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EXCERPT OF SOME CHAPTER ABSTRACTS
Search for a New Mode of Public Power in Rojava
Huseyin Rasit (Sociology, Yale University),
Alexander Kolokotronis (Political Science, Yale University)
Since 2012, the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria has attracted the attention of the
global Left with its peoples councils, economic communes, and radical gender equality.
Rojava has been so energizing for some that anarchists and Marxists from around the
world have traveled to the region to defend the revolution, creating a historical moment
resembling the Spanish Civil War. The fact that both anarchists and Marxists have run to
the defense of the revolution is not a historical accident. It is rather because Rojava offers
something to both sides since the system of radical democracy that the Democratic Union
Party (PYD) has sought to implement features both anarchist and Marxist elements.
Although this political project has been subjected to many analyses from different
political perspectives, there has not been a systematic analysis of the specific way it
brings together anarchism and Marxism. Rather than being a piecemeal mixture of
different ideological positions, we claim that Rojavas project constitutes a specific
convergence of anarchism and Marxism, resulting in a decentralist vanguard. Analyzing
the implications and tensions of such a praxis, we also claim that Rojava helps us to
openly face a problem that has plagued every revolutionary attempt: preserving
emancipatory ideals in the face of centralizing pressures. More than identifying the
problem, Rojava also offers a potential solution through its practices and institutional
innovations. This solution comes from the central position occupied by women within the
theory and praxis of the revolution. The combination of being identified as a central
constituency and possessing autonomous organizations confers upon women a specific
revolutionary role. We identify this role as becoming a democratizing middle stratum that
can disperse the authority of a would-be centralist vanguard while educating and
mobilizing the general public for revolutionary ideals. Such an institutional innovation
has the potential to offer a blueprint for revolutionary struggles elsewhere.
Global Right-wing strategies in the Global South:
Defending the Family in the 21st Century
Victor Hugo Ramirez Garcia
(CRIDUP - Paris 1 Panthon Sorbonne)
Recently in a large number of countries in Latin America a movement has surged calling
for the defence of traditional values, and warning on the danger the so-called gender
ideology signifies to the family. Big campaigns supported by transnational firms and
NGOs have been enforcing a set of strategies against the little achievements of the
feminist and pro-equality politics and institutions. In the last decade alliances between
conservative groups and right-wing governments in the region have succeeded in banning
interruption of pregnancy in a large amount of States, but there is now one cause they are
focusing all their attention and effortson: Sexual education and the recognition of a right
to decide what to teach at schools on sexual issues, a right supposed to belong to parents.
Even if the ideology of traditional family remains as an important feature of hegemony
(Gramsci and Sacristn Luzn 2007) among the countries where these campaigns are taking
place (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru), different social
trends have transformed family structures and sexual roles in recent decades (Vigoya and
Rondn 2017); gender mainstreaming policies, and mostly legalization of same sex
marriage have caused a revival of the most controversial issues in the conservative
agendas. Since capitalism embraced nuclear family ideology (Olsen 1983), some gender
mainstreaming policies as well as some LGBTTTIQ policies mean no menace to the
moral economy (Thompson 1971) encouraged by capitalism; social reproduction and
patriarchy are safe in that those policies promote similar values through the assimilation
of different groups of population into traditional economic and lawful forms. On the
contrary, comprehensive sexual education programs might appear as a threat to
traditional representations of society on account of the diversity of sexual themes
presented to children. Being one of the regions most battered by neoliberal politics, Latin
America and its populations show particular configurations of moral economy,
sex/gender system (Rubin 1975), and alienation, but also innovative and revolutionary
projects of resistance.
Revisiting Race and Marxism: A Conversation Between
Gramsci, Hall, and the Operaisti
Daniel Gutirrez (Freie Universitt Berlin, Graduate School for North American Studies)
In his 1983 lecture, Rethinking Base and Superstructure, Stuart Hall pushed against
theories that approached questions of race through strictly economic and class determinist
lens. At the same time, Hall urged that we not abandon the Marxian framework and note
instead the different levels or moments of analysis, proposing that Marxs Eighteenth
Brumaire is an exemplar work of conjunctural analysis that deploys multiple
determinants beyond the economic at the concrete, historical level. It is in the movement
from the abstract to the concrete where race comes into play. Following Halls insight, my
work proposes a schematic for moving from the abstract to the concrete. In this proposal,
I urge that we take up Gramscis framework of historical blocs in distinction to mode of
production, wherein a historical bloc signals the complex, contradictory and discordant
ensemble of the superstructures that defines a specific historical formation and its
historical (not logical) forms, alliances, signs, and strategies (Gramsci, 2014; de Smet,
2017). Historical blocs are constituted out of particular combinations of struggles waged
between historically formed subjects specific to a social formation. As such, the
segmented class compromise following the American New Deal constituted a specific
historical bloc, itself composed by particular forces and preferred particular social sectors
over others, and is distinct from that of the neoliberal historical bloc. Observing Halls
formulation that there have been many significantly different racisms - each historically
specific and articulated in a different way with the societies in which they appear (Hall,
2017, 146), I urge that each historical bloc has a particular formulation of racism that is
carried over (but distinctly recomposed) from the struggles of the previous bloc. This is
the first step in the movement from the logical to the concrete and conjunctural. In the
next step in the movement downwards towards the conjunctural, I propose deploying a
revised and expanded version of the class composition framework that the operaista
tradition provided. Here, I borrow the Class Inquiry Groups articulation of technical
composition and social composition (that provide the context of the specific material
relation of labor-power on the one hand and the field of social life outside the workplace
in the other) that combine to form the context from which political composition surges, in
a way that is autonomous and non-mechanical. However, in difference to the CIG, and in
order to understand the development of race, I propose a series of reformulations that
includes state formations in the technical sphere and subdivisions in the social field. The
motor of historical movement is, following Mario Trontis Copernican Inversion, the
struggle of the working-class against capital, but elaborated in historically specific ways.
Cycles of struggle give way to transformations in the different compositional fields, in the
institutions and apparatuses that compose them, and in the discourses that dominate these
circuits of power. Through such a framework, we can understand how and why such
transformations take place and what makes racism persistent across blocs and cycles,
why discourses (and their signifiers) shift and slide, and how some social sectors get
more privileges and others dont
What Are We For: Harry Hay’s Vision of Queerness as
Labor
Ben Miller (Freie Universitt Berlin / Humboldt Universitt Berlin)
This presentation, intended for the Sexual Violence, Discrimination and Oppression, and
Left Responses stream and adapted from a paper to be published simultaneously in
September in the peer-reviewed German journal Invertito and online in English on
OUTHistory, reexamines the theoretical contributions of the American gay communist
Harry Hay in light of his Marxism. In 1948, Hay co-founded the Mattachine Society in
Los Angeles, recognized as the first lasting gay organization in the United States. Ejected
from the leadership due to his history of Communist Party membership and activism, he
turned to theory in the 1950s and 1960s, laying out a highly individual view of the history
and possible future social roles of same-sex-loving people that fused Marxist analysis of
family labor with influences from esoterica, expressionