the past analytical and practical mistakes of Chinese communists have led to the present situation where capitalism seems poised to explode into dominance. Vlachou's valuable contribution here is her demonstration that from the onset of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, there has been great vacillation on the concept of elass, its determinants, and its effects as they apply to the transition to and securing of socialism. Vlachou shows that during much of the socialist experiment, elass has alternatively been defined in terms of property, power, or ideology. As a result, she claims, the absence of attention to collective forms of surplus production and appropriation have meant that the possible growth of communism in its economic aspects has often been sacrificed to the equalization of power relations, the abolition of private property, and/or to the creation and spread of the correct communist mentality or party line. While Vlachou regards these other processes as potential conditions of existence for communal appropriation, she notes that, in the hands of the Chinese communist leadership, these elements were seen to be the ultimate determinants of class, class struggle, and the socialist path rather than the "overdeterminants" of class and of each other. Vlachou provides a historical chronology in which one can see leading Chinese theoreticians, like Mao Zedung, grasping in one moment of history the problems attendant upon reductionist concepts of class and in the next moment resorting to viewing class and the construction of socialism as wholly determined in the last instance by one or another essential aspect of society. So, while Vlachou applauds Mao and others for moving away in the Great Leap Forward and in the Cultural Revolution from the prior identification of socialism with the abolition of private property, and from the judgement that all that was needed to achieve communism was the free development of productive forces, she also notes that by placing culture, consciousness, and politics "in command," Mao and other leaders retained reductionist notions even while they complexified the conceptions of class and socialist transformation. Vlachou does not rest in pointing out these reductionisms; for each historical phase in the Chinese experiment, she traces the troubling social and economic consequences that their retention brought about. Her final view is that whatever gains Chinese communists have achieved, and these have been many, the historical record may show that the inability to carry out a fully nondeterminist class analysis has been costly to the degree that the future of China as a socialist regime is now highly in doubt.

The six poems by Juan Cameron bear the marks of their location in time and space. Cameron, a Chilean who eventually emigrated to Sweden as a political refugee, constantly takes us back to the days before and after the overthrow of the Allende regime in 1973 and the gruesome days of the Pinochet dictatorship. While his poetry is often Iyrical and frequently tinged with acerbic wit, the overall effect is one of haunting memory and wrenching sadness, as friends and names and streets are lost in shadow, fall to earth, or are consigned to the wind. In the poems we publish here, Cameron retraces many steps in his quest to avoid having his memory and the existence of his comrades "being covered by oblivion." It is a wonder, then, that in the loss which accompanies many of the poems here, Cameron can sometimes find "the circle that brings the green again" or light out with friends to "go up to the festival of the exile," armed now with a bottle of wine, to "all sing together the Internationale." Once again, we are indebted to Cola Franzen, this time for her immaculate English translations of Cameron's engaging poems.

The infamous phrase "the negation of the negation" has seemed to many contemporary Marxist theoreticians as just so much Hegelian hocus-pocus with which Marx unfortunately mystified his more important historical insights. Christopher I. Arthur cites the primary occurrence of this phrase in a well-known passage on "the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation" at the end of volume one of Capital and carefully investigates the possible meaning and significance of this double negation in Marx's treatment of the historical transition both to and from capitalism. Arthur does not follow other thinkers, Engels included, who sought to claim for Marx's use of the phrase the status of a summary of the actual historical processes by which capitalist commodity production and forms of capitalist private property came into existence and also by which this same capitalism had produced the conditions for its own inevitable supersession. Instead, Arthur argues that the concept of the negation of the negation describes a logical—not concrete historical—relation between a totality (capitalist commodity production) and its constituent moments. Arthur looks very closely at the puzzle posed by Marx's use of the double negation to describe what he terms the self-destruction of individual property by capital in its original appearance and the consequent self-destruction of capitalist private property by the reemergence of individual property in communism. While Arthur notes that this puzzle cannot be solved by simply seeing here Marx's description of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and then from capitalism to socialism—as Arthur points out, Marx's historical analysis certainly contradicts the notion that primitive capitalist accumulation was the result of the "self-destruction" of the property of small artisans and independent farmers—he does believe that the solution to the puzzle resides in seeing Marx's discussion of the double negation as a presentation of the necessary logic of the self-production and reproduction of capital. In this discussion, capitalism "breaks the essential unity of the producer with the conditions of production" that constituted precapitalist social relations, therefore separating labor from "its" own individual property but then, by socializing the means of production and bringing workers together, creates the conditions whereby workers can be "reunited" with "their" property under communism. Arthur's proposed solution, then, is to read the negation of the negation as a description of what he terms the "inneraction" of capital considered as a totality and not as the empirically grounded historical account of the external interaction of the various aspects of this totality (capital and labor, and so on). Arthur ends his exacting inquiry with the claim that exposing the structural dialectic comprising capital's self-production and eventual self-destruction—the negation of the negation—while not identical with the empirical identification of the processes leading to or away from transition is "nonetheless fundamental to its explication."

In the sphere of contemporary Marxian considerations of aesthetics, Fredric lameson may hold pride of place in determining the contours of current debate. Jameson has conducted much of his extensive review and critique of modern and now postmodern aesthetics through his "dialectical" readings of several key figures in Western Marxism, most particularly Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno. In his detailed, appreciative account of lameson's dialectical aesthetics, Christopher Wise explicates lameson's "sublation" of Lukacs and Adorno in the attempt to rescue their considerable theoretical innovations from the trash heap of history to which they have been tossed by many poststructuralist and postmodem critics. Wise shows that lameson, throughout his career, has produced readings of Lukacs and Adorno that recast their famous and often vitriolic "debates" over the historical and practical aesthetic and cultural virtues and vices alternatively of modernism and realism in terms of the more common efforts of both to provide an ultimately historical horizon within which aesthetic movements and their attendant forms can been understood, enacted, and/or opposed. Perhaps the most striking feature of Jameson's renditions of the continuing importance of both Lukacs and Adorno, as Wise tells it, is their elaboration of concepts of totality, representation, and subjectivity that both sidestep and even trump current postmodern refusals of the same. Thus, Wise guides us through lameson's elegant maneuvers whereby Lukacs's concept of totality is seen not only to elude its current conflation with totalitarianism, but in point of fact emerges as a primary means to recover meaningful social existence in the face of the annihilation of meaning and subjectivity produced by totalizing and detotalizing forces alike. Lukacs's form of totalization, then, reemerges in Jameson's hands as "authentically subversive" of the postmodern world, of "consumer society" in which "experience has solidified into a mass of habits and automatisms." In a similar vein, Wise presents lameson's analogous repositioning of Adorno's project to "objectify" aesthetics (or at least to "desubjectify" it in the face of living in late capitalist society, in which alienation is no longer recognized and resisted since it has become the objective condition par excellence for subjectivity) while maintaining some last moment for aesthetic creation by the subject. Jameson here, as Wise argues, sees in Adorno's project a path through the Scylla of "the archaic subjectivity of bourgeois philosophy" and the Charybdis of "the fragmented subjectivity of postmodernism." Following this path allows us to envision a new "noncentered subject," one that does not disappear along with the realms of history and sociality but, instead, represents their very necessity. Wrapping up, Wise acknowledges approvingly lameson's dialectical demonstrations that the discursive conditions for thus thinking and practicing differently in the days of late capitalism already lie within the Marxian tradition itself, or at least within the still unfinished projects of Lukacs and Adorno.

Toni Calasanti and Anna Zajicek view the legacy of the critical theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse through the lens of contemporary socialist feminism. In their opinion, the major ideas of Adorno et al. can be constructively reworked by bringing to bear upon them socialist feminism's successful efforts to make the real "struggles and wishes of the age" the basis for an immanent, negative dialectical critique. In Calasanti and Zajicek's view, the key contributions of Adorno-et al. to socialist feminism include the emphasis on self-reflexivity as the basis for an oppositional epistemology, the perception of the varied forms of domination of the "totally administered society" of late capitalism, the effects of commodity fetishism in reifying individual actions and social relations, the understanding of the destructive split between public and private spheres, a conception of the family as either a site of instrumental rationality and oppression or a site of resistance, and much else. Yet, ironically, they believe that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School unfortunately resembles in its basic "abstractness" the very one-sidedness and inability to grasp concrete and contradictory experiences and struggles that Adorno et al. excoriated and attributed to the effects of the pervasive ideology of commodification. By neglecting the oppressions, experiences, and knowledges of women, the critical theorists blunted severely the radical concreteness of their own negative critique of capitalist society. Calasanti and Zajicek interpret current socialist-feminist research as showing decisively that the specific experiences of women in both public and private spheres and certainly the personal perceptions and emotions of these same women provide precisely the epistemological self-reflexivity that could ground the historically determined immanent critique of modern patriarchy and capitalism that Adorno et al. suggested but did not produce. By "listening and learning from all women about the oppressive conditions women experience, attending to one another's view of social reality, and using these experiences and views to guide and inform knowledge" and clearly informed by critical theory, today's socialist-feminists reveal the complex and diverse forms of cooperation and conflict among and between women according to race, class, sexual preference, and ideology in families and workplace sites (including the home). Thus, Calasanti and Zajicek show that the contributions of Adorno et al. in the last analysis are not rejected by socialist feminists but, instead, are being rewoven into a "new tapestry of critical theorizing."

Howard Sherman puts forward here a defense of what he terms the "relational approach to political economy." Such an approach is characteristic of the best efforts over the past 30 years of critical Marxists to free themselves and socioeconomic analysis from the various forms of reductionism that have been the hallmark of both orthodox Marxism and the dominant neoclassical economic tradition. Sherman notes that there has been little weakening in the individualist methodology underlying neoclassical economic thought. In fact, in recent years, such methodological individualism has not only served to determine the protocols and procedures of most mainstream academic economic thought, but has affected the work of some Marxist economists, as can be seen in the defense of individualism by the Analytical Marxists as the guiding microfoundational principle for all social science. At an opposite pole, Sherman warns of the continuing temptations and dangers of the class reductionism of "Stalinist" Marxism which, in his view, reifies the importance of collective entities, such as classes, in the determination of all aspects of social life. Rather than seeking once again to find the key initial principle upon which political economy can be built, Sherman distinguishes the relational approach in its commitment to seeing social causation as a constantly interacting set of diverse and irreducible processes. Sherman provides brief examples of how such an approach can illuminate the ways in which ideas, institutions, forces of production, and relations of production mutually constituted one another historically in the rise and demise of the Soviet Union. Sherman concludes that critical Marxists would be better served by treating the relational approach as a methodological guide to political economy rather than entombing it—in contrast to neoclassical and Orthodox Marxism—in the form of a general model with its necessary laws of motion of society and economy.

In their lifetimes, Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa were despised by liberal elites because they operated, or so it seemed, at the margins of civility and thereby violated the race and class norms that structured the United States after WWII. In his contribution to the Remarx section, Frank Annunziato considers the ideological grid through which, in the post-Reagan/Bush era, both Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa could be reclaimed as cultural icons if not mythical heroes for American liberalism. Annunziato sees the films released in late 1992 on Malcolm X and Hoffa as prime examples of how, in an era of heightened class exploitation, the exacerbation of race hatred, and continuing violence done to women, Hollywood filmmakers have been able to transmute these forces into the longstanding American obsession with representations of power and religion. The Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa that emerge from Spike Lee's film on Malcolm and David Mamet's screenplay on Hoffa are marred, says Annunziato, by the transformation of such complex characters into near gods whose actions and internal makeup are portrayed without doubts, contradictions, and remorse. The presentation of Malcolm and Hoffa as redolent of power—dripping both power and often blood from every por~is viewed by Annunziato as the means by which these "working-class heroes" are both deprived of their humanity and their politics and are hence converted into religious symbols.

Annunziato notes that while Spike Lee's Malcolm is miraculously converted from evil (his life as a junkie and pimp—and here is where women are largely allowed into Lee's film) to unadulterated good, mostly by his "recognition" of the existence and power of racism and his commitment to combat it "by any means possible," Hoffa is portrayed throughout his life as inexplicably and wholly absorbed in acts of extreme brutality and violence, from which his leadership of the Teamsters and their loyal following is shown to completely derive. Thus, while religiosity and the ideology of power work to totalize these films (even Lee's adept handling of racism reduces to a question of power and to a degree, perhaps, morality), the consequences and effects of class exploitation and gender (and race, in the Hoffa film) are largely expunged and leave no discernible trace in the Hollywood versions of Malcolm's and Hoffa's lives. As Annunziato points out, these excisions would be more understandable if it hadn't been for the fact, well documented, that class exploitation, race, gender, and even leftism played crucial roles in the paths and politics that Malcolm and Hoffa both pursued. Annunziato, then, finds both of these films to ultimately "reduce the oppositional qualities of Jimmy Hoffa and Malcolm X to make their reconstructed personalities fit comfortably into the nation's conventional and dominant consciousness."

The so-called crisis of Marxism—whose manifestations range from the abandonment of socialist goals and institutions throughout much of the world to the by-now familiar complaint that Marxian thought is thoroughly outdated and superseded by more compelling modes of explanation and praxis—has given rise to various projects of reconstructing Marxism. Since the seventies and eighties, new versions of Marxism have been produced in the traditional social sciences that are meant to avoid if not solve the problems of earlier, discredited forms of Marxian social theory. In his review of Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober's 1992 book Reconstructing Marxism, George DeMartino focuses on one of the salient differences of various approaches within current Anglo-American social science to reconfigure Marxian theory in order to make it a powerful tool of social analysis. DeMartino points out that for Wright et al., the reconstruction of Marxism that they endorse is one that seeks to finally bring to fruition the longstanding hope that Marxism could render scientifically its main theoretical and historical propositions. DeMartino argues that Wright, Levine, and Sober's strong adherence to the types of argumentation and evaluation of claims that emerged in the seventies and eighties out of what is known as Analytical Marxism shapes the notions of science and the forms of explanation that they are willing to accept as appropriate reformulations of Marxian thought. Thus, while Wright et al. conduct a critical review of the work of such thinkers as G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer, their basic agreement with the work of these main Analytical Marxists on the need to construct Marxian social theory as a consistent set of logically sound and empirically testable hypotheses using current "accepted" methods by mainstream social scientists outweighs minor disagreements on such things as the need for "methodological individualism" as the proper "microfoundation" for social analysis. DeMartino contrasts the views of Wright et al. on the issues of what would make Marxism scientific and whether this is indeed desirable or necessary if Marxian theory is to be useful and distinct with those of two other current schools of thought within the social sciences: the critical realism of much British Marxism which follows from the work of the philosopher Roy Bhaskar and the postAlthusserian Marxism of which this journal (or at least the work of its editors) represents a notable example. In criticizing Wright et al. for either neglecting or dismissing out of hand the contributions to reconstructions of Marxian theory of these two vibrant schools of contemporary Marxism, DeMartino calls into question what he sees as the essential premise of their work—the idea that only a turn to modern empiricist conceptions of science are legitimate and requisite for Marxism to rebuild itself. DeMartino suggests, in conclusion, that despite Wright, Levine, and Sober's important interventions, their call for such a "scientific" turn may do more to "distract Marxism from the discovery of new, compelling, and potent insights and practices" than to induce these very changes.

The Editors

In this issue Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff continue their project (begun in RM, Summer 1993) of investigating the class structure that mostly characterized the USSR during its 70-plus-year reign. Resnick and Wolff weave a fascinating tale in which the battle to establish "socialism" in the Soviet Union turned out to be the means by which the private capitalism of the pre-1917 era was supplanted by a "state capitalism" which, in turn, was ultimately rejected and replaced once again by the current movement back to private capitalism. Resnick and Wolff produce a new history of the Soviet Union in which they read the debates over state versus private Control of enterprises, industrial policy, rural transformation, and much else about the Soviet economic structure during this century as evidence of a stunning neglect of the prevalent state capitalist class processes as they partly constituted all spheres of Soviet life. As they argued in their earlier piece, the reason for this neglect has primarily to do with the conflation of the abolition of private property and the setting up of central planning with a communist class process. Resnick and Wolff show here that various supposedly "noncapitalist" forms of power and property, including worker management and social ownership of productive property, were at times intact in the Soviet Union, but clearly not in the service of communism. Rather, the capitalist exploitation of industrial workers by the Council of Industrial ministers was aided and abetted by some moves to "democratize" industrial decision making, by the elimination of private ownership, by the administering of commodity production and value relations through state rather than market institutions, and, perhaps most harmfully, through the ideological obliteration of the Marxian concept of class in the name of the victory of socialism. Resnick and Wolff's unique empirically grounded perspective positions them to see the recent downfall of the Soviet Union as the (perhaps temporary) failure of state capitalism to avoid the crises of surplus production and distribution that had emerged most forcefully by the 1970s, but that had successfully been resisted or postponed during the preceding 20 years. The current move back to private capitalism does not, therefore, represent the decisive historical defeat of communism that is trumpeted by both right and left critics today since, in Resnick and Wolff's words, "the almost tragicomic truth is that a century of hot debate over socialism/communism versus capitalism masked a set of oscillations from private to state to private capitalism."

As the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe recede now into the background after the initial flush of public exhilaration at the end of the Cold War, it is interesting to consider the cultural, economic, and political conditions that have translated the supposed struggles for self-determination into the veritable "Americanization" of Eastern Europe. Such a consideration serves as the backdrop for Reinhold Wagnleitner's spirited investigation of the similar cultural imperialism practiced to exquisite success in Central Europe after World War II. As Wagnleitner contends, the victory of Western and specifically American cultural ideals in Germany and Austria proceeded not as "a by-product of the political, military, and economic successes of the United States in Cold War Europe" but, rather, as the ideological conquest of Central Europe via the Hollywood film. Wagnleitner shows that a whole generation of Germans and Austrians, as well as the British, French, and Italians—allies and enemies alike—were virtually created in their tastes and lifestyles by the images and forms of consumption and display that were the stock-in trade of Hollywood films after the war. In telling this saga, Wagnleitner reveals the forms of mutual cooperation and antagonism that existed between the U.S. Army and other agencies of occupation and pacification and the U.S. film industry, as the Army relied increasingly on Hollywood for its propaganda efforts, and as film moguls, in too, depended upon the power of the Army and the U.S. governmment to provide the American film industry with nearly monopolistic control of the production and distribution of cinema in Central Europe. So, while the American governmment was declaring "hooray for Hollywood" as it began the process of "denazifying" Germany and Austria, the film industry was shouting "whoopie for Washington" as American film companies were able to reap monopoly profits and hegemonize their markets largely because of the deliberate destruction and control, through U.S. policy, of their cinematic competitors in the zones of occupation. For Wagnleitner, the results of this symbiotic process for Central Europeans was the "lack of control over the creation and dissemination of cultural capital; loss of sovereignty over the production of those images, which have probably become the prime movers and media of cultural self-interpretation and self-definition in the twentieth century." As the present-day Eastern European self-identity seems increasingly to be "made in America," Wagnleitner's entertaining reminder of the earlier success of U.S. cultural diplomacy and propaganda in Central Europe in creating a culture redolent with "capitalist consumption ideologies" requires a closer look at the ways in which the more recent "velvet revolutions" may, too, have been scripted in Hollywood.

Carole Stabile revives the notion of "class interests" in her stinging criticism of the postmodern tendency in Western feminism. As Stabile contends, the move to subsume the materiality of women and their bodies to the realm of discourse has had the result of privileging the particular activities, perspectives, and interests of one group of people in contemporary capitalist societies, that of intellectuals. Stabile chides feminists who follow the train of thought about power and politics a . postmodern politics of "radical democracy"—that has all but erased the traces of class experiences, positions, and forms of struggle in women's lives today. Stabile makes her case by finding the distinctive class interests that are served by the attack on class, the economy, essentialism, and materialism—that is, on the Marxist tradition in social thought and political action—in the work of Judith Butler and other leading postmodern feminist thinkers. For Stabile, feminists within the academy have disinherited class because, in the hands of Marxists, it supposedly downplays race and gender difference (again within the sphere of intellectual activities). In her eyes, this move belies the forms of capitalist exploitation and a. oppression, including those specific to women not privileged enough to avoid such exploitation, that are secured by the focus on the world of discourse and not on everyday material life. Stabile uses as an example of the mistakes in politics that are the consequence of feminism neglecting the materiality of class (and also race) in the lives of many women the reaction of well-placed feminists to the Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown debacle in 1992. As Stabile aptly reminds us, Quayle's attack on the single-parent status of the fictional TV character Murphy Brown came not only within the context of an abstract discussion of "family values" but, more insidiously, in response to the rioting in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict. Stabile regards as a prime example of the displacement to the realm of discourse of what should have been condemned by feminists as a ruse to disguise h the real conditions of poverty and neglect for poor women and blacks the too willing response to the skewering of Murphy Brown of many feminists who called for an expansion of the definition of what counts as a family. The cynical and misguided attempts by some feminists, in expanding this definition, to treat single parenting as a question of either choice or circumstance—and, therefore, according to Stabile, granting these "options" an equal standing—hid the fact that it is only a rewarding choice for those women whose class status protects them from the vicissitudes of capitalist exploitation. Thus, Stabile warns, contemporary feminism is in danger of allying itself with the forces that support a vast array of women's economic oppression by eschewing for feminist theory and politics the concept of class and the politics of class-interested subjects.

In the ongoing debates surrounding the different historical onsets of modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century, the issue of demarcating clearly between a regime of "productionism" and then later "consumerism" has been central. In his essay, Bruce Pietrykowski argues forcefully that no such clear-cut historical rupture between the modern and postmodern can be adduced. Writing as an economist, Pietrykowski shifts our attention away from the more familiar question of the modern or postmodern status of contemporary economic theory and method to the less explored problem of ascertaining the character of the lived experience of economic agents, especially in their current exalted role as consumers. Pietrykowski finds inspiration for his own study of this lived experience in the - work of the "regulation school" of Michel Aglietta and in recent discussions of a so-called post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation. Following in the path of the regulation theorists, Pietrykowski claims that a veritable transition from mass produced techniques of production ("Fordism") to those informed by small-scale, batch production and "just-in-time" methods of inventory control and goods delivery has in fact occurred in tandem with a transformation in the role of consumers and their patterns of consumption. Yet, in crucial departure from the regulation school and others who wish to link decisively the historical emergence of postFordism with postmodern culture (here tied together by the sobriquets "consumerism" or "society of the spectacle" or even "late capitalism"), Pietrykowski shows that modern and postmodern cultural elements and modes of consumption simultaneously have occurred within both Fordist and post-Fordist regimes of capital accumulation. For example, Pietrykowski presents evidence that many of the elements of "fast capitalism" and "ephermerality, fragmentation, juxtaposition, surface, and depthlessness" that are currently attributed to post-Fordism and postmodernism can be clearly seen in the rise of consumer services and the particular aesthetics or designs—he discusses the design features, spatial arrangements, and service orientation of early twentieth-century gas stations and department stores—that attended these services during the supposed heyday of Fordism in the United States. One important and concluding implication of Pietrykowski's argument is that, while it may be useful to distinguish between Fordist and post-Fordist regimes of production and consumption, economists and others would do well to recognize that "the legacy of postmodern influences may well extend back beyond the political economic crisis of the 1970s" and, hence, may suggest "shifting boundaries between the modern and postmodern."

We are happy to include here several works as excerpts from the exhibition "This is my body: this is my blood" that was mounted in conjunction with the conference "Marxism and the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities" in November 1992 organized by Rethinking MARXISM at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. By means of introducing and presenting the works selected here by the curators of the exhibition, Susan Jahoda and May Stevens, we quote from several contributions to the catalog from that exhibition. In our Foreword to the catalog, we stated that "the human body has been embraced as the subject for this exhibition because the body mediates the crises and possibilities of our social, political, and personal lives." Fleshing out (so to speak) such a mediation, the writer and artist Robert Blake sees the body in contemporary society as the "contested site where state interests are most determined to control reproduction, nakedness, sexuality, and are equally mobilized to restrict representation." Adding to this the appropriate context then for the exhibition's focus on the body, the well-known art critic and activist Lucy Lippard noted that "as racism, anti-semitism, and homophobia ooze through the cracks in disintegrating global structures, as artists desperately seek their places among the ruins and the sprouts, and as the U.S. Supreme Court hypocritically confirms a woman's right to her body and makes it impossible for most women to exercise that right, the theme is all too timely." The specific focus in the exhibition and in several of the entries reproduced here on the particular status and representation of women's bodies and their more recent dispersion provoked Lippard's reflection that "the autobiography and narrative that underlay much . . . feminist art have reappeared in the 90s, but now they are re-informed by the shifting and wildly diverse grounds of 'multiculturalism'." The desire of the participating artists to situate representations of the body in mass and popular culture but also to shed light on their own politically informed processes of artistic representation without compromising their works' integrity led Lippard to conclude that "they put their ideas and others' bodies on the line. " This line of sight is further illuminated by Blake who views the common terrain of the artwork presented here and in the original installation to be "the representation of otherness through visual and Iinguistic projects." The transgressive character of the work, then, is attributable to a "breech of silence" about the body as the different entries taken as a whole, in Blake's words, "chart wounds, differences, openings, breaks, refusals, recollections, collective and individual sites of resistance." We thank all involved in the F organization of the exhibition and catalog and the participating artists for allowing us to present some of the results of this highly successful and provocative show to our readers.

At least since the rise of the Western New Left in the 1960s, and certainly since the publication in 1985 of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, theoreticians of "radical democracy" have chastised orthodox versions of Marxism for their disabling class essentialism, political vanguardism, and apocalyptic vision of social upheaval. The current sharp opposition of radical democracy, often drawing quite heavily from Western liberal traditions, to Marxism has relied extensively, lay Stone notes here, on a rejection of Marxism's frequent recourse to positivist forms of explanation and to totalizing notions of social change and revolutionary activity. One of the primary sources for this rejection, Stone explains, is an appreciation of post-Hegelian phenomenology and hermeneutics with its emphasis on the importance of the intersubjective (and therefore pluralistic and ever-changing) conceptions of perception and the related idea that one's thoughts and actions are always situated within particular cultural, theoretical, and political "traditions" (thus eschewing illusions of a "revolutionary break"). Stone shows that the neglect of Marxism's more phenomenological and therefore dialectical moments has ironically led many Marxists to assert the primacy of "scientific" knowledge, class struggle, and revolutionary ruptures over the plurality of perception, the recognition of the "situatedness" and transitoriness of all perspectives and subjective/political identities, and the transformation of traditions, especially those of contemporary liberalism, from "within," as it were. Thus, Stone believes that such "post-Marxist" advocates of radical democracy as Laclau and Mouffe have hit the mark in preferring to wed phenomenology's insights into discursive and cognitive pluralism (now linked to strategic political pluralism) with Gramscian notions of hegemony and "historic bloc" in order to articulate a theory of radical political action which—in their view, contrary to contemporary Marxism—is simultaneously open-ended and determined. While Stone joins other radical democrats in imagining "Marxists abandoning Marxism as an ideology proper and appropriating and resituating important elements of contemporary Marxist theory within a hermeneutically structured radical democratic terrain," he does hold out the prospect that Marxism can revive the more dialectical, antipositivist, and liberal humanist values and elements of its own tradition in order to reform itself in the direction of radical democratic theory and politics.

The first entry in the Remarx section is Erwin Marquit's reflections on the conditions that led to the tumultuous rupture in the Communist Party of the USA in 1991. Writing as a participant-observer to the events that unfolded both leading up to and after the mass defection of many dedicated party members at the Party's 25th National Convention in late 1991, Marquit describes the direction of the official leadership, under the auspices of Gus Hall, as one that mostly subverted the basic principles of "democratic centralism," that privileged unnecessarily the organization of industrial workers rather than making central to the party's activities the question of racism and African-American equality, and that neglected critical theoretical and educational initiatives in developing distinctly Marxist views on the crisis of socialism in the USSR and much else. Marquit's particular reading of the crisis in the party leads him to a mostly sympathetic analysis of the consequent formation of the Committees of Correspondence, though Marquit notes that one of the problems that has appeared is the near abandonment, despite the presence of life-long communists and Marxists, of Marxism and Leninism as the theoretical and practical foundations for this new left-wing political organization. Though concerned primarily with the "organizational crisis" of the CPUSA, Marquit's essay raises interesting and lingering problems for all Marxists in the United States and perhaps elsewhere, such as the issue of how to conceptualize struggles for democracy and the end to race (and, we might add, gender) discrimination in relation to Marxist-inspired political movements and Marxist social theory more broadly. So, while Marquit's piece is clearly meant to intervene in political events with respect to a particular organization, it is important, nevertheless, not only as a historical document of recent Marxian left activity in the United States, but also as a concrete example with which we can retheorize the very problematic formulations that have been bequeathed to us by the CPUSA and orthodox Marxism.

The Cold War is over? Not really, says Benjamin Page, as he describes in his contribution to our Remarx section the latest economic and cultural phase of the Cold War following from the abatement of military hostilities between East and West. Using the changes that led to the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992-93 as a case in point, Page depicts the attempts by such Western-dominated international institutions as the World Bank and the IMF to impose a specifically Western agenda dedicated to the eradication of any traces of the socialist legacy in Eastern Europe. Page notes that in the former Czechoslovakia, the struggles for democracy, political freedom, and a humane socialism that coalesced in popular calls for the return of Alexander Dubcek as President in 1989 were soon blunted and displaced by projects invOlving privatization and unregulated market economics. In fact, Page contends, it was the fear and dissatisfaction with this elision of popular demands and the concern for retaining some of the material benefits of socialism that may have led Slovaks to opt for a separate republic. Page believes that Western capital and its international agents have had as their primary target in the "reform" of Eastern Europe the elimination of social programs, such as state spending on medical care, education, and the like, and any legislation or remnants of the socialist experiment, such as the fairly successful collective farms in Czechoslovakia, that stand in the way of privatization and the spread of market forces. Such moves to dismantle socialism have been underway for several years, the effects of which, by now, have been felt by many workers and others in Eastern Europe as a decline in living standards. Page believes, in fact, that while much had been promised in the way of modem capitalist concerns as the shiny-new future following from the penetration of Western interests, there is more evidence to suggest that Eastern Europe may become the source of cheap and available labor rather than an outpost of cutting edge, high-tech industry. Page extends his analysis to suggest that in this postmilitary phase of the Cold War, the real losers in the "Western agenda" may be workers across the globe since the creation of a large pool of underpaid labor in the East can and may already serve as the condition for depressing wages and resisting worker demands—all in the name of the "new competition"—in the Third World and in the West itself.

Jonathan Diskin's review of Ernesto Laclau's New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time carries forward both the theme of radical democracy developed in lay Stone's article (above) and his own past work (see Diskin and Sandler, RM, Fall 1993) on the breakthroughs and impasses of Laclau's antiessentialism. Diskin applauds Laclau's 1990 book as containing several real advances in the theory of democracy and its connection to discursive plurality, the work of which had begun with Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Specifically, Diskin points to Laclau's more elaborated understanding of the "democratic revolution" of our times as being about the forces of "dislocation" and "negativity" that have made it impossible to secure closure of any presumed objectively grounded historical event or movement in the realms of politics and society. Unlike that of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Diskin notes, Laclau's presentation of the possibilities for radical democratic thought and practice proceeds here not in direct relation to the history of Marxian political and social thought. Rather, Laclau's "manifesto" talks about any movement as democratic that "weakens" the impulse or the attempt to wholly encompass subjective identities, political opposition, and the social totality as unified, centered, and objectively determined. Diskin finds illuminating Laclau's refusal of deriving liberatory political projects and the hierarchy of privilege often accorded to this or that struggle from the supposed "nature of existence itself." Laclau's discussion of the temporary unities that can occur as a result of hegemony and antagonism rather than emerge almost naturally from the "inner logic" of some historical contradiction represents, says Diskin, a laudable endeavor. This endeavor is concerned with breaking the strong causal and logic-bound link often posited by classical Marxism between political action and the "closed discursive space" of contradiction. And yet, in Diskin's eyes, Laclau's desire to break this link falters rather noticeably when he turns to discuss the "proliferations of dislocations peculiar to advanced capitalism." Diskin sees as a serious departure from his previous antiessentialism Laclau's falling back on a seemingly "real" capitalism, replete with stages in which the latest one produces actual fragmentation in global production and commodification, as a means to deduce logically (and secure closure in the "nature of existence") the forces of democratic politics and identities. As an untheorized category, capitalism is treated by Laclau as given and, in Diskin's view, this leads Laclau to pass "from the logic of a theoretical argument to programmatic notions, suggesting that the latter can be deduced from the former." So, while Diskin sees great merit in Laclau's attempts to constitute the political and social realms complexly, he chides this otherwise careful thinker for neglecting to reconceptualize economic life in a nonessentialist manner and for producing a notion of democracy that, at times, tends towards universality because of its foundation in the historical reality of the latest phase of capitalism.

In closing, we wish to offer publicly our sincerest thanks and share with readers our sense of enormous indebtedness to one of our own. From the time that RM was simply a good idea in the mid-eighties to the present inauguration of volume 7, the production of the journal has been overseen by David Ruccio. With the completion of this issue, David has stepped down (though not from the board), and the job of production editor will now be carried out by Carole Biewener. Readers should know that along with other members of the editorial board and of our parent organization, the Association for Economic and Social Analysis, and, of course, our publisher, David has worked to format, edit, and produce every issue to date of RM (in addition to his other editorial responsibilities). David's contributions to the design, formulation, and technical processes involved in the production of RM have been innumerable and indispensable. Among other things, there is no question that had he not been willing to figure out and organize the ways in which we could produce RM ourselves through personal computers (as we did during the first 3 years of our existence), the journal could not have existed. Since we never before listed his contributions as production editor anywhere else in our pages, we wished to make clear both to David and to our readers that he has not labored in obscurity and that, to the contrary, he has always had our deepest admiration and respect for his work. We are sure our readers join us in these sentiments.

The Editors

In this issue we begin with Kenneth Surin's précis of the "marxism" of Toni Negri, Felix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze. Surin shows us that Negri, Deleuze, and Guattari go "beyond Marx" in their accounts of the present form that capitalism and the conditions for resistance to it have taken. As Surin notes, one of the crucial moments in this going beyond the letter of Marx has involved (as in the work of Louis Althusser) a turn to Spinoza, especially since Negri, Deleuze, and Guattari see Spinoza as providing a non- or antidialectical "materialist ontology of the constitution of political practice." Surin reads the work of all three radical thinkers as a response to the particular "crisis of utopia" that has enveloped western, developed nations since 1968. In this post-68 period, capitalism has now passed from a Keynesian-inspired, social democratic capitalism, in which the state and civil society could still be viewed as distinct, to an "integrated world capitalism" where the "real subsumption" of society to capital has resulted in the indistinction of capital, the state, and civil society. Negri, Deleuze, and Guattari may be joined in this view that capitalism has entered a new phase and that the dialectics of Hegelian Marxism cannot suffice to explain difference and antagonism in the present world system. They may also agree that Spinoza's "philosophy of the constitution of the structural movement of the multitude" and his physics of power, force, and opposition may be more useful than traditional Marxism in constituting a new anticapitalist political practice. But, Surin also explicates the differences between these three theorists. For instance, for Negri, the movement beyond the Marxian dialectic is grounded in the real historical conditions of capitalism and the forms of outright opposition of the proletariat to capital today; while for Deleuze, and perhaps Guattari, the objection to the dialectic is more "philosophical" and based on the view that the Hegelian notion of contradiction (borrowed by Marx) is a negation of singularity, multiplicity, and difference. In reconciling some of the differences between the three, Surin states that they share in some way the view that in "late capitalism" capital "operates in a domain where the separation between state and society can no longer be maintained" and where there is a single state/society "complex." Thus, Marxist thought must be particularly cognizant of "the production of social capital" and the dominative practices of the state (the "negative state") directed to bringing about forms of social cooperation in organizing capitalist labor processes. It is by thinking through these practices, the present limits of capital, and the politics of a countervailing force—based, in Negri's schema, on the real antagonism of the "socialized worker" to capital itself—that Marxism may now be reconstituted.

Barbara Epstein raises the issue of the apparent disjuncture of U.S. military superiority, strong patriotism, vibrant economic growth, and class mobility in the Pax Americana after World War II with the various "panics" and generalized anxiety in American culture~during the same period. Epstein looks specifically at. the fears that gripped American culture in the late nineteen forties and much of the fifties regarding the "effeminization" of males, the diminishment of masculinity and "real" sex, and the spread of male homosexuality. As Epstein notes, many of these fears were fueled by two sources: the growing psychoanalytic/psychiatric community, especially as psychiatrists were increasingly called in during World War II to pronounce on the mental health and suitability for service of young men, and the immensely popular "scandal" magazines, many of which published "psychological" and other pieces celebrating male sexual libertinism while admonishing forms of experimentation that went beyond straight sex. Epstein points out that the various panics about masculinity often converged in deducing the origins of the "problem" to "momism," the view, supported by numerous mental health professionals, that a large number of American men suffered from having overbearing, overprotective mothers. In her search for the social conditions that may have produced such panics, Epstein considers seriously the so-called "crisis of masculinity" and suggests that the anxieties that were driving Americans to worry about the "weakening" of their culture can be understood perhaps as reactions to the powerful role many women exercised within traditional family structures over the lives of their children in the face of changes in social life that took place immediately after the war (suburbanization, women's entry and then exit from the labor force, and so forth). Epstein finishes with some thoughts on how such a seeming discrepancy between "reality" and culture (similar, she suggests, to the present gap between the vastly changing roles of men, women, and families and the current hubbub over the return to "family values") can be illuminated by "the Marxist inclination to look for contradiction as a window onto hidden levels of social reality" such that "deep changes in social structure" and also "new movements for social change" are unearthed and brought to light.

Grow or die! According to Blair Sandler, this is the fundamental message of traditional Marxist political economy regarding the "logic of capital." This message, Sandler contends, serves as the basic tenet underlying "eco-Marxism," the recent blending of "red" and "green" movements for ecologically sound, postcapitalist societies. Sandler views the "grow or die" (GOD, for short) Marxist discourse as seriously flawed, since its own inexorable logic leads eco-Marxists to conclude that capitalism and ecology are incompatible. As Sandler shows, this conclusion is built up from a particular interpretation of Marxian value theory in which all expenditures on environmentally safer production processes and commodities are seen as "unproductive" to capital and, hence, as deductions from capitalists' profits. In the GOD discourse, then, capitalists are ultimately beset by the growth of environmentalism. On the one hand, if capitalists accede to the demands made for cleaner/greener production and goods, the accumulation of capital slows down, perhaps fatally. If, on the other hand, capitalists ignore environmental concerns, then "ecopocalypse"—the eventual devastation of natural resources and the planet—will occur. From Sandler's overdeterminist Marxian standpoint, the posing of this dilemma occludes from view the possibility of "green capitalism," a situation he believes is now occurring in which some capitalists are able to maintain and even expand their capital base while engaging in environmentally friendly production. Sandler's theoretical contribution resides in his explanation of how "environmental regimes"—including the present ecologically conscious regime—overdetermine the very value of commodities, thus transforming previously "unproductive" expenditures into value-creating ones. As a result, Sandler shows that capitalist exploitation is indeed consistent with the extension of green concerns even to the realm of capitalist production itself. Sandler sees that for many eco-Marxists, the "grow or die" premise begets the inevitable conclusion that only a socialist revolution can effectively promote environmentalism. Seeing that socialism may not now be on the agenda and wishing to have something to say to other radical environmentalists, eco-Marxists have often latched on to demands to force capitalists to be more environmentally responsible. Thus, as Sandler concludes, the avoidance of the overdeterminist Marxist approach to value and nature and an adherence to "grow or die" discourse leads eco-Marxists to be complicit, mostly unwittingly, in the current spread of green capitalism.

The rapid privatization of productive property that has taken place in China under Deng Xiaoping, says Harry Williams, is only the latest in a series of retreats since the revolution from real social ownership and worker control. Williams chronicles debates ova the "property question" in postrevolutionary China and shows that the official party lines, those of the main radical critics (such as the Gang of Four), and today's reform strategies have all defined socialist ownership so as to leave property essentially in private hands. Williams contends that such leaders as Mao Zedung saw early on that state or public ownership of production facilities was only one step in the road to socialist ownership and that formal ownership did not translate into the real control of property by the masses. Yet, Williams also notes that from Mao onward the question of worker control was usually subsumed to the issue of party/cadre control and often discussed in terms of the appropriate leadership both of the party and of management positions. Williams thus contends that, in fact, throughout much of the history of the People's Republic of China, party bureaucrats were able to retain effective control over production, hence displacing most attempts to "democratize" workplaces by channeling them through existing state institutional structures. When circumstances arose that promised more radical changes in the property system, as during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the democratization efforts remained voluntaristic, mostly unorganized and, therefore, were not institutionalized. Even the later efforts of the Gang of Four to "kick up a fuss over ownership" degenerated into a clash over party leadership, despite the advances in critical thinking that led the Gang to see "socialism" in China as revisionist and subject to the rule of bourgeois economic and political right. Williams points out the irony in the fact that Dengist reformers have been motivated in their calls for extensive privatization by problems similar to those explicitly addressed by the Gang: the need for a "radical stratagem" to counteract bureaucratism and the~ lack of enthusiasm for further changes under the banner of socialist revolution. So, while Mao and the Gang of Four may have placed politics in command, and while the Dengists have replaced this with economics in command, in Williams's view, the property system has never been placed in the hands of workers. Williams's outlook is slightly brightened, however, by the writings of Chen Erjin, one of the key thinkers in the Democracy Wall movement of the late seventies. As a poignant end to his brief history, Williams finds solace and satisfaction in Chen's view that "only by placing control of production and politics in the hands of the masses, mediated by democratic institutions, can society move toward socialism."

The rethinking and revamping of state welfare policy has proceeded apace with neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and the growing prominence of feminist and other radical movements over the past twenty or more years. In a past issue (Spring 1993), Nancy Fraser documented the changes in thinking about welfare policy from the Reagan-Bush years to the Clinton administration. In this issue, Martha Ackelsberg provides an even deeper focus on the concepts of "dependency" that seem to shape the suggestions for welfare reform emanating from critics of all political stripes. Ackelsberg, though, concentrates her powers of analysis and critique on recent feminist perspectives on welfare policy, especially those that maintain the view that the economic dependence of women on men and/or the state is what is to be most avoided in any overhaul of patriarchal capitalist society and the welfare state. In reviewing the contributions and quandaries bequeathed by liberalism to recent feminist thinking on welfare reform, Ackelsberg calls important attention to the fact that, for classical liberals, the notion that economic dependence is unworthy of citizenship in a modem democracy is clearly founded on a male-centered view of independence and the right to political participation. So, while Ackelsberg does see some of the virtue in liberal feminist criticisms of the economic dependence of women on men, or on their families, or on the state, she also sees that such criticisms mostly ignore the value of unpaid female labor and the many forms of nurturing that women do within the confines of their"interdependent" relationships. Likewise, while Ackelsberg appreciates the Marxian socialist (and especially the socialist-feminist) advances in social theory that shift the focus from individual economic achievement to group-based actions and interconnections, she notes a similar recourse to economic independence or self-sufficiency for women as a solution to women's oppression. In criticizing both strands of feminist thought,~ Ackelsberg calls for a movement "beyond the dependency model" of women's poverty and the welfare system. Ackelsberg's preferred approach is one that refuses the idea that there is any meaningful distinction to be maintained between dependent and independent subjects in contemporary societies. Rather, Ackelsberg closes with her plea to revalue the different types of dependence (and not just economic dependence) that "ought to be viewed as potential sources for empowerment, rather than symptoms of powerlessness." If we follow this lead, Ackelsberg suggests, we can see welfare reform as a site within which to validate "mutuality" and to valorize, even in monetary form, "one's place as a member of an interdependent community."

It is common among historians of ideas to trace the modern concern with individual human nature and its many effects on society to the work of the seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, whose writings served as the basis and foil for the founders of classical liberalism, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, grounded his gloomy view of liberty and individual freedom on the thesis that unconstrained self-interest could only lead to "a war of every man against every man." In his article here, John Sinisi revisits Hobbes's main theses and shows how the modem liberal view of capitalist markets as the key mechanism in reconciling self-interest, social peace, and economic development is built up from Hobbesian premises. While in social and economic theory the dominant modernist tendency has been to supercede Hobbes with Smith's more sympathetic rendering of the "invisible hand" of markets driven by self-interest, there do exist neo-Hobbesian and Marxian challenges to the mainstream. Sinisi shows that there are "deep resonances" between the neo-Hobbesian and Marxian critiques of Smithian liberalism. For, as Sinisi contends, though it is the case that neo-Hobbesians begin with individual self-interest as the wellspring for all consequent human action, their view is that individuals will often and quite rationally seek to alter the "rules of the game" in order to take full advantage of their situations at the expense of others. Thus, as with Marxists, who begin of course with concepts of class and class struggle, neo-Hobbesians (most of whom, we should add, can be usually found on the far right of the political spectrum) theorize the complex intersection of economic and political institutions and struggles for power within which individuals and groups seek to use the state to receive transfers of wealth to bolster their positions. Sinisi notes that, while starting from very different points of departure, neo-Hobbesians and Marxists have a similar concern with unproductive and wasteful activities that result from the self-interested behavior of individuals and classes under capitalism. So, Sinisi concludes that, while neo-Hobbesians and Marxists may seem worlds apart on the issue of the efficacy of capitalist markets to solve such problems, their common analyses and criticisms of the use and misuse of social, economic, and political power in self-interested systems make them useful to each other as sources for intellectual stimulation and political dialogue.

Marilyn Zuckerman's poetry does not flinch at its own powerful effects. In her poem "The Cherry Orchard," Zuckerman summons up the dreary fate of a once aristocratic family (presumably the already disintegrating Prozoroff family of Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters) as the century has continued to play out in pre- and postrevolutionary Russia. Zuckerman's poem expresses the constant setbacks not just to this family but more to Russian society and to the hopes and dreams of consequent generations as revolutions have aged, become exhausted or impotent, or have simply been deferred. The poem takes the form of the tired but bitter lament of Zuckerman's narrator (Masha of The Three Sisters?), as she recounts the cycles of expectations, work, broken promises, and new bosses—but also dogged survival—that have been the life of her family and for many Russians during the modern era. The bite in Zuckerman's poem comes as the narrator resignedly notes that the Americans and others have rushed in after the toppling of the Soviet regime, leaving herself and the Russian people to find that drudgery, exploitation, and mistreatment—now linked to the demands of international capital—have not abated and instead have taken their place in a recurring dirge of declining fortune. In "Problems for Peace in the Middle East," the poem speaks through the voice of the forgotten multitude of Palestinian and Israeli women who have suffered at the hands of their warring husbands and brothers. Zuckerman conveys the harsh irony that these women—separated though they may be through forced boundaries and a geography of hate and occupation—are permitted to share silencing, physical regimentation, mandatory service for "their men," disdain and neglect, ritual mourning, and numerous other displacements. They are prohibited from "sitting at the table" where their own food is served along with deadly plans for continued warfare or with the new prospects for liberation and peace. Zuckerman employs an arid desert language, rich in the traditions of retribution and religious prescription, to depict the defiant stance of those whose recourse to mute vigil speaks louder than the parched, broken voices of their occupiers and oppressors.

We were intrigued when we received Leonard Harris's "open letter," which he wrote as a reaction and lead-up to this November's first national conference of the Radical Philosophy Association in lowa. Harris's letter, which we include here as the first entry in our Remarx section, raises in a provocative, interrogatory way many decisive issues relating to the future of socialist thought and practice. Of particular interest to readers may be Harris's insistence on facing the "underside" of socialist and most radical thinking. He touches upon and challenges, among other things, the transhistorical, universal significance of radical action; the privileged moral place in left discourse of "oppressed" groups; the romanticization of the "historically despised"; the feebleness of the nostalgic language of socialism; and the obfuscation of the terror, deceit, corruption, violence, and domination that may (must?) attend all efforts to empower the disempowered. But, what is noteworthy as well about Harris's letter, at least as we read it, is that it is written to inspire a reestimation and reconstruction of Marxism and socialist thought. Harris throws down the gauntlet by questioning whether socialism has any future "without critiques that face the role of coercion, pressure, and force encoded in every effort to reform and resituate the despised?" In printing Harris's letter here, we take the opportunity to invite RM readers to reply with brief letters of their own with hope that we will be able to select some to publish in forthcoming issues as responses to or commentaries on Harris's piece.

After a brief period in which the classical economic theory of "comparative advantage" in international trade was once again heralded as providing the miracle cure for the economic development of all nations rich and poor, of late a "new international economics" has appeared that has reintroduced both history and government policy as crucial components for achieving an advantage in foreign trade. As Thomas DelGiudice recounts, though, this new international economics is as blind to the role class and class struggles plays in shaping and blocking a nation's trading advantages as were earlier theories of economic development. In his Remarx piece, DelGiudice goes a distance to remedy this faulty eyesight by showing exactly how an advantage in international trade can be historically achieved through changes in the class conditions of a developing nation. Looking at the history of prerevolutionary Nicaragua and the creation of its trading advantage in cotton exports through the lens of class allows DelGiudice to reveal the means by which the Nicaraguan state in the 1950s helped create the supposedly sanguine conditions in which advanced technologies were introduced, labor productivity was increased, unit production costs for cotton growers were reduced while profits rose, and all in conjunction with the relative immiserisation of cotton wage laborers. Additionally, DelGiudice employs a detailed class analysis to show that the ability of large cotton growers in Nicaragua to gain access to sources of income in addition to "profits" through their increasing control over the "conditions of existence" of capitalist cotton growing (such as land ownership, access to credit, control over marketing, and so forth) created as well an uneven development in the cotton industry. This uneven development fostered divisions that ultimately weakened the political resistance of the capitalist class in the days leading up to the Sandinista revolution. Using Nicaragua as a good example of a nation in which export success was linked with heightened inter- and intraclass tensions, DelGiudice's main point is that without a thoroughgoing class analysis of the policies and historical conditions that promote national "gains" through international trade, observers and natives of developing nations may overlook, to their eventual peril, the class consequences of enacting such changes.

The rational-choice model of human behavior remains the favored model within the economics profession. This model—in which "autonomous" individuals are believed to choose between alternative courses of action through a deliberate attempt to maximize "expected utility"—has been influential to such a degree that, during the past fifteen years, rational-choice Marxism has been one of the prevalent forms through which Marxian social and economic theory has been rethought. Despite a lengthy history within Marxism of suspicion of any social theory that derives social outcomes from individual motives, rational-choice models now flourish not only among radical economists (in conformity with their mainstream colleagues), but also among other radical thinkers in disciplines outside of economics. But, as Carles Muntaner reminds us in his Remarx essay, rational-choice models of human cognition and action have long been criticized and rejected by practitioners in fields, such as experimental psychology, whose speciality is explaining the determinants of human behavior. Muntaner presents here an array of criticisms of rational-choice theory from fields ranging from sociology to behavioral psychology. What seems to be common to many of these criticisms is the view that rational-choice models neglect the interaction between a social "environment" and individual choice, tend to understate the effects of past interactions with or responses to the behavior of others, generally ignore the impact of "social leaming," underestimate the role of rules or nomms on behavior, and much else. In Muntaner's discussion, rational-choice models are likewise seen to be faulty predictors of group behavior or at least of individual choices within the context of collective entities. Muntaner argues that the class-based Marxism of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, among others, fumishes a better grasp of the overdetemmined relations and processes that lead to both individual and group activities. So, in opposition to the boasts that rational-choice models and game theory have greater explanatory and predictive power, Muntaner infers the relative superiority of overdeterminist Marxism from his view that it conforms far better than rational-choice models to the breakthroughs in understanding human behavior that have been produced by experimental cognitive scientists in diverse fields.

Tony Smith reviews one of Emest Mandel's most recent books, Power and Money. Smith's review consists mainly of coherently laying out Mandel's informed responses to the claims that, with the collapse of the Soviet model, Marxism and socialism have been refuted and/or shown to be unfeasible. Mandel, perhaps the leading Marxist economist in the world today, challenges directly the view that the overthrow of the Soviet system demonstrates the impossibility of ever establishing socialism as a socioeconomic system. While rejecting the idea that the Soviet Union was characterized by "state capitalism" (see the articles by Resnick and Wolff in the Summer 1993 and Spring 1994 issues on this subject), Mandel, as Smith relates, believes that the successful transition from capitalism to socialism was blocked there and congealed into some "mutant form" of bureaucratic state control. While such a thesis may be familiar to followers of Mandel's previous work, readers may be more intrigued, in Smith's rendition, by Mandel's insistence that several of the central conditions that would be necessary for his model of democratic socialism are already in place in advanced capitalist nations. Mandel's model—in which direct worker participation, workers' collectives, a kind of consumer sovereignty, free provision of basic necessities, and a multiparty political system would be combined with forms of centralized planning in preference to markets and the rule of the "law of value"—would require a shorter workday, generalized access to information, an material abundance. So, as Smith concludes, Mandel's book (which Smith calls "magisterial summary of his views") provides historical detail, hardheaded calculations, practical proposals, and a spirit of optimism for those for whom the future Marxism and socialism appears at the moment to be in doubt.

The Editors

In this issue we commence with the troubled question of the relationship between Marxian economic thought and postmodernism. In their article, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio argue that modernist epistemologies, methods of analysis, and views of social causation are clearly dominant within neoclassical, neo-Keynesian, and most Marxian economic frameworks. Yet, they believe that one can detect within each of these schools of thought "moments" in the regnant notions of cognition, behavior, subjectivity, and social determination that defy the decidedly modernist preference for order, centering, and certainty. Amariglio and Ruccio concentrate their analytical efforts on highlighting the effects of this modernist preference on Marxian economic discourse. In so doing, they juxtapose the modernist tendencies to seek foundations for economic explanation in notions of order, centeredness, and certainty against the postmodern valence of notions of disorder, decentering, and uncertainty (or indeterminacy). Amariglio and Ruccio show that many of the main conceptual oppositions that structure classical Marxian economic theory– particularly those of production versus circulation, market versus plan, and ultimately capitalism versus socialism–are characterized by the overall preference to present capitalism and its institutions as disordered, alienating, socially fragmented, mystifying, and uncertainty-producing. In contrast, classical Marxism presents socialism as a system in which the full promise of the modernist project is realized in the social orderliness, organic unification, and subjective wholeness that can presumably come about as the result of rational economic planning directed by a democratically inclined, worker-controlled state. Amariglio and Ruccio allege that much political and theoretical damage has been done by the modernist bias in Marxian thought, and they set out to show how such distinctions as that between market versus plan fall apart with the realization, for example, that markets are as constituted by the predictable repetitions of habit and tradition as plans are subject to uncertainty, disorder, and conflict. In stressing the "postmodern moments" in Marxian thought–in teasing out the notions of disorder, decentering, and uncertainty that are implicit or immanent in the oppositions that are the primary focus of Marxian economic thought–Amariglio and Ruccio contend that the modernist faith in the inherent rationality of a socialist economy must be replaced by the recognition that capitalism has no unique purchase on disorder, decentering, and uncertainty. They conclude by arguing that, in any event, these "postmodern" elements are not the obstacles for constructing a socialist economy that classical Marxism and its offspring have most often believed them to be.

The "dossier" on socialist realism and East Germany modernism prepared by Julia Hell, Loren Charger, and Katie Trumpeter consists of three separate articles preceded by a joint precis surveying the landscape of politics and literary aesthetics in the wake of the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In their prefatory remarks Hell, Charger, and Trumpeter scrutinize the current fashion in German cultural circles to dismiss the socialist-realist art and literature of the GDR as pre- or antimodern, purely polemical, politically ingratiating, complicit with official censorship and state-sponsored brutality, devoid of aesthetic sophistication, and, therefore, worthless. Even more, as the authors point out, some leading lights of German cultural criticism have rejected any "aesthetics of conviction" in their insistence that the contamination of artistic concerns by political commitment must of necessity be rejected if the debasement of culture by the politically correct standards of socialist realism and its like is to be guarded against for the future. As Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener indicate, much of the recent controversy over socialist realism and the "complicity" of its practitioners and even many left opponents of officially sanctioned East German culture is founded, ironically, on a view of socialist realism that buries its numerous contradictions and aesthetic diversity in an all-too-polemical call for the separation of politics, ethics, and culture and the purification of aesthetic production at any cost. The aesthetic elitism that declares itself to be apolitical in German literary circles in opposition to the sullied, propagandistic legacy of East German socialist realism obscures or simply obliterates the various modernist and even postmodernist strategies and lacunae that distinguished the works of some of the main figures in East German literary history. In looking at specific texts produced by these figures, Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener unearth the ways in which socialist realism can be said to have unraveled or complexified itself in the utilization of formal techniques and aesthetic practices that were, at times, neither realist nor univocal in the heroic socialist optimism that was thought to pervade representative texts, performances, and other artifacts. Trumpener’s reading of Anna Seghers’s short story written during the Weimer period, Kruger’s reflections on the different politically-informed programs and aesthetic concerns of playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Muller, and Hell’s considerations on Christa Wolf’s 1963 novel What Remains in the context of recent condemnations of her as a collaborator with the East German regime through her purported involvement with the GDR’s secret police, are all offered as alternatives to left defenses and right denunciations of socialist realism as a cultural monolith. Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener demonstrate nicely that deconstructive readings of nuanced socialist realist texts spanning the history of East Germany can be rendered if we are willing to put aside "the urge to replace the worst excesses of ‘actually existing socialist’ dogma with an equally teleological schema of a triumphant capitalist culture that treats any socialist alternative as an aberration or a joke." The authors of this dossier seek nothing less than to open up the question–thought, by some, to be dead and buried in Germany today and perhaps in the United States as well–of socialist writing, its possibilities, its historical conditions, and its contradictory effects. Toward this end, Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener expose the "ideology of modernism" that has excommunicated (socialist) politically-inspired culture in the name of bringing the former East Germany into the orb of Western liberal cultural Germany ideals. In sum, Hell, Kruger, and Trumpener advance their dossier as a "critical intervention" in hopes of resisting the current silencing of those few critics who can discern political dimensions and agendas in all forms of aesthetic modernism and who may still conceive of socialism as a practicable and honorable goal, if not a perfectly good inspiration for cultural practice.

Regina Frank’s installation "L’Adieu Pearls Before Gods" appeared in a window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art (in New York) in the fall of 1993. Frank’s exhibit consisted of a month’s worth of her sewing pearls onto a silk gown while electronic postings of the daily wages of women’s handwork around the world were flashed above her. As the curator explains in her notes accompanying the installation (reprinted here), Frank’s performance constituted a rich overdetermination in which the inequalities of women’s labor in the global nexus were combined both with the daily ritual of Frank’s purchasing bread and roses with part of the "wage" that her stitchwork would bring and with the electronic equipment that conveys the flows of capital that make possible the multinational needle trades based upon the exploitation of their mostly female labor force. Frank’s installation, depicted here in several stills and a data chart of international wages that prevailed during her performance, raises additional questions for us as well. By calling attention in her enactment to the undervaluation and the wide international disparity of wages for seamstresses and others, Frank problematizes the equally disparate and often invisible labor of "artists." In "performing" labor (in several different senses), Frank avoids the erasure of her own production by connecting it explicitly to a global network of workers. Frank additionally confounds the distinction between art and craft as her performance of needlework and its display in a museum window on Broadway make it difficult to preserve the idea that–despite their often subsistence wages and sweatshop working conditions–seamstresses, embroiderers, and others perform an activity that resides aesthetically or economically outside of the realm of "art." Nor does the artist perform an activity that resists her own insertion into a global division of labor inspired by the extension of capitalist markets. We thank the New Museum and the artist for permitting us to place before readers the traces of Frank’s intriguing performance of indictment, celebration, and solidarity.

Perhaps the primary object of the newly emergent queer theory has been the unabashed challenge to heterosexuality both as a practical norm (for sexuality, gender construction, and general social relations) and as a central theoretical foundation for many of the concepts of identity inherited from liberal social thought. In her overview of queer theory and the politics with which it has been linked, Rosemary Hennessy raises in particular the extent to which queer theory’s critique of heterosexuality and its prevailing social norms circumvents rather than builds upon the insights about gender, sex, and class relations that have emerged from materialist feminism. Hennessy is most concerned that while queer theory has rightly destabilized the notions of fixed (hetero- and homo-) sexual identities and practices by stressing their performative rather than expressive character, it has done so by privileging the realm of signification to the near exclusion of other determinative material processes, such as labor. In Hennessy’s eyes, much "avantgarde" queer theory, including the pathbreaking work of Judith Butler and others, has followed the now familiar post-Marxist move of driving out labor, production, and class in favor of power, desire, and language from the pantheon of ultimate, constitutive causes of "the real." As Hennessy affirms, the resulting conceptions of gender and sexuality textualize these material forces to such an extent that they make difficult, if not impossible, critical interrogations of the sexual and social divisions of labor that help to structure patriarchal control and women’s domestic labor as well as gender and sexuality inside and outside of families. In Hennessy’s view, a queer theory not engaged with the (mostly capitalist) class conditions and the forms of "private" patriarchy that help to overdetermine compulsory heterosexuality is therefore undermined in its attempts to overturn "heteronormativity," in other words, the laws and ideology that naturalize heterosexuality and treat gay and lesbian practices as either to be tolerated or repulsed. Hennessy is dubious, then, of the transgressivity of a nonmaterialist queer theory that can be easily transmogrified into performative gender bending and flexibility in sexual identities and practices and, therefore, into "an index of the discovery of new consumer markets where pleasure can be profitably appropriated and produced." Hennessy concludes by urging queer and left theorists and activists to turn to a "materialist queer theory [that] can put forward a critique of heterosexuality that does not shrink from celebrating the human capacity for sensual pleasure even as it dares to address the overdetermined relations among identities, norms, and divisions of labor."

In this issue’s Remarx section we add to our running discussion on Marxism and ecology (see, for example, Raskin and Bernow, Spring 1991 and Sandler, Summer 1994) with articles by Andriana Vlachou and Roy Morrison. Vlachou leads off with a sharp look at some of the recent attempts by Marxists inspired by ecological viewpoints to resituate Marxism on a firmer, environmentalist basis in thinking through the relations between nature, society, and human intentions and institutions. Vlachou pays particular attention to the debate between Ted Benton and Reiner Grundmann in the pages of New Left Review in the late eighties and early nineties. In contemplating this debate, Vlachou notes the untheorized and largely "mystified" notions of nature, human interests, technology, and much else that function as key concepts and points of contention between Benton and Grundmann. Vlachou takes Benton to task for substituting philosophical "realism" for Marx’s historical materialism; it is this substitution which allows Benton to treat nature and "natural limits" as "real" objects (and therefore, as brute forces to which all human intentions must somehow adhere or bend), the knowledge of which is given to observers and not discursively produced. As Vlachou recounts, Benton’s realism leads him to claim that ecological conditions and crises were underestimated by Marx, Engels, and their followers since they tended to believe in the ability of humans to dominate nature nearly at will. Yet, while Vlachou finds Benton to err too much on the side of unexamined naturalism in his ecological reconstruction of Marxism, she finds Grundmann to err to the same degree in his resort to humanism and rationalism as the means by which he introduces ecological matters into Marxism. Vlachou stakes out a different ground–one that embraces the Marxian concepts of overdetermination, contradiction, and class–to conceive of the many currents that simultaneously constitute natural and social processes into a dialectical engagement with one another. Through some brief examples, Vlachou demonstrates that the kind of knowledge of the environment that can be produced in utilizing a class theoretical viewpoint informed by the Marxian idea of overdetermination can reveal unique insights into ecological problems and their solutions that are not available to Greens through any other means.

Roy Morrison has a somewhat different focus from Vlachou on the relation between Red and Green theories and practices. Morrison is concerned with the extent to which Marxism can both lend itself to and incorporate within its own ambitions the rejection of industrialism, upon which much radical environmentalism is based. Morrison, whose experience in the Clamshell Alliance contributed to his understanding of the manifold interactions between radical thought and political action, believes that the Green analysis of the ecological crisis that attends industrialism in all of its forms ultimately can be conjoined with the liberatory, democratic impulses of Marxism. But, as Morrison states, in order for Marxism to "green" itself, it must give up its persistent exaltation of a future socialist industrial order that would free human potential through the liberation of the machine. Rather, as Morrison argues, Marxism’s encounter with environmentalism must first and foremost include both the goal of achieving ecological sustainability of both human and natural environments and the view that the social and ecological destruction of capitalist industrialism is not simply an epiphenomenon of capitalist exploitation. A Green Marxism, in Morrison’s view, must be willing to recognize the environmental and totalizing folly of replacing capitalist with socialist industrialism and must, instead, build upon democratic and local "social practices that embrace sustainability and sufficiency."

Slavoj Zizek, as Teresa L. Ebert states here, has become the latest " ‘hot’ new intellectual commodity" in left academic circles in the United States. Zizek’s reworking of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical oeuvre into a new theory of ideology is the subject of Ebert’s review of Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Ebert wastes no time in getting to her criticism of Zizek’s elision of Marxian theory and the critique of capitalist social relations by his insistence on desire and pleasure as the irreducible, "impossible kernel of the social real." Ebert bemoans this latest "idealist" transcendence of the reality of capitalist exploitation by discourse and psychoanalytic narrative. As Ebert relates, Zizek’s privileging of enjoyment as the founding moment of the real, and as the "excess" of which all other surpluses, including that of surplus-value, are merely expressions, is a form of reductionism that has recently attracted the attention of cultural critics, many of them reputedly recoiling from the reductionism of orthodox Marxism. Ebert argues that Zizek’s choice to reduce social reality to the psyche and its "effects" has hidden the constitutive nature of capitalist class relations and forces of production as a material force. In her critique of Zizek as purveying the latest style in bourgeois social theory, Ebert brings up the crucial question of the inability of postmodern discourse to think through the historical conditions of its own making and its insertion in contemporary global economic and social arrangements. Zizek’s resort to "excess" as the key register through which to read any and all aspects of the real leads him, Ebert points out, to theorize capitalism as always transcending its own limits and making itself anew in "permanent development." For Ebert, then, Zizek "completely suppresses the objective reality of surplus-value and the contradictions of capitalism as based on the exploitation and appropriation of labor." Presenting capitalism as a juggernaut that fills the entire social space through its dynamic, excessive character and championing the cause of enjoying one’s "symptom," Zizek, in Ebert’s view, ultimately refashions the bourgeois imaginary par excellence–embracing capitalism as a system within which individual pleasure is unrestricted without regard to the conditions of exploitation and oppression that it has historically brought forth.

The Editors

In this issue we begin with an interview with Cornel West conducted in May 1994 by William Olson and Antonio Callari, members of our editorial board. The conversation ranges from West’s views on the positive aspects and lacunae in Marxian theory, and the limitations and potentials of postmodern theory, to the current status of liberation theologies and the black church, and finally to the question of the increasing significance of race, especially as it affects political action. In reviewing his strong debt to the Marxian tradition, West notes the importance of Marxian political economy to highlight what he calls “the rule of capital.” Yet he believes that Marxism has frequently stopped short of providing the much-needed, detailed analyses of reification and commodification that Marxists such as Georg Lukacs and Fredric Jameson have wished to make central to Marxism’s historical project. Turning to West’s writings on such poststructuralist thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, West discusses his aim of holding on to some notion of totality even while recognizing the theoretical and political salience of poststructuralist, antiessentialist thought. Under careful questioning by Olson and Callari, West assesses his own current relation to postmodern and deconstructive thought. Here, West applauds the work of Derrida as a “thoroughgoing austere skeptic,” but he also notes that in their fixation on discourse and language, many Derrideans neglect to create the space for “reconstructive energy.” While West resists bashing deconstruction and its postmodernist cousins for purportedly making action impossible through the introduction of discourses of uncertainty, he avoids a “moral relativism” by embracing a “radical historicism” that no longer asks philosophy for “permission to act.” The conversation moves on to West’s familiar concern to view religiosity as a community project. In the process, West treats readers to brief historical lessons in the substantial role that some progressive religious communities have played in remaking the world even while more and more social institutions, including churches, get gobbled up in the ethos of the capitalist marketplace. Callari and Olson interrogate West on the meaning of his advocacy of a “politics of conversion” which incorporates an “ethic of love;” West responds by clarifying the resort to community and forms of communal agency that his notions of love and universality imply. Finally, West discusses the competing theses of the declining and/or increasing significance of race and racism in U.S. society. Here, West notes that while the economic possibilities for African Americans have been enhanced, certainly since slavery, the political use and misuse of (especially white) racialist discourse has recently increased in its extension and vitriolic force. As might be expected, West is hopeful that there is now some “real possibility for democratic regeneration.”

These days, Allegra De Laurentiis tells us, Walter Benjamin is most often regarded as a literary critic, though “a respectful reading of the texts must reaffirm that Marxism and mysticism are the two pivotal features of his thought.” De Laurentiis proceeds, therefore, to read Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History as an opportune occasion to reveal Benjamin’s immersion in both Marxist and Jewish-mystical traditions, especially as they shed light on Benjamin’s “meditations” on history. Benjamin himself defies the conventional wisdom that Marxism and messianic Judaism are absolutely irreconcilable. But, as De Laurentiis shows, Benjamin produces a novel understanding of Marxist historical materialism through his audacious claim that the Marxist approach to history would be “unassailable on the condition that it ‘enlists the services of theology.’ “ Benjamin’s unique reading of historical materialism centers on the idea that it is “redemption of the past” and not a liberatory vision of the future that enlivens Marxism’s theory of history. In particular, Benjamin finds present in historical materialism a moral obligation to the “oppressed past.” As De Laurentiis points out, Benjamin hitches his understanding of this moral obligation to what he called the “monodological view of history,” in which singular events in human history are inspirited with a transcendental and meaningful presence to be comprehended only by “a redeemed mankind.” As a means of illuminating the kind of historical knowledge toward which Benjamin aspired, De Laurentiis seeks examples (as Benjamin himself did) in the visual arts. Through a brief presentation of the photographs that Roman Vishniac shot of Eastern European Hasidic communities in the handful of years leading up to the “final solution,” De Laurentiis shows us what Benjamin could have been getting at: the seizure and arresting of a past time in the lives of an oppressed people to reveal the true essence of historical events. In De Laurentiis’s view, such a “Messianic cessation of happening”—glimpsed, for example, in the flash of time attenuated in Vishniac’s images—held for Benjamin the special possibility that the “past can now be suspended” through the revolutionary action presaged and then produced by historical materialism.

Subaltern studies have given rise, among other things, to a reconsideration of the traditional Marxian notions of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist hegemony. In the realms of cultural and political representation, the critique of “Orientalism” has determined for postcolonial subjects and theorists of the subaltern a project of constructing a “relatively autonomous space” of resistance to continued postcolonial dominance. Much of the resulting analysis and suggestions for resistance have focused on the degree to which “tradition” has been or can be the grounds for eluding the ever-tightening grip of modernization. Ajit Chaudhury argues here that the notion of “simple hegemony,” which shows up now in “Brown Orientalism” (the borrowing and inverting by postcolonial subjects of the problematic of Orientalist discourse), is not adequate theoretically or politically to create the space of opposition to Western domination. For Chaudhury, what is most often missed by Brown Orientalists is the overdetermination of tradition by modernism and, more importantly, vice versa. The mutual constitution of tradition and modernism means that when and where colonial rulers had to modify their plans for modernizing cultural and political spheres, as with the British in India, the resulting transformations did not imply the “victory” of nativist tradition in subverting the class-based efforts of the colonizers to establish “simple hegemony.” Chaudhury contends that the tradition thus touted was, and is, always/already overdetermined by Western modernism, and that the seeming inability of subaltern subjects to fully interiorize Western values and therefore collaborate in their own subordination does not translate into counterhegemony and the repudiation of modernism. Chaudhury proposes, in place of “simple hegemony,” a concept of “synthetic hegemony” in order to bring to light the mutual constitution of tradition and modernism in the relative positions of colonizers and colonized. With this proposition, Chaudhury seeks to show that colonial, and now postcolonial, power “alters (displaces) the traditional values in order to combine them with modern values.” Chaudhury then sees in contemporary postcolonial resistance movements a collaboration with hegemonizing power, as the “servants” attempt simply to valorize that which they believe has escaped modernism, speaking (but now loudly, rather than meekly) in the language of their oppressors. Chaudhury does see the possibility of constructing a space of subaltern resistance, but here he uses insightfully the discussions of values and power that have emanated from Nietzsche and Foucault. For if, as Chaudbury reads these thinkers, the master’s aggressive self-conception allows him/her to “forget” the servant when the servant enacts his/her meekness and/or “cowardice,” then the “disappearance” from the master’s gaze of the servant when he/she acts “weakly” suggests that the master (here read colonial and postcolonial rulers) cannot often see and act in the face of nonviolence and other acts that are not valued as “strong.” Thus Chaudbury concludes: “implicit in the servant’s apparent submissiveness, we might find resistance.”

Henry Krips returns to the scene of one of Louis Althusser’s most noteworthy contributions to Marxian social theory: the concept of “Ideological State Apparatuses” and the process of interpellation. Interpellation, as Krips reminds us, was formulated by Althusser to explain the material practices through which subjects come to represent themselves to themselves and through which these same subjects are subjected to the “Law of the Other,” perhaps best represented by and in various “state apparatuses.” The ideology of self that both recognizes and misrecognizes the subject’s position is one that is born of this dual movement of being called (or named) and of being subjected, and is not the result of the inverted reflection (or distortion) of a prior reality or already constituted meanings that predate interpellation. While Althusser may have believed that his notions of self-representation and subjectivity were largely borrowed from Jacques Lacan’s retheorization of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and conclusions, Krips argues that Althusser ignored the crucial role that desire played in both Freud’s and Lacan’s rendition of the constitution of subjects, Krips, then, sets out to revamp the Althusserian notion of interpellation by seeing the site of the subject’s being hailed as one constituted by fundamental antagonisms of meaning. In coping with such antagonisms, Krips says, subjects are forced to constitute themselves as desiring beings, revisiting and displacing through the process of “repetition” (Freud’s term) the “primal lack” that makes them experience a loss of control and a subjection to seemingly capricious forces that they see as outside (and perhaps above) them. The reconstitution of desire and self-representation, in Krips’s reading, is linked to the action of Ideological State Apparatuses only through the social antagonisms set off by the operation of these apparatuses. And these antagonisms, in turn, serve as the motivating force in constituting the subject’s desire as he/she experiences the urge to respond to the loss or questioning of self-identity that such potentially hostile interpellations may involve. Krips’s reconstruction of interpellation is designed, in the end, to indicate “the need both for a politics which understands the existence of social antagonisms, and a psychoanalytics which explains how those antagonisms come to have the constitutive effects of making us who we are.”

Employing at times the precise language and images of a mechanical trade magazine or, at the same moment, uncovering the libidinal excesses in the circulation of work, sex, and machines, Cinthea Fiss gives us “Pump,” a dexterous combinatory of text and photo stills. The words of a high-rise, building engineer, a woman whose discourse of exact quantities (from the pressure of hot-water pumps used to heat the goliath structure to the number of floors she must climb in order to service heat ducts and take water samples) is imbued as well with her sexual fantasies and their signifiers, her remembrances of friends, family, and foes (all workers, we should add), her narrative of her everyday worklife, and much else. The photos that accompany the text deliciously convey the seepage of desire that spills over into the naming of implements, processes, apparatuses, and artifacts of the mechanized workplace. Fiss gives us screws, cock valves, oiling pumps, and the like in this overdetermined, erotic economy of technology, labor, environment, art, and libido. Fiss’s piece also respects deeply the technical and social knowledge and skills of the engineers, as the narrator and her fellow workers traverse in pursuit of their jobs not only the many floors–from sub-basements to the roof–of this center for corporate capitalism (the Bank of America’s President has his office on the fortieth floor), but they also bridge occasionally the gender, racial, political, and occupational differences that mark their spatial and social distances. Fiss’s spatialization of temperature difference (the heat pump nearing “implosion” is on the thirty-ninth floor, while the building’s cooling towers are on the roof) metaphorizes the fluctuating scenes of sexual heat, taut corporeality, and subsequent cooling that are imagined by the engineer as she climbs each day to the roof (her “secret excursion,” she calls it) to be bathed in the moisture produced by the pressurized, heated water of the “cooling towers.” Whether this climb is an escape, a passion, or a “discipline,” as the engineer describes it, (or all three) is left open; what is certain is that Fiss’s “Pump” eroticizes the blue-collar/white-collar workplace, while it brings means of production and mechanical power to bear on the constitution of sexuality.

Cynthia Kaufman and JoAnn Martin look closely at the theory of the political and the possibility for radical political action in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and also of Judith Butler. Kaufman and Martin are troubled by the rather incomplete or undertheorized notions of the relation between social theory and the political practices undertaken by a multitude of “interpretive subjects” in the writings of Laclau, Mouffe, Butler, and other postmodern thinkers. For Kaufman and Martin, the conception of postmodern politics that emerges from some of these writings (as with Butler) often privileges antiessentialist and antifoundationalist discursive strategies, thus restricting subversive political action to only those moves that embrace the deconstructionist turn. Kaufman and Martin contend that in other streams of postmodern thinking about politics (as with Laclau and Mouffe), the opening up of the political space by notions of contingency, plurality, and articulation is followed by a closure in which radical democracy or some other unifying discourse or movement becomes the common ground upon which all antagonisms are articulated. In Kaufman and Martin’s view, the diversity of political practices and subject positions, though gestured at by Laclau and Mouffe and by Butler, is ultimately proscribed by the lack of recognition of or attention to the socially-constructed passions–often stemming from deeply-felt, essentialist concepts of self, identity, and lived experience–that motivate subjects to enunciate and enact their forms of political commitment. In sum, Kaufman and Martin fault Laclau, Mouffe, and Butler for failing “to include any sense of their theoretical formulations as emerging from an interpretive subject” or to “include the possibility that there are other interpretive subjects who are politically engaged and yet have a different understanding of the political.”

Over the years, we have published several articles that have questioned the pervasive left view that capitalism has oozed into every nook and cranny of modern society (among them, Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff, Winter 1989; and Gibson-Graham, Summer 1993). In these pieces, the authors have demonstrated not only the existence of noncapitalist class processes in, perhaps, unexpected locations, but they have also documented the strength and vigor of “other class structures in these same sites. A case in point is contained in the first entry to our Remarx section. Gabriel Fried and Richard Wolff use the history of the trucking industry in the United States to trace the alternating fortunes of capitalist firms and “ancient” (independent, “self-employed”) transporters. Fried and Wolff give an account of the ever-changing class structure of the trucking industry since its beginnings in the early part of this century, as motor carriages came to prominence as one of the primary ways in which goods were to be hauled over the landscape of the United States. What Fried and Wolff show is that, from the period of the Great Depression until now, the competition between ancients and capitalist firms has been affected by the growth and success of labor unions for wage-earning drivers (especially the International Brotherhood of Teamsters), government regulation of freight transportation rates, government distribution of transport licenses, changes from long-term to short-term freight contracts, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and finally government deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1980s. Fried and Wolff illustrate that in different periods, ancient truckers comprised the majority of enterprises (if not rigs and haulers), while in others, spurred on by the strength of regulations and sometimes the unions, capitalist firms were clearly dominant. And, at other times, ancients and capitalists enabled one another (especially in attempts to evade the power of the Teamsters). Fried and Wolff show that, in effect, the struggle between capitalist and ancient class structures in the trucking industry has displayed “no linear development toward adopting capitalist class structures to replace all others,” and that this case can be seen as one more corrective to the tendency of Leftists to assert rather than demonstrate the prevalence, universality, and security of capitalism where it is presumed (often mistakenly) to exist.

After NAFTA, has America seen the last of H. Ross Perot? Perhaps not, if Lauren Langman is right that Perot and his “Perotistas” comprise a postmodern version of “friendly fascism” to which many middleclass folks seem particularly vulnerable in this age of virtual realities. Langman provides a deep reading of the appeal of Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign (in which he garnered approximately twenty million votes) by focusing on the interconnections between the economic “crisis” of the 1980s (mostly reflected in the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich and the decline in real incomes for a considerable portion of the American population), the rise of postmodern forms of communication and identities, and changes in personal and group psychological structures during the past few decades. In his utilization of “depth psychology” as a means to make sense of the American psyche, Langman shows that with the recent proliferation of personal identities and the concern for identity politics, many U.S. citizens turned to Perot as a charismatic leader through whom they could redefine or achieve a sense of self-empowerment in the face of the attendant anxieties set off by postmodern fragmentation, deteriorating economic and social conditions, and much else. Langman describes the “farce” of Perot’s emergence as an American hero, in which this “ordinary (very rich) guy” deftly used the most advanced telecommunications systems to emerge as “a free floating signifier of substanceless charisma” who could “tap deeply into a number of heroic narratives to grant followers dignified identities linked to cultural traditions.” Farce, maybe. Good entertainment, perhaps. But Langman invites us to worry nonetheless about what the authoritarianism Perot’s candicacy and his relative popularity (not to mention the more recent and even more troubling reverence for the Gingrich-Limbaugh crowd) clearly exemplify. So, while Perot’s meteroric, neopopulist rise may have been halted temporarily, Langman’s analysis of the tendency of Americans to seek anxiety reduction and confirmation of self-esteem through increasingly authoritarian figures may turn out to be prescient with or without Perot actually on the scene.

The name of “materialist feminism” has been given to recent attempts to negotiate some of the distance between feminism, Marxism, and postmodernism. Two books appearing in 1993, one by Rosemary Hennessy and the other by Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, provide excellent introductions to the present state of this negotiation. (For related work by these authors, see Hennessy in RM, Fall-Winter 1990 and RM, Fall 1994, and Landry and MacLean in RM, Winter 1991.) In his reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of these two books, Marc Epprecht appreciates Hennessy’s skillful discussions of current postmodern theorists and their contradictory influences on feminist thought and practice. He appreciates as well Hennessy’s cautionary notes warning of the way feminist historians have often written so as to keep in place forms of argument and the use of concepts that obliterate difference, tend toward naturalism, essentialize gender difference, obscure race and class, and much else that may “contribute to reforming [rather than eliminating] the unjust and exploitative structures of late industrial capitalism.” Yet, Epprecht finds much of Hennessy’s discussion to be couched in the very difficult, perhaps elitist and reactionary, language and conceptual frameworks that she makes the object of her criticisms. Accounting for this language, Epprecht believes that, while well-taken, Hennessy’s main positive proposals regarding the need for self-reflexivity, attention to disabling and essentializing language, and the inclusion of concepts of class and race while discussing gender have, indeed, all been made before within socialist feminism, a tradition that Hennessy supposedly sees materialist feminism to be an advance over. Here Epprecht comes to his main point: the omission of the very word “socialist” from Hennessy’s own position, despite the fact, at least in Epprecht’s view, that most if not all of Hennessy’s contributions can easily be placed within this context. In contrast, Epprecht finds Landry and MacLean’s book more satisfying on the fate and fortune of socialist feminism in the wake of postmodernism. Epprecht regards Landry and MacLean as providing a clearer and more comprehensible history of the engagement between Marxism and feminism over the past three decades. For him their book produces a discussion of articulation and plurality of left social movements that avoids the possible "totalization" he detects in Hennessy’s materialist feminism. Looking back at both texts, while also noting the advances materialist feminism has undoubtedly made, Epprecht finishes with a plea to resist the temptation to rename (or dismiss) socialist and socialist-feminist traditions and ideas in order to suit current fashion.

The Editors

In this issue the interconnections between art, social meaning, historical memory, and radical politics comprise the focal points for several of the entries. To begin, we publish Satyananda Gabriel's unsettling short story. "Paper People Burn," which reminds us of how volatile and open to conflagrations the lives of poor black and white southerners remain today after the fires of slavery and Reconstruction have supposedly long ago burned out. Gabriel's narrator, an old Louisianan, recalls the fateful night he arrived in his Rambler to visit his sister in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, where the local chicken plant seems to have replaced the cotton fields as the primary site of toil and travail. His narrative ramble—intimately familiar with the details of southern African-American life—alights along the way on the hardships that befall young black women who get promised "the moon and stars," on the dilemma of never-to-return black college students who "have all this knowledge" but are lost anyway, and on the tragedy of black men filled, perhaps, with the "American dream" of being master at home or not at all. The narrator's eventual and foreboding encounter with a white "witch," whose only act of sorcery seems to be that she lived and loved another woman (we can only guess that comfort and exclusion brought them to live in the Black Bottom of Cotton Plant), leads him to ponder her whispered plaint that "some people are no more than pieces of scrap paper," a view confirmed later that night by the tragic event in which scraps become ashes. Driven forward, as if by the Arkansas winds that swirl together leaves, dirt, and people's lives, Gabriel has written a powerful, haunting tale that finds rape, exploitation, the defilement of people and their land, air, and water, and finally trial by fire the price that blacks, poor whites, lesbians, women, and workers have to pay in Cotton Plant as elsewhere for the living legacies of servitude, violence with impunity, and domination.

Caffyn Kelley, editor and publisher of Gallerie, the Canadian feminist art journal, organizes her comments on "art and life" around the installation of Jana Sterbak's "flesh dress" (a dress sewn together from flank steak) at the National Gallery of Canada in 1991. Sterbak's piece was predictably attacked and defended, reports Kelley, from entrenched positions in the never-ending debates in consumer society between artists and their critics. Kelley, though, reflects on these debates and Sterbak's piece itself from a different angle, one that begins with two premises: First, that art is fundamentally useless outside of its ability to convey or generate meaning and, second, that art objects are enmeshed within commodity space such that they only must be bought and sold in art markets—they must have a value in exchange—to exist as "art." Kelley presents the beautiful irony in all of this. On the one hand, and in contrast to a precommodity culture, art objects need not have the ability to convey "social significance" or shared meaning. In the economy of art, any object only needs to be of significance—only needs to "mean" something—to a single buyer. This social meaninglessness—which reached its apogee with high modernism in the arts—is, however, a condition of extraordinary independence and creativity, as artists are freed from the task of making meaning f~r anyone in particular, just as buyers are freed from defending their purchase on grounds that anyone other than themselves need to "get" what their commodity signifies or even that they must, as consumers, implicitly endorse the meaning therein inscribed. But, as Kelley notes, on the other hand, this incessant production and sale of only privately meaningful, "unique" objects removes art from the realm of social struggle where meaning is publicly constituted and contested. Kelley sees another paradox as well. While modernism's selling point was the aesthetic execution and purveyance of stunningly meaningless objects, during the recent period of decline in corporate support for the arts, a new postmodern commodity aesthetic has emerged which has impelled artists to produce more socially significant work for an increasingly important customer, the state (a.k.a., "the public"). Kelley, though, is uncomfortable with the circumscription of art, whether modern or postmodern, within the commodity economy and so describes instead work (art?) produced within "an activist space." Using as an example another meat dress, this time produced for a 1985 protest against the Miss America pageant, Kelley salutes work— blurring the boundaries between art and life—that "suggests the yet-remote possibility of a different kind of economy, not necessarily hawking unique objects nor distinguishing amateur from professional" by intersecting with social struggle.

René Magritte's haunting, startling, provoking, amusing paintings have been at the center of new critical theoretical discussions not only amongst art critics and historians but also amongst social theorists intent on deconstructing hegemonic ideologies and ways of seeing. The problematizing of the epistemological and axiological norms inscribed within inherited aesthetic practices was surely given new impetus in the 1980s by the publication of Michel Foucault's fascinating This Is Not a Pipe—a brief reflection on the problem of meaning and the relation between language, thought, and representation stimulated by Magritte's now famous painting of the same name. Diverging somewhat from Foucault, Richard Wolff takes up the intersection between Magritte's epistemological cares and the radical political implications of his work. Specifically, Wolff elucidates the ways in which Magritte's aesthetic performance of a new epistemology—one not wedded to "bourgeois" habits of seeing and representing—dovetails with distinct positions within contemporary Marxism, particularly with the Marxian notion of overdetermination, first championed by Louis Althusser. Wolff draws out the similarities of Althusser's and Magritte's projects, especially their shared ambition to complicate the relations between determinants and determined in considering the forms of connection between sight, thought, objects, and subjects. Through reference to several of Magritte's better known works, Wolff draws out Magritte's various commitments to depict the close, intereffective relations between thinking and seeing; to question given pictures of "reality" by presenting supposedly "known" objects in unexpected settings; to confound the distinction between the visible and the invisible; and to rescue the unknown or unthought from their present status as roadblocks to thought and action by converting them into the vehicles of a new reality. In analogizing Magritte's nonmetaphysical reverence for the "mysterious" with Althusser's overdetermination—in each case, what is "produced" or pictured by its overdeterminants is both inside and outside the visible frame—Wolff shows how each can contribute to a Marxian way of seeing, one that illustrates the complicity of existing bourgeois epistemological protocols with forms of exploitation and oppression while moving us forward in articulating and acting on a specifically Marxist project of social change.

Game theory—strategic choice theory—has been all the rage in the social sciences, especially economics, during the past fifteen or more years. Accompanied by the usual fanfare reserved for the latest fad in formalism and weighed down by its very close association with eighteenth century conceptions of "rationality" and individualism, game theory has been suspect, to say the least, to many Marxian thinkers. ln his straightforward, sensible approach to its possible uses and limits, Bruce Coram delineates the ways in which the techniques of game theory can enlighten rather than obstruct central issues and methods of Marxian political economy. Coram is cognizant of the complaints that game theory is antithetical, in its assumptions and procedures, to a variety of traditional and new Marxian approaches. Yet, Coram patiently explains the likely force of game theoretic analyses when they are harnessed to longstanding Marxian views on how conflict, struggle, and power are central to the construction and historical development of class-based social formations such as capitalism. Seeing game theory as one technique among many available to Marxists for bringing to light the (sometimes surprising) results of strategic individual and collective action within the confines of class struggle, Coram shows, through brief examples, how game theory can add significant insights into the dynamics of capitalism, the distribution of surplus according to social democratic norms and rules (in preference to markets), and much else. Coram's modest but firm defense of the potential productivity of game theory within Marxian political economy stands, therefore, in welcome relief both to bloated claims for the unique scientificity of game theory's formalism (coming, among others, from some leaders of radical political economy) and to uninformed attacks by critics on its assumptions and techniques as being necessarily sustaining solely of non-Marxian theoretical concepts and goals.

Sheila Rowbotham's one-act play "Hindsight," which has been performed on the British stage, takes us into the editing room of a once-socialist filmmaker, a man whose middle-aged, reedy thinness seems to be matched by the drink-sodden seediness of his personal affairs and disaffected politics. Working in a haze induced by too much drink and too little control over his work (a film reviling the communist era in Russia and trumpeting the coming of market capitalism), the filmmaker is visited by the Bolshevik organizer and socialist-feminist Alexandra Kollontai, who appears to emerge from a vase of lilacs. As Kollontai visits the filmmaker to help him arrive at a more suitable "ending," Rowbotham's play becomes an extended debate, one that encompasses evaluations of the successes and failures of the Russian revolution, the virtues and vices of market capitalism, the tensions and turmoil of the filmaker's "private life," and, not least, the feats and frailties of Kollontai's own life and writings, in which socialist politics, the struggle for women's equality, and sexual desire were combined as personal history and as a theoretical/political project. Rowbotham's characters enact, to a degree, the effects of these combinations; their interactions are marked by bursts of theoretical energy, perseverance, emotion, political disagreement, personal accusation, and, of course, desire. Rowbotham's dramatic device of granting Kollontai visitation rights all these years after the revolution is directed toward a brutally frank appraisal of the revolution's outcome, but also the impossibility of turning away from the liberatory impulses it set off. Rowbotham's Kollontai is especially eloquent about the risks of inventing a socialist democracy where the resistance is so strong and the precedence so weak for the "leap into the light" that such action involves. Not so much an acquittal as a call to appreciate the alternatives that Kollontai and others strove to keep alive (with dirty hands, no doubt), at the conclusion of her play Rowbotham leaves her film director and us in the position of coming out of our stupor and either taking or leaving Kollontai's plea to "make our own ending."

As "welfare reform" has become the new, cynical watchword for increasing the misery of the poor, the different institutions of public and private assistance have seen their primary task to be "preventing the ineligible from getting assistance" rather than finding ways to lessen the burden on the poor. Sanford Schram notes that this view of the welfare system is the consequence of a discourse on poverty that takes a managerial point of view rather than one that sees hunger, homelessness, and the like from the "bottom up." Yet, while Schram is critical of much welfare policy and the research done on it because "it assumes the point of view of an imagined policymaker/manager designated with the responsibility to contain and control the problems of welfare" (a stance, by the way, he attributes to putatively left policy analysts as well as to their liberal and conservative counterparts), he also is leery of "alternative" strategies in research and policy that claim the superiority of qualitative as opposed to quantitative analysis and that privilege the "authentic" experiences of the poor "in their own voice." Schram calls for welfare research and policy to make perspective, position, and discourse explicit, thus noting that every utterance and action on behalf of or against the "interests" of the poor are partial and partisan and must be regarded (though not necessarily dismissed) as such. Through personal testimony as well as empirical research, Schram uses this view of welfare policy to call for an "inversion of political economy," an inversion designed to bring to the fore the marginalized discourses of dependence, reproduction, distribution, and poverty that are shunted aside in both left and right political economy by the emphasis on individual economic self-sufficiency through productive activities. Schram documents the centrality of welfare discourse and policy for contemporary American political economy by tracing the important and decisive shifts since the 1970s in privatizing the welfare system. Using food shelves as his case study, Schram shows how the radical attacks on the welfare system and the dramatic reduction of public assistance have forced many people to seek private assistance to feed themselves and their families. But, in Schram's view, the private food shelf agencies, despite the best intentions of many of its volunteers and employees, follow suit with the public agencies and the dominant discourses of political economy in creating subordinate and demeaning identities for those "in need" through disciplinary practices that impute to those seeking food the characteristics of "bad shoppers, poor cooks, ignorant dieticians, and thoughtless eaters." Schram believes that inverting political economy to highlight the effects of such disciplinary practices on the poor is a way of making the focus of welfare policy the real life consequences of such policy for those who must live, for now, within the increasingly privatized system of public assistance. ~

In his brief foray into the polarized postmodernism versus Marxism debates, Michael Roberts attempts a rereading of Marx and Nietzsche that finds substantial similarity and agreement on their respective epistemologies and theories of historical practice. Roberts's look at Marx and Nietzsche uncovers a deep homology in the ways in which they developed such thematic elements such as force, growth, movement, and agency. In contrast to the position advanced by leading poststructuralists, Roberts argues that Marx was a sophisticated critic of the Hegelian dialectic and that his view of the advance of history was constituted, in common with Nietzsche, "in terms of conflicts between many forces and will-powers." Such a view, Roberts states, frees Marx as well as Nietzsche from the "immanent telos" inherent in the Hegelian conception of history. Roberts also notes that a Nietzschean-style critique of the Hegelian dialectic—one that recognizes the irreducibility of difference and nonidentity—is not original to poststructuralist thought, as it was a key point of departure for such Marxists as Theodor Adorno and Henri Lefebvre. Roberts turns as well to Marxian criticisms of the necessarily entropic nihilism of the poststructuralist project following Nietzsche. While Roberts acknowledges that the celebration of inertia does occur in the writings of Jean Baudrillard and perhaps others, he shows in contrast that Nietzsche formulated his defense of nihilism—the transvaluation of values—as the basis for growth and movement in human knowledge and practice. Roberts concludes with a reexamination of the "epistemological intersection" of Marx and Nietzsche. His study finds that they were clearly united in their aversion to both metaphysics and empiricism, their questioning of the subject/object dichotomy, their uniting of theory and practice, and their emphasis on forms of agency for the progressive movement of hun an society through time.

Maurya Wickstrom looks at the image of possible gendered futures captured in Sally Potter's fantasy of one person's sex switching over time in her 1993 film Orlando. In the lead article in our Remarx section, Wickstrom contrasts Potter's open vision of permutation with Virginia Woolf's more limited portrayal of gender transformation unaccompanied by social change. In Potter's Orlando, " a woman emerges who, as a single person, a propertyless person, an artist, and a mother, can make herself a future in which her own unique voice becomes audible." Wickstrom regards Potter's Orlando as an advance over Woolf's treatment in which Orlando is ultimately unable to overcome sexual stereotypes "even as her historical overview affords her some perception into stereotypes as ideological and historical constructs." As Wickstrom perceives, Woolf depicts Orlando's gender changes as openings for critique but not for breaking the bounds of gender and class within which Orlando throughout his/her history is inscribed. Potter's work, Wickstrom claims, finds Orlando crossing gender boundaries, experiencing, in her last transformation as a mother, a new self rich with possibilities. In fact, Wickstrom notes, Potter's Orlando discovers these possibilities by walking away, at the film's end, from the privileges of class and wealth and embracing a life—simultaneously as artist/writer and mother—that is usually constituted (for the majority of women) as constraint or obligation and not as liberation. And here, then, for Wickstrom lies the sparkling strength of Potter's film: Potter's Orlando is the imaginative picture—a "what if "—of a woman's courage "to throw away the wealth, rank, privilege, and gender definitions which she has, as a man, accrued throughout history, in favor of a self developing toward increasing freedom," thus breaking free of the "culture of silencing" that, in Wickstrom's view, remains the dominant experience for most women.

The second entry in the Remarx section is Stefano Azzarà's report on the January 1994 international conference on "Lenin and the Twentieth Century," held in Urbino, Italy. The conference brought together some of the leading Western Marxists (Azzarà lists George Labica, Domenico Losurdo, and Samir Amin, among others) to ponder the historical balance of Lenin's contribution to Marxian theory and social and political movements after the Russian revolution. Azzarà reports that one particular focus of many of the papers was how Lenin "went beyond" Marx in ways that brought Marxian thought and socialist political practice into direct contact with struggles for universal rights, democracy, and liberation outside of Europe. At the conference, Lenin was credited especially with theorizing imperialism and with "widening the horizon" of revolutionary practice, as resistance to the rule of capital became not just a European thing but life and death struggle of colonized peoples as well. The universalizing of the class struggle in a world dominated by capital was conjoined by Lenin with the "vindication of human rights" on a global scale, at least in the view of some of the conference's participants. Azzarà recounts an important debate at the conference regarding the current status of Lenin's analysis of imperialism, with some (like Samir Amin) believing it to have been surpassed by the globalization of capital through transnational corporate expansion, while others claimed that Lenin's lasting and pertinent contribution on this score was to stress the class, and not the nation-state, origin of imperialism. Indeed, with the increasing attention paid by contemporary Marxists to the "globalization of capital" and with the present obligation to evaluate popular struggles throughout the globe in terms of democracy and human rights, Lenin's extensive work on imperialism, the national question, and the status and nature of the state may become increasingly significant in the Marxian corpus. Azzarà's review of the conference, above all else, tells of the solemn responsibility and commitment of today's Marxists to make as "an obligatory point of reflection for all current Marxist research" the communist project, Lenin's decisive role within it, and the dramatic failures and successes of socialist experiments from the October revolution to the present.

In our Correspondence section, Raphael Sassower offers some thoughts on Robert Albritton's article in RM, Spring 1993, and Albritton replies. Sassower detects a rush to judgment in Albritton's declamation of the "excesses" of postmodernism and especially their supposed deleterious effects on Marxian political economy. Sassower notes, first, that Albritton denies to Marxists the worthwhile tradition of political critique that proceeds as a "politics of language," exemplified best by Marx's dissection of classical political economy—long before the supposed "fad" of postmodernism. Along these lines, Sassower then raises the more pointed objection, squarely addressed to Albritton's discursive unfolding of the logic of capital as the keystone to Marxian theory, that Albritton neglects to problematize, á la Marx, the very concept of capital as it emerges as a historical object for social critique and political practice for the 1990s. In his reply to Sassower, Albritton confronts this criticism. Albritton explains that the importance of asserting and laying bare the "self-reifying" aspect of capital is meant, on the one hand, to combat the current deconstructive endeavors that dissolve capital into one among a plethora of concrete moments of society and, on the other hand, to disclose unwaveringly the extent to which the logic of capital constitutes "the most powerful single social force operating in the modern world." Albritton seeks to steer a course that avoids both the dissolving logic of difference in which capital nearly ceases to appear and the totalizing logic of capitalism's monolithic unity, in which all other social practices and movements become simply grist for the capitalist mill. Elaborating on his original article, Albritton refuses what he refers to as the "horizontal deconstruction" of postmodernists and espouses instead "vertical reconstruction," which "problematizes 'capital' not by collapsing it into the political and ideological, but by theorizing it at three different levels of analysis." In their interchange, Sassower and Albritton also reflect on the degree to which postmodernism's assault on the meaningful distinction between scientific discourse and all other forms of discourse is harmful or helpful to Marxist theoretical projects. While Sassower advises that "in order to exploit more fruitfully the ideas and intellectual struggles of postmoderns, we need to walk more slowly down their path, rather than walk toward the promised land of revolutionary solutions," Albritton counters that, because postmodernists typically reject ontological realism and correspondence theories of truth, "no effective Marxian political economy can emerge from such reflections."

The Editors

In this issue, we start with Enid Arvidson’s critical discussion of the "L. A. School," a group of Marxist scholars whose writings since the 1970s on contemporary architecture, uses of space, and the "built environment," have put forth some of the most trenchant statements of the problems with postmodern "hyperspace" in the era of "late capitalism." Arvidson lauds these writers (who include, among others, Mike Davis and Edward Soja) for making the issue of spatial relations and their transformations in such places as Los Angeles (their preferred object of analysis and much scorn) a key concern in Marxist socioeconomic criticism. Inspired to a degree by Fredric Jameson’s now famous article on postmodernism and late capitalism, in which he advances the view that the postmodern built environment has produced profound disorientation and alienation in people’s "cognitive mapping," Davis, Soja, and others put forward rich and novel descriptions of the ways in which spatial fragmentation, destruction, and reinvention of place are themselves consequences of a new phase in capitalism fostered by globalization and shifts in national economies. Arvidson finds, though, that, like Jameson’s piece, the L. A. School first makes postmodern spatial relations a mostly superstructural effect of "the economy" and then reduces "the economy" to the pure space of capital (neglecting, therefore, the possibility that there are locales for economic and class relations that remain "outside" capitalism and that may also expand in conjunction with the proliferation of postmodern hyperspace). Arvidson notes as well that much of the L. A. School’s writings suffer from a related form of reductionism, that which attributes to their own "sighting/siting" an epistemological privilege to reveal the capitalist reality that pervades all those displacements and fragmentations. While seeing what is valuably added by the L. A. School’s use of cognitive mapping as a guiding metaphor for making sense of current spatio-economic relations, Arvidson shows too what is hidden in these accounts, particularly (and perhaps ironically) the multiple class processes that traverse and fracture the supposedly hegemonic postmodern, late capitalist terrain. Following a line of thought put forward by J. K. Gibson-Graham (see RM, Volume 6, Number 3) and others, Arvidson faults the L. A. School for disabling radical politics by painting a picture that just frames a global capitalist landscape, only to be replaced by an entirely different picture of the planet. Arvidson’s turn to nondeterminist Marxism charts "a fragmented economy with a variety of class processes and their conditions of existence, to open up alternative routes to transformative social change rather than ‘waiting for the revolution.’"

Most left activists, at some time or another, have likely wondered about the psychosocial forces that, for some people and times in history, have led to movements for social change while, in other times and climes, have resulted in quietude and acquiescence. In the Marxist tradition, often orthogonal to economism and class determinacy, there have been "heretical" formations that have made psychosexual analysis and the question of personal agency the core of revolutionary political theory. As Ramsey Eric Ramsey relates, the writings of Wilheim Reich and Ernst Bloch are two such efforts to account for the individual and social structures that create personalities for which possibility and hope are attendant. Ramsey discusses the importance of "everyday life" for both Reich and Bloch and especially the ways in which they called attention to how our experiences of everyday activities often articulate dissatisfactions that express profound structures of character and personality. As Ramsey notes, for Reich, these structures were themselves linked inextricably to structures of authority and power such that our "dispositions" to events were both determined by and expressive of broader social forces (often of reaction) and institutions. Ramsey joins Reich’s analysis of these dispositions to Bloch’s "militant optimism" (his discussion of the various levels of "possibility" that could and sometimes do motivate people to enact the potentialities that are rife within even the most administered of societies). Ramsey’s message, which he derives from his conjoining of Bloch and Reich and which he also advocates as a teaching method, is that attention to the dissatisfactions that we all face in our everyday existence may be the best way to incite us to "potentialize the potential," although often this may be possible only through collective action. Ramsey joins Bloch and Reich in believing that the utopian moment—the hope—which is made visible by asking about our dissatisfactions can be made to last if it induces forms of agency that "seek to actualize the hidden, but not absent, revolutionary potentialities in situations."

In her cogent and impassioned article, Teresa Ebert sets forth a materialist "Red Feminism" over and against the mostly idealist "post-al" theoretical practices that she believes have infiltrated left politics, displacing such crucial Marxian ideas as exploitation, class struggle, ideology, and justice from the terrain of social action. Ebert’s clarion call for "Red Feminism," closely connected to those Marxist and socialist-feminist traditions in which emancipatory projects link oppression and injustice to the material conditions of production that prevail under "patriarchal capitalism," is developed in her piece through a confrontation with leading poststructuralist feminist and post-Marxist thinkers, such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Drucilla Cornell, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Judith Butler. Ebert argues that, for most of these "post-al" theorists, the assertion of the "impossibility" and "unrealizability" of the good, the textualization of politics, the dissolution of emancipation into free play, the absolute relativizing of truth and "the good," the delinking of power and justice from class and production, and the displacement of broadly-based historical narratives for local and singular events represent not so much a new and effective politics of social transformation as a denial of the very possibility and desirability of this goal. This is, claims Ebert, a necessary result of the fact that the "anarchic-ludic" politics of "post-al" theory both reinforces the dominant economic logics (of a global patriarchal capitalism) of our times and occludes "the historical necessity of the class struggle over power" that she finds central to Marxism and Red Feminism. Ebert shows that the consequence, for example, of Cornell’s "ethical feminism" is a turn away from historical materialism and the connection of women’s existence, their suppression, and the relations of production toward a concern for the "discursive economy of violence" through which women’s reality is thought to disappear. Likewise, Ebert finds fault in Butler’s "valorization" of the "unrealizability" of any notion/project of emancipation, including, therefore, women’s liberation from patriarchy. Butler’s move, like Cornell’s, keeps in place the capitalist status quo by providing "an alibi for continuation of the existing relations of class exploitation and class privilege." Ebert concludes by proclaiming that, in contrast to the "ludic" feminism of Cornell and Butler and their "post-al" cronies, Red Feminism "insists on the historical reality of the ‘knowable good’: the necessity of ending exploitation and meeting the basic human needs of all people."

Colin Hay’s rethinking of the "crisis" of the British state begins, initially, as a critique of Tom Nairn’s recent attempt to attribute Thatcherite "one-party dominance" to the requirements of Britain’s ruling class to secure the "antiquated structures" of the English establishment in the face of prolonged economic and social failure. Hay’s criticism of Nairn proceeds in the form of an alternative conception of "failure" and "crisis" in the Marxian theory of the state. For Hay, the important distinction that Nairn neglects to make is that between failure as a complex set of "objective" contradictions in the economy and polity and crisis as a process which, in essence, involves the always contested discursive construction of perceived failure as decisive moments of transformation. Hay uses this distinction to put forward his own story of the rise and continued success of the Thatcherites and new Rightists in the United Kindom. In Hay’s view, the Thatcherites in the 1970s were able to construct the "crisis" as a narrative that merged together in abstraction disparate events as singularly caused by the "overextension" of the welfare state brought on by the influence of the trade union movement on Labour government policies. Thus, as Hay explains, the New Right was able to selectively narrate "the symptoms of state and economic failure into a coherent and simple discourse of crisis capable of finding and constructing resonance with individuals’ experiences . . . of the economic and political context." This discursive construction of the moment of crisis has done nothing, in Hay’s view, to alleviate the underlying causes of economic and political failure in the United Kingdom. If anything, the transformations of the state precipitated by the Thatcherites have led to a new "post-Thatcher settlement" in which an "underextended, retrenched, and debilitated state" can no longer be expected to intervene in the deep recession that has characterized the British economy. Hay believes that the hope for the Left in Britain should reside in the recognition that it, too, can construct the current situation as a crisis caused by the prior Thatcherite narrative (and its effects). While Hay is rather somber about the current Labour party’s willingness to construct this discourse of crisis—largely because he believes that they have accepted for the most part the "profound structural transformation of the institutions, apparatuses, and boundaries of the state, economy, and civil society" effected by the Thatcherites—he also thinks that the British Left "cannot wait for the crisis to materialize, it must constitute it." In thinking about an alternative strategy, one that taps into the deep dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Major government and with experiencing ongoing economic dislocation and demise, Hay concludes that Labour must seize the discursive/political moment since "the devil may have all the best tunes, but the Right need not have all the best narratives."

David Mertz examines the "constellation of relations amongst racism, nationalism, and State(ism)" through a Lacanian lens in order to show the basic conceptual necessity that these ideological forms possess for modern subjects. Mertz is particularly concerned to redress the "severing" of racism and nationalism that he finds in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, one of the most sophisticated and influential treatments of nationalism to appear in recent years. Mertz shows, contra Anderson, that nationalism (and its fantastic representation and constitution by the State, during the past two hundred years) relies on a projection of its own impossibility—the "fact" that the "real" nation cannot be shown to have empirical existence as it is always comprised of diverse and different groups, languages, locations, and individuals—onto an imagined, racialized Other. Relying on Slavoj Zizek’s use of Lacanian categories in the analysis of racial, ethnic, and national subjectivity, Mertz argues that Anderson’s failure is in his belief that nationalist "love" and racialist "loathing" are not implicated in each other’s constitution and their codetermination of the national subject. Mertz’s view is that the nation which is "loved" by its "natives" is one whose unity is fantastically represented in relation to its empirical lack. Thus, the projected, symbolic unity which is the Nation-State, both stems from and introjects a subjectivity whose "failure to achieve national identity is condensed onto the racial Other." For Mertz, then, racism cannot be combated within the framework of a call for national unity, nor seen purely as a "perversion of cultural differences," but, rather, must involve simultaneously a confrontation of nationalism and statism as ideological forms that operate to construct our essence as modern subjects.

Guy Debord’s Society and the Spectacle has achieved something of an iconic status for artists and activists who, perceiving the pervasive commodification of modern everyday life, have turned to cultural politics and/or alternative art forms to locate the possibilities for individual and collective action that would combat the passivity induced by the "spectacle" of popular culture. Concentrating his inquiry on the cultural politics of the Situationist International—the group of artist/practitioners, including Debord, whose creation of "situations" as oppositional aesthetic/political practices sought to interrupt the trivialities and inactivity of everyday life—Bradley Macdonald considers the extent to which the situationists were able to commence a set of theoretically informed practices that avoided the thoroughgoing pessimism about popular culture which beset the Frankfort School as well as the aestheticism and compartmentalization that characterized avant-garde art movements, such as Dadaism and Surrealism. As Macdonald shows, the situationists believed that, rather than being the totalizing prison within which only the most talented and critical individual philosophers and artists could escape (at least in the Frankfort view), popular, commodified culture had as a dominant feature the fact that individual desires for pleasure and play (and even transgression) could never finally be satisfied, controlled, or extinguished. Yet, as Macdonald points out, the situationists also thought that the appropriate forms of cultural resistance to the spectacle was the supersession of art, as everyday life (and not the specialized "work" of artists) could become the location for creativity and especially collective action. The publicly staged "situations" they produced—from graffiti to living collages to mobile architectural forms within the urban environment—were designed, says Macdonald, to make the sites of everyday life, and not the gallery, the arenas for common cultural/political experiences in which power, play, and desire were given free reign against the conformity and acquiescence required by capitalist commodity culture. In assessing the cultural politics of the situationists, Macdonald regards them as both a precursor to and a supplement of recent "post-Marxist" theories of politics and radical democracy. Their cultural politics uniquely yielded a post-Marxism "that resituates the best of Western Marxism and postmodernism." Without completely retreating from their Marxian sources, but also without hanging their political analysis on a theory of a classically constituted working class, the situationists, concludes Macdonald, succeeded in theorizing a politics of everyday life that takes "popular culture seriously as a terrain of struggle" by linking the micropolitics of subjectivity, identity, and power to the macropolitics of capitalist commodification and alienation.

As readers may know, a major inspiration for our rethinking of Marxism was and remains the work of the late French philosopher, Louis Althusser. The contributions to the Remarx and Review sections in this issue take up the continuing question of Althusser’s significance—of both his writings and his life—for contemporary Marxian thought. Jo-Young Shin’s article reminds us of Althusser’s lasting interventions in Marxian philosophy and social thought. Organized by the overriding concept of overdetermination, Althusser’s reading of Marx posits a double rupture of Marxian thought from nonMarxist, bourgeois forms of essentialism/determinism and from its own "ideological," humanist, and economic reductionist past. Shin’s object here is to show that Althusser precipitates a new rupture, one that separates Marxism from its modernist history and inaugurates a postmodernist Marxism. Shin shows that, for Althusser, the inception of postmodernist Marxism involves a "continuing break" from economism, humanism, structuralism, and historicism by a rigorous adherence to overdetermination. But Shin also seeks to preserve the specificity of Althusser’s Marxian postmodernism which, in his view, consists of Althusser’s partisanship, his commitment to "go beyond private exploitation" while doing battle with modernist tendencies of all kinds. Shin sees overdetermination as initiating a new, postmodern history for Marxism or, quoting Althusser himself, "a point of no return" whose consequences for social thought and political practice are only at a beginning.

Richard Wolff reviews Althusser’s "autobiography," translated into English as The Future Lasts Forevever: A Memoir. This work has been considered sensational and scandalous alike by detractors and supporters of Althusser, in many cases for similar reasons: the intense scrutiny and intimate detail through which Althusser interrogates his "subjective" life, dwelling at length on his sexual foibles and frailties, his emotional wanderings and disablements, his familial situation, and of course his murder of Helene, his wife and comrade, the point of departure for the text. Wolff reads Althusser’s memoir as a reflection on the overdetermined conditions that constituted a life in which Marxian theory, communist political commitment, and high academic standing were deeply intertwined with subjective elements that caused Althusser’s ceaseless efforts to construct a "presence" in lieu of the fundamental "absences" that he believed were in part constituted in and by his family situation. Althusser’s "confessions" of his fraudulence in regard to Marxism and philosophy in general and his sentiments of feeling most often like an imposter in personal relations, the academy, and political circles are seen by Wolff to be examples of the struggles with "self" and "mastery" that Althusser took from being "missing" from the scene of his own nuclear family and especially from the love of his mother and father. Indeed, Wolff sees throughout Althusser’s retelling of his life the themes of absences and presences that figured prominently in his epistemological innovations and in his desire to make visible the repressed forces of exploitation and class that, he believed, remained unappreciated even in the Marxian tradition. Yet, Wolff is largely interested here—using Althusser’s own painful recollections as prime example—in arguing for the inclusion of those subjective (and material) psychological and emotional aspects in social/theoretical analyses informed by Marxism. Wolff views Althusser as recognizing the impoverishment of those forms of Marxian thought that bracket off the sexual, familial, psychological, and emotional as outside of their self-consciousness and irrelevant to their stories of the social. In sum, Wolff believes that Althusser’s poignant and often tortured recounting "achieves a kind of Marxism whose commitment to social analysis and radical change includes and integrates subjective, familial intimacies into its theoretical framework," thus supplying one more text in Althusser’s œuvre that enriches our collective Marxist understanding.

Last up, Chip Rhodes’s review essay looks at the renewed interest in Althusser’s work during the past few years. He focuses on two books of essays: the first, The Althusserian Legacy, edited by Michael Sprinker and E. Ann Kaplan, and the second, Althusser A Critical Reader, edited by Gregory Elliott. Rhodes’s main concerns are to see how the criticisms of Althusser have held up in the light of the continued relevance of some of Althusser’s main theoretical initiatives—the concept of the "conjuncture," the notion of ideology, and the idea of structural causality (with last-instance determinance of the economy). These concepts, according to Rhodes, comprise Althusser’s primary attempt "to initiate knowledge production that will further the goals of a communist praxis." In perusing the essays in the two collections, Rhodes sees that the majority of contributors pay Althusser the homage of reading his own work "symptomatically" in the same vein as Althusser’s own reading of Marx and the Marxist tradition. Rhodes goes on to revisit the important debates Althusser’s work set off in three distinct areas as a way of illuminating Althusser’s lasting contributions: historiography and the status of historical materialism, the notions of ideology and subjectivity as they appear in Althusser’s reading of Lacan, and the possibilities for political action in the absence of the self-contained historical subject. While the essays range from outright dismissals, oppositions, and inversions of Althusser’s views in these areas (he mentions the pieces by Axel Honneth and Paul Ricoeur in the Elliott edition as examples) to more inventive if not appreciative pieces (such as Rastko Mocnik’s essay on ideology in the Sprinker and Kaplan volume), Rhodes concludes that for the most part the criticisms and revisions do not displace, and actually help delineate, Althusser’s genuine challenge to Marxist theoreticians and practitioners—to study the current conjuncture "in its complex relationality" and to reopen the question of revolutionary politics.

Readers might also look at a recently published collection of essays, Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, edited by Antonio Callari and David Ruccio. The book is published by Wesleyan University Press and contains new essays, written in the wake of Althusser’s passing, by Antonio Negri, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, Gregory Elliott, Richard McIntyre, Warren Montag, Stephen Cullenberg, Emmanuel Terray, Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, Etienne Balibar, Jonathan l~iskin, Anne Marie Wolpe, Alain Lipietz, Bruce Roberts, and Grahame Lock, along with an extensive introductory essay by Callari and Ruccio who are members of RM’s editorial board.

The Editors

In this issue, Liu Kang compares the Marxian "problematics" of Louis Althusser and Mao Zedong in constituting a critique of capitalist modernity and a search, in theory and practice, for an "alternative modernity." Kang credits both Mao and Althusser with initiating far-ranging criticisms of economism and teleological modes of thought that characterized Classical Marxism and served as the ideological determinants of the Soviet experience in constructing socialism. Yet, Kang also sees in the work of both Althusser and Mao tendencies toward universalism, cultural reductionism, the essentializing of dialectical materialism, and the reverence for "objectivity" in the guise of "laws of society" (Mao) or as "science" (Althusser), that is, kinds of determinism that are opposed to the concepts of contradiction and overdetermination that both pioneered. Kang shows, specifically, that Althusser’s concept of overdetermination, written in the context of struggles within the worldwide communist movement and in the moment of the philosophical "break," were largely the result of Mao’s earlier writings, carried out within the context of political/military struggle and strategy, on the "particularity’" "unevenness," and "mutability" of contradiction. Mao’s writings, Kang notes, were directed toward the problems of conceiving an alternative modernity to that of the capitalist West and the Soviet Union as well as toward reversing the lines of causality of Classical Marxism in which the economic "base" was always the determinant of the cultural/political "superstructure." Thus, in Mao’s view (later developed by Althusser into a extended critique of Hegelian, dualistic notions of contradiction and of the necessary forward motion of an unfolding history), the possibility to both think and to make the Chinese revolution required a complex notion of contradiction (along lines later developed by Althusser’s concept of "structural causality"), specifying the concrete conditions that make any contradiction particular and unique and showing its multiple determinants and effects as well as the transformability of its aspects. But, while these more complex and developed notions of contradiction may have gone far in overturning the determinisms of modernity as conceived by the Enlightenment and realized in the Soviet experiment, the experience of the Cultural Revolution and the ultimate rescue of universalism and reductionism partly in the form of cultural determinism led both Mao and Althusser to remain within the modernist project and problematics. In his concluding remarks, Kang observes the turnabout that now typifies post-Mao China: with the Cultural Revolution debased and derided, and along with it the uniquely Maoist (and by extension, Althusserian) critique of economic determinism in the making of socialism, the revival of modernization with a vengeance is the order of the day.

It happens in some academic disciplines like economics that the moniker given by practitioners to some of their most cherished dreams and desires is called science. It also happens that in the history of these same disciplines, the fight to establish heterodox positions, often in opposition to a dominant discourse, means to "fight science with science." As Robert Garnett shows, the strategy of Marxist and other Leftists within the field of economics to fight the pro-market, value theory of "general equilibrium"—first pioneered more than a century ago by Leon Walras and codified by neoclassical economic theory ever since—with an alternative science is a dubious strategy indeed. Garnett surveys the attempts over the past century of Marxists and others to displace Walrasian value theory (the theory of the determination of prices in a competitive market system) with their alternative theories of value. He concludes that these attempts have unwittingly done much to strengthen the hold on economics of Walrasian value theory because of the unwillingness of critics to abandon the modernist terrain of economic "science." Building on emerging post- and antimodernist, heterodox traditions in economics, Garnett advises that perhaps a more successful strategy in combating Walrasianism and the celebration of the market, which has only increased in volubility since the so-called "collapse" of Marxism and communism in recent years, is to "fight science with critique of science." Garnett acknowledges the very good reasons why Marxists and others continue to keep alive their dream of an ultimate triumph whereby they vanquish the "ideology" of Walrasianism through their singular, superior "science" of market capitalism based on their alternative (also singular) theory of value. Yet, Garnett concludes by noting that the consequent divisiveness (as each group fights to make "their" value theory the one and only) and the retention of some of the most debilitating aspects of modernism in economic discourse do not portend well for the opening up of the economics discipline to the important, new heterodox ideas and insights of the past two or more decades, many of which are cautionary or clearly critical of the present extension of market discourse, if not the spread of market capitalism itself.

Michael Parkhurst assesses the incessant return in Theodor Adorno’s many writings to the problem of theory and oppositional (if not revolutionary) praxis. Parkhurst describes these revisitations in the context of Adorno’s prevailing view that the world of "late capitalism" is one in which transformative, collective political action has been made inept, if not impossible, because of the overwhelming "administration" of social life; the cooptation of dissent, alienation, and critical thought by the "culture industry"; and the ossification and betrayal of the Left through official Marxism’s and communism’s privileging of oppressive, universalizing practice over critical theory and resistance. Parkhurst focuses primarily on the extent to which Marxist critiques of Adorno’s "pessimism" and "mandarinism" in the realm of political analysis miss thepractical role that theory plays for Adorno in keeping alive a space that, while still mostly complicitous with total administration and/or late capitalist commodification, preserves a residue of resistance through individual acts of thinking against the grain. Adorno’s argument for "theory as praxis," Parkhurst argues, holds out the possibility of at least individual oppositional stances by "keeping faith with non-identity and negation in a totalizing web of identity and positivity." That is, Adorno specifies the ways in which experience, suffering, dialectics, particularity, and subjectivity permit, to a limited but important degree, an individual to "critique" a world in which even this trope has been instrumentalized by commodity culture and the rule of the vanguard party. While Adorno, according to Parkhurst, does not cast about for a new revolutionary subject to replace the thoroughly pacified/defused proletariat in the march of history, he does privilege the lonely while "luxurious" thoughts of critical intellectuals to keep resistance alive, in a time when mass revolutionary activity is "in an indefinite period of hibernation." Yet, in contrast to other Marxist critics, Parkhurst does not see this move in Adorno—as frustrating as it may be for an elaboration of politics—as non- or anti-Marxist. Parkhurst calls attention to the fact, in Adorno’s defense, that Adorno continues in much of his work to draw a close correlation between the domination that characterizes post-Enlightenment philosophy and the domination of society and nature that corresponds to the rule of the economy in the late capitalist era. Adorno’s "Marxism," thus, comes to light through his attempts "to articulate the brutality of identification and of the domination of nature" which "should be seen as a deepening of the materialist tradition," and to demonstrate "in persuasive dialectical detail, how thoroughly political theorizing itself is." Parkhurst believes, in sum, that Adorno "develops a Marxian ethic for anti-Marxist times," even though he neglects to connect this ethic to political movements for deep social change that, in his time and since, continue to emerge.

Martín Espada’s five poems range from the elegiacal and lyrically stirring "All the People Who Are Red Trees" to the stark and terse "When the Leather Is a Whip." Among other things, Espada’s poems are episodes in compassion and solidarity. This can be seen in the beautiful tribute to "condemned anarchists," "poets in chains," "nameless laborers marching with broken rifles" in Catalufla, and "union organizers without headstones," all of whom are brought to mind and commemorated in the leaves, flowers, and bowers of red trees which are nourished by their blood and their words. It can also be seen in Espada’s rendering of the simple astonishment of imprisoned Hispanic immigrants—island men—in an upstate, New York prison, for whom the snow of the northern climes and of the cocaine economy produce both silence and remembrance (in Spanish). It can likewise be detected in his depiction of the street harassment facing a newly arrived carpenter in Boston, whose practice in raising her hammer in pursuit of her freedom and craft and in swinging her toolbox while walking down these mean streets cannot prevent her from trembling at the avarice and brutality directed against women, immigrants, and others. The acts of charity, bravery, and understanding displayed by some of the men and women who people Espada’s poems are created by a language that always grasps the material conditions and instruments, from toolboxes and belt buckles to sandwiches, of the tragedies and victories, big and small, that make up our daily, common lives.

In cultural and literary fields, such terms as "libidinal economy" or "symbolic economy" have arisen mostly over the past twenty years as alternative conceptions to the "closed" and "phallocentric" notions of economy that have reigned among political economists and their mainstream siblings. Margaret Nash explores the move by some poststructuralist feminists to expand upon these notions of alternative economies as ways to challenge both phallocentrism and the concentration on scarcity, reproduction, conservation, rationality, and the like that characterize familiar notions of economy. Nash looks at the opening up of the notion of economy beginning with Nietzsche and Freud and taking shape more recently in the writings of Georges Bataille and Jean-Joseph Goux. She shows that in each case the "transvaluation" that has taken place installs excess, desire, plenitude, and pleasure in opposition to the notions of lack, containment, system, and closure that were and are hallmarks of much "metaphysical and patriarchal" thought about the forms of production, consumption, and exchange that structure many forms of social existence and interaction (from sexuality and language to "economy" proper). Yet, though Freud and Goux especially may have addressed the role the phallus plays in structuring such closed economies, Nash believes that it has been the preeminent contribution of feminist theorists, particularly Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, to have developed specifically open, "feminist" economies in which the notion of a "self-less" female sexual pleasure, not debased or construed as lack or derivative, plays a crucial role in promoting possibilities for "economic" strategies that are outside of patriarchal political economy, including Marxism. Nash is concerned in her article to show that the phallocentrism that deforms and limits neoclassical approaches to economic thought is reproduced in a different way in the early Marx’s recourse to the primacy of (male) creativity. And, while she appreciates the nondeterminist Marxian approach of some of the editors of this journal in opening up potentially new concepts of economy, she sees this work also as being silent on phallocentrism and in danger, perhaps, of codifying such terms as "overdetermination" into a system. Nash calls on Marxists and other feminists to follow the example of Cixous and Irigaray in imagining and writing feminist economic possibilities that inscribe libidinality, pleasure, and excess on the bodies and texts of men and women alike.

Domenico Jervolino situates a contemporary "philosophy of liberation" within a cosmopolitan setting, beginning with its origins in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and spreading throughout the world as a critique of the totalizing ontologies and moralities that have been the legacy of Western liberal and even communist humanisms. Jervolino traces the development of liberation philosophy in Latin America—in relation to but distinct as well from "liberation theology"—as the birth of a new, potentially universal ethics that sees the historical significance of the colonial and post-colonial experiences of Third World peoples as refusing the closure of Western totalizing thought and as introducing "fleshy, plural subjects" as the "other" from which this new philosophy of liberation must start. Jervolino extends the specifically Latin American intonations of this new ethics to include other discussions and critiques of Western-imposed modernity, and especially of the norms and obligations that have served as the models for moral thought and praxis (and which have allowed a philosophy of freedom to be mostly blind to the violent conquest and subjugations that have been and continue to be conditions of existence for the hegemony of the West and the wealthier, Northern hemisphere). Jervolino shows that this extension has already begun in the interchanges between Enrique Dussel, one of the leading figures in the philosophy of liberation movement, and such theorists of the philosophy and ethics of discourse and communities of communication, such as Karl Apel and Jürgen Habermas. And Jervolino calls for this extension toward a cosmopolitan perspective to include engagement with the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and new movements to rethink Marxism in the light of well-deserved cynicism about the dialectics of liberation in actually existing socialism. While Jervolino thinks that Marxism still has an important role to play in this new philosophy of liberation, he also believes that there must be a definite shift from a "communism of the absolute" to a "communism of finitude" in order to "reject once and for all the prometheism of a self-founding subject and the ‘totalism’ of a science of praxis understood as absolute knowledge." As Latin American liberation philosophy goes cosmopolitan, Jervolino concludes, it can "give rise to an original encounter, under the sign of a ‘dialectic of the concrete,’ between critical Marxism, the phenomenology of the life-world, and the ontology of social being."

Many portrayals of modern life as it has been fundamentally shaped by capitalism emphasize the element of time (though such motifs as "development"). Tony Fabijancic seeks to locate the role of space more centrally in the characterization of the modern experience, and in the balance to show how the "reification" of social life described in such graphic and generalized terms by Georg Lukács is both manifested and constructed by a spatial dimension. Following Lukács, Fabijancic regards reification as perhaps the defining experience of capitalist modernity, as the fragmentation, estrangement, and objectification of social relations harden into a persistent abstraction in modes of thought and vision, passivity, and the acceptance of capitalist commodity production and exchange as natural and permanent. Fabijancic’s contribution, here, is in extending Lukács’s analysis of reification to encompass the daily life world of urban dwellers as they are positioned as subjects in modernist city spaces. Using as one example Baron Haussmann’s "massive reconstructions" of nineteenth century Paris (with its long boulevards and arcades), Fabijancic shows how the modern city (even in its more recent, complex territorializations) depends upon and reconstitutes the splits between subject and object and public and private that reification creates. Fabijancic tells us that one primary form in which the reification of space is realized is the experience of most city folk in having their imagined relation to the urban space be one of a displaced or alienated subject confronted by an incredible collection of objects and surfaces, commodities and facades not understood to be of their own making. Fabijancic also shows that, with modernity, vision becomes both privileged among the senses (as the primary ways of a detached subject to "know" and experience objects) and reified within urban centers, as the depthless gaze upon abstract surfaces, whether masterful or subordinate (depending largely on differing class positions), is all that most urbanites are allowed in apprehending their relation to city spaces, from the great boulevards and arcades/shopping malls to their homes. The splintering of life that reification of space and vision bring leads to the loss of totality in experience, all the better to mystify the ever-expanding forces of capitalist production and consumption that, in Fabijancic’s view, is nowhere better understood than in the creation of the arcade, that semi-public, skylit, enclosed retail space that was an invention of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs and city planners. While urban modernism and its aesthetic is clearly connected with alienation and the like, Fabijancic ends on a different note in suggesting that the utopian and defamiliarizing elements of some modern art, in which labor and subjectivity are converted into a style, allow perhaps both space and vision to be conceived in dereified ways, ways that reveal rather than conceal the forces of capitalism through which modernity and its disfigurements are produced.

In her artist’s statement that accompanies the text and pictures, Sally Grizzell reflects on the "indigenous ironies" that exist in places like the American South, where she was born and grew up, and East Africa, where she later resided. These ironies consist of the identities and "self-delusions" that structure ways of seeing/living "class, gender, and economic worth." The aphorisms, descriptions, and little stories that are superimposed on images of magicians, the offering up of elongated, broken bodies, and wall paintings, among other pictures, clearly work toward disclosing the ironic fictions that make possible the veneer of acceptability of sometimes impossible events and states of being. Witness, in this regard, the advertisement for a new circus act, declaring the thrill of watching a "beautiful young woman" risk her life framed around a picture of her body, seemingly lifeless and "hanging" as part of another act, perhaps. Witness as well the fashionably dressed skeletal remains of a woman, turning away perhaps in disgust or escape, inscribed within a textual frame that tells of her watching a butcher’s emptying out a side of beef and starving to death after learning of the "nasty things" that make up our body’s interiority. Or sense the struggle to preserve enterpreneurial hype, personal dignity, and questionable civility in the wry story, overhung by dangling arms, of the elephant sandwich which cannot be served because of the lack of bread. While the ironies of place and position are sometimes frightening, and often startle or provoke wonder, Grizzell’s work does reveal the values that are "indigenous" (both exotic and familiar at the same time) and constructive of our identities and cultural realities.

Sursam Corda, Diana Roche and James Stormes tell us, is Latin for "Let us lift up our hearts"; it is also the name of the predominantly African-American low income community in Washington, D.C. where a successful struggle of the poor to become tenant-owners of housing was conducted mostly on the bases of communal forms of distribution, production, and social life. In the first entry to the Remarx section, Roche and Stormes document this struggle beginning from the housing project’s construction in the late 1960s to the recent completion of the transition to a cooperative a few years back. While the twists and turns in their story (and, of course, in the lives of Sursam Corda’s residents) demonstrate the alternating impact that capitalist, communal, and other class processes have had on the fortunes of the community, they also show the contradictions and ironies that are attendant upon the production of poverty in a capitalist social formation. Indeed, much of Roche and Stormes’s narrative depicts the various ways that communal forms of sharing resources and working for the project in families and the community more broadly were forced upon and seriously challenged by an individualist, capitalist economy for which the poor are largely underemployed, excluded by race, and relegated to illegal activities. In Sursam Corda, like many other poor communities, racism, unemployment, deterioration of the physical environment, drugs, and other crime were a clear presence throughout its thirty-year history. But, say Roche and Stormes, unlike some other communities, forces existed, sometimes in the guise of extraordinary acts of generosity, concern, and shared feeling by community members and others, that allowed for the communal economic and social processes to emerge eventually victorious. Roche and Stormes are aware, as well, of the contradictory effects of these communal processes. They show that while communal structures and culture from tenant associations to group prayer "provided stability and predictability over twenty-five years of radically changed external pressures and supports"; allowed for people to survive the exclusions of the capitalist world; kept in tact a large part of the initial tenant base; and provided a means to challenge drug marketing and consuming activities that sorely tested everyone’s ability to survive, they also served at times to reproduce negative social activities, attitudes, and effects. Likewise, as with the delicious example of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Jack Kemp, whose push to privatize public housing partly made possible the transition to a coop, Roche and Stormes draw out the paradoxes involved as both public and private "external" forces, often identified with abuse of the poor, served as conditions for the expansion of communal class and nonclass structures in Sursam Corda. Roche and Stormes intend their story to remind us, if not to lift up our hearts in the face of such determined struggle to combat the devastations of poverty, then to recognize that communal structures do exist and survive, and that our lives may often and crucially depend upon them.

Ajit Chaudhury, whose piece on "brown orientalism" we published in Volume 7, Number 4, continues his argument by providing a critical review of the Marxist heritage within Indian academic circles. In his contribution to the Remarx section, Chaudhury shows that, from its inception after independence in 1947 to the more recent "Subaltern Studies" movements, academic Marxism (as opposed to the communist movement, which is much older) has developed in India as a series of reflections, initially, and economistically, on the nature of agrarian modes of production and peasant resistance and consciousness; the consequences and effects of Indian nationalism in the face of continued Western hegemony, which incorporated rather than obliterated "traditional" forms of production and life (theorized in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of "passive revolution"); and, lately, the culturally informed studies of postcolonial subject positions of all "subaltern" classes and groups as they may attempt to resist modernization and "represent" themselves. Chaudhury, who figures importantly in the debates over Marxism’s heritage and its current stage of "rethinking," notes that one of the guiding preoccupations in the discussions has been the extent to which there is a singular "subaltern" position (whether it be peasants or postcolonial subjects) from which a challenge to Western hegemony (and nationalist "collaboration") can be waged and modernism and its ravages can be resisted. Chaudhury is critical of those in the Subaltern Studies movement who posit either an unambiguous meaning from subaltern consciousness/behavior or a form of subaltern subjectivity that effectively confronts Western postcolonial discourse and power through the maintenance and revaluation of a "tradition" which has not been distorted by the push for modernism by nationalist elites. For Chaudhury, the possibility of a counterdiscourse or political strategy in which the subaltern speaks and represents him/herself has involved mostly an "inversion" of modern values and/or suppression of all those forms of tradition that are not appealing to a modernist logic. Thus, Subaltern Studies offers up as the basis for a new, postcolonial "subject of history," "traditional values" that, in Chaudhury’s view, are inextricably bound up with modernism. In calling for a "different view" (and not a privileged, independent subaltern stance, which, itself, is merely a position within modernism), Chaudhury also advances the cause of a new third world writing that can "produce a theoretical frame that includes its own self-criticisms (i.e., the overdetermining aspects of modernism and tradition) and therefore can incorporate the many other voices in it."

Psychologist Edward S. Reed closes the Remarx section with his observations on the abuse that, in his view, is behind the persistence of fear and uncertainty in the United States during the recent past. Reed’s idea is that there is a strong analogy to be drawn between the forms of fear, shame, and helplessness often felt by victims of domestic abuse and the same sentiments experienced by ordinary Americans who, in response to the continuing degradation in socioeconomic life and relations, seem to sink ever deeper into despair, hopelessness, denial, and immobility. Reed links his own rather personal declamation of the alternating ineptitude, cynicism, and arrogance of political and business leaders in the United States to general trends in the social psychology prevalent in America which have left its "victim-survivors" unable and afraid to name their abusers or to find common solutions to widespread social problems. In Reed’s view, pain, worry, and anguish are by now such dominant and shared feelings amongst Americans that it will take a "campaign of citizens against fear" to begin to "acknowledge just how victimized we have been, . . . to point to both those who have abused us and those others who watched the process and benefited from it," and from there to "make our lives over again" as separate as possible from the perpetrators of abuse. Reed’s overarching vision is to transform into a "real home" the dangerous domicile that the United States has become through progressive-led support groups and models of self-transformation and empowerment that are used to good effect in dealing with the sources, traumas, and consequences of domestic abuse.

From Louis Althusser’s and Etienne Balibar’s Reading Capital to Roman Rosdolsky’s The Making of Marx’s Capital, much work of Marxist scholars over the past thirty years has been directed to uncovering Marx’s method in Capital, both to explain the peculiar "logic" of that remarkable text and to reexamine Marx’s main findings in lieu of developments in textual exegesis and the philosophy of interpretation during the same period. A recent edited book, Fred Moseley’s Marx’s Method in "Capital": A Reexamination, brings together economists and philosophers to consider the degree to which Marx employed a "dialectical" method of exposition as well as to take stock of Marx’s novel formulations in political economy contained in Capital. Andrew Kliman’s brief review of Moseley’s collection touches on the different conceptions of dialectics that Marxian philosophers, such as Tony Smith and Chris Arthur, deploy in making sense of Marx’s general categories in Capital. Kliman takes seriously these attempts to reinstate dialectics as a key to Marx’s method, though he remains skeptical in the face of several of the contributors’ belief that dialectics should be seen as "a self-contained development of concepts" structuring the whole of Marx’s text. Kliman is likewise interested in the revived debates over abstract labor and the transformation process, themes that continue to inspire much reinterpretation in a variety of Marxian economic traditions. So, while it is clear that Moseley’s collection touches on only a few of these traditions (postAlthusserian and critical realist views of Capital seem to be notably absent), Kliman suggests that the primary value of this book is that it shows the question of Marx’s method to be very much alive and in need of further study.

We note sadly the death of Harold Wolpe on 19 January 1996. Harold Wolpe (1926-1996) was a sociologist, lawyer, South African activist, and a member of this journal’s Advisory Board. Wolpe made important theoretical contributions on the capitalist construction of apartheid in South Africa and contributed crucially as well to policy studies on educational reform in postapartheid South Africa. His pathbreaking Marxian theoretical work in the 1970s on the forms of South African cheap labor and their importance to the development of capitalism there was what brought Wolpe’s work initially to the attention of many of us at RM. This line of Wolpe’s work was crowned by the publication in 1988 of his influential Race, Class, and the Apartheid State. During his long exile in England after escaping from a South African prison in 1963, Wolpe began his work on education in South Africa, planning for the period after liberation from apartheid. Upon his return to South Africa in 1990, Wolpe continued his involvement in educational reform by founding and directing the Educational Policy Unit at the University of the Werstern Cape. In his obituary in The Guardian (22 January 1996), Ronald Segal speaks of him as "gentle but quite capable of anger at stupidity and prejudice" and of his death as "a great loss to the intellectual vitality of the new South Africa, which needs those whose allegiance involves independence of judgment and the guts to express it." A Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust has been created, with Nelson Mandela as a Patron, in order to support research in Harold’s intellectual and critical legacy. The writer and activist AnnMarie Wolpe, Harold’s wife, and their children Nicholas, Peta, and Tessa are among the Trustees of the fund. Contributors to the trust should contact Peta Wolpe,15 Elm Grove, London, N8 9AH, U. K.; Tel.: 0181 348-0193; Fax: 0181 340-5001.

The Editors

In this issue, we open with David Harvey’s interrogation of the meaning and import of the notion of globalization, a term that has supplanted earlier Left/Marxist categories of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and has suggested an endpoint for the worldwide spread of capitalism. Harvey views this term cautiously, though productively, and calls on readers to do the same. His advice is that we see globalization as a process. One that has been in effect for the past five hundred or so years, as capitalism has territorialized and reterritorialized the world, creating cities, states, built environments, and the like, but also (and presently) organizing supranationalities and spurring decentralizations. Harvey, whose work thus far has been to retheorize Marxist political economy and historical materialism to include an appreciation for the spatial dimension of capitalism, thinks that globalization needs to be revised in its conception to take account of the persistent unevenness in the spatio-temporal development of capital flows. Harvey does think that we may now be facing a qualitative change in capitalism’s effects, though in his view, this change "is toward the reassertion of early nineteenth-century capitalist values coupled with a twenty-first century penchant for pulling everyone (and everything that can be exchanged) into the orbit of capital while rendering large segments of the world’s population permanently redundant in relation to the basic dynamics of capital accumulation." Harvey acknowledges that globalization can best be seen as a concept designed to signify the changes wrought by international financial deregulation since the 1970s, by the so-called "information revolution" (suggesting the "dematerialization of space" in communications), and by a continuous decline in the costs and time of moving commodities and people; but he locates these trends within a broader history of capital’s everpresent impulse to "annihilate space through time," as the drive to speed up the circulation of capital makes the constant (but uneven) reorganization of the globe compulsory. While Harvey takes note of the many challenges to socialists that are presented by the international dispersal of production, the enormous expansion of a culturally diverse wage-labor force, the increased mobility of peoples across national boundaries, the rise of megacities throughout the world, and the decline of state power in affecting capital movements, he believes that a reanimated socialist movement can help to "synthesize" many of the anticapitalist struggles that he sees occurring as the "backlash" to the destruction caused by the globalization process. In Harvey’s view, the Marxian Left remains ideally suited both to "emphasize the pattern and systemic qualities of the damage being wrought" and to build a "community in class struggle" by uncovering the class content of so many anticapitalist struggles during this current phase of international capitalist development.

Our special Remarx section for this issue is reserved for two different appraisals of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. The articles by Pierre Macherey and J. K. Gibson-Graham contribute to the growing commentary and debate over the terms and tensions of Derrida’s text as well as the book’s relevance, if any, to ongoing discussions of Marxian social and political theory. Derrida’s book presents a "hauntological" reading of Marx, one that focuses largely on those aspects of Marx’s work where the invocations of ghosts, apparitions, and specters not only inhabit his pages, but are crucial explanatory concepts (such as Marx’s and Engels’s reference to the specter of communism haunting mid-nineteenth century Europe or the mysteries and veils that envelop, by fetishizing, a commodity economy). Of course, Derrida is also intrigued by the ghostly status of Marx’s work these many years after his death, asking what is living and/or dead in Marx’s theoretical output and seeing that his ideas are neither strictly dead nor alive and that there is still a debt to be paid (or an inheritance to be cashed in).

It is within this framework of spectrality—bringing in the impossible but irrepressible relation between appearance and reality, materiality and ideality, spirit and "the real"—that Macherey reviews Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the Marxian legacy. In Ted Stolze’s translation, Macherey credits Derrida with encouraging a rereading of Marx that, in his view, leads "to a free appropriation of Marx’s ‘inheritance."’ Macherey understands Derrida’s contribution to consist of a reconsideration of several of Marx’s key texts in which references to ghosts and the like are introduced "not only as a figure of rhetorical style but as a determination of those texts’ contents of thought." The different forms of spectrality that Derrida finds suggests a Marx divided at times against himself and in turmoil over the distinction between the spirit world and the world of objects, over the demarcation between appearance and reality to which he turned incessantly and which, in the end, haunts his work. Yet, despite the value of showing the fundamental instability of these distinctions in some of Marx’s writings—the impossibility of preserving a notion of reality which is not also "apparent" and of preserving an apparition which is not simultaneously "real," and hence creating a sense of the immaterial material, the insensible sensible—Derrida, according to Macherey, accomplishes his transformation of Marx’s spirit into something presumably usable today by reducing Marx’s work "to a history of ghosts." In this sense, Macherey tells us, Derrida "dematerializes" Marx and "deontologizes" Marx’s thought, if only to provide us with a "new science of spirit." We can detect, reading symptomatically if not spectrally, in Macherey’s appraisal a trace of doubt in the efficacy of Derrida’s project since, in his view, Derrida’s reduction involves drawing "Marx alongside his ghosts" and appears to succeed perfectly "on the condition of filtering his inheritance to the point of retaining from Capital only book 1, section 1: Marx without social classes, without the exploitation of labor, without surplus-value . . . [which] risks, in fact, no longer being anything but his own ghost."

J. K. Gibson-Graham writes in the spirit of both Marx and Derrida. Gibson-Graham looks approvingly at Derrida’s figure of the specter since, by conjuring forth the effectivity of what is excluded in/on what strives mightily to be pure and uncontaminated, Derrida unleashes the concept of possibility. It is the powerful notion of the possible—that concept that inspirits the specter of The Communist Manifesto and that binds together past and future with the contemporaneous—that Gibson-Graham identifies with Derrida’s deconstruction of ontology and his spectral reading of Marx. While Derrida’s Marx appears on stage as one who is fighting the ghosts that seem to confound his attempts to delimit the socioeconomic "real" (and to spirit it off to an unintruded realm), Gibson-Graham points out that this Marx is doomed to be haunted, since the "banished" always and ever returns to the space of its sentence. This perception, though, also informs Derrida’s critique of the triumphalism that has cascaded down from the heights of neoliberalism with the purported "death of Marx and Marxism" after 1989. Derrida faults Francis Fukayama and other revelers in the victory of capitalist markets, says Gibson-Graham, for believing that their incantations that the "dead man is really dead" can truly perform the ultimate exorcism they are in need of, fearing, of course, the real possibility that Marx is not buried for good. Gibson-Graham notes that Derrida organizes much of his counterdiscourse to Fukayama and others—perhaps surprisingly—around an undeconstructed, if only provisional, image of a unified and hegemonic capitalism, in which the "capitalist paradise" of the celebrants is turned upside down to reveal the ever-continuing horrors of the "new world disorder." In Gibson-Graham’s eyes, Derrida performs the usual left rite of bringing forth, in discourse, a vision of the world that is familiar in its naming of the plagues attending the global spread of an unproblematized, undifferentiated, and omnipresent capitalism. the "ghosts" that haunt Derrida’s own work are the many forms of noncapitalist, noncommodity, and nonmarket activities and sites which, along with plural capitalisms, remain excluded from the undeconstructed monolith that Derrida feels compelled to summon up as a referent to the "real." In Derrida’s own spirit of deconstruction, then, Gibson-Graham calls to light all these excluded terms of economic difference that permit not only a different (and Marxist) picture of the world to emerge in contrast to both Fukayama’s triumphalism and Derrida’s malaise, but that also make feasible and desirable a politics of transformation in which what is possible is always/already present.

Robert Garnett mediates what he sees as a debilitating dispute between those who read and uphold the modernist moments of Marx’s value discourse and those who find in Marx a kindred postmodern spirit. Garnett focuses his attention on Marx’s discussion in the first chapter of volume 1 of Capital of commodity production and exchange via Marx’s particular value approach, which has been understood as advocating the naturalness and universality of human labor as the measure of value and/or, alternatively, as a denial of the universalist, humanist notions of value that undergird Classical political economy and that mark Marx’s theoretical "break." Garnett cautions against reading Marx’s value theory as unified in either its modern or postmodern dimensions. He indicates the theoretical and political harm that results from separating out decisively Marx’s critique of the historical specificity and uniqueness of a capitalist commodity economy through his "social constructionist" value analysis from a revolutionary narrative, pervaded by radical humanism and economism, in which the perverse "irrationality" and "fetishism" of a commodity economy is juxtaposed with a vision of a transparent and socially directed economy constituted by the "association of free men." Reading Marx’s value theory as multivalent, possessing both postmodernist deconstructive and modernist prophetic moments, Garnett argues that these distinct voices complement each other, "adding a dimension which, if removed, would alter the nature and purpose of the discourse." In particular, Garnett urges those engaged in producing a uniquely postmodern Marxism not to turn away, in simple dismissal, from the modernist aspects of Marx’s work which "remain, even today, among the preconditions for Marxism’s critical successes." The cost of such dismissal, Garnett adds, may be that "those who have labored so hard to revive and rethink Marx in the light of postmodernism may find themselves struggling to read Marx at all."

"The collapse of ‘existing socialism’ in Eastern Europe and in the former USSR coincides with a general retreat of Marxist theory in Western Europe." Beginning with this simple observation, John Milios briefly considers the question of the relation implied by the coincidence. Milios does not resort to a thesis of a heightened and general "crisis of Marxism" as an explanation of how the implosion of the Soviet system intersects with the widespread demise of Marxism as a mass ideology in the West. As Milios, borrowing from Louis Althusser, points out, 150 years of Marxism demonstrate that the heated contention—often monumentally crucial for the lives of millions of people—over different renditions of Marxist theory and practice marks Marxism’s natural course, a condition of its existence. Hence, the everpresent existence of different, sometimes violently opposed, trends in Marxism—what some have pointed to as the sign of its "crisis"—has been and will continue to be an indispensable, and ineluctable, part of its history. Nor does Milios see the "failure" of Marxism to be a matter of the final decomposition of its theoretical insights in view of their supposed "realization" in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Rather, distinguishing Marxism as theory from Marxism as a mass ideology, Milios believes that Marxism’s "retreat" in Western Europe and perhaps elsewhere consists of its weakened influence on workers’ and popular movements, a condition well under way before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. Milios regards much of this weakened influence to be the result of the dominance of "Soviet Marxism" as a more-or-less mass ideology (represented at least in the ideological pronouncements of party leadership) in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but also having profound effects on the understandings of the relation between state power and class struggle in Western European left circles as well. In Milios’s view, "Soviet Marx ism" as a mass ideology, with its reading of "socialism" as mostly the state control of monopolistic firms and industries (what others, in addition to Milios, have termed "state capitalism"), significantly affected Leftists in other places, leading them to identify "governmentalism" and "reformism" with the advent of socialist struggle. In Milios’s view, the inability of left political parties to maintain this reformism as a mass ideology, especially during the economic crises of the 1980s, led many in Western Europe to turn away resolutely from Marxism and socialism. All that was left for the "retreat" of Marxism in Western Europe was its "publicizing" in the aftermath of the events of 1989-91. In Milios’s view, the revival of Marxism as a mass ideology will depend mostly on the "reappearance of the socialist movement of the working class," but it is his hope that this revival will not bring with it a resuscitation of "Soviet Marxism."

Studies of mass communication, including television, have been greatly influenced for much the past twenty years by British Marxist perspectives. In this article, Nicholas Stevenson looks at the work of the Glasgow University Media Group during much of this period, and highlights the issue of class-dominated and class-inflected "bias" in television that was the focal point of its analyses. As Stevenson notes, the more recent waves of postmodernism and post-Marxism in left communications studies have often called attention away from the issues of class bias and ideological hegemony of the mass media and replaced them with epistemological and hermeneutic concerns for specifying the plural forms of textual "readings" and audience interpretation. Stevenson argues that this shift of attention has largely meant giving up on claims and ideals of objectivity, balance, and impartiality in the media, and thus deprives the Left and subordinated social groups of demanding a more democratic cultural community, one in which rational discussion without bias is possible. Stevenson, thus, regards the Glasgow University Media Group as having brought to light intractable problems regarding the lack of objectivity, impartiality, and balance in British network newscasts and other programming, even while he criticizes the group for holding contradictory positions about the possibility or desirability of "truth" in reporting, for having somewhat crude notions of the instrumentality of class in determining television ideology, for insufficiently exploring the precise institutional and occupational situations that give rise to television bias, and for its neglect of audience interpretation as partly implicated in the ideological effects of news broadcasting. So, while Stevenson is aware of the advances that have been brought by recent alternative emphases on the cultural productivity of audiences of the mass media, he thinks that the Glasgow Group’s work deserves appreciation and rethinking since, in his view, their studies make possible an interest in the "normative relevance of questions related to truth and democracy" and reassert a Marxist viewpoint whereby "questions related to democratic public spheres in a media age presuppose a concern with political economy and ideology critique."

Citing Heidi Hartmann’s well-known formulation of the "unhappy marriage between Marxism and feminism," Kenneth Long suggests a different way to conceive of this relationship, one that, contra Hartmann, does not run the critique of patriarchy and the development of counterpatriarchical female identity through the sieve of a socialist feminism overly reliant on Marxian economic analysis. Instead, Long argues, a more profitable way to engender the potential contributions of Marxism to feminism is to see how the noneconomic issues of identity, identifying, creating community, and separation—as they emerge in radical, more than socialist, feminism—are central to several "other" texts in Marxian and socialist thought: Marx’s work "On the Jewish Question," Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism. Long contends that, in different ways, each of these texts presage some of the most important themes in radical feminism. For Long, Marx shows that the tripartite division of nineteenth-century German Jews into Orthodox, Reformed, and the synthetic Conservative traditions preserved reactionary religious identifications and/or a questionable "emancipation" through assimilation and, consequently, the acceptance of bourgeois exploitation. According to Long, just as Marx showed that the Conservative compromise could not and did not lead to a new Jewish identity bereft of classism, opposed to the intolerances of religion, and suspicious of formal (because not real) equality, radical feminism analogously decries the situation in which the poles of femininity, masculinity, and their supposed synthetic overcoming in adrogyny leave in place patriarchy and male-created forms of gender identity. Likewise, Long sees Fanon’s emphasis on cultural imperialism as perhaps more devastating and longer-lasting as akin to radical feminism’s insistence that the cultural, gender-specific, and psychological aspects of patriarchy may be more harmful to women than their economic oppression. In Nkrumah’s post-World War II advocacy of new Third World nations separating from the economic imperialism of world capitalism to achieve a true (and socialist) independent identity, Long finds an analogue to radical feminism’s politics of separatism as a way of building community and striking down, by eluding, patriarchal control. Long thus concludes that a rethought marriage between Marxism and feminism may proceed more happily from a feminist focus on patriarchy and the relationship of women to men, as it will allow for a discovery and learning from Marxist writings that "strikingly parallel radical feminist advocacy of separatism, womenspace, and womanculture as a means of combating and overcoming gender imperialism."

Fred Lonidier’s "Blueprint for a Strike" presents a documentary-style, encapsulated visual and verbal history of the union struggle against the National Steel & Shipbuilding Company combined with the artist’s monologue on the present situation of the arts in relation to Marxist theory and practice. These two elements, sharing back and forth the space of their respective presentations, provide related ways to conceive of the forms of practice that are effectual in participating in, while also representing, the "class struggle" in and out of the artworld. The stills and text which comprise Lonidier’s "fragmentary history" of the continuing workers’ struggle for health and safety, better wages, job security, and the right to represent themselves through their unions draw upon a recognizable style of documentation in which factories, urban landscapes, picket lines, union leaders and militants, provocateurs, and company headquarters are all depicted as locales and participants in the recounting of this history. The straightforwardness of this "reinvented documentary," fiercely partial in its telling of this ongoing story, is set against and plays off of an equally unflinching, recent historical glance at the status of Marxism in the arts and among the cultural Left. Both elements speak to the gains and setbacks of these interlinked struggles, but it is Lonidier’s stated aim to draw particular attention to the stakes involved in the fight to make art an "engaged practice" informed by Marxism. This aim is partly accomplished by the continuation of his discussion of getting artists and other Leftists to enlist each other in a joint commitment to advance working-class solidarity for several pages after the story of the Ironworkers is brought to a tentative end. Perhaps, then, Lonidier’s piece will begin what he sees lacking in the pages of RM and elsewhere: an encounter between politically committed, socially critical art and serious, intellectual, Marxist discourse.

Reviewing Tobin Siebers’s Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism and T. V. Reed’s Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements, Donald Morton situates these texts within a deepening "crisis of liberalism." While Siebers and Reed seem to take divergent positions about the theoretical and political responsibilities of (mostly academic) humanists in relation to transformations in Cold War criticism and the rise of postmodernist approaches to texts and politics, Morton sees in them a common neglect or refusal of Marxist political economy as a predominant lens through which to analyze the complex and troubled connection between literary and social movements and events. For example, Morton faults Siebers for his critique of the literary and cultural "skepticism"—derived from the "masters of suspicion," Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx—that has permeated the humanities in post-World War II America and that currently goes under the names of deconstruction, postmodernism, and the like. Morton regards Siebers’s call for a new "affirmation" of liberal values in response to "post everything" theory as not much more than "the ‘happy’ side of an idealist fantasy," and one designed to mislead the critics of the current rage for indeterminacy, uncertainty, pleasure, and playfulness into thinking that what is needed is not ideology critique along historical materialist lines, but humanist reverie. Just as Morton views Sieber’s as critical of Cold War skepticism as "ultimately a necessary part of the substructure of uncertainty, mistrust, fear, and trembling endemic to class societies," he likewise views Reed’s positive affirmation of postmodernism and call for a turn away from high theory toward the everyday politics of representation a voluntarism born of the impatience with a less-faddish Marxism’s insistence on carefully treating the complicated coupling of literary and cultural positions with the economic base. According to Morton, Siebers and Reed come off as slightly more "hip" versions of post-Cold War liberals who, in conjunction with their reactionary "enemies" differ not so much "over whether bourgeois democracy should continue," but on the degree to which multinational, late capitalism will be allowed either to reveal or to hide its intentions and effects.

We have received a request for help from the Paul Robeson 100^th Birthday Committee. They are organizing celebration events for 1997 and 1998 the latter being the centennial year of Robeson’s birth. The committee includes artists, educators, and community activists who "have come together to reintroduce Paul Robeson—this proud African-American athlete, scholar, singer, actor, and fighter for justice into the mainstream of American history." Toward this end, they are looking for "writers and poets, painters and muralists and playwrights, musicians and film artists to produce works of art" to commemorate and celebrate this important socialist’s life. The committee also asks for anyone interested either in participating on local Birthday Committees or in helping to organize local or national exhibitions or publications to please contact them. Their address is the Paul Robeson 100^th Birthday Committee, DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 East 56^th Place, Chicago, IL 60637.

The Editors

In this issue, J. K. Gibson-Graham begins by "querying" the discourse of globalization: the familiar narrative in which the internationalization of capital penetrates and ultimately conquers every available space where economic activity is conducted. Gibson-Graham’s novel rethinking of the discourse of globalization proceeds by bringing the story of capitalism’s unlimited and unstoppable power of invasion into a productive comparison with "rape scripts," in which women’s bodies are thought to be potentially and necessarily violated by the "fact" of men’s inescapable violence. Using poststructuralist feminist reconsiderations of discourses of rape and how they may help to produce women as potential victims (by neglecting partly the moments of resistance and subversion of the essential "fact" of the dominance of male violence), Gibson-Graham shows that an analogous move to naturalize the inexorable subordination of all noncapitalist spheres of socioeconomic life to an irresistible capitalism is an unquestioned assumption in much of the globalization literature.

Gibson-Graham envisions a different globalization discourse—one in which capitalism is not only "hard," penetrating, and dominant but also is "soft," capable of being penetrated and even subordinated, largely as a result of the globalization process in which noncapitalist forms of production and the proliferation of economic differences are likely consequences of transnational flows of capital. From international labor activism to the creation of newly self-employed workers, Gibson-Graham gives numerous examples of how global capital is resisted by economic subjects and forms of economic practice that are not inscribed in the body of capital, and of how capital (for example, finance capital) itself is much more incoherent and fluid than that which most globalization discourses present. In this last respect, Gibson-Graham seeks to "queer" global economic discourse by emphasizing that, not unlike gender and sexuality, no fixed and transcendent identity should be attributed to capitalism. Global capital gives rise to a variety of "infections" that, in addition to spreading capitalism, produce "the renewed viability of noncapitalist globalization." Gibson-Graham warns us that "if we create a hegemonic globalization script with the multinational corporation, the financial sector, the market, and commodification all set up in relations of mutual reinforcement, and we then proclaim this formation as a 'reality,' we invite particular outcomes." In contrast, Gibson-Graham urges us to query globalization and to queer the body of capitalism so as to "open up the space for many alternative scripts" with an expanded cast of characters who may "participate in the realization of different outcomes."

Serap Kayatekin tells us that the main traditions in the social and economic analysis of sharecropping assume the need either to subject this agrarian institution to the evaluative criterion of "efficiency" (the primary norm of neoclassical economics) or to theorize sharecropping as a mostly transitional economic form, something "other" than capitalism but precariously perched on the dustbin of history because of capitalism’s dynamic of subjugation. These approaches usually presume stable and fixed meanings for the key terms in the sharecropping arrangement: cropper, landowner, and rent. Developing a detailed class taxonomy, Kayatekin begins the process of deconstructing the concept of sharecropping by showing us the multitude of class processes and positions that have been encompassed by the term. Drawing on cross-cultural and transhistorical examples (from the métayage system in medieval France to the postbellum U.S. South and sharecropping in contemporary Malaysia and the Sudan), Kayatekin subjects each site where sharecropping exists to class analysis. She unearths along the way the alternative possibilities that sharecropping can be constituted primarily by feudal, self-exploitative, and capitalist class processes or by some combination of all three. An added and crucial feature of her work is to diversify the concept of "rent," at least as it applies to sharecropping, with each new meaning suggesting different class origins and components. Kayatekin shows that the termination of the class composition of any type of sharecropping is decisively dependent upon the cultural, political, and legal forms that position the cropper and the landowner in relation to the ownership/possession of land and other means of production, to appropriate rights over the crop, and much else. Kayatekin considers in passing the idea that the "persistence" of sharecropping throughout history and across geographical boundaries is not surprising; its various and different forms suggest that the conditions for its existence also are many and can appear both within and outside the supposed extension of the capitalist world market. Kayatekin’s antiessentialist rendering of sharecropping allows for a keen reconceptualization of this rural fixture, one that promotes conjunctural investigations rather than general proclamations about sharecropping’s essential historical tendencies.

With the "end of history" at hand, can it be said that the Enlightenment project of establishing the universality of liberal democratic ideals has neared completion? And if not, what then is the status of those ideals in movements and rhetorics of protest, especially for those who regard late capitalism as a nightmare of rampant commodification and total administration rather than heaven on earth? Deborah Cook considers these questions in her article, using the late writings of Theodor Adorno as her means of investigation. Cook begins with the provocative thesis that the late Adorno was more willing than he had been earlier in his career to base an "ideology critique" of late capitalism on liberal democratic ideals. Cook emphasizes that in works after the Dialectics of Enlightenment (written with Max Horkheimer), Adorno went on to defend "the critical power of liberal ideology’s normative ideals against both positivism and the view of ideology as false consciousness." In so doing, according to Cook, Adorno projected the idea that liberal norms (such as freedom, autonomy, and spontaneity) could be crucial to drive a wedge between the "real" forms of their existence in a commodified and alienated society and their unliberated "truth." Thus, in Adorno’s view, liberal ideals continue to remind us of the gap between the lived reality of abstract equality that is reduced to the logic of commodity exchange and domination and the possibility of a freedom not reducible to this reality. In Cook’s reading, Adorno’s abhorrence for the "culture industry" stemmed mostly from his view that it duplicated and justified the status quo of the identity of ideology with reality and did not, therefore, seize the utopian potential in the liberal ideals culture claimed to "represent." Cook also shows, however, that Adorno’s belief in the "utopian" moment of liberal ideals was tempered to a far greater degree than in today’s left advocates of radical democracy and rights, such as Bowles and Gintis or Laclau and Mouffe. In Cook’s reconstruction, Adorno never lost his insight that "since the vast majority of individuals in the West have fallen under the ’spell' of positivist modes of thought and behavior, liberal ideology has become increasingly outmoded." For Cook, Adorno "reminds us of the impact that Enlightenment’s liberal democratic ideals had had—and might yet have—on consciousness and reality, while demonstrating how much critical force they have already lost."

"Trotsky in the Park" marks Amitava Kumar’s return to the pages of RM. It is a poem about poems, a work about work. It unfolds in the cityscape that is New York, where black women breathe verses about death and pregnancies; where Puerto Rican kids play ball in mean and not-so-mean streets; where a Pakistani student reads Trotsky in the park, thinking of the clash of cultures that envelops him, but looking for clues nonetheless in the red "classics"; where city parks are the battlegrounds of another cultural standoff—the plight of the homeless. Kumar’s ode to poetry via this rainbow urbanity releases all the vitality, beauty, and anger at the historic moment that has pushed those from "poor nations protecting their land and their language" haltingly but unyieldingly into the limelight, and that has made those who are "class negative, color negative" ineffably visible and voluble. We hear through Kumar as though we had forgotten that poetry is at once the sound of sweet revenge and the sound of its failings, the sound of angry desire and the sound of its refusal, and always the sound. If Kumar entices us with the poetry of the spoken word (as we read it on the page), he is adept at making us confound our senses, as readings, writings, and listenings are mingled together in the "noise" of the city. At the poem’s end (how can this poem end, one wonders), Kumar presents a young factory worker, a woman whose immigrant status has her working overtime, standing late at night deep in the bowels of New York’s subway system. As she gazes at her hands—her own means of production, she is surrounded by silence. Kumar tells us that "in that silence is born the silence that this poem makes." If this is silence, then silence is golden.

It may well be that in some postmodern Marxist circles, left arguments for justice and equality have been elided during the past two decades by a pervasive antihumanism and by the belief that establishing the ethical bases for socialism is inextricably linked with liberal concepts of self, society, and social action. Yet, during these same decades, there has been a raging debate among some left social thinkers for whom providing compelling ethical arguments for socialist egalitarianism and the end of capitalist exploitation has remained a basic goal. Perhaps leading these efforts has been G. A. Cohen, whose twenty year attempts to wed a bedrock commitment to personal freedom with some form of egalitarianism are documented here by Paul Kamolnick.

Kamolnick first revisits Cohen’s initial work in the 1970s and early 1980s, in which Cohen was intent on showing how a preference for any social scheme founded on "self-ownership" and the conduct of a "free individual life plan" was diametrically opposed to inegalitarian social conditions, whether voluntarily arrived at or not. Kamolnick shows that during this earlier phase, Cohen was grappling with the profound reverberations in ethical discourse set off by Robert Nozick’s defense of a mostly right-wing liberalism, for which private property and inequality were justified as necessary outcomes of the free expression of liberty. Kamolnick reviews Cohen’s subsequent moves in the 1970s and 1980s to try to find the lacunae in Nozick’s reading of John Locke’s theory of property and labor value, then his abandonment of that pursuit in favor of discovering a moral justification for "joint ownership" as a condition for freedom. Kamolnick provides an update on Cohen’s most recent work in which he still embraces personal liberty and, with it, personal choice, but is critical of antiegalitarian assumptions that "choice" itself is sufficient to imply unequal "rewards" and, more important, that the "preferences" and "capacities" upon which choice is presumed to be based are "chosen" at all. Kamolnick sees Cohen’s latest endeavors as having practical significance since some of his most recent arguments about marrying libertarian and egalitarian norms have been made within the political debates of the British Labour party, whose members have had urgent discussions over labor’s just share in the context of the acceptance of the market mechanism. Skeptical that the market can be the means to achieve egalitarian distributive goals, though convinced that the market is an effective mechanism in realizing individual life choices through the unplanned allocation of social labor, Cohen has retained his status in these debates as a careful, independent, and indispensable ethical theorist of a better social(ist) order. As Kamolnick concludes, "if Cohen is right about the fact that socialist normative theory is premised in a vision of human self-realization that mandates both egalitarian and libertarian moments, the continuing need to theorize the possibility of that project seems as pressing as ever."

Thomas Kamber reminds us that Marx was a devotee of reading Aeschylus. Not surprisingly, then, Marx can be read as a theorist of historical tragedy as well as a tragic figure, a hero whose suffering is reflected in the self-repudiations and vindications that can be traced in the unfolding of his own work. Kamber takes this Marx, tragic flaw and all, and shows that it is through the trope of tragedy that we can understand how Marx could produce such "harsh, dystopic views of human relations under capitalism" and yet never purge himself of an unabiding "utopianism." Kamber notes that much of Marx’s continual self-cleansing and implied admissions of guilt, which are accompanied by constant suffering, take the objectified form of his trenchant, merciless critiques of the ideas of others who held views that an earlier Marx for the most part had already abandoned. Thus, Kamber shows that Marx, in turn, embraced and rejected "practical need" as it characterized his view of "the Jew," philosophy as the form of discovery of species-being and human essence, and history as the "real" engine of social transformation. In Kamber’s story Marx finally becomes the theorist of the political conjuncture, advocating an activism based on a tactical envisioning of the future. Marx’s acerbic critiques of those who held onto views associated with his own earlier contributions can be read as self-critiques and, more to the point, as self-inflicted punishments for his own tragic flaws of sentimentality, bourgeois humanism, ahistorical naturalism, and much else. As Kamber argues, "all his life Marx incorporated deeply utopian impulses into his theory, yet attacked the same ideas (when held by others) as sentimental, seeking phantom images of harmony, or simply bourgeois." In Kamber’s view, Marx’s continuing commitment to communism was based on understanding "the suffering of the proletariat as a necessary step to a new way of thinking," an understanding that inscribed Marx and his historical subject as tragic and heroic, seeking and realizing redemption through confrontation and protracted struggle with his own tragic flaws.

Images photographic and electronic suffuse the environment, while every object and subject becomes "fair game" for portrayal in these media. Scott Townsend’s photoessay comments on the situation where, increasingly, "we are asked to decide the fate of electronic and photographic simulacra, without understanding the gap between our construction and the fate of those placed outside of our electronically enlarged language." Townsend’s images, which blur the distinctions between camera and computer, between representation and construction, appear murky in their own right, coming out of the background just long enough to put into play. Are the fragments of hands, globes, sentences, geometries all fair game? Are these imaginings part of the same game, for that matter? What ends do they serve? Knowledge? Dissemination? Pleasure? Control? Townsend shows just enough of these images to suggest a portrait, but one that is open to contestation, a matter of politics. The coming to clarity, the moment of recognition that Townsend ultimately effects, still leaves us with the problem of having to decide on the form of our intervention in a world clearly permeated by machinic/electronic means of representation/production. Will we face the game that is our electronic environment with fairness in tow, or have we, too, by now become fair game?

The Remarx section opens with Kalyan Sanyal’s biting critique of radical democratic discourse. Sanyal’s claim is that the post-Marxist work of Laclau and Mouffe, Bowles and Gintis, and others has granted a discursive and political privilege to struggles over "rights" and power in the First World. This privilege is possible only if one ignores the uneven, global politics of power and economic development that position postcolonial subjects as victims of environmental degradation, worsening work conditions, and so forth. Sanyal argues that the ability of social movements in the West to wrangle increases in rights via struggles for radical democracy, ecofriendly production, or a greater say in the workplace is built on the ability of Western capital to make the Third World the main location of "smokestack industries" and authoritarian regimes that are increasingly hostile to unions and demands for improved labor conditions and political rights. Sanyal is pessimistic about a new internationalism emerging from radical democracy since not only does it generally hide or ignore the continuing problems that stem from class exploitation, but it also nationalizes the struggle for rights through a discourse of "difference." In this discourse, the "others" within Western nations are substituted for distant others who, in turn, are subordinated to the demands of global capital by present unevennesses in the international pattern of trade and production. In this way the supposed transcendence of the older (and "economistic") notion of imperialism by the post-Marxist language of the "articulation" of radical democratic forces bespeaks an "occlusion" of the Third World and the plight of its people in the face of its integration "into one single global economic and political order." While Third World activists and intellectuals, then, may see something of merit in the rejection of modernist narratives and programs, Sanyal believes that the prospect for a postmodern, radical democratic discourse that theorizes implicitly conditions in the Third World—including their discursive and material reproduction through post-Marxism—will be frustrated by the inability to address "global unevenness and the politics of power associated with it."

Calling discourses of "safe sex" the new secular scientistic religion of the Left," David Mertz concludes this issue with his contention that AIDS has been the premise upon which progressives have largely capitulated their prior support for sexual revolution. Mertz wishes to "out" the reactionary sexual moralism that he believes has enrobed itself in the medico-scientific authority of warnings about the danger to the general population of unsafe sexual practices. But Mertz’s disapproval is directed mostly at the Left which should know better, but which seems to have warmed to the task of serving as moral educator and advisor to "innocents" such as young, heterosexual undergraduate students. Mertz detects in the moral/scientific languages of safe sex a determination to regulate sexual activity, and he believes the Left has performed that function to perfection by suggesting that to remain silent on unsafe sex is to abdicate moral responsibility and to be complicit in AIDS-related deaths. While Mertz does not believe that the known facts about AIDS suggest either the imminent, epidemic spread of the disease to non-drug-using heterosexuals or the likelihood that mortality rates will increase dramatically in the future, his argument depends less on the epidemiology of AIDS than on his view that the Left has succumbed to the demand that sexuality be rethought in terms of "responsibility, danger, and obligation" rather than "liberation, freedom, and resistance." Mertz notes the uncanny similarity between the discourses that attended the spread of syphilis in the early parts of this century and those that currently constitute the reactions to AIDS. In each case, Mertz believes, the Left played a most dismaying role, taking the lead in some instances by calling for moral restraint and the "forfeit of freedoms." Mertz ends by reflecting critically on the change in left moral discourse that has been wrought by the history of venereal diseases, as "the language of science, remaining on the surface value-neutral, became the framework for conceptualizing moral necessity."

The Editors

In this issue, our first offering is Cindy Patton’s article on the curious similarity of the logics of social space that are currently enunciated and acted out by a growing radical right and by queer activists. In Patton’s mapping of the changing geopolitical landscape, both the New Right and queers have succeeded to a degree in materializing social space through a politics of presence that threatens the dominant but disintegrating liberal pluralism. It is liberal pluralism, says Patton, that ostensibly dematerialized social space by constituting and transforming the "essential" differences (of lifestyle and memory) of "minority" groups into claims of civil rights within a pluralized, hence "neutral" public. In Patton’s view, the New Right cleverly seized upon liberal pluralism’s notion of public space as an articulation of citizenship in terms of separate but formally equal identities, and presented its demands as a beleaguered minority of whites and other "true Americans" who also had been victims of discrimination. Yet, as she shows, the New Right has gone beyond liberal pluralism, which was fracturing as a result of the proliferation of minority claims and new identities, and instead has moved to a new logic of space, one that regards social space as "nonpartitionable" and essentially God’s own. In this space, the New Right legitimizes its violent apocalyptic attempts (epitomized by the killing of abortion-clinic doctors) to clear God’s space of evildoers, all those dissident bodies that comprise the minoritarian public of liberal pluralism. Further, Patton regards the emergence of queer politics and activism as having actualized a similar fracturing of the liberal, pluralist spatial logic as queers, too, insist on their prior, central, and material (omni)presence and thereby a notion of monospatiality. Of course, Patton considers the important differences in the spatial logics enacted by the New Right and queer activism, reflecting on the fact that while queers are more interested in "transmogrifying" all bodies by queering them, "through the concept of evil, [the New Right] has tried to connect some bodies with a force that threatens the project of monospatial production." Thus, while queers seek to infiltrate and create public space in a queer image, New Rightists are intent on " reclaiming" holy space, in effect ratifying a genocide against unholy bodies. Patton ends by considering the differences between queers and lesbian and gay rights activists, noting that the latter are more wedded to the civil rights discourse of liberal pluralism and are therefore less likely to "queer" state-sanctioned rights, institutions, and practices, like marriage. While the political differences within the New Right are not over spatial logic (the Christian right regards all space as holy land), the differences between queers and lesbian and gay rights activists, Patton avers, are politically difficult to traverse. Yet, rejecting the diagnosis of a schism, Patton hopes that alliances will occur through the new queer logic of space that does not require queer, lesbian, and gay bodies to have a "natural unity" to be represented in the public, political space created by liberal pluralism.

The idea that sex, gender, and class are neatly correlated, especially in the household, is a hallmark of radical feminist conceptions of a "patriarchal mode of production" and of the oppressiveness of female domestic labor. The one-to-one correspondence construed in this literature has been criticized on diverse grounds, including arguments that there is no preexisting, transcultural unification of sexual and gender identity and that the division of labor in households is extremely complex and can be understood in terms of a variety of possible class processes and subjective class positions. Jenny Cameron seeks to "trouble" both radical feminist notions of domestic labor as the universal and originary site of women’s economic and gender oppression and the poststructuralist and overdeterminist Marxist criticisms of these notions. She cites the work of Harriet Fraad, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff (see RM, Winter 1989) as a good starting point to break the necessary link that previous feminists had drawn between female domestic labor and the class position of women inside and outside households. It shows that inside contemporary households, women can find themselves in any number of class positions, from providers of feudal surplus labor for their male "lords" to a member of a family "commune." However, Cameron also argues that in Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff’s work there is a tendency to treat gender differences as preexisting and in need of transcendence through the equalization of gendered power relations within a transition to communist households. Cameron’s critique invokes both a poststructuralist notion of gender as "performative" and an argument that the very act of participating in class processes allows subjects to "become" gendered. She presents these arguments by discussing the domestic arrangements of one "Pam," an Australian civil servant who, in Cameron’s view, "self-appropriates" the fruits of surplus labor (washing clothes, making dinner, etc.) she produces and then distributes to her male partner. Cameron well understands that Pam can be seen as an exploited feudal serf and that her performance of the traditional responsibilities of women in households bespeaks her prior gender constitution in a familiar heterosexual context. Yet, she employs Pam’s own narrative as a means of making problematic the idea that her surplus labor is simply expropriated rather than independently appropriated and freely given, and that the gendered division of labor within which she performs is imposed rather than chosen as her way to achieve mostly heteronormative experiences of sexual pleasure and gender differentiation. Cameron concludes by showing that Pam’s "gendered becomings" through her participation in domestic labor and the heterosexual matrix are, themselves, "open to disruption and destabilization." And this, Cameron tells us, suggests a new class and gender politics in which all gendered becomings and class processes are ripe for "troubling," not as a "linear movement from a backward and regressive class process or gendered becoming to a more progressive form, but a fragmentary and uneven opening up of differences."

Noel Castree considers the "impasse" created within contemporary Marxism as a result of the polarization of modern and postmodern readings of Marx. The either/or posturing that marks these current disputes is, to his mind, unproductive and insensitive to the "productive conjunction" that modern and postmodern approaches can bring to elucidating the unifying power and the irreducible ambivalences of the Marxian project. Castree thus appreciates "modernist" attempts, like that of Murray Smith in his recent book Invisible Leviathan, to make "visible" the underlying relations of value and capital that presently structure the global economy. He finds much of great importance in Smith’s text, most notably the presentation of the complex problem in Marx of value as a "real" dissimulation of the social relations of production which it (mis)represents. For Smith, this problem is not simply theoretical but is experienced as a reality for the world’s working class, as market exchange and the movements of capital hide of necessity their exploitative and competitive character through the value form of an "equal exchange" of supposedly disembodied, free-floating commodities. Castree approves of Smith’s bringing to light the "invisible Leviathan" of global capitalism as a counterpoint to the "invisible hand" of the market, "whose beneficence is so vaunted by the forces of the Right." But while he esteems highly Smith’s work of making legible the value ontology of living capitalism, he also finds Smith taking up a resolutely (and largely one-sided) modernist position on these value relations. In Castree’s view, Smith reserves for himself the role of an Archimedean observer of a capitalist economy, with all the privileges of clear, unified, and "better" sight this reservation entails. Likewise, Castree sees in Smith aspects common to much modernist Marxism for which a capitalist economy is a "pure," autonomous, and ubiquitous entity capable of existing "in-itself" and for which an undifferentiated subject of history (the working class or humanity) is this economy’s "real" product and ultimate opponent. From his critique of Smith’s modernist aporias, Castree turns to an appreciation of Gayatri Spivak’s more textually centered speculations on value and economic relations. In Spivak, Castree sees some of the necessary remedies to Smith’s modernist renderings of value, while still keeping the focus on the powerful vision that a Marxian value discourse implies for laying bare the structures of exploitation and inequality in world economic affairs. In Castree’s view, the innovation in Spivak’s meditations is her opening up of Marx’s concept of value to its own textual deconstructions and discontinuities, which consequently sheds light on the heterogeneity and diversity that are named by such critical social concepts as "use-value" and "class." Finally, Castree takes from Spivak’s discussions of the subaltern a reminder that while the task of making visible capitalist value relations is indispensable, the modernist fallacy of speaking from everywhere (and thus nowhere) must be jettisoned in preference to stressing "the active role of the investigator in making things seen," a view perhaps that can be contributed by postmodern readings of Marx.

Quoting from George Steiner’s review of Louis Althusser’s "autobiography," Philip Goldstein tells us that the sharp decline in interest in Althusser’s work is largely attributable to the terrible murder of his wife and his equally troubled, though perhaps pitiable, recurring bouts with depression until his death. This summing up of Althusser’s "irrationality" is, of course, then carried over into his theoretical work in defense of the scientificity of Marxism and his commitment to postmodern modes of theorizing. Or, as Goldstein suggests, Althusser’s life’s work is reduced to the symbol of his violent insanity since the irrationality this signifies comports well with the violence, horror, and abuse that, supposedly, are unleashed with the application of scientific Marxism to the construction of real communism and with the relativist nihilism of postmodern theory. Goldstein proceeds to explain the ways in which Althusser’s defense of Marxism’s scientific status was thoroughly opposed to the forms of Hegelian and Stalinist humanism and to rationalist notions of the unity of theory and practice that Althusser believed to be among the primary faults of orthodox Marxism and Soviet communism and that, only partly, led to the latter’s degeneration into a totalitarian nightmare. Goldstein argues that traditional (anti-Soviet) Marxists and critical theorists are joined, ironically, with conservative historians of the Soviet Union in believing that it was largely the misapplication of scientific practice and the betrayal of reason that led to this nightmare, not the uneven development of socioeconomic and ideological formations to which "postmodern" thinkers such as Althusser constantly called attention. Thus, Althusser’s accounts of communism are best suited, in Goldstein’s view, to combating the conservative totalitarian theories (and those of their "humanist" leftist compatriots) that remain the constituent elements of dominant approaches to the history of communism. From start to finish, Goldstein presents Althusser as a unique figure in contemporary Marxism, negotiating the difficult terrain of science and postmodernism, standing nearly alone in articulating a theory that "preserves the theoretical integrity of scientific Marxism but rejects any ‘foundational’ or humanist guarantees of truth."

This issue’s Remarx section begins with Peter d’Errico’s brief historical deconstruction of the doctrine of "corporate personality." D’Errico provides a synoptic overview of the last 150 years of legal decisions in which corporations enter into the law as personified entities with all the "rights" and "freedoms" of "natural persons." He traces two strands of legal thinking–one Germanic, the other Roman– in which corporate bodies are thought to be organic associations of "real" persons whose sovereignty is independent from the state (Germanic) or "fictional" persons whose legal status is owed to the state’s authority to create this artifice (Roman). In the United States, d’Errico argues, the fictional legal personhood of corporations became predominant over the course of the past century. This historical development has meant that rather than conforming to some notion of "real" or "natural persons," the identity of corporations as persons has become more abstract and defined by their economic activities within a capitalist market economy. Not only have corporations, then, been legitimized in abstract, political-economic terms, but the idea of "real" persons as entering into the law as "natural" has been subverted by the application of the same legal abstractions; as d’Errico puts it, natural persons and forms of human community have been subsumed to the fiction of the legal personality. D’Errico gives several examples of the law’s superimposition of abstract, market-based "legal personality on the existential reality of human beings." Using a civil rights case from the 1960s as a prime example, he shows that in the recent past the move to define legal personhood abstractly has both reflected and been determinative of market economic relations, as even the refusal to blacks of "equal access to public establishments" was corrected by the courts on the basis of their legally sanctioned status as consumers in a market economy, not their status as " real" humans with corresponding rights. In d’Errico’s view, the U. S. legal system is built on "personal property and formal equality of all ‘persons,"’ which has resulted in the ascendance of a corporate managerial class with sufficient power to "consume the earth in a mad war for global domination." His hope is that by challenging the doctrines of corporate personality, a renewal of discourse about freedom, equality, and alternative types of human organization will ensue.

The discursive turn that is closely associated with the advent of postmodernism has made it possible to treat categories that were thought to be fixed once and for all in the realm of the "real" as the sites of contradictions and a multiplicity of meanings. Anjan Chakrabarti and Ajit Chaudhury investigate two such cases in which previously anchored "ontological" social categories–the "working class" and the "subaltern"–have been reconceived according to postmodern logics of difference and discursivity. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury are particularly interested in how the category of the subaltern, which was developed extensively by the subaltern studies movement initiated by Ranajit Guha, has been rethought by Gayatri Spivak as a richly differentiated discursive space in a move to free it of its original essentialist connotations. Yet, as Chakrabarti and Chaudhury worry, Spivak’s rescue of the subaltern from its inscription within an essentialist power discourse and her recuperation of the concept as a "blank space within elitist (Western) texts" renders the subaltern as a category of "quiet other" that cannot speak for itself. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury compare this change of terrain from ontology to discourse with another: Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff’s rendition of class not as a "noun," but as a name for a kind of process and as an adjective that describes a multiplicity of positions that any agent can occupy within the field of surplus production, appropriation, and distribution. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury see strong similarities between Spivak’s move to treat the subaltern as a discursive fiction, not as a "thing," and Resnick and Wolff’s rejection of the ontological fixity of the concept of "working class." They state as their own goal carving out a space for Marxian categories of class within the broader postmodern space of the subaltern. Their concern is that Spivak’s notion of the subaltern does not so much make space for contextual concepts such as Resnick and Wolff’s "working class" as it omits or possibly even prevents their emergence since, unlike the general category of the subaltern, the "working class" concept of Resnick and Wolff can "speak" as part of the "inner voice of the West." Chakrabarti and Chaudhury also detect in Spivak’s work and in that of many other theorists of subalternity the view that Third World intellectuals and their "enlightened" comrades in the West are complicit in the continued subordination of the non-West. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury regard the reintroduction of such morally loaded and essentialist distinctions as a negation of an overdetermined logic in which the Third World is always already the West and vice versa. The consequence of this reintroduction, they conclude, is to "stifle a political strategy that seeks realignment of people on a global scale" and therefore to prevent the awakening of a new internationalism in opposition to global capitalism.

In our Review section, Loren Kruger furnishes an account of several recent art exhibitions scattered across postapartheid South Africa. Kruger sees these exhibits as embedded within a continuing struggle to bring art and history into productive dialogue even while visions of the new are in the process of formation. The historical residue of apartheid and the related complicity of foreign and domestic capital are, of course, the subject of some of what she sees. After all, as she points out, it is not just self-indulgence that makes official exhibitions and festivals the sites of familiar narratives of sacrifice, terror, and liberation. Rather, in an active process of creating a historical memory and taking stock of the numerous (and often less-known) personal, local, and domestic effects of the struggle, artists in South Africa investigate the past to produce an archive "which contains a multitude of histories rather than a single official history." In Cape Town she visits the Fault Lines project, designed to "cast a critical as well as affirmative eye on the processes of history, memory, and commemoration" on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Soweto Uprising of 1976. She finds entries that unwittingly continue the process of historical forgetting as well as ones that are able to present the past as "texture," something that remains yet reconfigures the terrible moments of the mass movement meeting police brutality. Passing on to Grahamstown, she selects for review exhibitions, forming the National Arts Festival, that range from those that register and acquiesce in the commodification of history and those whose elements (photographs of "New Africans" taken between 1890 and 1950, for instance) demonstrate that the historical desires of South African blacks to become citizens and partake of the fruits of commodity society were capable of both documentation and abandonment. Kruger is partial to the work of Trevor Makhoba, a young artist whose paintings move through history revealing hidden secrets, shame, and desire within social dramas. Several of the prints accompanying her review are Makhoba’s work, and they are both disturbing and amusing for mixing "sex and power in explosive proportions" while also including "critical reminders of the social and economic factors affecting women’s and men’s freedom of movement" in South Africa. She ends by reflecting on a video that does not tarry in the past as a means to disguise the ills of the present, as its animated subject–History of the Main Complaint–suggests that the historical relationship of apartheid and capitalism cannot be set aside with the demise of the former. Commenting on what she calls the ANC’s "recent neoliberal turn," Kruger sees this animated work of historical allegory as art bearing witness that "the end of apartheid does not yet mean freedom for all."

The Editors

In this issue, we start with Theodore Burczak’s defense of socialism in the aftermath of the past decade’s global political changes and the renewed theoretical notability and popularity of Friedrich A. Hayek, surely one of the chief architects of modern neoliberal and libertarian thought. Hayek conducted a lifelong attack on any social theory that called for social engineering via government intervention in order to bring about "distributive justice." Yet, as Burczak points out, what may be less known is that much of Hayek’s onslaught against socialism stemmed from his "postmodern" view of knowledge and the consequent impossibility of a government enacting policies in pursuit of justice on putatively "rational" foundations. Hayek’s skepticism about socialism is consonant with postmodern Marxist critiques of the rationality, universality, and certainty that are supposedly inherent in and exclusive to central planning (as opposed to the "anarchy" and indifference of the market). Burczak takes as his main challenge, then, contra Hayek, constructing a theoretical defense of the traditional Marxian values of ending exploitation in the workplace and of creating social equality through coordinated action that builds upon the Hayekian/postmodern view of knowledge. Burczak sets out to accomplish his task by arguing for a definition of socialism that is not restricted to the democratic, collective appropriation of surplus by workers at the site of production, but also concerns itself with distributive justice within society as a whole. Burczak judges that arguments (such as those of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff in RM, Spring 1988 and of Stephen Cullenberg in RM, Summer 1992) for collective appropriation that are derived from a labor theory of value are limited since they leave intact the presumption of the "right" of capital to hire labor and the "myth" that this right entitles capitalists to be the initial appropriators and owners of everything produced by labor. Sidestepping longstanding debates between Hayekian Austrians and Marxists on "objective" versus "subjective" value theories, Burczak calls upon Marxists to abandon their defense of collective appropriation on the basis of the labor theory of value and to replace it instead with a "labor theory of property," one that argues for the fundamental right—which cannot be "alienated"—of laborers to appropriate the entire product. He passes on from his advocacy of democratic, collectively appropriating firms to an original defense of distributive justice. Burczak shows that many of Hayek’s objections to social justice "and its embrace of some type of end-state principle of equality" can be countered partly by noting the contradictions within Hayek’s own work on the responsibility of a community to meet basic human needs and partly by arguing for a notion of the "common good" that identifies what is empirically shared crossculturally, or at least within a nation, as the qualities and capabilities of humans. Burczak attempts to put forth an argument for social policy in pursuit of justice and equality that avoids, on the one hand, the modernist commitment to a universal human essence and, on the other, moral relativism. His reconceptualization of the meaning of socialism is intended to "offer some common grounds for communication between Hayekian-inspired libertarians and postmodern Marxist socialists—both of whom challenge the . . . modernist, pretenses of traditional socialist thought."

We suspect that other leftists will continue to register their reactions in these pages to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. As we did in RM, Winter 1995 (see articles by Pierre Macherey and J. K. Gibson-Graham), we present here another take on this touchstone text. Tom Lewis zeros in on the politics of "hauntology" that Derrida announces in his grand narrative of Marxism’s obsession with and inscription in the figure of the "specter." Lewis’s perspective is that of a critical reader of Derrida’s politics, as he sets forth principled objections to what he perceives to be Derrida’s endeavor to displace Marxism by Derrida’s own "hauntological," deconstructive politics. Lewis finds these politics wanting in a number of ways. First, he sees Specters of Marx as "constituting no more and no less than an elaborate philosophical rationale for the abandonment of revolutionary socialism in favor of a new ‘true’ socialism." Additionally, he extracts from a close reading of the text, and then rebuts, Derrida’s appeal to keep alive Marxism in spirit only. As Lewis shows, Derrida’s gloomy appraisal of Marxism’s continued haunting by its own fear of ghosts and its inevitable rush to posit the pure presence of an historically based ontology of "materialism" leads Derrida to conclude that Marxism is ill-suited to grasp and contend with the current configuration of a dislocated, "spectral" capitalism. But this analysis, he points out, is derived from Derrida’s entanglement in Marxist and nonMarxist metaphysics and very little from a concrete look at and evaluation of present economic and political circumstances. For Lewis, Derrida’s reduction of the spirit of Marxism to "self-critique" and the jettisoning of most everything else in the classical Marxist corpus gives the lie to Derrida’s proclamation of "mourning Marxism" rather than wishing it simply dead. In Lewis’s view, Specters of Marx "relentlessly drives verbal stakes through the heart of marxism’s claims to provide a viable knowledge of history capable of grounding an adequate practice of social transformation." But it does so, he says, "without anywhere demonstrating why such concepts as ‘mode of production’ or ‘social class’ no longer provide a critical purchase on reality." Lewis places Derrida’s call for a "New International" within the context of the appearance of post-Marxist "new true socialism" with striking similarities to the "true socialism" that Marx and Engels excoriated in The German Ideology, ironically a text featured prominently in Specters of Marx. In contrast to Derrida’s decision that the time has now passed for Marxism’s leading concepts to be anything but spooks in search of their own dissolution, Lewis depicts current global conditions as confirming the continued relevance of "classical marxism and its tradition of revolution from below."

Murray E. G. Smith insists that by continuing to ignore and dismiss summarily the vast writings of Leon Trotsky and his many and diverse followers, leftists can only contribute to silencing what he believes to be "some of the best responses that could be given to the current ideological offensive of world capitalism against the fundamental ideas of socialism" after the demise of "actually existing socialism" or its "deformation" at the hands of Stalinist parties and states. Smith’s article is an entreaty to "revisit" Trotsky and to ponder seriously the wisdom of several of his key theses and predictions, such as his characterization of the Soviet Union and its satellites as "transitional formations" in which precapitalist, capitalist, and socialist economic and class elements were combined under the tyrannical leadership of a "bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state." Smith makes a strong case for the accuracy of Trotsky’s prognosis that faced with crisis and a weakened proletariat after years of Stalinist rule, the Soviet Union would be pushed either in the direction of the full restoration of capitalism or toward the less likely outcome of worker democracy and an extension of the struggle for world socialism. Smith also attempts to combat the "prejudice" he sees in the persistent identification of communism with its Stalinist expression since, as he notes, the notion that all communism had to offer took bodily form with Stalin’s rule has led even independent socialists to conclude, in this period of retreat, that such successful innovations as central planning and the collectivization of productive property are hopelessly inferior to markets and private ownership. Smith brings to light, again, the importance of Trotsky’s "law of combined and uneven development" as a founding concept to understand how the melange of socioeconomic modes of production came to exist in such "backward" areas as the Soviet Union and how such an uneasy formation—isolated by a hostile and predatory capitalist world—would be prone simultaneously to totalitarian rule as well as real gains in productivity and workers’ living conditions. In other words, as Smith argues, the current "admission" by leftists of the implausibility and failure of a vast array of socialist economic transformations is only possible on the condition that we ignore contrary voices such as Trotsky’s and accept the self-serving, and now defeatist, "propaganda" of both apologists for capitalism and erstwhile, former Stalinists. Smith also advances a call for a new look at Trotsky as a remedy to what he regards as the misplaced "anti-Bolshevism" of the champions of "new social movements." In reply to "those . . . who would collapse Stalinism and Trotskyism into the same Leninist chowder," Smith reminds us of Trotsky’s admonitions against the "Stalinist" origins of many of these new leftists’ favorite planks such as coalition politics, "sectoralism" in the form of identity politics, and market socialism. Acknowledging the "marginality" of Trotskyism, Smith asks leftists to reconsider Trotsky’s legacy and to put aside past judgments that the intractable splits that have longed plagued international Trotskyism (but which Smith regards as understandable and meaningful) are reason enough to renounce the pertinence of Trotsky today.

The Remarx section begins with a dialogue of sorts. Ronald Aronson leads off with a summary and extension of the main points he elucidated in his book After Marxism and his article in RM, Summer 1992. In his contribution here, Aronson calls for a "relativized Marxism," one that is reconciled to the passing of Marxism as a master narrative of the march of history and as strategy to unite and liberate all oppressed peoples under the vanguard leadership of an international proletariat. Aronson explains that reconciling oneself to his passing—and engaging in a bit of collective mourning in the process—means that Marxists need to "offer our insights, if at all, in a newly humble spirit, listening to others as much as seeking to teach and no longer seeing ourselves as the natural leaders of, but now as only a part of a new and multifaceted coalition." It also means that Marxists need to "explicitly forsake the authority of Marx for our new theoretical and practical direction" and eschew outlooks, like that of Resnick and Wolff, that claim that "reductionism-as-project" was never central or necessary to Marxism’s power and that Marxism can (re)establish itself on a nondeterminist basis. Aronson calls for a collective "letting go" of the past successes and failures of Marxism as a hegemonic project, and advises Marxists to go forward learning "to understand themselves as representing a single strand of an eventually pluralistic movement—lower-case marxists, proponents of class among other things." He is concerned, though, not to let this more humble version of Marxism as one among many in an always changing coalition be read as a call for separatism and micropolitics. Indeed, he asserts the necessity for some general collective movement if the continuing deprivations of capitalism, racism, sexism, and much else are to be effectively opposed. He looks to past—often interlinked—struggles for "universal rights" as a guide to create and maintain in the present a new left movement in which multiple identities and objectives do not override the possibility of common purpose. Aronson’s prospect for social change is long-term, noting that is may take centuries to achieve (if at all) much of what Marxists and other freedom fighters regard as something close to socialism, but he offers this assessment in a "spirit of optimism" that draws "together our marxist riches and the strands of postMarxist radicalism in order to move beyond the sterile opposition of the old forms of unity and the new forms of particularity."

The next two pieces are comments by Richard Wolff and Antonio Callari on Aronson’s estimation of Marxism "after Marxism" and his prolegomenon to the "next Left." Appreciating much of Aronson’s call to scale down the past pretensions of a universalistic Marxism, Wolff also has several bones to pick with him. One is that Aronson sees the need to move "outside" Marxism to conduct the antiessentialist move toward a more pluralistic Left, while Wolff argues that much of Aronson’s discussion could be seen better as an argument within Marxism since many of the positions he finds "outside" have been in play, in some cases almost from Marxism’s inception, throughout its history. But perhaps more crucially, certainly for Marxism’s role within the political coalition for which Aronson calls, Wolff sees "a kind of excess pendulum swing" such that Marxism becomes "one among many different, multiple strands within what sounds like a kind of additive agglomeration of micromovements." It then seems magical, in his view, that cohesion could occur from this simple "addition," but if such unity and direction imply negotiating different organizational strategies and structures, then it should not be possible or advisable for Marxism to shy away from enunciating and struggling for its own conceptions of commonality, hegemony, and the like. Wolff worries that Aronson’s mea culpa on behalf of historical Marxism will single out Marxism unjustifiably as having to be careful in the process of creating new political movements. Finally, he finds fault with Aronson’s reasoning that Marxism has been rejected by other social movements because of the tendency of Marxists in the past to subordinate them to a working-class vanguard. As Wolff notes, in addition to the fact that many within the post-Marxist camp have ignored or denigrated class, this rejection cannot be laid solely at the feet of Marxists since there are copious other social forces that, for all too long, have pushed and seduced activists engaged in "other" struggles to repudiate any connection to Marxism.

Callari pursues a slightly different tack. Focusing on After Marxism as the fullest expression of Aronson’s ideas, he discerns two forms of argument that constitute that text. Callari notes that Aronson moves back and forth from "objective," dispassionate description of the misfortunes of Marxism to a more "confessional tale" of Aronson’s personal history on the Marxian left. Detecting the "prophetic intentions" of Aronson’s text, he sees the two forms of argument working, ironically, to reinstate the exalted status of "classical Marxism" rather than to announce its passing. Like Wolff, Callari chides Aronson for his reduction of "Marxism" to its classical, modernist forms, but he goes on to state that Aronson’s rigidity in identifying Marxism purely as orthodoxy sets the stage for a messianic appeal and an act of Resurrection in Aronson’s call to mourn and then transcend this thing now dead. He reads Aronson’s text as largely about his own "psychocultural habits and needs" to ritually kill and then to mourn (classical) Marxism as an embodiment of the prophetic dimension Aronson identifies as Marxism’s crucial moral side. Aronson’s call for Marxists to look bravely into the abyss, having to now "think and be on their own," is interpreted by Callari as overstated and, in any event, questionable in light of the history of so many Marxisms’ "oppositionality" under the worst conditions. In Callari’s summation, Aronson’s views, "rather than allowing Marxism to evolve and to change in line with some of the new political and theoretical conditions he identifies, can keep Marxism stuck in its official and inadequate representations." Perhaps readers will wish to jump in on this important debate.

The last item in the Remarx section is Conor Kostick’s overview of the historical and contemporary situation of Marxism in Ireland. Kostick takes us through the insights of Marx and Engels—whose writings on the ruination of peasant farming and domestic industry at the hands of nineteenth-century British imperialism and incipient capitalist control over the Irish economy marked the beginning of specifically Marxist analyses of Ireland—to the present modest revival of a distinctly Irish marxism. He demonstrates convincingly that the various nationalist and working class movements over the course of the past century have provided vexatious and immutable problems for Marxist theory and political practice. As Kostick shows, at key moments Marxists have been challenged to contribute conjunctural analyses in which Republican and Unionist sentiments and strategies have had to be interrogated for their class content and implications. Thus, for example, he touches upon the leadership of James Connolly, the Irish socialist who believed that the nationalist movement at the turn of the century had to be fused with the growing Irish industrial working class. But with the British repression and partition that followed the Easter Uprising of 1916 (and Connolly’s execution), as he notes, Marxists were confronted once again to reconsider the fate of the Irish working-class movement in the context of Republicanism, the increased divisions in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics, and the success of Ulster Unionists in conducting pogroms against the Left and establishing a new state. He brings us forward through the decline of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s to current analyses and political actions made possible by a renewed desire for a nonsectarian form of politics among Northern Irish workers, by the increased involvement of workers in the peace movement, and by the move of Sinn Fein toward state power which, in Kostick’s opinion, is "leaving a vacuum that is potentially open to the Left." These analyses and actions are also occurring in the Republic of Ireland where "a large radicalization of Irish society has come with the continued growth of the urban working class" and where there has been increased worker involvement in the turbulent abortion and divorce debates. He summarizes recent Marxist theoretical work as significant in targeting the "revolutionary potential of Protestant workers" and in rejecting the prior view of the South as a neocolonial state, for which nationalism was thought to take precedence over workers’ complaints and desires. The increased militancy of workers in both Irish states, says Kostick, "is the source for a cautious optimism that Marxism can win a growing audience in Ireland today."

Correspondence from Sue Penna and Martin O’Brien and a reply from Teresa Ebert are the last two entries in this issue. Penna and O’Brien write that Ebert’s article "The Knowable Good: Post-al Politics, Ethics, and Red Feminism" in RM, Summer 1995, is a prime example of "the current reflex dismissal of ‘post’ perspectives" that is growing to a crescendo. They make clear that while they are "highly sympathetic to the notion of a transformative politics and agree that the exploitative dynamics of capitalism are of crucial analytical importance," they also believe that "poststructuralist critiques of marxism’s historical subject and its political agency, the mode of production as the casual mechanism of inequality, and the capitalist state as the organizing locus of power are neither trivial nor intellectually illegitimate." Penna and O’Brien take issue with what they regard as Ebert’s failure to rethink Marxism in the face of such critiques, and instead to lump all "post-al" thought into a single category of idealist claptrap that at best distracts from the class struggle and at worst operates as the thinly veiled voice of capitalist apology (disguised as "left critique"). They are most critical of what they believe is Ebert’s unwillingness to engage seriously the complexities that postmodernists and others discern in the once simply rendered Marxian concepts of class, subjectivity, agency, and power. They also argue, versus Ebert, that post-al politics is far from an expression of bourgeois individualism and class collaboration, as its emphasis on the "lived complexity of social and political relations or the historic marginalizations that have structured modern projects of ‘emancipation"’ is crucial to successful struggles for social change and justice. Penna and O’Brien dispute Ebert’s rendition of post-ality and its focus on difference and discourse as representations of "atomized, isolated individuality." In this generalization, they find a "misrecognition" of post-al politics. In contrast to Ebert’s reading, Penna and O’Brien assert the productivity for leftists of seeing post-al concepts of difference as "socioculturally produced asymmetries of power"—quite "material"—and as constitutive of forms of agency and identity for which "cultural politics becomes far more significant in the theory and practice of transformation" than Ebert and her call for a "red feminism" based on classical marxism would seem to allow.

Ebert responds both directly and more broadly to Penna and O’Brien. She sees the "confidence" of their critique as another sign of post-ality’s rise to orthodoxy: "its secure position of power in the philosophical and scientific establishment." She does not agree with their reading of her text as simply "restating" but not "rethinking Marxism," though she explains that for her such a rethinking is more a "boundary move to place classical Marxism in the zone of emerging new capitalist contradictions (including post-al theory)" than revising Marxism "into one of the hybrid marxisms that will abandon the idea of totality and describe . . . contradictions as autonomous sites of the social." Ebert situates Penna and O’Brien’s comments within a set of conceptual problems and positions that, in her view, sharply separate legitimately Marxist doctrines from "bourgeois avant-gardism." On the issue of materialism and materiality, she criticizes the substitution of the praxis of labor by "discourse" and "difference" in post-al theory since, in her view, "discourses codify and represent surplus labor in ways that legitimate its extraction" and therefore post-ality negates "the history of labor and the way in which the labor of the proletariat is exploited." Treating discourse as material has the added effect of performing "what the idealist theory of the material has always done: it places human practices outside history and in the (un)conscious of the subject of desire." Responding to Penna and O’Brien, Ebert also defends her adherence to a "base/superstructure" conception of the relations among culture, politics, and the class-based economy, calling it "the most productive explanatory model of the socioeconomics of culture." Post-al theory, in her view, replaces historical materialism’s regular and deep structural causality and scientific explanation with "singularity" and "multidirectional description." Penna and O’Brien join other post-al theorists, according to Ebert, in shifting "the analysis of the sociohistorical from [an] underlying structure of labor to individual singularities," thereby "legitimat[ing] exploitation." Finally, she locates their comments within the new orthodoxy of Foucauldian approaches in which power, rather than "being derived from ‘production’ practices . . . is autonomous and has its own internal logic." Once again, she regards the consequent" mystifications of ‘agency’ and the localities of change" to be "complicit with capitalism" rather than resistant to it. In her rebuke of Penna and O’Brien, Ebert concludes with a reassertion of her "red feminism," one that puts "the binary of classes in the forefront of social practices."

The Editors

In this issue, we open with Andrew Parker’s reflections on the "prehistory" of a text still in the making: his own Re-Marx. His look back at the past decade during which he has "rewritten" this text three different times has less the feel of a self-critique or self-analysis (though it has those moments, too) than a conjunctural investigation of the failures and fortunes of Marxism and deconstruction and especially their relation during this period. Parker is clear that the past decade has not been particularly kind to either Marxism or deconstruction, as the former has fallen on hard times as part and parcel of the demise of numerous Communist regimes, while the latter has been blunted by its "calcification" in the U.S. academy as well as by such scandals as the revelation of Paul de Man’s wartime, pro-Nazi journalism. Yet, as he points out, it is in the context of these developments that an additional element has appeared which, if truth be told, has also been part cause for Parker’s return to his own text while reenlivening interest in the Marx/deconstruction relation: the publication of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Parker’s own project during this decade has changed, at least in part in relation to these and other events, from seeking "to approach Marxism and deconstruction on the model of neither their difference nor their sameness, but in terms of a tension between difference and sameness that resists dialectical resolution," to pursuing the question of the conflicts between class-based and representational concepts of politics, and finally to bringing to light the history of Marx’s own writing. While these phases do not perfectly correspond to or anticipate the major events of the decade, they do indicate another history, one that began with promise in the early 1980s for there to erupt a literature dedicated to finding intersections and forms of productive interchange between Marxism and deconstruction but that ran into the post-Marxist refusal of Marxism by the end of that decade. In the aftermath, Parker experienced a "double surprise" with the appearance of an important interview with Derrida on Marxism (and his relation to Louis Althusser) and with the publication of Specters of Marx, both of which brought forth new questions and mixed emotions. He found in the Marx-struck Derrida (as well in Gayatri Spivak, Derrida’s predecessor over the past three decades in considering the Marx/deconstruction relation) the "undeconstructively symmetrical" and familiar debate concerning Marx the metaphysician versus Marx the first deconstructer, early and late Marx. or continuity (one Marx) versus discontinuity (two or more Marxes). Parker’s own late attention to Marx’s writing—and specifically to his early forays into "literature"—is intended, in fact, to bring us out of this insistent impasse, to raise the question of how Marx’s literary procedures take leave of literature and begin to sign themselves as science, and with a difference. Perhaps his attention to Marx’s own writerly prehistory thus marks the end of the prehistory of the Marx/deconstruction conjunction, and perhaps as well, the end (or beginning) of his own Re-Marx.

Harriet Fraad asks the question, why is incest as a form of sexual child abuse so prevalent in U.S. society despite its being widely regarded as an extreme taboo? Searching to bring some insight and also a sense of political determination to this issue—one brought to the fore historically by the feminist movement—she outlines the conditions of existence of incest ranging from the ideological status of children as "property" of their parents to the narcissism that seems to be the most common psychological profile of incest abusers. In her practice as a psychotherapist, Fraad has seen many clients who are the victims of father-daughter incest, and she presents one such typical case as the focus of her discussion here. Fraad is attuned to the complex forces and effects that surround paternal incest, but she includes among them— perhaps for the first time—the class ideologies and processes that permit "feudal" patriarchs to practice sexual abuse on serflike children (both dependent on the "lord," and obligated to return the favor through "love," devotion, and silence). She shows nicely the various and sometimes competing ideologies inhabiting current gender roles, diverse class and economic positions, legal practices, and religious discourses, which combine to produce both the incest abuser and his prey within the confines of that most idealized institution, the family. As Fraad points out, the very idealization and separation of the family and its concerns from public scrutiny along with the scarcity of public resources to deal with incest "creates an atmosphere in which children are prisoners in families whose sexual mistreatment of them will be concealed." And, despite studies which show that there is a higher risk of incest to girls living in higher-income families than lower-income ones, the access to private resources of richer folk to deal with or hide incest leads to the familiar result in U.S. society that the majority of perpetrators who are caught and convicted are poor and nonwhite. Fraad also details the human costs of incest to young women who are more prone to depression, entering into dangerous relationships with abusive men, neglecting (perhaps even hating) the needs of their own children, and much else. For Fraad and many of us, these costs are too dear. But the changes required to lower them are extensive, while necessary; in Fraad’s words, "we may repress the extent to which children are incested because if we faced the practice of incest, we as a nation might have to rescue our children from the exploitation and oppression they suffer in our most sentimentalized institution, the nuclear family."

The fear of the debilitating effects of postmodernism’s relativizing tendencies, or worse, the claim that postmodernity has enshrined commodification and the subjugation of aesthetic and ethical values to that of capitalist economy have had the result of placing the question of value at the forefront of current left theoretical and practical endeavors. The recovery of value as a prerequisite for political action has now become a standard battle cry for Marxists and others who have sought refuge from the "decentering" set off by postmodern interventions. Roby Rajan squarely confronts the issue of the familiar tripartite separation of economic, aesthetic, and ethical value, and locates in the rise of modernity the origins of the presumed autonomy of these realms (and the marginalization of aesthetics, if not ethics, in the recent spread of a global "postmodern culture," created by unbounded capitalist economic expansion). As Rajan notes, this separation is decried by Marxists not simply for the consequent political impotence and irrelevance of contemporary art and the abstract universalism of a lofty, "indifferent" ethics. It is denounced as well because of the synthesis that supposedly has been achieved lately within which artistic productions and ethical platforms are thoroughly subsumed to the capitalist dynamics of worldwide exchange-value expansion and profit creation. The call either to accept this subsumption as fait accompli (and expunge from art all aspirations of transcendence and/or opposition) or to confront this subsumption "through a heave of aesthetic power," as Rajan puts it, is to miss the possibilities of critique that are still present in art, though largely constrained by the form of its autonomy. He finds a viable critical position for Marxists—one that detects the subtle dialectic between aesthetics, economics, and ethics—in Theodor Adorno’s work. Most important, Rajan assigns to Adorno the position that while economy holds sway as dominant in the tripartite, modernist separation, this does not imply that art, in particular, is completely preempted by the instrumental rationality of market economy, in which all objects and others are subsumed to the will and needs of utility-seeking subjects. For Adorno, says Rajan, art is that which uniquely encompasses both rationality and "mimesis," the ability of something or someone to "assimilate itself" to another. This assimilation is different from attempts of subjects to subdue objects, and it allows for "nonidentity" and "dissonance" to comprise the truth value and the ethical stance of all art worthy of the name. Such inharmonious, even "irrational" art, says Rajan following Adorno, while trapped within its own autonomy and subject to economic forces, is nonetheless capable of interrogating critically the separation of the three realms of value that constitute the "value regime" of modern capitalism. So, Rajan concludes, "while art’s own praxis is devoid of any direct, socially transformative effect in the era of the hegemony of economy . . . [it] nevertheless keeps alive within modernity a reminder as to what a nondominating mode of cognition and a nondifferentiated praxis might be like."

Juha Koivisto and Veikko Pietilä present a summary for an English-speaking audience of the laudatory and extensive work during the past two decades of Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Projekt Ideologie-Theorie on specifying and utilizing for empirical analysis the Marxian concept of ideology. Koivisto and Pietilä credit Haug and his colleagues with preserving by synthesizing, but also going beyond, several different strands of past Marxist attempts to theorize ideology, most importantly those of Marx and Engels and also of Althusser and Gramsci. Similar to Marx and Engels and to Althusser, Haug and Projekt Ideologie Theorie see the ideological not as the sphere of consciousness, but rather as an ensemble of practices and social relations that articulate consciousness with other reified social forms such as the state. Specifically, Koivisto and Pietilä focus on Haug’s notion that "ideological powers" are those that emerge out of the "real" contradictions of society to produce "socialization from above" as a way of resolving those contradictions without violence, but in favor of dominant classes and groups. Thus, for example, the fractures in real communities that stem from the emergence of classes may be displaced and then seemingly "resolved" in the imagined community of the state, itself a quintessential ideological power. This view of ideology, while similar to Althusser’s "ideological state apparatuses," differs decisively from the Althusserian concept in seeing ideology not only as standing above society, but also as a set of "celestial" institutions and practices that can indeed be transformed and ultimately eliminated by an anti-ideological, communal movement. Koivisto and Pietilä use Haug’s notion of ideology and its elimination to shed light on Richard Rorty’s recent appeals to a "mythic America" in his critique of multiculturalist activism. Rejecting as supremely ideological Rorty’s resort to a unified populace—disciplining discontented "others" into remaining subalterns within a largely white, suburban America—Koivisto and Pietilä entertain alternative visions of how to create community in the face of ideological powers. Here, too, they turn to Haug and Projekt Ideologie-Theorie to find Gramscian notions of counterhegemony and historical blocs built on the anti-ideological strategy of helping individuals caught by oppression and exploitation to "develop their own social capacity for action" through a new articulation of social forces.

Paulo Freire’s death this past year took from the world, in Henry Giroux’s estimation, "a grand figure who had a wonderful sense of life, living, and passion." In his remembrance of Freire for our Remarx section, Giroux pays tribute by recalling Freire’s lifelong, deep commitment and contributions to radical democratic pedagogy. Giroux is concerned to make clear that Freire’s work can be a superb guide to democratic educators, but only if they resist the temptation to reduce his writings to a simple method of "good" teaching techniques. He argues that the lessons of Freire can be learned and taught only by adopting a stance of "critical respect rather than reverence." Freire’s writings and teachings exemplify a spirit of hope and a passion for justice and equality that build upon the idea that the poor and oppressed can and must act to create democratic movements and institutions. In this regard, as Giroux notes, Freire’s work transcends the narrow bounds of a pedagogical method, but rather opens up to a "social theory whose aim is the liberation of the oppressed as historical subjects through a critical educational process that involves making the pedagogical more political and the political more pedagogical." Giroux shows as well Freire’s distaste for the simple-minded (and often illusory) refusals of pedagogical "authority" that some readers of his work have taken as his lasting contribution. Not wishing to romanticize the experiences of dominated groups, including students, Freire called for a critical pedagogy that didn’t stop with shifting power from teachers to students, but also demanded of teachers that they "assert authority in the service of creating a participatory and democratic classroom." As Giroux notes, the process of democratizing the classroom is not in aid of making students "feel good," but instead is intended to make students confront actively and critically their place in society. Freire’s work, says Giroux, "is always unsettled and unsettling, restless yet engaging"; his gift was "to elaborate a theory of social change and engagement that was neither vanguardist nor populist." It would be a terrible loss, in this age of corporatist attacks on democratic education, to allow Freire’s voice to be silenced with his passing. As Giroux concludes, not only would such silencing be the democratic left’s great loss, as it searches for strategies to face the forces of privatization and elitism intent on dismantling public education, but we would deny ourselves the pleasure—or perhaps the responsibility—of remembering a "presence in the world" that "turned poetry into politics, and humility into a requisite for political engagement."

Cyberspace has become a primary site of natural and social scientific research. This is best seen in the use of computer simulations to create artificial life and, more recently, artificial societies. In his contribution to Remarx, Shai Ophir considers the possibilities for demonstrating the proclivity of human societies for forms of cooperation through experiments on replicating evolutionary processes within cyberspace. Ophir calls attention to several successful simulations that, to his mind, provide solid evidence that cooperation among animal agents (including humans) "emerges in evolutionary processes and in complex adaptive systems." He adds that this cooperation "is unconscious to itself. It is only a mechanism, which is part of the behavior of the most primitive creatures on earth." And he adds that computer simulations can lend support to an additional claim. Reviewing experimental work on artificial societies in which trade figures prominently, Ophir notes that the disequilibria that are endemic to these models may be resolved by the imposition of "social rules" and resource sharing that would introduce greater equality among trading agents. Ophir suggests, then, that computer simulations may allow us to "realize" in one venue the socialist vision that forms of collective concern and sharing may join cooperation as cornerstones of social evolution and stability.

When the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA) began the work of creating RM back in the early 1980s, we understood from the outset that our best hope for success and survival depended on being able to constitute a working collective that would share tasks, rotate jobs, and periodically reinvigorate the journal with new ideas through the accession of different people to positions of primary responsibility. We also understood that without access to major sources of funding and in the face of changing political currents, we needed to draw on our own labor as the main means of RM’s production and dissemination. From our initial issue in 1988 this labor has sustained us through nine complete volumes. From the years we produced RM entirely ourselves (and "ourselves" here included the magnificent, unselfish labor of a team of then graduate students and some of our editors) to the present issue, we have benefited enormously from the willingness of so many people to work several full-time jobs to put out RM.

True to our original intent, during the past year and a half, some important transitions have been occurring within RM. To begin with, we have finally been able to hire a managing editor, Jacquelyn Southern, whose impeccable work on production, taking over from the equally capable (but unpaid) Carole Biewener, has made us all wonder how we were able to manage without her. As another crucial change, we have had peaceful, harmonious transitions to new section editors. After having helped to inaugurate and set an exciting tone for the Remarx and Book Review sections respectively, both Rick Wolff and Steve Cullenberg have now stepped down from these positions and have been replaced by Carole Biewener (Remarx) and Rob Garnett (Book Reviews). Several years before that, Harriet Fraad, who in the spirit of adventure agreed to take on the initial, monumental task of making art and fiction a regular part of RM, also stepped down as arts editor and was replaced by Susan Jahoda. In one of our most crucial changes, our longtime treasurer (and fiscal conservative), John Roche, also stepped down a few years back and was replaced by Jonathan Diskin (no wastrel either!). We have gained new members for our editorial board each year, and have seen others "retire," some for a short period of time. This past year, valuable, longtime members Enid Arvidson (who continues to work on subscriptions with our publisher), Julie Graham, and John Roche stepped off the Board and into other AESA projects. We have also recontracted for several more years with our first-class publisher, Guilford Publications. And finally, with the next issue we will have two new main editors of Rethinking MARXISM, Steve Cullenberg and David Ruccio, both of whom have been there from the beginning and have already made countless contributions to the life and health of RM. In David’s case, as we noted in RM, Spring 1994, his work was tantamount for many years to serving as coeditor, though this was never stated in print. As for me, I remain on the Board involved in several of RM/AESA’s nascent projects, including a book series entitled Articulations that I will coedit with Julie Graham and Kathie Gibson.

As a result of these changes, RM is now positioned to expand upon its initial promise of serving as the outlet for all those many projects that are under way dedicated to keeping Marxism(s) alive in all fields and in many registers, but most crucially to extend the reformulations—especially nondeterminist Marxism—that we have championed. It must be said that our ability to survive and indeed flourish in the current hostile climate is at least in part testimony to the commitment and hard work that our collective has been able to muster. Though events can change in a flash, we have until now been peculiarly fortunate to have expanded steadily our readership and to have brought dispersed Marxist scholars and activists into increased contact with one another through RM and the three massive international conferences (in 1989, 1992, and 1996) we sponsored. And this has occurred during a period in which many of our friends and comrades have faced harder times with the so-called demise of Marxism. Our own relative good fortune to date, we hope, will encourage others to see that the death of Marxism is greatly exaggerated.

Friends have commented to us that it is nice to have the wind at our backs, but of course one can’t always count on the wind to be up. So, while we will continue with the past practices that have gotten RM this far, readers can be sure that we have many ideas for innovation and exciting initiatives in motion, as befits the transitions described above. It is my firm belief that readers will be the prime beneficiary of the changes we are making as we prepare to enter our tenth year of publication. I am convinced our rejuvenated editorial collective will deliver a greatly improved journal whose impact on left scholarly and practical debates will be enhanced in the process.

As I step down as the editor of RM, my most public job is also coming to an end: writing the introductions to each issue. I have been amazingly thankful (though sometimes I treated it as my own, private purgatory) to have had this task, as I have learned more about Marxism in the process than I could ever have imagined. I am grateful to all the authors upon whose work I have commented, and I am thankful to readers as well for the goodwill you have shown, without much complaint, in allowing me to provide a bit of a road map to each issue. In writing the introductions, I strove to do two things. I attempted to highlight the theoretical contributions and contextual importance of each piece. I did this in the hope that putting the best foot forward for everything we published would make readers appreciate the difficult work involved in creating a meaningful Marxism and would make readers engage with each piece at its strong points rather than focus on its lapses. I also attempted to remain true to the goal and direction of the editorial board and its own collective sensibility. I tried to make clear that the editors had enormous respect for authors and readers, but also that we were most interested in projects of rethinking (and not just repeating) Marxism. SO, I scrutinized each piece for the connection to this project, even in debate and disagreement. As I have said, I learned an immense amount about Marxism and its current practitioners; on the basis of this experience, I am happy to report that there is an incredible vitality to contemporary Marxism though, of course, there are weaknesses and problems to boot.

It is out of our collective division of labor that I wrote the introductions, and it was always in relation to this collective that I envisioned the shape of each issue. While our editorial group has changed many times, it has also involved some people who have worked together and known each other for as much as thirty years, while others perhaps for as little as thirty weeks. But they have all been good friends and trusted comrades. Since our earliest days, I have been happily blessed to represent them in these pages. SO, it is with my deepest gratitude to this group as well as to the authors and readers who have built RM, that, for this one time, I sign the introduction under my own name.

The Editors

We launch the tenth volume of Rethinking MARXISM in the same year that we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Just weeks after its appearance, the uprising of French workers in the Paris Commune inaugurated the century and a half of challenges to and rethinkings of Marxian theory. Today as we approach the new millennium, we can look back and recognize that Marxism has been elaborated, transformed, and renewed many more times, and in many more ways, than we can possibly name. Indeed, not only is the text of Marxism being transformed rapidly in the current period, but so is its discursive form. Marx’s Capital can now be purchased as a multimedia CD-ROM and much of Marx and Engels’s work can be accessed, searched, and downloaded over the Internet. The Internet itself has become an important site for left and Marxist organizing as many Web sites, including our own (www.nd.edu/~remarx), announce conferences, provide electronic versions of published articles, present multimedia versions of political and cultural events more easily and inexpensively than before, and support worldwide dialogue and discussion about important political issues through chat rooms and e-mail lists. Recently, a new, “slick” version of the Manifesto has been produced and will be marketed prominently in Barnes and Noble’s superstores. All this has contributed to a rapidly changing left culture, what we might dub a culture of CyberMarx, along with new challenges and opportunities for a renewed Marxian and left global dialogue. Yet, the initial vision articulated by Marx and Engels still speaks powerfully to the wanton destruction and widespread injustices associated with the development of capitalism and, therefore, for the liberatory dreams of peoples and movements the world over. Marx and Engels in 1848 already recognized the incipient forces of globalization and, in today’s world, where instant communication and footloose corporations seem to define every dimension of our economy and culture, we would all do well to take the time to (re)read and thus, to rethink once again, that prescient and unparalleled document of social and political analysis.

The first issue of RM, in Spring 1988 contained a statement by the editorial board in which we explained how the journal came into being, what our specific concerns were at the time, and what we hoped to accomplish in setting off on this journey. In the first essay in this issue, we look back over the past ten years, assess what we and the larger RM community hope to have achieved in contributing to the emergence of new Marxian cultures and communities, and invite our readers and supporters to join us as we reaffirm our commitment to the rethinking of Marxism.

The next contribution in this issue is Susan Jahoda’s photo essay, “The Dancing Lesson.” The fragments of life associated with Jahoda’s ballerina are instructive. Her photo essay weaves together the carefree experiences of a young dancer, already being formed into an adult, with those of her English mother and Pakistani father. By being reminded of her lateness, the daughter is already becoming “female,” while at the same time she is being introduced to the repetition and tedium of life through her dance classes. Jahoda succeeds in reminding us (in juxtaposition to or merely as the extension of the young ballerina’s formative routines, we might ask) of the ever present lessons of adulthood—the contradictory pleasures and pains of class, bodies, race, gender, and nationality.

Peter Ives explores the idea that many of Gramsci’s important political concepts, including hegemony, do not derive directly from Marx or Lenin but, instead, from the science of language or linguistics. Taking his cue from the work of Lo Piparo, Ives both develops and challenges Lo Piparo’s theses about the Gramscian relationship between spontaneous and normative grammars and Gramsci’s major political concepts. Ives offers instead a close reading of Quaderno 29, “Notes for an Introduction to the Study of Grammar,” in order to demonstrate Gramsci’s distinction between how a dominant hegemony operates and how a different hegemony based around the Italian proletariat would operate. Ives argues that the philosophy of praxis attempts to build such a progressive hegemony out of the incongruities of various spontaneous grammars of the people, which are then transformed into a normative grammar. Such a progressive hegemony is similar in construction to the way in which Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is produced out of common sense, that “disconnected, contradictory, and confusing mélange of beliefs,” as Ives puts it.

Roger Burbach insists that Marxism is in a profound crisis, not so much because of the “collapse of communism” after 1989 but rather, due to its inability to identify a revolutionary subject. He argues that the very foundations of Marxism need to be rethought and proposes that some of the insights of postmodernism can be usefully integrated into Marxism to give it new life. For Burbach, a postmodern Marxism is not one which rejects all claims to truth, as he claims the “strong” postmodernism of Derrida does, but rather one which seeks new metanarratives from the ground up, rooted in the new social and identity movements so prevalent in the world today. These movements go beyond the classic Marxist subjects—the proletariat and the peasantry—to encompass the irreducible identities and strategies of feminism, ethnic and civil rights movements, the ecological movement, gay and lesbian movements, and the peace, human rights, and solidarity movements. Echoing a theme from his recent book written with Boris Kagarlitsky and Orlando Núñez, Globalization and Its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms, Burbach stresses that in many countries the informal sector, the marginalized, and the unemployed represent the vast majority of the population and that these groups of people are not easily organized into trade unions as the more traditional proletariat was. Burbach argues that what we need to do today in the epoch of globalization is what Marx did for the era of industrial capitalism—namely, to identify the social actors capable of envisioning economic and social alternatives and of transforming the world in which we live.

Darko Suvin begins his provocative and insightful essay by asking us to consider what is to be gained by revisiting and revising Marx today. To pose that question, however, is immediately to confront another: which Marx? For as Suvin stresses, Marx’s thought oscillated throughout his lifetime and, while perhaps not in the manner of the strict demarcation between an early Marx and the later “scientific” Marx, as Althusser once claimed, one needs to read critically to draw out that which remains valuable today, rather than cast aside his oeuvre tout court, as Suvin argues that postmodernists like Lyotard have done. Just as Marx believed that history developed through its wrong side, Suvin suggests that what is lost to Marxism today is belief in a scientistic and deterministic conception of progress, understood as an eschatological necessity. However, two methodological pillars remain fundamental to a Marxian critique, as opposed to their complete rejection by many postmodernists and post-Marxists. In Suvin’s view, the ideas of demystificatory vision and the open-ended concreteness and recategorization of analysis are central to any transformative social analysis. He describes a Marxian notion of demystification as one where, once a phenomenon is described in a “normal" way, it is then analyzed to reveal the different meanings encoded within it. In contrast to what he sees as the postmodernist tendency to demonize the concepts of essence and totality and to make “ontology out of delight,” Suvin insists that an appropriate reconceptualization of these categories is necessary for revolutionary critique as “all such essences and totalities are . . . not ontological realities but epistemic tools.”

Anja Rüdiger finds irony in the fact that, as she puts it, mainstream Marxists have gained renewed attention from the publication of Derrida’s Specters of Marx. She argues that many Marxists have failed to comprehend the specific political and theoretical role that deconstruction has played in developing a contemporary politics of emancipation. In contrast to the traditional Marxism that insists on controllable progress and rationality, and whose eschatology follows from a determinate deduction from the present, she argues that deconstruction provides a genuine opening to the future and is the basis for a radical politics of displacement. Such a politics is built around the idea of an agonistic democracy that differentiates itself both from liberal notions of democracy based on fixed interests and Marxist notions emanating from a communal sharing of universal ideals. Instead, agonistic democracy reflects the idea of process and the never-ending struggle over the production of interests and communities, and which inevitably entails constant acts of exclusion. For Rudiger, post-Marxist political theory involves a paradoxical relation in that it attempts to construct a hegemonic order that continuously displaces any attempt at a welldefined succession of orders. Instead, as she insists, post-Marxist solidarity “informs a hegemonic order that is democratic insofar as it includes a disruptive, self-displacing movement to counter the inevitable processes of exclusion.”

In reply to Noel Castree’s article “Invisible Leviathan: Speculations on Marx, Spivak and the Question of Value,” published in the summer 1996/97 issue of RM, Murray Smith returns to the main points of his 1994 book Invisible Leviathan: The Market Critique of Despotism beyond Postmodernism. Smith argues against what he perceives to be poststructuralism’s idealism, and insists that theory should derive from program and be based on material and social forces. For Smith, Marxism should not develop along the lines of a textual deconstruction of Capital or any other influential text but from Marxist practice itself. In his rejoinder, Castree wonders how in these “virulently antisocialist times” we can forge a broad working-class consciousness that would be fundamental to the revolutionary struggle that Smith envisions. How can we, Castree asks, create solidarity in a world where working-class identities are increasingly complicated and negotiated through other identities? Marxism needs to be able to handle these issues, and certain insights from postmodernism and poststructuralism can be useful in forging such analyses and political alliances.

Ajit Chaudhury extends the approach to value theory initially developed by Richard Wolff, Antonio Callari, and Bruce Roberts by addressing the longstanding issue in the Marxian literature on value theory concerning how to incorporate heterogeneous labor into a more general framework concerned with the transformation problem. The issue is important because Marxian value theory aggregates labor in order to discuss the equivalence of abstract labor times and to calculate surplus-value. If, however, labor is not homogeneous—for example, due to different skill levels—then aggregation becomes a problem as unlike, or heterogeneous, labor is being compared, and some way must be found to make the heterogeneous labors commensurate. Chaudhury borrows an idea from Ricardo and Marx to weigh different concrete labors by their relative wage rates and thereby to create a homogeneous category of abstract labor. Chaudhury points out that this procedure offers support for Wolff, Callari, and Roberts’s approach by showing that exchange conditions (wage rates) overdetermine labor-time categories (abstract labor). The fact that Marx’s two aggregate equalities (total prices equal total values and total profits equal total surplus-value) hold in the case of heterogeneous labors offers a further argument against the attempt to seek in Marxian value categories an ultimate source of prices and profits and therefore additional support for the idea that values and prices are mutually constitutive.

Finally, we want to add our voice to the celebration of the life and work of the artist Rudolf Baranik. RM readers will remember Baranik from the various entries that we have published from his Dictionary of the 24th Century, in which he showed, by tracking the changing definition of certain words (such as state, earth, and world), how the barbarities of the twentieth century will undoubtedly look from the vantage point of the future. We are also grateful for his collaboration on our 1992 project “This Is My Body, This Is My Blood.” Combining the lives and identities of artist, teacher, and political activist, Baranik created the antiwar series “Napalm Elegies” and was one of the first artists to organize protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Later, he founded the organization Artists Meeting for Cultural Change and was active in the group Artists’ Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hirschorn Museum. Rudolf Baranik died on 6 March 1998 at his home in El Dorado, New Mexico, at the age of seventy-seven.

The Editors

In this issue we begin with an important contribution to the ongoing discussion within the pages of RM concerning the relationship between art and capitalism. Here, Mike Sell focuses his attention on the particular, ambivalent role played by the Happenings of the 1960s and compares them (along with the events sponsored by the Fluxus group) to the quite different artistic and political strategies of Guy Debord’s Situationist International. Not only does Sell deconstruct the binary terms conventionally used to describe the opposition/complicity of avant-garde artistic production and capitalist commodification, but he also invites contemporary artists and cultural critics to acknowledge the enduring legacy of, and to study carefully the issues left hanging by, the "performances" of the past . . . Martin Morris’s view is that the "socialness" of commodity exchange is the singular basis for a Marxist conception of reification and, ultimately, for the "real abstraction" of capitalist society captured by Marxian value theory. He then uses this as the springboard for a critique of the theory of reification (as well as the general theory of society) put forward by Jürgen Habermas. According to Morris, Habermas severs the connection between reification and the social act of exchange—by prioritizing language and communication in a theory of intersubjective consciousness—and thereby fails to recognize the relationship between reification and class domination within capitalist society . . . For JoAnn Pavletich, emotions are not natural and universal but, instead, have their own discontinuous social history. Her essay begins the task of producing such a history by examining the relationship between the rise of a culture of restricted affect—the containment of emotional expressivity accompanied by the search for intense experiences—in the United States and the emergence of new forms of corporate culture and state control in the early twentieth century. For Pavletich, the "retreat to emotional inexpressivity" (which, in her view, persists to this day) can be explained as the product of, on the one hand, attempts by the dominant class to homogenize and corporatize U.S. culture and, on the other, attempts by middle-class women, the working class, and people of color to change the power dynamics inherent in that culture . . . What is the appropriate basis for a Marxist critique of capitalist injustice: a labor theory of exploitation or a labor theory of property? Can there be any overlap between Marxian and Austrian (or, for that matter, between Hayekian-socialist and Hayekian-liberal) conceptions of socialism? Rob Garnett was generous enough to organize an unprecedented exchange among Stephen Cullenberg, David L. Prychitko, Peter Boettke, and Theodore Burczak to discuss these and related questions initially posed by Burczak in his essay "Socialism after Hayek" (RM 9[3]) . . . Not surprisingly, the film 12 Monkeys, with its temporal disjunctions and epistemological ruptures, has lent itself to a series of quintessentially postmodern readings. In the first Remarx essay, Matthew Ruben challenges what he considers to be the limitations of such readings. His alternative approach "situates" the film (and the postmodern experience more generally) in the uneven development of urban political economy, thereby uncovering the concrete conditions within which 12 Monkeys was produced but which it desperately seeks to erase . . . The lives of Marxist thinkers and activists around the world are also often erased. Carles Muntaner and Francisco Fernandez Buey take up one such life, that of Manuel Sacristan, the Spanish Marxist who devoted much of his energy to the struggle against the Franco regime and who, in addition, left behind a rich and prodigious body of Marxist scholarship . . . Is The End of Work an optimistic manifesto for the emergence of a new "social economy" or does it merely provide a grim vision of a coming world of unprecedented economic dislocation? Sean Flaherty finds much to admire in Jeremy Rifkin’s book but, absent an analysis of the political conditions that can generate a more profound social transformation, holds out little hope that the postcapitalist "third sector" envisioned by Rifkin is anything other than a chimera.

As always, we invite readers to send us their comments and ideas. We welcome correspondence on past articles as well as suggestions for future projects.

The Editors

In this issue we begin with Carla Willard’s fascinating study of late-nineteenth-century images of segregation, commodity markets, and the emerging consumer culture of the high income professions and jobs occupied by "white subjects" in the United States. Willard uses the 1893 advertising pamphlet, The Life of Aunt Jemima, The Most Famous Colored Woman in the World, to exemplify how this type of advertising, through the repetition of highly condensed—racialized and sexualized—images of "Aunties" and "Uncles," represented the intersection of brand advertising and social Darwinism and served to produce a new "reality" of docile and loyal former slaves. It is in and through these images that a messy and painful Southern past is made tame and acceptable, both to Northern capital and to the national conversation on race relations. Throughout, Willard weaves a rich and complicated story of the Aunties and Uncles to investigate the role of racial images (then as now) in stabilizing and naturalizing the economic and social hierarchies of U.S. capitalism . . . Marc Becker examines the formation of the first Indigenous and peasant organizations in the canton of Cayambe in the northern Ecuadorian highlands during the first half of the twentieth century. He analyzes the role that various Marxist forces (including urban political parties and labor unions) played in the formation of these rural organizations, the relative equality that characterized the relations between ethnically diverse rural and urban movements, and the radical demands that together these organizations presented to the Ecuadorian government. In particular, Becker focuses on a peasant strike during 1930-1, and a subsequent thwarted attempt to hold a peasant congress and forrn a national organization of agricultural workers. It is these early "communist" movements in Cayambe, Becker argues, that helped to define the issues and strategies which later ethnic-based Indian movements in Ecuador would address, and he insists that movements today (in Ecuador and elsewhere) would do well to learn from the historical solutions forged in Cayambe . . . John O’Kane believes that the discourse of cultural materialism is in crisis, torn as it is between the more poststructuralist-inflected form of cultural studies found in university humanities departments and the cross-disciplinary, critical Western Marxism often found, as he points out, in different voices in this journal. In this light, O’Kane discusses Fredric Jameson’s ambitious efforts to map cultural indeterminacies within postmodern capitalism that build from his interrogations of the idea of complex causality found both in Althusserian overdetermination and in postmodern depthlessness and excess. O’Kane sees in Jameson’s various theoretical encounters with the idea of totality (in the texts of Lukács, Adorno, Althusser, and others) the potential—still largely unrealized—to construct a framework that builds on and consistently extends the notions of overdetermination and contradiction, and which offers a way out of the crisis of cultural materialism . . . Stephen Philion seeks to bridge the theoretical and political divide that all too often has separated those advocating new social movements in contrast to a more traditional Marxian approach to class analysis. For Philion, new social movement theory is critical of Marxian class analysis for three primary reasons: the social conditions of production have qualitatively changed since Marx wrote Capital and are now seen as "postmaterial"; a class compromise has been reached in advanced industrial countries over the postwar period; and the economistic logic of class-based movements is fundamentally inconsistent with what motivates the new social movements. For Philion, these phenomena account for the failure of class-based and new social movements to unite. Philion then seeks to show how an alternative conceptual framework, one that employs a new language of class to address both economic and noneconomic forms of oppression, makes it possible to encompass difference within contemporary social movements. As an example, he suggests that the Piedmont Peace Project is one such social movement that has organized around the issue of nuclear disarmament by "speaking the language of class" and thereby bridging the class/peace movement divide . . . Franco Barchiesi uses autonomist Marxist theory to study worker subjectivity and the resulting contradictory responses of workers to new technological and managerial processes in the South African automobile industry. Barchiesi links an analysis of the concrete manifestations of industrial antagonism to changes in production structures and processes in South Africa. Further, he explores the ways in which industrial change provides both opportunities and constraints for workers to modify such changes, and he shows how this is related to different forms of identification that are responsive to intra- and extraworkplace strategies of acceptance, adaptation, and resistance to a changing workplace environment. As a result, Barchiesi argues for the potential of the contested character of the workplace as a site for the development of class consciousness . . . Shannon Bell offers a rereading of her 1994 book Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body using the Marxian categories of fetishism and value as well as Derrida’s and Levinas’s concepts of justice and law in order to explore, as Derrida put it, the "mystical foundation of [prostitutes’] authority." Similar to Derrida’s notion of a specter or ghost haunting Marx, Bell argues that it is the ghost of Aphrodite that haunts the contemporary prostitute. For Bell, the purchase of the prostitute’s body elides the fact that the payment escapes value, as what becomes fetishized in the prostitute is not the phenomenal commodity form but what exceeds that form. It is the excess that undermines the commodification not only of sex but of all social life . . . In our first Remarx essay, Timothy A. Gibson takes up the issue of the ideological power of common sense in order to frame a case study of race, crime, and urban geography in Philadelphia. There, Gibson discovers the common-sense equation of racial difference with neighborhood decay which serves to undergird everyday stories about "good" and "bad" neighborhoods. The alternative, Gibson suggests, is to refuse this common sense and to uncover marginalized stories in order to rearticulate new, more progressive ways of seeing and being within our neighborhoods . . .Fernanda Navarro writes eloquently of the Zapatista movement in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, by relating that struggle to Althusser’s later ideas on political philosophy. Subcomandante Marcos has been widely identified in Mexico as an Althusserian philosopher and even the New York Times has referred to him as a "postmodern guerilla." Althusser’s aleatory materialism, and his later belief that organized minorities at a microscale could provide the basis for a different kind of liberatory politics, suggest to Navarro that the Zapatista movement represents an example of precisely the new practice and hope for political struggle that Althusser attempted to articulate. She argues that the Zapatista refusal to seek state power, and instead to establish a new decentered relationship to power, is key to the success of the Zapatista Front and its attempt to establish an alternative political culture in Mexico . . . Finally, as we arrive at the end of volume ten, we are sad to report that, after serving as coeditor of RM during the course of the past volume year, Stephen Cullenberg has decided to step down from the position (while, fortunately, remaining as a member of the editorial board). We are pleased, however, to disclose that Steve has done so in order to work full time in the important, difficult, and time-consuming role of coorganizing (together with John Roche and others) the next RM gala conference, "Marxism 2000," to be held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on 21-24 September 2000. We are also very happy to announce that David Ruccio has agreed to take over as editor of RETHINKING MARXISM. So, please keep an eye on our Web page (www.nd.edu/~remarx) for further information and updates about the upcoming conference. And thank you, Steve and David, for your longstanding and continuing service to our readers and to the project of rethinking Marxism.

The Editors

In this issue we are pleased to publish Mohamed Zayani’s translation of and introduction to another dimension of Henri Lefebvre’s most important contribution to the rethinking of Marxism: the study of everyday life. Readers are no doubt familiar with Lefebvre’s wide-ranging analyses of modern society, including the role of consumption, the reproduction of the relations of production, and the production of space. Here, in an essay coauthored with Catherine Régulier toward the end of his life, Lefebvre focuses his attention on the times of everyday life, on the modalities of the conflictual unity of the adventure of cyclical rhythms (so-called natural time) and the repetitiveness of linear time (associated with the capitalist regulation of production, consumption, movement, and housing). Coming to understand this "unity of diversity," a packet of polyrhythms, which characterizes both the habits and the disruptions of everyday life, is the goal of the "rhythmanalytical project" . . . Walid Ra’ad’s aim was to document a photographic project organized on the eve of the civil war in Lebanon and carried out in the midst of that war in the streets of Beirut. His photoessay is going to press just as the ceasefire for another war has been announced, a war with all the death, destruction, and disorder that accompanied the one in Lebanon. While Ra’ad’s project is fictional—all the names of the sponsoring organizations, its board of directors and staff, the funding sources, and the museums and galleries are fabricated—the issues he poses are quite real. Together, the text and the images invite us to examine "the constellation of relations amongst the discourses of photography, geography, nationalism, and war" . . . Does Capital yield an ethical foundation, a manifest political agenda, and a revolutionary subject? According to Vidya Ramakrishnan, this has been the traditional expectation of Marx’s magnum opus. However, a rereading of volumes 1 and 2 of Capital reveals significant aporias in the relations both between agent and subject and between ethics and politics and, therefore, a different understanding of socialism in relation to capitalism. In particular, on Ramakrishnan’s interpretation, the labor theory of value leaves us with, at best, the agent as part-subject; it refuses the immediate identification of the worker with the revolutionary proletariat and, therefore, "the possibility of a politics that seamlessly preserves justice for the worker" . . . 12 Million Black Voices, published in 1941 and composed of Farm Security Administration photographs and a text composed by the novelist and (then) Communist Richard Wright, was an attempt to create a narrative of the evolution of black "folk" in the United States. Leigh George analyzes the volume, on one hand, as a product of the difficult and changing discussion of the relationship between race and class within the Communist Party USA during the 1930s and 1940s and Wright’s own attraction to (and struggles to remain within) the party and, on the other hand, in terms of the representational structure of the photographic layout and text of the book itself. In George’s view, the volume represents an attempt—ultimately undermined by a combination of essentialist Marxism, the we/you voice of the text, and the photographic gaze of the New Deal state— to articulate the identities of racial difference and transracial solidarity . . . Andy Merrifield’s provocative thesis is that the relationship between human suffering and freedom links Marx to Dostoevsky—specifically, the early "existential" ideas of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the mature fiction of the "spiritual" novelist, species-being to the Underground Man. While not denying the profound differences between the "ultimate implications" of the views expressed by Marx and Dostoevsky (but, even there, he finds surprising points of convergence), Merrifield notes their shared rejection of a purely rational conception both of human beings (since, for both, humans realize themselves through suffering and desire) and of a world of human freedom (which, in neither case, is reduced to rational progress or "mathematical exactitude") . . . Alejandro Raiter is concerned with the ideological defeat of the Marxist left in Argentina and elsewhere after the fall of authoritarian military regimes. For this, he argues that Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses needs to be supplemented by a theory of dominant and emergent discourses, by an analysis of the speech acts of Marxist groups themselves. For Raiter, the failure of Marxists to challenge the dominant discourse can be traced to their inability to question the systems of references that sustain that discourse—to change the social system of references, the prevailing "common sense," in order to inaugurate a radically different discursive formation . . . A class analysis of the charter school movement reveals opportunities for improving public education by transforming exploitative class structures—that is the novel argument developed by Ken Byrne in the first Remarx essay. Most charter schools (there are now more than 240 in the United States, and their number is growing) are organized in a capitalist manner. What founders of charter schools have failed to appreciate is the possibility of forming communist institutions, schools in which education takes place on the basis of the communal production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor. In fact, Byrne, using Massachusetts as a case study, develops one model of what such communist schools could look like and the advantages (especially for teachers and other school workers) it might offer . . . The second Remarx essay focuses on two conferences— one in Sardinia, the other in Naples—devoted to the political thought and action of Antonio Gramsci. Frank Rosengarten’s report reveals the wide-ranging and creative rethinking of Marxism that is taking place on the basis of contemporary Marxist thinkers’ engagement with Gramsci’s writings, especially the Prison Notebooks . . . G. M. Goshgarian revisits the modus operandi of the "Sokal affair" in his sharp and witty review of Impostures intellectuelles coauthored by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Goshgarian takes to task the insinuations, summary dismissals, quotations out of context, guilt by association, "gotchas," and so on that comprise Sokal and Bricmont’s attack on the "intellectual dishonesty" of postmodernism and ultimately mark the book as a self-referential exericse: "a series of intellectual impostures that decries a series of intellectual impostures" . . . Writing on John Berger’s Photocopies and Mary Anne Staniszewski’s Believing Is Seeing, Amitava Kumar focuses our attention on the question of what might constitute revolutionary art and criticism today. The elusive answer, he suggests, lies in the style—in the engagement with the material details of both life and art and in the blurring of the boundaries between the two . . . Finally, Andrew Light reviews Norman Geras’s sustained argument against Richard Rorty’s political philosophy in Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind. After summarizing the ways in which Geras’s critique is based on a defense of a common human nature and of realism in political philosophy (a defense with which he expresses his own sympathy), Light finds the appeal to human nature as a foundation for political theory in need of more support than Geras is able to provide.

The Editors

(The full text of this isssue is now available as a sample—requires Acrobat Reader)

In this issue Jason Read explores the centrality of the notion of antagonism in the work of Antonio Negri. (Readers will remember RM’s 1997 open letter on behalf of Negri, who was imprisoned upon his return to Italy after almost fourteen years in exile in France.) Antagonism, in Read’s view, operates not as a foundational concept within Negri’s readings of Spinoza and Marx but, rather, as a way of destabilizing the standard presuppositions of thought and of thought’s relation to politics. In the case of Spinoza, Negri’s use of antagonism serves to highlight the creative tension between the negative and affirmative moments of thinking—between pars destruens and pars construens— which refuses any easy resolution within the practice of thinking itself. Instead, "constitutive power" marks the place where thought encounters the materiality of power and desire, the moment when thinking is inserted into history and politics, when the demands of ontological speculation meet those of practical political activity. Read argues that antagonism also serves as an organizing principle in Negri’s reading of Marx’s Grundrisse—specifically, of Marx’s treatment of the seemingly unified categories of political economy as concealing and, at the same time, indicating a series of antagonistic tensions. The Marxian critique of political economy, in this rendering, reveals the intersection of subordination and exploitation, the mutual relation of the "economic" and the "political." The result of this "overdetermined" relation (in Negri’s sense) is not the simple reproduction of capitalist relations or the emergence of a single contradiction; on the contrary, it involves an intensification and expansion of the set of social antagonisms which, in turn, create new anticapitalist subjectivities and forms of cooperation. For Read, it is this radical difference of antagonism from both economism and the traditional notion of the dialectic that forms the basis of Negri’s conception of communism as the politics of constitutive power, a radical alternative to the "bourgeois tradition" that emerges within and alongside it, and which is articulated in the writings of Spinoza and Marx.

David Bernans’s goal is to study the politics of "language games." Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus writings are, of course, the starting point for contemporary discussions of language games. However, in Bernans’s view, the "metamodel" of equivalence/ difference that he detects in the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe should be counterposed to the "antimodel" that follows from Wittgenstein’s own way of conceiving of how ordinary language functions when it is used to get things done in specific social circumstances. Bernans also finds that, when Laclau and Mouffe map equivalence and difference onto equality and liberty, they forget about class and confine political activity to a radical democratic project. Yet, in this case, because Wittgenstein is so focused on the dynamics of specific language games, "he offers very little in the way of direct insight into the politics and struggles" that emerge within and across such games. Bernans, therefore, turns to the work of the Russian Marxist philosopher of language V. N. Volosinov to find a way out of the dilemma. Using Volosinov’s notions of speech utterances and genres, Bernans is able to map out the project of examining the political dimensions of the use of language: for example, the ways in which the dialogical process of surplus extraction—the "class-struggle language game"—is crosscut by and, at the same time, spills over into the nonclass language games associated with gender, race, sexual preference, and so on.

The political implications of language are also the focus of Stella Gaon’s essay. Here, she enjoins an ongoing discussion (including essays by Pierre Macherey and J. K. Gibson-Graham in RM 8/4 and Tom Lewis in RM 9/3, and future contributions by Peter Hitchcock and Imre Szeman) of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and, more generally, the ethico-political consequences of deconstruction. Gaon argues both that Derrida’s Marxist critics incorrectly conclude that the Derridean motifs of "indeterminacy" and "undecidability" represent a retreat from politics and that, notwithstanding the (frustrated) expectations of such critics, the Specters text should not be considered the privileged site for detecting the politics of deconstruction. Gaon’s alternative interpretation is that Derrida’s elaborations of différance, whether focused on Marx’s texts or not, are not only inescapably political but offer important contributions to a specifically Marxian politics. In the first instance, Gaon writes, passing through the ordeal of undecidability is an important condition for a notion of justice appropriate to Marxism. This is perhaps best seen in Derrida’s treatment of the gift which exceeds the calculation of market-based systems of exchange, thereby enlarging the field of responsibility and creating the very possibility of—precisely by offering no guarantees for—ethical and political choices. And it is when this structural undecidability is, in a second instance, conjoined to a Marxian spirit of radical critique by rendering (impossibly) "the reason of reason itself," what is demanded of us is an ethical impulse, a "socially constituted desire," for justice. While deconstruction does not therefore represent an argument for a particular Marxian political project, the naming of the necessity of such a project is, Gaon writes, "already a lot."

It is this spirit of deconstruction and radical critique that runs through the pages of J. K. Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (as we knew it). We are pleased, therefore, to present the exchange between critics and authors initially arranged by Jack Amariglio for the RM-sponsored “Politics and Languages of [Contemporary] Marxism” conference and shepherded to publication by Rob Garnett. The special section includes essays on different moments of The End of Capitalism by Michael Moon, David F. Ruccio, and Arturo Escobar, along with a response by Gibson-Graham herself. Moon begins by noting Gibson-Graham’s novel and productive use of queer theory to challenge the ordinary language of economy deployed by Marxists and other left thinkers. He then focuses his attention on the relevance of Gibson-Graham’s proliferation of capitalist and noncapitalist class processes for his own analyses of "homosexual economies" in nineteenth-century American literature and, more generally, for rethinking the nexus of gender, sexuality, and economy in contemporary cultural studies. In particular, Moon points to the usefulness of the categories of noncapitalism, especially the "feudal," for revisiting what he considers to be some of the more intractable moments of first-wave queer theory itself. Gibson-Graham’s linking of concepts of capitalism with the problem of political affect is the first issue noted in Ruccio’s contribution to the exchange. While the traditional notions of unified and powerful capitalism may represent a compelling mapping of the world for some intellectuals and activists, those same notions are considered quite disabling by others, precisely because they attempt to encompass too much. One of the great merits of The End of Capitalism, in Ruccio’s view, is to show that there can be different conceptions of capitalism, alongside which many forms of noncapitalism can be envisioned and created. And such visions of capitalism and noncapitalism can and do exist not only in the academy but also in everyday discourses. Therefore, he directs attention to a theoretical and political project that is provoked by and yet points beyond Gibson-Graham’s book: to create an anthropology of class discourses of economy. Escobar, for his part, notes the overlaps between Gibson-Graham’s anti-essentialist critique of "capitalocentrism" (the idea that all parts of the economy, including instances of noncapitalism, are understood in relation to capitalism) and parallel efforts within economic and ecological anthropology to move away from economism and to decenter the economy itself. In his view, the multidisciplinary project of creating economic difference requires both that capitalism be displaced from epistemological privilege within economic discourses and that, within the history of modernity, the economy be removed from its central position. That project, to which The End of Capitalism offers invaluable lessons, has far-reaching theoretical and, Escobar insists, political effects. In her response, Gibson-Graham uses The Full Monty as way of contrasting the exhaustion of traditional models of resistance-style politics to the possibilities offered by the emergence of new subjectivities which is occasioned by the destruction of existing economic identities and the chain of equivalences—gender, sexual, and so on—with which they have been constituted and enforced. She then compares viewers’ dampened reactions to the end of the movie to the frustrated responses she has received to her current research on local economies of difference that represents a sequel to The End of Capitalism: in both cases, the alternatives are considered "not good enough." In her view, it is precisely the capitalist-centered logic of existing political economies that prevents left thinkers and activists—because the languages used may not be explicitly anticapitalist—from valuing the communal identities and activities that have emerged and can be formed within many alternative regional development projects.

The first Remarx essay comes from the pen of "international correspondent" Loren Kruger who traveled to Germany to witness and document the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of communist playwright Bertolt Brecht. What she found was a series of walking tours, exhibitions, and theater productions that served to create a monumental figure—but which also provide her the opportunity to recognize Brecht’s debt to Marx and to revalue the contributions of Brecht and his collaborators to a vital anticapitalist cultural movement. Kruger is able to uncover the sites of Brecht’s communist choir and acting groups, unpublished essays that sharpen the political focus of some of his more famous plays, his unorthodox reading material (a collection of books including not only Lenin but also Luxemburg and Trotsky), and— quite in contrast to the ways in which plays were being staged—Brecht’s efforts both to contest bourgeois culture and to create alternatives to it.

For E. San Juan, Jr., the controversy over the veracity of Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiographical narrative provoked by David Stoll’s charge that important elements of her story were fabricated is an occasion to address issues of knowledge production. While distancing his view from both objective scientific inquiry and what he considers to be the excesses of social constructivism, San Juan does worry about the politics of Othering, the conditions and consequences of the representation of non-Western groups by writers of the "economically powerful North." He cites an analogous case, the current debate over the Philippine revolution against Spain and the U.S. intervention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on these examples, San Juan proposes an alternative to both objective truth and subjective interpretation, one that poses a series of questions about the "exigencies of the dialogic communication" among subaltern voices, their sympathetic interlocutors, and privileged critics.

The economic crisis in Korea has been explained in at least three different ways within the Korean left, citing alternatively the "chaebols," neoliberalism, and overproduction for primary blame. Seongjin Jeong and Jo-Young Shin locate the problems, especially the political implications, associated with all three explanatory frameworks and propose a Marxian "long-wave" synthesis. Their own view is that the crisis is structural, not merely cyclical, and was triggered by the particular relation between Korean and global capitalisms, from which they conclude that the Korean left should respond by rejecting schemes for rebuilding the economy and by supporting workers’ demands for subsistence wages and job security.

The final essay in the Remarx section is another international report, John Milios’s reflections based on his trip to Cuba to participate in a conference commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto. What struck Milios about the conference was the pluralism of views and openness to different theoretical currents that characterized the Cuban delegates and Cuban Marxism generally. Beyond the conference itself, Milios remarks on the economic and social conditions of the country, including the absence of traditional Third World deprivations, the relative absence of racism and sexism, and the existence of petty corruption associated with the parallel dollar economy which, however, does not seem to rise to the levels of "illegal capitalism" that characterized the socialist economies of Eastern Europe.

This issue also contains two reviews of books that form part of the burgeoning left response to the corporate restructuring of higher education. The first, by Eric Schocket, examines the collection edited by Cary Nelson, Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis. While Shocket notes the theoretical unevenness among the various contributions to the volume, he also finds numerous examples of serious and incisive political engagement with the problems associated with the downsizing, outsourcing, and casualizing of labor currently taking place within the academy. Fred Curtis focuses his attention on the strengths and weaknesses of Wesley Shumar’s indictment of the commodification of higher education in College for Sale. He writes approvingly of Shumar’s use of a combination of postmodern theory and left political economy to create a critical ethnography of the "imagined community" of the academy. At the same time, Curtis raises questions about Shumar’s analysis, including the absence both of a discussion of what a noncommodified education might look like and of a more extensive treatment of exploitative class processes among both full-time and part-time faculty members. Engaging with these and related issues would then form part of a Marxist analysis of the corporatization/commodification of higher education and, most important, of the formulation of effective responses and alternative proposals.

The Editors

In this issue Beverley Best sets out to shake up the seemingly established, strict opposition between Marxism and post-Marxism by staging a confrontation between Fredric Jameson’s dialectical criticism and Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony. However, instead of focusing on the oft-cited, substantial differences between those two theorists (and the bodies of theory that their work is taken to represent), Best engages in a nuanced—in the best sense, dialectical—analysis of the ways in which some of the key concepts put forward by Jameson and Laclau, however discontinuous and even divergent they may seem, can be interpreted as sharing a common ground and speaking to a similar problematic. For example, according to Best, the complex interplay of contingency and history, of immanence and transcendence, is present in the frame-works of both Jameson and Laclau. Similarly, both theorists refuse to relinquish the idea that Utopia, at once necessary and impossible, is a key moment of social analysis. These points of convergence, in turn, flow into the issue of the universal and the particular, especially as it refers to the relationship between individual subjects and the social totality or, in more general terms, between identity and its other. Best finds that both Jameson and Laclau raise, and then refuse to resolve—thereby maintaining a permanent tension between—an entire series of such otherwise antagonistic concepts. This orientation lends a fundamentally different cast to the connections between their theoretical approaches. Refusing both simple opposition and final synthesis, Best invokes a "permanent uncertainty" which undermines the rigidity of existing interpretations of the divide between Marxism and post-Marxism and is constitutive of her conception of "productive and self-conscious social theory."

The novel, especially the realist novel, has a special affinity with Marxism in its capacity to focus on the structure of class and to make the experience of class exploitation intelligible. At the same time, it is rare to discover in such novels, including and perhaps especially politically radical ones, the representation of a rich pattern of overdetermined relations between class and nonclass processes. The pro-vocative thesis of Julian Markels’s contribution to a new "poetics of class in the realist novel" is that mainstream novels (such as those of Balzac and Dickens) too often ignore class or subsume class to other social determinations while radical novels (such as Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart or Meridel LeSueur’s The Girl) often make class their entry point but then fail to explore its mutual constitutivity with respect to other moments of social reality. According to Markels, the "representational resistances" that can be detected in both mainstream and radical novelistic attempts to represent the ravages of capitalism and the dynamics of strike activity mean that the realist novel can often provide literal examples, but ultimately falls short of creating a credible and powerful sustained representation, of the overdetermined—class and gender, individual and communal, and so on—experiences of everyday life.

Is civil society primarily an economic realm or a sphere of political practice? And what are the implications of both views, or an alternative conception of civil society, for the goal of imagining socialism and the process of mourning the loss of the con-temporary relevance of the socialist ideal? For Viren Murthy, the economic conception of civil society can be traced back to Hegel and, especially, to Marx’s critique of the Hegelian conception of the strict separation between civil society and the state. Marx’s view, according to Murthy, is that the state is incapable of containing or resolving the economic contradictions inherent in civil society, thereby requiring a working-class revolution to transform both the capitalist state and civil society out of existence. It is this conception of a projected "end of politics" that so-called civil theorists have challenged in recent years, arguing that civil society is much more than economics and that Marx overlooks the possibility of democratic practice within civil society. Marxists, of course, have attempted to answer these criticisms. Murthy examines two such responses, by Paul Thomas and Moishe Postone. Both thinkers re-state Marx’s theory, by incorporating the possibility of democratic political struggle among multidimensional social agents and, at the same time, the necessity of eventually overcoming the antinomies of civil society. In Murthy’s view, this new Marxist conception points in the direction of a radically new imaginary of a future socialism, as the abolition of abstract labor instead of its extension or final realization, and the present possibility of democratizing both the state and civil society.

The conventional history of Marxist literary and cultural criticism in the United States has focused almost exclusively on English-language sources and has failed to recognize the earlier emergence of an explicitly Marxist approach to literary and cultural analysis in the Yiddish press at the turn of the century. Steven Cassedy sets out to fill in the missing page by examining the work of the Jewish émigré intelligentsia that arrived in the United States during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and who, coinciding with the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Maxim Gorky’s visit from Russia, tentatively explored and then forcefully stated specifically Marxist approaches to literature and literary criticism in newly founded journals and newspapers such as the Forward and Di Tsukunft (The Future). Writers such as Louis Boudin and Jacob Milch proceeded, not unlike Plekhanov and other Russian Marxists, to graft the rudiments of Marxist economic theory onto the cultural and political world-view of the pre-Marxist Russian revolutionary movement. Cassedy credits those initial steps, while they may not have directly engendered the next wave of Marxist criticism, with having established the combination of normative judgment and activist stance for the succeeding, U.S.-born generation of radical critics who established such organizations as the American Writers’ Congress and the journals Partisan Review and New Masses during the Marxist cultural heyday of the 1920s and 1930s.

The New Origami Hotel in the City of Angels is the site and symbol of tourist dollars and civil unrest, union organizing and union busting, Central American immigration and Japanese ownership—as well as a murder behind the "Do Not Disturb" sign of one of the hotel suites. The bilingual cartoon series prepared by Stephen Callis, Leslie Ernst, and Rubén Ortiz Torres chronicles the experiences of housekeeper Carmen Lucia Vargas through a portion of a typical workday. Reminiscent of the style of traditional U.S. comic books and more recent ’zines, Los Supermachos and Los Agachados from Mexico, and the "For Beginners" series initiated by Rius, "Murder in My Suite/Bienvenidos al Hotel California" is a compelling reminder of the ability of "low" art, popular culture, and humor to play with (and, of course, to play off) both other examples of the genre and the "serious" articles between which it is sandwiched in these pages to provoke new ways of thinking about the economic and social issues that are central to the Marxian tradition.

Gramsci’s discussion of "common sense" is not, as is often assumed, relevant only to cultural issues. As Evan Watkins explains in the first Remarx essay, Gramsci’s notes can also be fruitfully appropriated to rethink the complexity of economic relations, especially for understanding the multiform, contradictory character of "capitalist" everyday thought. It is precisely the combination of what Watkins considers to be the "pre-Keynesian" and "postmodern" currents of contemporary capitalist common sense that calls for a Marxist analysis of a new sort: not a project of ideological demystification but, rather, a pedagogy that seeks to mobilize and extend the alternative economic practices that are already emergent around us.

The next Remarx essay focuses on the film The Usual Suspects, which serves Andrew Biro and Steven Hayward both as an example of a political critique of late capitalism and as a backdrop to elaborate an alternative to certain Marxian theorizations of the postmodern. There is a close connection, Biro and Hayward argue, between gangster films and the capitalist ideology of radical individualism and progress through innovation. However, in the case of The Usual Suspects, criminal labor is displayed as fully alienated, thereby bringing into question the possibility of capitalist justice. At the same time, the key shifts that make up the postmodern representational strategy of the film create the possibility of an immanent critique of late capitalist society itself. It is in this sense that, for Biro and Hayward, the ideological—cultural form of late capitalism can be used to challenge its content.

Meera Nanda continues, in her contribution to the Remarx section, the debate over so-called relativist—social constructivist, postcolonial, and postdevelopment—views of science that was provoked by the plenary addresses of Sandra Harding and Vandana Shiva at the 1996 conference sponsored by RM. In a substantially revised version of the paper she delivered at that same conference, Nanda first defends the project of modernist secularization as a key ingredient of progressive science and larger social movements in India and elsewhere in the Third World, then challenges the claims of both postcolonial critics of modernity and constructivist interpreters of Western science. While she is willing to concede that social and scientific "traditionalists" may be committed to progressive social change, Nanda emphatically argues—through critical exposition and personal testimony—that the content and protocols of modern science are uniquely suited to the cause of social justice.

Finally, we are pleased to present reviews of four quite different books that, together, represent the extraordinary range of issues central to contemporary Marxist thought. Vin Lyon-Callo begins with a discussion of Talmadge Wright’s Out of Place, a critique of both the dominant social policies toward homelessness and the social production of dominant understandings about homeless people. While Lyon-Callo finds much to recommend in this volume, he does suggest that Wright’s ethnographic method could fruitfully be extended to include the practices of compliant homeless individuals as well as the articulations of policymakers and other homelessness professionals. Carla Willard, for her part, discusses the significance of Richard Ohmann’s historical analysis of the role that mass-circulation magazines played in the seemingly magical appearance of a national mass culture in the United States at the turn of the present century. Willard credits Selling Culture especially with exploring the remarkable complicity of marketing strategies practiced by corporations, ad agencies, and magazines, and their ability to create society itself as a form of consumption. The history of the tango is a perfect example of the global inequalities created by colonial and postcolonial forms of domination. However, according to Janet O’Shea, Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion ventures far beyond any binary model of colonizer versus colonized to draw attention to newer—and perhaps harder to characterize—forms of global financial trafficking. Walter Mignolo’s Darker Side of the Renaissance demonstrates the ways in which European experiences in the New World were important to Europe’s own discursive formation. In her review, Karen Graubart notes the importance of Mignolo’s project but also raises a series of important questions concerning the ways in which colonial sources are used to represent the subalterity of pre-Hispanic cultures and societies. Her criticisms represent an important reminder both of the need for and of the difficulties encountered by projects of postcolonial cultural and social analysis.

The Editors

In this issue Christopher Fulton creatively poses the issue of what new and different insights Marxism has to offer to the study of art history. Borrowing a page from Marx, who begins his critique of political economy with a discussion of the commodity, Fulton argues that the appropriate object of a specifically Marxist historical aesthetics is the "elemental product of artistic labor," the material facticity of the work of art itself. Fulton’s strategy is to combine a presentation of theoretical concepts and strategies with an investigation of the "totality of social relations" and a discussion of specific examples of Renaissance art in order to illustrate what he considers to be the advantages of a materialist, Marxist art history over both traditional idealist and more re-cent sociological approaches. He begins with an analysis of the changes in the social practice of art collecting in mid-fifteenth-century Italy, especially the attempts by the new Florentine mercantile elite to affirm their social status through new modes of domestic architecture and the appropriation of public symbols in the form of private art collections. Focusing attention on both the symbolic form and the materiality of the works of art produced during this period, Fulton argues that the effects of the activities of the Medici family can be viewed dialectically as a "transvaluation" of civic imagery by private appropriation and, at the same time, as a fundamental change in the ontological condition of art, its "transformation" into an independent object. It is this double movement that, for Fulton, explains the emergence of such diverse artistic novelties as schiacciato relief sculpture and easel painting. He then focuses his attention on art criticism and the ways in which the material form of art induces a specific form of viewing and contemplation. Thus, for example, changes in the objects of art that accompanied the growth of private collecting encouraged the emergence of "connoisseurial" aesthetic values and a formal discourse on art, thereby completing the profound transformation of Renaissance art. While able to provide only the most general of guidelines for a rejuvenated Marxist art history, Fulton argues that the rise of the autonomous work of art can be best understood in terms of the social and historical conditions that give rise to the objects, identities, values, and institutions— in short, the fetishistic character—of the modern system of art.

Unlike the notions of art and aesthetic value, desire is often taken to be external, even inimical, to the materialist strategies of Marxist theory. However, Bradley Macdonald demonstrates that it is possible to excavate not only the figure of desire but also another concept that has been ignored by readers of Marx—namely, that of pleasure. Focusing his reading on the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, with due attention to the issues raised by such diverse thinkers as Herbert Marcuse, Judith Butler, Guy Debord, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Macdonald is able to construct a concept of desire that refers to "the socially and historically embedded way in which sensuous beings strive to make their world, aspiring toward plenitude and singularity." A Marxian notion of pleasure emerges, in turn, as the gap between desire and its practical realization. In Macdonald’s view, the materialist concepts of desire and pleasure that are articulated within Marx’s writings exceed both the ahistorical and idealist foundations of Hegelian theory and the productivism and economism to which Marx’s discussion has been traditionally confined; while embedded in specific social and historical conditions, these concepts can be read as ontologically more than their investment in economic forms and prior to their attachment to political economy. Still, the question remains, why are such materialist concepts necessary, "particularly when there are plenty of competing discourses on desire circulating within the ‘body’ of postmodern theory?" Macdonald’s answer to potential skeptics or critics is twofold: on the one hand, a specifically Marxian conception of desire and pleasure opens the Marxist tradition to diverse realms of struggle that are not reducible to those of labor and the economy; on the other, it serves as a corrective to the proliferation of reductionist (because ahistorical and naturalistic) conceptions by examining the particular demands that are "never met under conditions of exploitation and oppression."

The proliferation of discourses of capitalist globalization seems to have eclipsed the discussion of the development of capitalism within third world countries that held sway during the 1960s and 1970s. John Milios returns to Lenin’s extensive contributions to the Russian controversy over capitalist development to rejuvenate the Marxist and neo-Marxist debate concerning the class nature of economic development in contemporary less developed countries. Lenin, we are reminded, was concerned to refute the Narodnik thesis according to which the development of capitalism was "blocked" by the lack of development of the home market and to defend the contrary idea that Russia was a capitalist social formation, albeit a relatively less developed one, at least when compared with the major European capitalist powers. While arguing that Lenin’s analysis of Russian agriculture (according to which the rural population was being increasingly polarized into capitalists and wage-laborers) was probably mistaken, Milios finds that the remainder of Lenin’s analysis of capitalist development in Russia represents two key contributions that have been largely overlooked in the postwar period. The first advantage of Lenin’s approach is a set of methodological principles that stress concrete analysis over teleological principles, an analysis of different modes of surplus labor appropriation (e.g., instead of focusing on the existence of commodity exchange), and the idea that growth in the size of the home market follows and need not precede the development of capitalist production. Perhaps even more innovative, in Milios’s view, is Lenin’s second contribution: the theory of the "buyer-up" as the major agent of preindustrial capitalist relations. According to Lenin, Russia could be characterized as a predominantly capitalist economy and society not because the majority of the population was involved in wage relations but, rather, because small-scale producers were formally subordinated to capital through their relations with merchant buyers. Thus, Lenin conceived large-scale industrialization as representing a transition from one, relatively underdeveloped form of capitalism to another, more developed form rather than—as his opponents then and many radical thinkers in recent years maintain— the passage from precapitalism to capitalism. For Milios, the spread of cottage industries and subcontracting in contemporary third world countries indicates, like the buyer-up in Lenin’s time, the existence of incipient forms of capitalist development which, under certain social circumstances, may lead to the real subordination of labor to capital and, thus, even more developed forms of capitalist relations.

Beginning with the architectural metaphor of traditional Marxism, the base/ superstructure model, Gary Tedman identifies a "missing" element, the aesthetic level of practice, which serves to complicate the rigid framework of the initial metaphor. For Tedman, the aesthetic level is concerned with the affective practices of human subjects, their emotions and feelings, within class society. Located and mediating the "traffic" between civil society and the state, between production and reproduction, aesthetics (understood in a "catchall" sense as comprising the entire range of sensory awareness) is best described as the work of the media. In Tedman’s view, class antagonisms create commonly felt, estranged emotions, forms of sensuous alienation, which the entire culture industry (involving such phenomena as the anthropomorphic spectacle of sports and television advertisements, kitsch aesthetics, and haute couture) attempts to sublimate and redirect onto "safer" pathways, thereby reproducing the existing conditions of production. What do we gain by paying attention to and theorizing the structuration of human feelings within capitalism? Tedman’s stated intention, at the theoretical level, is to provide a bridge between poststructural conceptions of subjectivity and the class-based subjects of classical Marxism. Perhaps even more important, Tedman argues that the long-term success of left political movements may be crucially bound up with valorizing previously marginalized microstruggles in order to undermine the dominant aesthetic and to create alternative artistic practices.

Eliot Katz’s verses are a testament both to the range of contradictory feelings and frustrations that are the product of living in these times and to the ability of poets (and other writers and artists) to record, to remember, these individual and collective experiences and to encourage and provoke us to view them in a new light. One of Katz’s strategies involves making connections and creating juxtapositions among seemingly disparate phenomena: between the Gulf War bombing and Oklahoma City; the vicissitudes of empowerment evidenced in the former Yugoslavia, Mandela’s South Africa, alternative religions, and poetry itself; the idiocy of locking one’s keys in the car, the homelessness of a pregnant Latina woman, the absence of a Canadian-style New Democratic party in the United States, and the dismissal of Anita Hill’s testimony. In each case, the reader is invited to identify with the "I" of the poet and to share in the fright, anger, loss, grief, hope, and laughter that are poignantly and provocatively depicted through the images and metaphors that comprise this selection of poems.

We are pleased to offer another in our ongoing series of minisymposia. In this case, Rob Garnett assumed responsibility for and the work of coordinating critical essays by Andrew Feenberg and Andrew Light on Steven Vogel’s pathbreaking volume on Marxist critical theory and environmental ethics, Against Nature, along with Vogel’s appreciative response. While Feenberg and Light find much to applaud in Vogel’s attempt to trace the ambivalent, even contradictory treatment of nature in Western Marxist critical theory (from the early Lukács and the Frankfurt School through Habermas) with the goal of devising an appropriate—antinaturalist and constructivist—stance for a Marxist environmental ethics within contemporary debates, they also note their respective disagreements with specific aspects of Vogel’s treatment. Feenberg focuses on what he perceives to be weaknesses in Vogel’s interpretation of Lukács, especially the idea that Lukács invoked the absolute independence of nature (which, for Vogel, contradicts Lukács’s conception of the dialectics of society and history). For Feenberg, Lukács’s argument can be successfully defended and used to produce a post-Habermasian critical theory of the natural world based on collective self-awareness. The practical effects of a philosophical ethics for negotiating differences within the environmental movement and for devising better policies regarding the natural and built environments are what most concern Light. It is Vogel’s position on anthropocentrism—that nature can be an object of moral inquiry but not a subject of moral theorizing—and defense of a Habermasian communicative ethics that Light finds most worrisome and least defensible, for these place no limits on a Marxist environmental ethics. In his rejoinder, Vogel defends his view that the natural sciences are "from the very start" social and, therefore, subject to the kinds of transformative practices that Lukács and Feenberg seem to accept only with respect to the social sciences. Vogel then takes up Light’s questions and explains that he is most concerned to move beyond the romanticism, vitalism, and naturalism of contemporary environmental philosophy in order to clear the space for a theory of nature that affirms the political and philosophical commitments of the critical theorists, yet overcomes what he considers to be the ambiguous and incoherent legacy of their conception of nature.

In their essay in the Remarx section, Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps interrogate the role of passports as a form of state power designed to limit the mobility of human beings between countries. For Higgins and Leps, the issuing (and denial) of passports is an instrument of governmentality invented by modernity and implemented as a matrix in which both relations of power and domains of knowledge are articulated, and from which other relations are excluded, thereby subjecting individuals through their identification. They discuss the celebrated cases of Paul Robeson and Philip Agee with respect to the United States government and the exclusion from European citizenship of seven million "guest workers" as examples of the state’s ability to make all individuals, citizens or not, potential aliens. Instead of demanding an inalienable human right to mobility, Higgins and Leps suggest that winning the international legal right to a passport would eliminate the arbitrary use of government power to police international borders. Such a movement, they suggest, would also overcome the shortcomings of existing identity politics and, instead, contribute to the creation of new forms of subjectivity.

The final section of this issue contains three review essays. The first, by Lucas B. Wilson, focuses on the discussion of Marxism and Deweyan pragmatism in Christopher Phelps’s recent biography of Sidney Hook. For Wilson, what is remarkable in Phelps’s treatment is his attempt to view Hook’s early work not through the prism of his later anticommunist iconoclasm but, rather, as a set of irreducible tensions that the young Hook saw as elements of Marx’s own revolutionary method. Phelps shows both how Hook’s reading of pragmatism pulled it to the left and how the orthodox Marxism of the turn of the century had produced a mechanical, dogmatic reading of Marx that, in turn, sacrificed what Hook considered to be the revolutionary qualities of "action, experiment, and democracy." This combination of tension and affinity between antiessentialist Marxism and the radical elements of Dewey’s pragmatism remain, for Wilson, a valuable source of future exploration.

Richard McIntyre finds a good number of thought-provoking insights and issues in A. Fuat Firat and Nikhilesh Dholakia’s examination of the meaning of postmodernism for contemporary consumption and marketing in Consuming People. However, for McIntyre, the authors’ conception of a strict separation between and historical succession of modernism and postmodernism (instead of, for example, seeing postmodernism as a moment within modernism), together with their single-minded celebration of new modes of consumption, ultimately serves to marginalize the kinds of theoretical and political innovations that sponsor and encourage direct contact between communities of workers and consumers.

The short collection of Louis Althusser’s diverse and fragmentary writings on psychoanalysis and its complex relationship to Marxism offers, for Rick Wolff, invaluable insights and raw material for anyone today who is interested in examining and fostering the relation between those traditions. Wolff draws special attention to Althusser’s further development of his breakthrough concept of overdetermination (which Althusser initially borrows from Freud’s interpretation of dreams and uses to criticize economic determinism within Marxism, and to which he returns to undermine any notion that the unconscious is the effect of some "originating" experience), his critique of the theory/practice dichotomy as a standard of truth, and his drawing of parallels (for which he thanks Lacan) between Marx’s critique of political economy’s homo economicus and Freud’s rejection of homo psychologicus.

Since this is the last issue of volume 11, we follow our usual practice and include an index for the entire volume. We have also initiated a new feature, a page of public acknowledgments in which we extend our thanks to all those individuals and institutions without whose contributions of time and financial support over the course of the past year it would have been difficult, perhaps even impossible, to produce the four issues of RETHINKING MARXISM that comprise this volume.

The Editors

In this issue David Shumway challenges contemporary Marxists to rethink their conception of consumer culture. Moreover, in order to understand the "actual historical uses to which people have put the things which they desire, purchase, and enjoy," the advocates and practitioners of a Marxist cultural studies need both to relinquish their traditional understanding of commodity fetishism and to focus their attention on the use-value of the objects of consumption and the desires with which they are associated. In his essay, Shumway expresses his appreciation for the work of such important thinkers as Sut Jhally, Laura Mulvey, Wolfgang Haug, and Theodor AdorNumber But he takes issue with what he regards as their overemphasis on exchange-value and the fetishistic nature of commodities, especially the extent to which such conventional interpretations have tended to privilege reification, mystification, and false consciousness. (But see the novel discussion of the role of commodity fetishism by Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari in the Fall 1989 issue of RM. Shumway argues instead for an analysis of the social construction of use-value of the sort that Richard Ohmann pioneered in Selling Culture (1996). Not only does such an analysis promise a new and different understanding of the historical and social life of things but it will also assist Marxists and other radicals to overcome what Shumway calls "the futile position of opposing or seeming to oppose the desires of the working class for their fair share of consumer goods."

Was Antonio Gramsci the first postmodern thinker in the Marxist tradition? Can his work be described as moving beyond modernism, or is there some sense in which his discussions of history and hegemony presage approaches later developed by Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault? Esteve Morera does acknowledge that Gramsci posed questions and formulated theses on topics ranging from cultural politics and the history of subaltern groups to language and the relation between power and truth that have indeed been echoed in postmodern writings of recent decades. However, in his view, a more comprehensive reading of the Prison Notebooks demonstrates that Gramsci utilized theoretical strategies that have little in common with what Morera takes to be the central "discursive" turn of postmodernism. It is a testament to Gramsci’s "critical modernity" that a debate about his position between modernism and postmodernism exists at all. Morera is careful to show that Gramsci’s extended treatments of objectivity and hegemony led him to question received concepts of ideology, science, history, the body, and much else, and in this sense to presage the kinds of issues and concerns raised in postmodern critiques of post-Enlightenment philosophy and social theory. Yet, he is also quick to point out that the existence of such similarities should not obscure the gulf that otherwise separates Gramsci’s approach from some of the main trends of contemporary postmodernism (witnessed, in Morera’s view, in the most recent work of the Subaltern Studies project). In particular, Morera finds that certain modernist concepts and strategies— such as epistemological realism, integral history, dialectics, teleology, and so on— are fundamental to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, historical blocs, the role of subaltern subjects, and so on, that represent his legacy to contemporary Marxism.

The complex relationship between postmodernism and Marxism is also the back ground for the next article, by Michelle Mawhinney. However, Mawhinney’s approach involves reading Marx in a manner that locates an ethical potential—specifically, an ethics of nonidentity that is often associated with postmodernism—in the very logic of dialectical materialism. Mawhinney launches her analysis with a discussion of the paradox of authenticity in the modern context: the contradictory process according to which the desire for self-identity (the compulsion to discover and safeguard the "truth" of the self) is dependent on the need to create the oppositional "other" (all that is out side the truth, all difference) as a condition of identity, thereby deferring the possibility of self-certainty. Not surprisingly, the tensions associated with the problem of authenticity are also present in Marx’s writings, but Mawhinney refuses the usual interpretation according to which Marx is said to have found the "solution" of the progressive fulfillment of an authentic humanity through his conception of the mastery of nature and self-realization through labor. Instead (or, perhaps, in addition), Mawhinney focuses on the negative or "agonistic" moment in Marx’s approach, the extent to which the process of "self-making" is open-ended and nonteleological, which is accompanied by a recognition of the tendency to impose closure upon identity in specific historical and social conjunctures. It is this positing of both difference and sameness, of maintaining the radical "alterity" of otherness and theorizing the concrete homogenizing and totalizing effects of capitalism, that, in Mawhinney’s view, creates not a final reconciliation but, rather, an ethical promise of nonidentity.

Both Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Roland Emmerich’s film Independence Day offer related representations of the political anxieties, messianic historicity, and possibilities of political transformation that are present in the world today. That is the provocative argument made by Philip Wegner in his wide ranging essay on political pedagogy titled, in a phrase borrowed from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, "A Night-mare on the Brain of the Living." Combining insightful readings of such popular cultural texts as The Simpsons and recent science fiction films with insights drawn from leading Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers, from Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Frederic Jameson to Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Lyotard, Wegner demonstrates the ways in which the narrative structure of Emmerich’s 1996 film of alien invasion provides an immediate, lived sense of the pressing problems and perspectives created by the current sense of political paralysis that are theorized in Derrida’s much-debated (in RM and elsewhere) volume on Marx. For Wegner, one of the key tasks facing politically engaged intellectuals today is to recover the "messianic specters haunting the closure of our own present" that can be glimpsed in popular texts such as Independence Day and, at the same time, to respond to the challenge posed by Gramsci (and echoed more recently by Etienne Balibar): to participate in the process of imagining and creating the concrete political agencies that represent the only real possibility—albeit without guarantees—of creating a new and better society.

The presence of a postmodern condition in contemporary economics involves, for Ernesto Screpanti, both the internal dismantling of the modernist systems that have long characterized neoclassical and Marxian theories and the proliferation of a wide variety of alternative, heterodox approaches. Screpanti begins by defining economic modernism in terms of certain key characteristics: a humanist ontology of social being, a substantialist theory of economic value, an equilibrium approach to economic and social structure, and a metanarrative of humankind. As Screpanti sees it, both neoclassical and traditional Marxian economics have exhibited these four characteristics, which, in turn, can be synthesized as determinism and essentialism. But, in recent decades, both theoretical traditions have suffered from problems and criticisms (such as the existence of multiple equilibria in neoclassical theory and the questioning of the lawlike status of the falling rate of profit in Marxian theory) that have exposed the flimsiness of their modernist foundations, thereby opening the door to the emergence and proliferation of a series of new—nondeterminist, antiessentialist—economic theories that exhibit significant postmodern moments. Among these, Screpanti includes neoclassical and radical institutionalism, evolutionary economics and complex systems theory, neo-Austrian theory, post-Keynesian economics, and postmodern Marxian economics. Whether or not the development of this heterodox research program will generate a new Schumpeterian "classical situation" is still an open question. Screpanti expresses his doubts about such an eventuality, but he does consider the current crisis of modernist economics to be more far-reaching than the three or four that have occurred in the last two centuries, comparable only to the period in the mid-eighteenth century that gave rise to modern economics in the first place.

The relationship between Marxism and democracy is the topic of Richard Wolff’s contribution to the Remarx section of this issue. Whereas the history of that relationship comprises a sequence of reversals and pendulum swings by Marx and later Marxists, as they variously allied themselves with or found it necessary to criticize existing democratic ideas and movements, Wolff’s goal is to break from that either/ or oscillation and to pose the question of what contributions Marxism (and contemporary Marxists) can offer to radical thinking about and practices of democracy. He begins by noting that other approaches to democracy focus on the "who" and "how" of democratic decisionmaking; Marxism (in a manner parallel to feminism and antiracism), however, involves placing something new on the agenda: what will be decided. Then, he argues that the "what" specific to Marxism involves the range of issues associated with class, the processes whereby surplus labor is appropriated and distributed. It is this class aspect of democracy that Wolff finds to be missing not only in other theories of democracy but also in the specific case of the Soviet Union, where the "transformation of the organization of surplus labor inside state industrial enterprises" was never made "an explicit object of decisionmaking, democratic or otherwise." Wolff’s alternative proposal is to include, among the issues to be decided by democratic decisionmaking, those that pertain (directly and indirectly) the class structure of society—from which different class processes will be allowed or encouraged to exist and how account can be taken of each society’s prior class history to whether or not (and, if so, in what manner) nonproducers will participate in appropriating and distributing communal surplus labor.

Ranajit Guha’s collection of essays, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, is an attempt to define the conditions and eventual failure of British hegemony as part of the larger Subaltern Studies project that emerged in the 1980s. David McInerney expresses his appreciation both for Guha’s work and for the general approach to recovering subaltern resistance that has brought together the insights and strategies of Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault. What McInerney finds troubling, however, is the role that Marx’s concept of capital plays in Guha’s explanation of the necessity of British failure in achieving the consent of the Indian peasantry. In particular, although Guha’s reading of the limits to the expansion of capital in terms of the conceptual schemes of dominance/subordination and force/consent allows him to successfully challenge British and Indian elite historiography, it also imposes unnecessary restrictions on producing knowledge of the conflicts and struggles among both the subject populations and their British rulers. McInerney thus encourages Guha and the other members of the Subaltern Studies project to rework their appropriation of Marxist categories in order to further their stated goal of building an effective anticapitalist movement.

In the second review essay, Marian Aguiar discusses the recently published "literary biography" of the Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet. Although in Aguiar’s view more successful as personal/historical biography than literary criticism, Saime Göksu and Edward Timms’s Romantic Communist provides a long overdue English-language introduction to the life and work of that remarkable literary and political figure. Aguiar recommends this biography both because of the relative neglect of Hikmet’s innovative and politically engaged poetry in the English-speaking world and also because his life coincided with historically significant cultural and political events in both Turkey and, during two periods of exile, the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century.

Finally we wish to offer publicly our sincerest thanks to RM’s outgoing Managing Editor, Jacquelyn Southern, and to welcome her successor, Helen Smith. Four years ago, when we first confronted the need to hire someone to take responsibility for shepherding the manuscripts from copyediting through production to final publication, we began a search that culminated in our finding an enthusiastic, remarkably talented, and good-natured individual who, in addition to her own graduate studies and family responsibilities, was willing to take on the job. Jackie has labored tirelessly with us, our authors, and publisher to do all that was humanly possible to make RM appear on time, while maintaining the highest standards of quality. Fortunately, Jackie has agreed to stay on as copy editor and assist Helen in becoming acquainted with the sometimes convoluted manner in which our issues are initially assembled and, for many, magically appear at some later date. We look forward to working with Helen in years to come.

The Editors

In this issue the Brazilian political theorist Carlos Nelson Coutinho demonstrates that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony represents a fundamental contribution to the idea of democracy and, especially, to the possibility of imagining and enacting the radical democratization of society. Today, as is well known (and, in left circles, much disparaged), the discussion of democracy has been effectively captured, monopolized in both academic and everyday discussions, by the language of the "invisible hand," purely formal constitutional and electoral rules and procedures, and distinctly non-Marxian conceptions of civil society. However, it is not enough, Coutinho implicitly argues along with Gramsci, to counterpose to this neoliberal position an approach to political praxis founded on the idea that the state is a coercive apparatus or that capitalism and democracy are fundamentally incompatible. Gramsci can be read as recognizing and adding to these Marxian insights a concern for another fundamental dimension of politics, that of "intersubjective and consensual interaction." But, to get there, Gramsci (like Althusser and so many other Marxist thinkers) had to make a theoretical detour. In the case of theory of democracy, Gramsci was able to articulate his insights by engaging not only with the work of Marx and Lenin but also—and, for Coutinho, significantly—with the nonliberal contributions of Rousseau and Hegel.

Rousseau can be credited with criticizing the entire liberal tradition of contract theory that begins with Locke while, at the same time, insisting on the idea of a "legitimate" social contract founded on popular sovereignty, on the "general will" of "a collective subject." Still, there are two major limitations of Rousseau’s conception of democracy: the maintenance and eventual strengthening o particular interests associated with the continued existence of private property and the inability to grasp the conditions of pluralism and diversity in modern society. Hegel, for his part, was able to overcome these problems—even as he discarded some of Rousseau’s theoretical achievements. He succeeded both in giving concrete form to the notion of general will and in linking hegemony (the preponderance of universality) with pluralism (the respect for and cultivation of differences). What Hegel lost in the process, however, was the contractualist dimension that lies at the center of Rousseau’s project. In Coutinho’s view, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony both absorbs the valid dimensions of the writings of these two classic figures and develops new ideas to move beyond the limits and aporias of their work. Gramsci borrows from Hegel the idea that particular interests are concretely determined within material culture and undergo a process of universalization that leads to the creation of collective subjects. And, from Rousseau, Gramsci views participation in the various hegemonic apparatuses as a contractual or consensual process. It is this new sphere of social being that Gramsci marks with his concept of "civil society," which constitutes an enlargement of the traditional Marxian concept of the state to include the dimension of consensus. For Coutinho, one of Gramsci’s key contributions to democratic and socialist culture of our time is the necessity of opposing coercion and expanding the sphere of contract—in order to build the consensual bases of a "regulated," communist society.

Feminist philosophers and social theorists have long drawn on Althusser’s writings, especially the famous essay on "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," for insights into the nature of ideology and the interpellation of the subject. Yet, Hasana Sharp argues in her article, "Is It Simple to Be a Feminist in Philosophy?" a materialist reading of Althusser’s theory of ideology and interpellation offers even more to contemporary feminist thinking than has been recognized, even by such astute readers as Judith Butler and J. K. Gibson-Graham. In particular, Sharp understands feminist philosophy and Althusserian theory as taking similar positions concerning the practice of philosophy—on the idea of philosophy as practice; however, the limitations that have operated in the feminist engagement with Althusser have, in Sharp’s view, foreclosed the investigation of additional dimensions of subjectivity and its relationship to "material" institutions and practices. What most worries Sharp is the idea that Althusser’s theory of the constitution of subjectivity, the project of under-standing the interpellation of individuals as subjects in and through ideology, has been reduced to a problem of language. For example, while expressing her admiration for Butler’s work as a "significant and important contribution to, and augmentation of, the ‘investigations’ of subjectivity initiated by Althusser," Sharp thinks there are other encounters between Althusser’s work and Butler’s own writings on the materiality of the forces constitutive of subjectivity that operate alongside, but are ultimately not reducible to, a central authority or linguistic signs. In a similar vein, Sharp praises Gibson-Graham’s use of Althusser’s notion of overdetermination in their practice of theorizing economic difference alongside sexual difference while challenging her to consider its correlate, underdetermination. It is the latter which, for Sharp, signifies an alternative to determinism and functionalism, a way of thinking "at the extremes" rather than attempting a full and complete explanation of the way things are. Ultimately, then, what Sharp calls for in pointing toward further encounters between feminist theory and Althusserian Marxism are experiments in theoretical practice that, for her, are the real meaning of "intervention."

The social life of trash, in Liz Sisco’s photo-essay, involves both official and unofficial, public and private, forms of recycling. Across A Street from Sisco’s neighborhood, amid the well-groomed lawns and Neighborhood Watch signs, the city sponsors a program of curbside pickup: blue plastic tubs; plastic, glass, and newspapers properly sorted. However, south of A Street—a high-density, "mixed residency" neighborhood where, the Environmental Service Department explains, curbside recycling is not yet possible—residents do have an unofficial, private recycling program. Each morning, "a steady trickle of street people" enters the neighborhood (watched with a good deal of suspicion by Sisco’s next-door neighbor) and looks for things that can be transformed into commodities, items with market value. As Sisco discovers when the tables are turned and a black plastic bag of mildewed clothing and a roll of unprocessed film is left on her back doorstep, the creation of life out of discarded possessions is "tough work." The found objects resist interpretation: Are they random acquisitions from the street, or do they represent a family robbed of its possessions? Whose life is registered in the odds and ends of the unwanted inheritance? But, without doubt, they do force us to confront the "vulnerability of people who depend on the street for survival."

Many of us—Marxists and non-Marxists alike—took it upon ourselves to reread, and then to discuss and debate the continued relevance of the Communist Manifesto during the many celebrations occasioned by the 150th anniversary of its publication. In this sense, the Manifesto was reappropriated—written and created, once again— as one of the common texts of left culture. Thomas Kemple sets out to investigate precisely how the Manifesto works as such an active text, a key-work, "a symptom of and an agent in the history of which it is a part," by threading his way through and providing an alternative to existing (both subjectivist and objectivist) readings. Kemple’s own reading focuses on the discursive strategies of theatrical script, legal argument, and pedagogical lesson that contribute to the text’s political effects and, thus, serve as a model for new fields of discursive practice.

Kemple begins by examining the overall hermeneutic framework within which the strategies of the three major sections of the Manifesto can be seen to operate. What emerges from the combination of spectral sightings, shifting verbal tenses, and historical references invoked by Marx and Engels in the initial passage is a contrasting of ways of life that are fading, passing out of existence, with the emergence of others that have "not yet" come into being. Next, "the history of all previously existing society" represents for Kemple a kind of stage direction according to which the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary and violent agent of history, takes the lead role—followed by the appearance of the central character, the proletariat, which threatens to disrupt and redirect the forward motion of the narrative, culminating in a counterintuitive spectacle of catastrophe and redemption. The second principal section, "Proletarians and Communists," can be read as a carefully articulated, quasi-legal disputation in which the cross-examination of the founding principles of bourgeois society—property, freedom, work, family, nationality, and the ruling ideas—serve as the means of turning the tables on the accusers. For Kemple, the final section, notwithstanding its pedantic style, provides a valuable pedagogical lesson in distinguishing "the regulative ideal of a classless society" from its uses within "apparently or potentially allied discourses." The discursive strategies that together comprise the Communist Manifesto offer something more than a theory of history; they also contain a thesis about the historicization of theory, "an open framework which requires its own transformation in confrontation with newly emerging political circumstances, historical tendencies, and fields of application." This is precisely the collaborative work that, in Kemple’s view, the Manifesto exemplifies and that it invites us to take up.

In a chronological sense, postcolonial discourse comes after W. E. B. Du Bois. However, as Kenneth Mostern demonstrates, although Du Bois has had little noticeable influence on the texts of postcoloniality, the definition of postcolonial critique (put forward by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture) applies unambiguously to Du Bois’s 1903 volume The Souls of Black Folk. In particular, the themes of doubling, ambivalence, hybridity, interdisciplinarity, migration, and national art that are used to describe cultures and psyches in at least one version of contemporary post-colonial theory (which Mostern considers to be the dominant position in the field today) are also present in Du Bois’s much earlier work. The strong parallels between the two historically separated texts then lead Mostern to investigate how the "structure of the double represses this history by representing postcolonial discourse as ‘new’." Mostern locates his explanation of the emergence of the postcolonial double consciousness not in the slave or colonial experience itself but, rather, in the class situation of migrant professional classes following such a period of "oppressive dislocation." It is the similarity in the postslavery and postcolonial experiences of the educated middle classes that, for Mostem, closes the gap between the terms of critique of the early Du Bois and contemporary postcolonial discourse and, at the same time, serves to hide the class origins of hybridity. It is this Marxist "moment" that Mostern finds missing in Bhabha’s version of postcolonial theory but present in texts of the later Du Bois such as Dusk of Dawn. There, Mostern finds an autobiographical narrative of intellectual work that is contextualized at various levels, from psychological motivation through the nexus of race and nation to racial imperialism and the international capitalist economy. Dusk therefore combines a Marxist framework of analysis and a "carefully defined, identitarian, practical intellectual politics" that, Mostern argues, acquires an importance as a key document for rewriting the history of postcolonial discourse and, therefore, for understanding the "complicated and multifarious spaces we inhabit, and by which we are identified."

The basic equations of Marxian value theory need to be radically transformed by the explicit recognition and incorporation of household labor. That is the conclusion of Ajit Chaudhury and Anjan Chakrabarti’s analysis of the relationship of exchange between the capitalist economy of the market and the noncapitalist economy that obtains within the household. Chaudhury and Chakrabarti take as their point of departure the overdeterminist approach to Marxian theory pioneered by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff and the class analysis of the household that Wolff, Resnick, and Harriet Fraad initially published in RM (and which subsequently appeared in a Pluto Press book, Bringing It All Back Home, in 1994). While defending the distinctiveness of the Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff approach against its critics, Chaudhury and Chakrabarti proceed to make their own "corrections" in order to incorporate what they consider to be the particular class structure of a typical Indian household. This is what they call the noncommunist "community" class process: one that involves individual performance of surplus labor by the direct producers—according to a clear, gendered, division of labor—along with "community appropriation of the goods produced." Both agricultural production (where individuals do the farming but the community appropriates the harvest collectively) and household economies (where the household members collectively appropriate the cooked food while male and female partners individually perform "inside" and "outside" labor according to a gendered division of labor) are examples of such a community class process. In neither case are Chaudhury and Chakrabarti willing to consider the process to be communist because the performance of labor is not collectively organized.

The next task is to show how a formal value-theoretic Marxian approach can incorporate the household economy. The main problem, as Chaudhury and Chakrabarti see it, is to find a way of reducing the incommensurable, heterogeneous labors carried out within the household economy to a single measure of abstract labor. Once this is accomplished, Chaudhury and Chakrabarti arrive at a conclusion that many readers will no doubt find controversial: while women (in this particular gendered division of house-hold labor) often work more hours than men, they may also occupy the position of exploiter. This is because the external market may value the labor of women substantially less than it does that of their male counterparts; thus, a smaller quantity of men’s labor more than compensates for women’s work in market terms. What this implies for Chaudhury and Chakrabarti is that equal exchange means quite different things for the capitalist and household sectors; in particular, it may turn out to be quite unjust for a particular group within society. it is on this basis that Chaudhury and Chakrabarti challenge contemporary Marxists to recognize the gender biases inherent in existing approaches to the labor theory of value and to take up the challenge of incorporating household labor and the household economy into their discourse.

Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx continues to haunt—alternately engaging and frustrating—reflections on the contemporary relevance of Marxist theory and political practice. Imre Szeman joins a host of others, including Pierre Macherey, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Tom Lewis, and Stella Gaon, who have previously responded to Derrida’s text in the pages of RM. For Szeman, having expressed his appreciation for the range of ghostly issues raised by Derrida, the ultimate unanswered question remains what is to be done? Szeman does credit Derrida with reading Marx in a manner that effectively confronts two of the most important changes in the world situation: the apparently completed hegemony of capitalism after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc (and the interpretation of this event as marking the death of Marxism) and the necessity of retaining or reconstituting the radical edge of Marxism against the threat of incorporating it "into the safety of an established philosophical or political canon." For Szeman, Derrida’s injunction to remember specters, "to see them as something to be kept close by instead of conjured away," reinforces both the project of critique (especially Marxist critique—of global capitalism, of the state, etc.) and the work of undoing everything that tries to hide specters, thereby being more attentive to a certain spirit of Marxism. Where Derrida’s approach falls short, Szeman argues, is in confronting the spectrality of politics itself, the third major transformation in the world today. According to Szeman (and Derrida himself), the nineteenth-century model of party and state has given way to a mass-media culture that has radically reconfigured the possibility—indeed, the very space—of political activity. What remains unclear is what spectrality has to offer, beyond naming the derealization of the political and posing the idea of justice, to formulating a Marxist politics appropriate to these changed conditions. Here, Szeman argues that it is necessary to return to and reinvigorate an older discourse, one that has long haunted Marxism: the aesthetic. Like the specter, the aesthetic can be seen as a figure that works to disrupt the closure of a hegemonic system and promises new possibilities "by its very conceptual form." Szeman notes that the aesthetic is not without its own problems and limitations. However, to the extent that the "old" aesthetic combines a model of transcendental cognitive power and a historical and ideological social practice, it represents a tension that is virtually absent from Derrida’s ghosts but vitally important for Marxism to retain.

We conclude this introductory essay with Richard Wolff’s appreciative review of Terry CAESAr’s recent book, Writing in Disguise: Academic Life in Subordination. Wolff notes that CAESAr’s incisive and sustained critique of academic writing forms part of a growing literature in which academics finally "are turning the weapons of their criticism to their own academic imprisonments." Alongside such far-reaching issues as college and university finances, the corporate reorganization of higher education, the role of sweatshop labor in the production of school logo apparel, the casualization of academic labor, the challenges to intellectual property via the Internet, and much else that is receiving long-overdue attention inside the academy, CAESAr focuses on the deleterious effects of the rigid—though often unstated—rules of what, how, when, and for whom academics are forced to compose (and from whom, in return, to receive) their written work. The mythology of objectivity surrounding the memos, dissertations, rejection letters—even the jokes and casual anecdotes that academics spend a good bit of their time preparing and reading—all mask the various forms of insult and injury to which they are regularly subjected. Wolff expresses his appreciation for the author’s sharp and humorous style, as well as for the "disturbing" issues CAESAr raises for readers. But he cautions that much work needs to be done by way of analyzing the relationship between the changing class structure of universities and the forms of writing that lead to the subordination of academics before formulating plans for imagining and inventing new systems of academic writing.

The Editors

In this issue a Marxist rethinking of international human rights is the lead topic. Neve Gordon, Jacinda Swanson, and Joseph Buttigieg begin by expressing their appreciation for the important work conducted by Human Rights Watch, the second largest human rights organization in the world, but they also want to expand on that work, by pointing out what they consider to be its shortcomings and proposing an alternative approach. Using a framework that combines the insights of the Communist Manifesto, Marx’s writings on law, and Gramsci’s critique of economic determinism, Gordon et al. critically examine two mid-1990s HRW reports, Rape for Profit and The Small Hands of Slavery, that deal with human rights abuses in India and Nepal. What they find is that, although there is much to applaud in the analysis carried out by HRW, its recommendations fail to take into account "its own socioeconomic analysis" and the global context within which human rights violations occur. In addition, what Gordon et al. regard as HRW’s top-down "legalistic" approach to human rights tends to overlook social change from the bottom up and to ignore the ways in which legal systems are both informed by socioeconomic relations and constitutive of social identities. What Gordon, Swanson, and Buttigieg recommend is a move beyond individual human rights and political emancipation to embrace a strategy of human emancipation. (In order to pursue this dialogue between Marxism and human rights, we organized a roundtable among the authors of this article and some key activists within HRW. The transcript of that discussion will be published in a future issue of RETHINKING MARXISM.)

The issue of individual rights is also the focus of the next article, by Jeff Noonan. Noonan is concerned to recover "a socialist conception of individuality"—in order both to contest the ways that the libertarian Right has been able to portray itself "as the sole defender of liberty and self-creation" and to overcome left-wing thinking that focuses on civil society and all but ignores capitalist constraints on individuality. For Noonan, neither classical liberalism (of the sort proffered by Hayek) nor the New Left (he focuses on the work of Andrew Arato and Josh Cohen) adequately conceptualizes the socioeconomic conditions of individual development: liberalism, because its critique of the state (which, for Noonan, has its kernel of truth) ends up being profoundly undemocratic, and radical democratic thought, because it seeks to maintain a strong public-private distinction (thereby safeguarding not only the sphere of free association but also private property and market relations). Noonan’s alternative proposal would move beyond the rights of citizenship to include a rethinking of the relation between democracy and control over public wealth because, in his view, "without the public sphere there can be no genuine individuality, at least for the majority of"

Beverly Best argues that Ernesto Laclau’s "social logic of hegemony" has the potential to undo many of the reified dichotomies (such as universalism/historicity and essentialism/antiessentialism) that, in her view, paralyze contemporary social theory. That potential has not been realized because, for Best, Laclau’s texts have been systematically misread by many left-wing, especially Marxist, critics. Therefore, in her article, Best aims to work through and clarify the key categories and arguments that underpin Laclau’s approach. Her explication de texte covers a wide range of notions—from discourse and objectivity to antagonism and difference—and focuses on the apparent contradictions, the antinomies—such as "equality in difference" and "particular universality"—that lie at the heart of Laclau’s understanding of hegemony and historical transformation. Best argues that, in the end, it is precisely the conceptual contingency and openness of Laclau’s scheme that run counter to the political paralysis often attributed to post-Marxism, because the field for action is widened and social agents acquire a "sense of responsibility for the dimensions of the greater social landscape."

In Patricia Huntington’s view, the Zapatistas’ approach to social change, their "impossible" uprising in Chiapas, is predicated on their resistance to the genocidal subtext of colonialism and a reinvention of themselves as fully human—in short, on a poetic revolution. Huntington arrives at that conclusion, first, by developing a theoretical framework that creatively combines Enrique Dussel’s critique of European modernity and Julia Kristeva’s theory of genotext and, then, by examining how the Zapatistas have confronted the myths that have attempted to marginalize and contain their rebellion. According to Dussel, Europe gives rise to modernity through a sacrificial violence that conceals or misrecognizes non-European peoples while, for Kristeva, poetic discourse can bring people to an awareness of their participation in a given social narrative (such as the racial contract of modernity) because it loosens their affective attachment to that narrative. Comandante Marcos and the Zapatistas can then be seen as challenging the neoliberal project within Mexico by disrupting the imaginary and racist ideas about who they are and thereby establishing the conditions on which, for the first time, a real dialogue can take place to enact the necessary structural changes within Mexican society.

Both the context and the content of the bhajan, or Hindu devotional song—the subject matter of Agha Shahid Ali’s poem—remind us, subtly and indirectly, of the uneasy recovery of mystician and religious fundamentalism not only in India but also across the globe. The lyrics that Ali "found" on the 78 RPM speak to a world before the advent of compact disks (before even 45’s, long-playing records, and cassette tapes), a time when oral traditions were first being mechanically reproduced and films and other forms of mass entertainment were being invented. Many, of course, believed that modern technology would hasten the arrival of a secular age when such songs (and associated practices and institutions) would retain little meaning. And yet today, a religious revival seems to be taking place, as millions of people aspire to union with the "dark god," the result of restless days, sleepless nights, and broken hearts—of having little else.

The Remarx section comprises three essays that, in different ways, challenge the conditions and effects of contemporary neoliberalism. The first, by Fred Block, seeks to explain why left-wing criticisms of global neoliberalism have been so muted and to outline an alternative line of attack. Taking a page from J. K. Gibson-Graham’s study of the disempowering consequences of totalizing conceptions of capitalism, Block argues that the imagery of capitalism as a singular, natural system serves to reinforce the position that "there is no alternative." Even the "varieties of capitalism" perspective has made little headway outside the academy because, in Block’s view, it has failed to reconceptualize international capitalism as a "constructed system." For Block, the way forward, theoretically and politically, is to deconstruct capitalism by showing how the system is put together and by illuminating its "weld lines," the places where the system is weakest. In particular, Block explains, the Left needs to focus its criticisms on the theory of self-regulating markets, the strategy of financial liberalization, and the tension between class power and economic efficiency in order to cut a path between neoliberalism and the traditional vision of socialism.

In the second Remarx essay, David Barkin discusses in some detail the various forms of social polarization that have accompanied the determined effort to implant the neoliberal program in Mexico, beginning in the 1980s. Could these be the consequences that, among others, led the recent electoral defeat of the long-ruling PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party? Written before the elections took place, Barkin’s analysis demonstrates that the reorganization of the Mexican political economy in order to fully integrate into the world economy led to a profound restructuring of the labor force (involving a massive displacement of labor from traditional agricultural and manufacturing jobs and toward the maquila industry and unemployment), a precipitous fall in real wages, an increasingly unequal distribution of income, and an ineffective "targeted" welfare program. The results have been devastating, but Barkin witnesses the emergence of an alternative vision within and among communities encompassing "as much as one-third of Mexico’s population," such as direct commercial ties between unions and rural producers, sustainable resource management projects, and the defense by indigenous groups of historic titles to their regions.

Biju Mathew, in the final essay in the Remarx section, uncovers that cultural expansion and financial underpinnings of Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, within the hidden orders of the global economy. Focusing his analysis on the Indian professional community dispersed throughout suburban North America, Mathew reconstructs the network of electronic communication, student organizations, and corporate fundraising that, by merging nationalism with charity, both responds to the crisis of Indian diasporic identity in the United States and funds the right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad (or World Hindu Council)-inspired communal violence that is currently taking place in India. Mathew makes clear that "one does not have to be a raving Hindu fanatic . . . one has only to be located in this cusp of global capitalism and diasporic identity battles" to sit in front of a computer screen or engage in multicultural celebrations and, however unwittingly, to participate in the blood-letting thousands of miles away.

We conclude this issue with two reviews, one on left environmentalism and the other on the relationship between critical theory and computer technology. The first, by Steven Vogel, examines an anthology of essays on the philosophical roots of contemporary environmental theory, Minding Nature, edited by David Macauley. Vogel applauds the wide range of philosophical, political, and cultural thinkers— Rachel Carson, Charles Fourier, and Ernst Bloch to Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jürgen Habermas—whose writings are brought to bear on the problem of elaborating a progressive environmental philosophy and ethics. However, Vogel also finds that none of the contributions resolves what he considers to be the central problem for left environmentalism: "can we acknowledge the social and historically constructed character of what we call ‘nature’ and the associated impossibility of finding in nature a set of guidelines for how ‘it’ ought to be treated, without thereby losing the ability to criticize, at a ‘deep’ . . . level, contemporary depredations of the environment?"

Sasho Lambevski, a self-styled "practitioner of inter/hyper/textual reading/writing," begins his commentary on George Landow’s Hypertext 2.0 by noting the inherent difficulty of composing a review of a book on electronic hypertext (itself ironically presented in a linear, paper-based format) for a printed academic journal. Still, Lambevski engages with the "book"—first, expressing his appreciation for the original edition and, second, discussing what he considers to be some major problems in the revised and amplified version of Landow’s argument. As Lambevski sees it, Landow was able to maintain a precarious balance between the theory and practice of hypertext in the first edition, for example, by showing that hypertext writing/reading replaces the conceptual systems derived from print civilization with ones of decentered self, multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks. However, Lambevski argues that, in the second edition, Landow upsets that balance by focusing too much on the technological possibilities of hypertext systems and failing to theorize the issue of the subjectivity of the hypertext reader/writer. The result, in Lambevski’s view, is that Hypertext 2.0, though "still a book worth reading," exaggerates the liberating effects of recent advances in computer technology.

As this issue goes to press, preparations are well underway for "Marxism 2000," the fourth in the series of international conferences sponsored by RETHINKING MARXISM. The previous three conferences were by all accounts resounding successes and, thanks to the efforts of the members of the organizing committee for this year’s gathering (Enid Arvidson, Margot Backus, Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg, Stephanie Eckman, Rob Garnett, John Roche, and Marjolein van der Veen) and many others, once again we look forward to a series of wide-ranging and stimulating discussions that will chart the future courses of Marxism. Readers can expect to see some of the most original and engaging papers from this year’s conference published in future issues.

The Editors

In this issue we are pleased to launch an exciting new series, “Globalization Under Interrogation.” Coedited by board members Yahya Madra and Jack Amariglio, the series begins from the premise that globalization is a “terrain of struggle,” a site of contending theoretical representations and political projects, not a singular entity whose conditions and consequences can be taken as given. Madra and Amariglio, in their introductory essay, note that many of the representations of globalization that are invoked and deployed on the Left have had the effect of displacing existing conceptual schemes (such as imperialism), reinserting the foundational role of the economy, and limiting the possibilities of an effective left politics. The goal of the series, then, is to interrogate these representations and to begin the task of formulating novel theoretical and political strategies to “frontally engage with globalization.” We invite readers to send us their own interrogations of globalization, either by contributing articles and other pieces (such as artwork and fiction) or by responding (in the form of correspondence or brief commentaries) to work that is published in the series. Either way, our hope is to create a lively and open-ended forum in which our expectation is nothing less than a “ruthless criticism of everything existing.”

Arif Dirlik, in his essay “Globalization as the End and the Beginning of History,” begins the project of such a criticism by admitting his own skepticism concerning the usefulness of the term globalization but then assuming what he considers to be the risk of treating it as a “self-consciously new way of viewing the world.” The first step in Dirlik’s argument involves distinguishing between globalization “as process and paradigm,” a move that makes it possible for him to emphasize the relative autonomy of the paradigm and, at the same time, to insist on its historicity: “its contradictory relationship to the history of which it is a product, and the history it is in the process of producing.” Thus, for Dirlik, contemporary globalization comprises both a response to changing configurations in global relations and a project to reshape those relations in ways that “[serve] some interests better than others,” an awareness of the postcolonial (and, importantly, postnational) reorganization of societies and the creation of new forms of exploitation and marginalization. From a historical perspective, Dirlik admits that the globalizing force of capital today emerges from and shares important features with that of the late-nineteenth century (as presaged by Marx and Engels in the mid-nineteenth century, in the Communist Manifesto). However, Dirlik also wants to focus on the political and cultural differences between the two periods: whereas the earlier period was characterized by the “globalization of Euroamerican norms,” such that colonialism and nationalism involved a hierarchical ordering of the world according to a single conception of modernization, that Eurocentric hegemony has broken down in the contemporary world. For Dirlik, the proliferation of multiple alternative forms of capitalism and modernity that can be witnessed today are precisely the products of capitalist globalization, which simultaneously unified and fragmented the world. Thus, in Dirlik’s view, the globalization paradigm emerges not only in the wake of the cold war but also after the appearance of new capitalist economies in East and Southeast Asia, thereby representing the decentering of both economic and social institutions and claims to knowledge. Globalization therefore represents, for Dirlik, both an end and a beginning: the culmination of the Euroamerican expansion across the globe and the possibility, perhaps for the first time, of making history.

We continue our project of reinventing RM by devising ways to promote exchanges of ideas instead of limiting ourselves to publishing individual articles. Toward that end, we are gratified that Deirdre McCloskey, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and S. Charusheela agreed to participate in a conversation that we sponsored at the annual meeting of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) and to submit their remarks for publication in this issue. We should note that URPE and other groups representing nonmainstream approaches to economics are increasingly being marginalized within the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA), whose center of power is the American Economics Association (AEA). The AEA, which has not been known for its acceptance of alternative theories for at least the last half century—since the “victory” of its neoclassical wing—has decided to decrease the number of sessions organized by Marxists and other heterodox scholars while, elsewhere; students and professors of economics are beginning to raise their voices against the sterile mathematization and “Stalinization” of the discipline of economics. Even recent Nobel economics laureate James L. Heckman has felt compelled to decry the lack of pluralism in economics and to express his support for “a very inclusive view of economics that recognizes the way our field is used by people outside of it and the strong disagreements over ‘correct’ ways to view a number of important issues.”

Our own heterodox minisymposium, which was coordinated by Charusheela, was designed to explore the divergent theoretical approaches and political strategies that emerge from poststructuralist feminist scholarship on such important topics as female agency in the economy, the relationship between women’s oppression and capitalism, and conceptions of progress. McCloskey begins the conversation by proclaiming her allegiance to postmodernism, feminism—and free-market capitalism. For McCloskey, classical (Soviet-style, centrally planned) socialism was a modernist project and, yet, while in her view postmodernists are often critical of markets, “there’s nothing in postmodernism entailing socialism.” Indeed, McCloskey wants to make the opposite case: that postmodernists should embrace a market society that in her view is “alert, flexible, innovative, bubbling up, democratic, unintended, creative.” McCloskey then connects feminism to postmodernism and markets because, according to her reading of economic history, markets have been “the great liberator of women.” The logic of her argument is that markets have led to economic growth, and higher levels of per capita income have increased the choices available to women.

Thus, McCloskey’s story of the “three centuries past and the century to come” is one of progress—for women as well as for poor people, religious minorities, and sexual minorities. Moreover, McCloskey believes that, in contrast to what she finds in Spivak’s writings, imperialism is neither the principal cause of underdevelopment in the third world nor a key ingredient in the levels of wealth achieved by the imperial powers. McCloskey’s final point is that, while feminists rightfully do not identify with one-dimensional notions of homo economicus, the variety of human motivations in Adam Smith’s writings—including both prudence and love—can serve as the starting point for “a feminist theory of desire and economy.”

Spivak continues the conversation by arguing that, in her view, there is “no necessary connection between capitalism and specifically women’s oppression.” Instead, the relationship between capitalism and women’s oppression depends on the situation in which capitalism operates, on whether or not “women can be dominated as women with cultural consent.” Thus, one cannot rely on the abstract logic of capital (which “must equalize but also keep inequalities in place”) but, instead, must take into account the concrete conditions that mark the emergence of each nation within capitalism as an international system, as well as the different ways in which women (in Asia and North Africa as against Central and Southern Africa) have been written into the narrative of capital. Similarly, for Spivak, no single concept of female identity can serve as the basis for a feminist theory of desire and economy. Instead, Spivak considers it a “methodological necessity” to distinguish between subjectship and agency—between, on one hand, the complex, incessant dynamic of woman-becoming in which differences are made and, on the other, the “general equivalent” of woman which is an outcome of the international women’s rights movement. For Spivak, the distinction between subjectship and agency acquires its significance precisely in the attempt to create a rhetorical model of resistance, of “a constant interruption, a constant thwarting of the ends of globalization.” Instead of the usual model of manufacturing free choice in the context of “gender-training,” which subjects women in the name of global capital, Spivak proposes a program of changing economic institutions, which represents an intervention in the sphere of agency. For this, Spivak suggests that is necessary to overcome the limitations imposed by global capital and learn to take anticapitalist mind-sets seriously.

Charusheela joins the conversation in an afterword, “On History, Love, and Politics,” in which she interrogates the terms of the debate between McCloskey and Spivak and makes the case for a poststructuralist rethinking of Marxian conceptions of capitalism and subaltern struggles. According to Charusheela, the dispute over the relationship between capitalism and women’s oppression stems not from different ethical positions but, rather, from contrasting conceptions of capitalism: McCloskey’s celebration of bourgeois virtue and free markets and Spivak’s focus on the polarizing effects of the social relations of production. Charusheela finds fault with both the former’s refusal to separate culture and economy and the latter’s view of capitalism as a selfsufficient motor of history. Her proposed alternative takes its point of departure from two central ideas: “that capital does not emerge automatically, and does not have the structuration to reproduce itself automatically.” It is this undoing of the automaticity of capitalist development that, for Charusheela, is key to addressing the problem of “ethics under difference”—of promoting feminist alliances that cut across differences—not just in the realms of identity and culture but within the economy itself. Combining insights from both McCloskey and Spivak, Charusheela concludes that love is both a condition of the feminist project of promoting institutional agency without exercising ontological control and an ethic that requires an institutional reorganization of the economy. Only then can we “learn to love as equals.”

The war in Kosovo has been quickly effaced and all but forgotten in the United States. However, in Western Europe, the effects of the war continue to haunt everyday sensibilities and political possibilities. The questions abound: What is the meaning of human rights when it serves as the pretext for launching the machinery of war against the citizens of a contested state? What are the prospects for the European Left when putatively socialist governments connive with the U.S. administration to perpetrate the war? What is the role of the critical artist when those same left-wing governments orchestrate an intense media campaign in a determined attempt to justify and to drum up support for the war? German artist Babette Eid responds with her own “agit-prop” campaign by reappropriating the images (most taken from daily newspapers) that were used to manufacture consent during the war and adding captions from her “trip.” The resulting travelogue reveals both the pornography of wartime propaganda (do we miss it?) and the possibility of disrupting that propaganda (how could we have missed it?) so as to ensure that it will not simply be effaced and forgotten (and, thus, that it not be missed).

While negotiations at the Hague concerning the actual implementation of the Kyoto Treaty are being undermined by powerful national and corporate interests, Andriana Vlachou warns us that the policies being considered depend crucially on the theoretical assumptions buried within the models used to analyze the economics of global warming. In particular, Vlachou points out the severe limitations of the neoclassical models that are often used to value the damages occasioned by, and the benefits of reversing the process of, global warming. While the models employed are put forward as complete and objective, Vlachou shows that there are subject to considerable uncertainty (e.g., regarding which costs and benefits are included and excluded or a particular rate is inserted to “discount” the implications for future generations) and social bias (e.g., when valuational schemes presume that “workers choose freely to get exposed to risks”). Such models also ignore the class aspects of global warming: from the historical patterns of capitalist development that have caused greenhouse emissions through the different groups of capitalists who stand to lose or gain by controlling such emissions to the class positions of scientists themselves. Vlachou concludes her critical assessment by reminding us that the “possibility of socialism could be enhanced if it became grounded in ecological and social practices that challenge capitalism effectively.”

We conclude this issue with three Remarx essays, the final set edited by Carole Biewener before completing her long and productive tenure on RM’s editorial board. Carole joined the board with the second volume and, for more than a decade, she performed many roles that were invaluable not only to the production of the journal but also to the workings of the editorial board itself. She managed subscriptions, stepped in to supervise the process of producing the journal, and, when we finally hired a managing editor, she was elected as the editor of the Remarx section. In addition, and certainly of equal importance, Carole was one of the most active participants in the internal organization of the editorial board—as a member of innumerable committees (all that unglamorous labor that goes on behind the scenes and without which the journal simply wouldn’t exist) and, especially, as one who worked indefatigably to make the collective nature of the RM project a reality. We want readers to join us in publicly thanking Carole for all that she contributed to RM over the years. We are also delighted to introduce Rob Garnett as the new Remarx editor and Eric Glynn as the editor of the reviews section.

Kai Nielsen, in the first Remarx essay, defends Quebec nationalism as a project that, in contrast to many Marxists’ suspicions of (or outright opposition to) nationalism, should be supported by socialists, for two major reasons. First, Nielsen argues that it would yield “cultural protection for a people,” and therefore serve as a local identity that not only is not incompatible with but, in his view, is a necessary condition for the kinds of “cosmopolitan universalist humanist commitments” favored by socialists. Second, Nielsen views a sovereign Quebec as having, from the start, a more social-democratic orientation than elsewhere in North America. Thus, while acknowledging that fostering Quebec nationalism falls short of full-scale socialist transformation, Nielsen believes that a “more progressive” Quebec might play “an effective part in the building of socialism” in Canada and elsewhere.

The problems of theorizing “the political” in architectural discourse is the focus of the second essay in the Remarx section, by Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann. As architects, academics, and community activists, Dutton and Mann criticize recent discussions of the political dimensions of contemporary architecture because such discussions tend to reduce the relationship between architectural strategies and the social world to “aesthetic radicalism.” The conceptual problems that Dutton and Mann discover in these academic exchanges include the conflation of form and content, the subsumption of the critique of society within a critique of architecture, and the substitution of radical discourse for social action. The alternative proposed by Dutton and Mann begins with Gramsci’s notion of “organic intellectual practice” and points toward a different—critical, strategic, and affiliated—practice of architectural activism.

How ironic (and tragic) that the authors of the late-1970s critique of Eastem European socialism, Dictatorship Over Needs—Ferenc Fehér, Ágnes Heller, and György Markus, students of Lukács and leading representatives of the so-called Budapest School—would become the “leading ideologues” of the new neoliberal order in Hungary. That is the provocative argument advanced by László Andor in the final Remarx essay. In Andor’s view, the demise of socialism and the restoration of capitalism in Eastem Europe were the result not only of internal forces but also of an array of extemal pressures from the surrounding capitalist world, which the main figures of the Budapest School failed to appreciate and to criticize. The result, for Andor, is that the original proponents of a “democracy of needs” have, in returning home, become the architects of an IMF-inspired “democracy of wants.”

We conclude by noting our pleasure at the success of the fourth international conference sponsored by RM, “Marxism 2000: The Party’s Not Over,” that took place at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in late September. Some 1200 students, scholars, artists, and activists gathered over the course of four days, in over 150 individual sessions and 4 plenary meetings, to explore the richness and diversity of the Marxian tradition and to move Marxism’s future forward into the new millennium. We want to recognize the tremendous time and effort on the part of the organizing committee (cochaired by Stephen Cullenberg and John Roche), as well as that of many others who raised money, designed and distributed posters, assembled the program, made local arrangements, and mostly joined together in a collective project to put together the conference. They deserve our thanks. Readers can look forward to future issues of RM, which will include many of the creative and thought-provoking papers that were originally discussed and debated in Amherst.

The Editors

In this issue the work of Argentine Marxist philosopher-in-exile Enrique Dussel receives first attention. As Fred Moseley contends in his introductory essay, Dussel's trilogy about Marx's economic manuscripts (the first volume of which is soon to appear in English) may well "turn out to be one of the most important works in the history of Marxian scholarship." The significance of Dussel's oeuvre is, for Moseley, based on his reading of the entirety of the manuscripts in the original German (through which he discovers that Marx wrote four—not two, as is often presumed—drafts of Capital) and, especially, on the sophistication of Dussel's philosophical method.

According to Dussel himself, the increased availability of Marx's texts, combined with the "new eyes" afforded by the impoverishment of the Latin American and global periphery at the dawn of the new century, make a complete rereading of Marx both necessary and possible. Working in a novel fashion—with a team of students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and numerous trips to consult the original handwritten manuscripts in Berlin and Amsterdam—Dussel reports on his reconstruction of the various drafts of Capital. His view is that, contra Althusser, Hegel continues to exercise a decisive influence on Marx's critique of political economy and that central to that critique is living labor, the "generating category for all of Marx's remaining categories." Thus, it is the concept of living labor that provides, for Dussel, the transcendental reference point from which it is possible—for Marx and for contemporary Marxists—to pose an ethical critique of both contemporary capitalism and bourgeois morality.

Herbert Reid trains his sights on the complicity of academic professionalism with the resurgence of what he calls the market machine-god. In this wide-ranging and engaging essay, Reid explores the ways in which the contemporary capitalist fantasy of global markets dovetails with and feeds on the long-standing U.S. myths of boundless self-determination and political purity, a postcommunal life beyond politics, as well as the recent increase in the ideological role of economics and economistS, the reinforcing of scientism and a technological worldview, the attack on the state, and much else. Reid challenges contemporary academic and independent intellectuals to devise a new, postmodern and community-based economics in order to confront the "naturalistic representation of the economic space of modern capitalism,, and, thereby, to recreate the conditions for a truly democratic politics of collective action.

The Guggenheim Museum mounted its first exhibition of Soviet-era art and design only when the Soviet Union itself had "melted into air," after the fall of the Berlin Wall A shop in New York City's Soho that sells used furniture and other items of interior design is called Historical Materialism. And now? Deborah Bright shows us advertising images of Russian workers, an overall-clad union member, and a Lewis Hines-like struggle of person and machine along with a Sunday-magazine feature story on the industrial art of the "machine age." At the same time that, the machines themselves having been discarded, decommissioned factory buildings are being offered for sale/lease—to be converted into museums, offices, restaurants, and shops. The only thing that remains solid, the constant within the flux, is that the men who direct the melting process walk away with the lion's share of the surplus.

Bob Tanner's provocative thesis is that Marx's theory of commodity fetishism (as interpreted by Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari in an essay published in the Fall 1989 issue of RM) is the implicit, unstated premise of Lenin's conception of political strategy in What Is To Be Done? According to Tanner, commodity fetishism, which provides the cornerstones of a noneconomistic Marxist theory of agency or subjectivity, refers to both a problem (the need to overcome the relations of reciprocity of a commodity-exchanging society) and a solution (the creation of relations of mutuality or solidarity). Tanner then reads Lenin's uncompromising critique of economism and his strategy of "comprehensive political exposures," whereby the working-class moves beyond purely economic struggles and comes to oppose all forms of oppression, as representing the conditions for the emergence of new forms of subjectivity that point beyond the fetishism that characterizes bourgeois society.

What does it mean for the "philosophy of praxis" to be Gramsci's principal legacy to the Marxist tradition? Wolfgang Haug first outlines Gramsci's struggles—against Bukharin's materialism, against Croce's and Gentile's idealism—that led him to reclaim the "vital source" of Marxist thought. But, Haug then explains, Gramsci's theoretical work represents not a position in philosophy but a reconstruction of philosophy from the outside—indeed, "from below." The result is both a philosophical conception, incomplete in itself, and a way of working that is embodied in the concrete projects that occupied the rest of Gramsci's attention: the analysis of politics and civil society (including the concept of hegemony), the study of culture, and the examination of Fordism. For Haug, the task before us is to "begin anew" with Marx and historical materialism, aided by the criteria of historical experience and Gramsci's philosophy of praxis.

The first entry in the Remarx section is Margot Backus's interview with longtime activist and Socialist Worker's Party organizer Eamonn McCann on the Good Friday Agreement and the antiimperialist movement in Northern Ireland. In the course of their conversation, McCann and Backus explore the real contradictions that were never addressed in the Agreement, the salient differences between the situation in Northern Ireland and that of South Africa, the lack of support for key republican ideas within the Republican movement, the historical role of the civil rights movement, and the fixing of nationalist and unionist identities in the electoral rules of the Agreement. Backus's afterword makes clear that the deadlocking of the Good Friday Agreement has had the unfortunate consequence of creating the conditions for new rounds of violence in Northern Ireland.

Peter Amato, in the second Remarx essay, interprets Marx's "first critique" of Hegel, the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, as reflecting the standpoint of a broad critique of Hegel's notion of science. Thus, according to Amato, Marx criticizes the external, speculative rationality that Hegel attributes to social reality (and that serves as his justification of existing institutions) while, at the same time, recognizing Hegel's advance from Kant as making a truly historical and critical philosophical social science possible. Amato's view is that Marx establishes the methodological principles for emphasizing the historical-subjective dimensions of social institutions and processes, for arriving at a "rational grasp of irrational historical conditions," and thus, for "making the world more rational that it is."

What is the relevance of Lukács's philosophy and literary theory after the postmodern "war on totality" and, especially, "after communism"? In his review of Eva Corredor's collection of interviews with a wide range of postwar intellectuals (including Etienne Balibar, Cornel West, and Terry Eagleton), Matthew Callihan notes the enduring, albeit controversial and contested, legacy of Lukács's work. What merits special attention for Callihan are Lukács's conceptions of totality—including a forgotten dimension of Lukács's writings, the loss of the whole—and the role of literary realism—even while nineteenth-century forms may no longer be appropriate and new realisms may have to be invented for our times.

Richard Joines commends Geoff Waite's polemic against the contemporary influence of Nietzsche's thought, Nietzsche's Corps/e, as a valiant "attempt to solve the riddle of Left-Nietzscheanism." Waite's project of breaking Nietzsche's spell (and, with it, of recovering a communist project from its supposed failure) involves both revealing the esoteric intentions hidden within the exoteric surface of the Nietzschean corpus and developing a specifically Marxist theory of esotericism and intentionality. Joines's conclusion is that Waite's volume is, like Brian Lloyd's Left Out and Shadia Drury's books on Strauss, Kojève, and the American Right, "indispensable reading to the rethinking of Marxism."

The Editors

In this issue readers are immediately confronted by Slavoj Zizek's intriguing question, "what can Lenin tell us about freedom today?" to which he provides the provocative answer: "a great deal." What Lenin represents, for Zizek, is a closing of the gap between ethics and politics, a Marxist alternative to the Third Way reduction of political intervention to purely pragmatic considerations, an awareness of "what it actually means to take power and to exert it." But what of his conception of freedom, the shibboleth of all liberal-leftist dismissals of Lenin's legacy? According to Zizek, it is precisely Lenin's focus on "actual" freedom, the ability to challenge and transcend the parameters of a given moment, to redefine the "very situation within which one is active," that represents such a radical challenge to the "formal" freedom enshrined in liberal ideology. Using the results of Jean-Leon Beauvois's psychological experiments concerning the paradoxes created by conferring on a subject the freedom to choose, Zizek argues that liberal subjects are the least free, because they change their perceptions of themselves and accept the conditions imposed on them as originating in their "nature." Today, the Leninist approach to freedom means stepping outside the "logic of victimization," the supplement to the self-centered assertion of the liberal subject, and reasserting the possibility of "true radical choice."

In the next article, Lisa Lowe conducts her own project of reclaiming (and rethinking)—in this case, of utopia. In a revised version of the plenary talk she delivered at the "Marxism 2000" conference, sponsored by RETHINKING MARXISM, Lowe proposes to think utopia differently, beyond the universalizing claims of a uniform working class, in order to include "other forms of subjectivity, work, and exploitation within the uneven conditions of globalization." She illustrates the problem of claims to universality by examining the different treatments of the issue of "sexual harassment" with respect to the labor of U.S. women and women working on the U.S.-Mexican border. What she discovers is that the narrative associated with liberal definitions of sexual harassment serves to make discriminatory practices visible with respect to U.S. women's work—and to render invisible the conditions that reproduce the "hyperextraction of surplus-value" within the export-processing zones on the U.S.-Mexican border. Lowe makes clear that she is not arguing that sexual harassment doesn't exist or should be considered unimportant in the United States; rather, in her view, existing discourses of such harassment promote an "uneven politics of knowledge" that obscures the way in which maquiladora workers are subjected to specific modes of discipline and have engaged in gender-specific struggles to change those conditions. Reclaiming utopia therefore means creating a provisional space in which "differently located subjects in global capitalism collectively act" to eliminate the various forms of exploitation that exist in the world today.

Not only did the Communist Manifesto become an important part of weltliteratur or world literature but it also announced the coming into existence of such a literature on the basis of its economic analysis, especially the concept of the "world market." That is the imaginative thesis that Antonio Santucci uses to explore the ways an analysis of the theme of world literature can contribute to reducing the distance between Marx and Engels's text and contemporary world conditions. As with the concepts of bourgeoisie and proletariat (which were borrowed from the French socialists), the notion of world literature did not originate with the authors of the Manifesto (but instead with Goethe). What Santucci claims, however, is that Marx and Engels's insights into the "inevitable globalization of literature" and the sociology of literature—including the commodification of intellectual labor, the growth of the means of communication, and much else—can be combined in order to imagine an international information industry that is "capable of holding disparate ideas, theories, and cultures." Still, Santucci argues, it is necessary to carefully distinguish between the critical effects of world literature and the tendency to create an "artificial and indistinct universality," a result that would signal the end of the era of world literature.

Commodification is also the main theme of Marjolein van der Veen's article. But her focus is prostitution, especially the warring narratives of commodified sex produced by radical feminists and sex radicals and the ways in which a Marxian analysis of prostitution can overcome the existing stalemate and deliver a "peace dividend." In van der Veen's view, one of the major differences between radical feminists (who see prostitution as the commodification of a woman's body) and sex radicals (who emphasize the selling of sexual services) concerns the issue of pleasure: the former argue that prostitution does not involve mutual pleasure but, rather, the use of a woman's body by a man in exchange for money, while the latter regard prostitution as a way in which desire is potentially depathologized, allowing for the experience of various forms of pleasure on the part of both clients and sex workers. What van der Veen finds lacking in this debate (and, for that matter, in the "early" Marx's references to prostitution) is a well-developed class analysis of prostitution. The idea that prostitution may be organized in a variety of different class-specific ways—including slavery, capitalism, and self-employment—opens up the possibility of connecting the "prostitute's power, pleasure, and independence, or subjugation, degradation, and pain" with the kind of class process used to produce the commodity. It also means imagining and creating alternatives to existing, exploitative forms of prostitution.

We are pleased to include in this issue a follow-up to the article on Marxism and human rights, by Neve Gordon, Jacinda Swanson, and Joseph Buttigieg, that was published in the Fall 1999 (volume 12, number 2) issue of RM. In an innovative experiment designed to foster a dialogue between the Marxist academic community and the human rights movement, the authors of that article met with Reed Brody, the Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch, and various staff members in order to review and discuss the implications of the criticisms of the work of HRW originally raised by Gordon et al. The transcript of their open and honest roundtable discussion

reveals various points of agreement—for example, the important role that Marxist political economy can play both in analyzing the causes of human rights abuses and in finding solutions and the need for bottom-up, popular organizing in addition to shaming techniques. It also demonstrates the need for further conversations (since individual articles and reports are easily subject to omissions and misunderstandings) and charts new ways in which the two communities can collaborate in order to promote not only individual, civil rights but also collective, socioeconomic rights.

Many people have the experience of daily commuting, especially to and from work and school. Some use the opportunity to catch up on sleep or job-related tasks (especially with the proliferation of new forms of electronic gadgetry); others while away the time listening to music, reading the news, engaging in or trying to ignore the ubiquitous "cell yell," becoming lost in thought, or observing the rituals of other commuters. What would it mean, however, to occupy oneself by drawing images of fleeting scenes on bus windows and leaving the traces behind for others? Grady Gerbracht documents such a series of performance-installations that he conducted on Route #163 of the New Jersey Transit bus system. His aim, in this and other recent projects, is to reinhabit and reinvent the structures of everyday life, revealing the complicated ways in which our identities are formed within those structures. As the photographs attest, Gerbracht was able to create a space for creative improvisation or play and, perhaps even more important, for reevaluating and transforming the relationships we have to "elusive social, cultural, and institutional regimes, to each other, and to ourselves."

Neither Theodor Adorno nor Jurgen Habermas is particularly sanguine about the prospects for the emergence of progressive solidarity movements under the conditions of late capitalism. But, as Deborah Cook explains, the two critical theorists arrive at their pessimistic, even bleak, assessments through quite different means. Adorno, for example, argued that the displacement of class conflict, the eclipse of class consciousness, and the regressive state of individual psychology compelled by the commodification of all aspects of society combined to undermine the bases for modern, nonfascist forms of solidarity. Habermas, for his part, has shifted attention from class and has focused instead on the colonization of the "lifeworld" and its "communicative infrastructures" by the political and economic imperatives, the money and power, of late capitalism. Cook's own assessment of the possibilities for solidarity is somewhat more optimistic. First, the effects of recent and ongoing attempts to undermine the welfare state may make eulogies of the end of class-based conflict premature. Second, Habermas's "simplistic division of labor" between lifeworld and political and economic system is untenable. Therefore, in Cook's view, it is Adorno's account of bodily needs and desires that may provide a key to understanding the "extensive changes to economic and political conditions" that are necessary for new forms of solidarity to take hold.

Although the body has become the object of much academic work in recent decades, colonial encounters in knowledge of the body are little theorized. Anirban Das sets out to remedy this discursive silence by examining the forms of encounter between western medical knowledges of the body and their Indian (specifically Ayurvedic) counterparts. Das's first task is to modify the concept of overdetermination in order to theorize the unequal and asymmetric translations of meaning between colonial spaces, resulting in what he calls a mimicry of overdetermination. He then shows how inequalities are retained in the hybrid interaction of the conceptions of the body produced within modern western medicine and Ayurveda. In particular, Das argues, while the context-sensitive patterns of certain Indian knowledges are assimilated into the overall structure of the knowledge of the body in western medicine— through the formation of a subdiscipline, "tropical medicine," and a conception of disease causation, "germ theory"—without threatening the subjectivity that is constructed and displayed within western medicine, the constitutive principles of the knowledge of the body in Ayurveda are translated into and, in the end, displaced by those of western medicine. In Das's view, this is an example of a larger pattern (encompassing other encounters, of genders, races, and classes) of "mutual constitution between unequals."

Albert Einstein is most famous as the founder of general relativity and is the subject of a wide range of biographies, films, and other media. What he is much less known for is his interest in political affairs and, especially, his socialist ideas. David Renton, in the Remarx essay that concludes this issue, locates Einstein within the generation of left-wing European intellectuals who were forced to confront the rise of antisemitism and fascism and the ravages of two world wars. Like Walter Benjamin, Einstein was critical of Zionist nationalism; he expressed his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi and worked in favor of an "active pacifism" that opposed both war and national armament. Less publicized are the anticapitalist views he expressed in such varied activities as lecturing at the Communist Party's Marxist Workers College and writing essays, including "Why Socialism?" published in 1949 in the first issue of the U.S. Marxist journal Monthly Review. Renton is clear that Einstein made a number of conflicting political claims (e.g., concerning Stalinism and U.S. capitalism) over the course of his life, but he does not share Stephen Hawking's patronizing conclusion, i.e., that Einstein was "confused." Instead, Renton regards the contradictions in Einstein's thinking as "part of the contradictions of the times," making him "no better and no worse than his milieu."

Finally, we were pleased to discover recently that the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company is alive and kicking on the north side of Chicago. Started a few weeks before the Haymarket Square riots of 1886, Kerr brought out the first complete English translation of Capital and stands now as the world's oldest socialist publisher. You can learn more about the history of the press and its current list of books and pamphlets (including Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy) on Kerr's website: www.kerrpubco.org.

The Editors

In this special double issue we are pleased to present a "dossier" on Empire, the widely acclaimed book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. As many RM readers will no doubt be aware, Hardt and Negri's most recent collaborative writing project has elicited a great deal of interest around the world, having been reviewed in a wide variety of media (from left-wing journals to mainstream publications and television programs) and translated into an ever-growing number of languages. Here, for the first time, guest editor Abdul-Karim Mustapha has carefully assembled the reactions of a large and diverse group of international scholars, who engage and confront the comprehensive historical narrative and specific arguments—cultural, economic, philosophical, and political— encompassed by Empire, together with a response by Hardt and Negri.

Our hope is that this collection of novel and provocative essays will contribute to a wider discussion, among Marxists and other left-wing thinkers, of the meanings of globalization and the emergent theoretical and political moments—both challenges and opportunities—that we face. This is especially true in the aftermath of what has become known as "9-11." Due to the lead time associated with publishing a journal like RM, this issue (including the guest editor's introduction and the authors' response) was compiled and edited during the months prior to 9-11 but will only appear later in the year. In the meantime, the world has witnessed the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., as well as the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, the sharp rightward shift of the terms of political debate in the United States, antiwar mobilizations around the globe, and much, much else. We do not consider it appropriate, as an editorial board, to settle on or present a specific "position" on these events. However, we do want to provide a forum in which manifold reactions to and interpretations of the conditions and consequences of 9-11 can be shown to emerge from or be brought into dialogue with the Marxian tradition.

Richard Wolff, the new Remarx editor, is compiling a series of essays on the events of 9-11, which (along with full-length articles, artwork, and reviews) will appear in future issues of RM. We want to take this opportunity to thank Rick for assuming this new role, and to publicly acknowledge and extend our gratitude to Rob Garnett and Antonio Callari who, after long service, have decided to step down from the board. Rob has worn many hats over the years, including those of Reviews and Remarx editors. Antonio, for his part, coedited the special issue on Althusser (volume 10, number 3, fall 1998), contributed reviews and translations of articles too numerous to mention, and was one of the principle organizers of the international gala conferences sponsored by RM. Both Rob and Antonio will be sorely missed.

But our work goes on, and plans for the next large-scale, international conference are already underway. It is scheduled for early November 2003 at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Additional information about the upcoming conference, as well as news about previous conferences and other material of interest to RM readers, can be found on our web site: www.nd.edu/~remarx.

The Editors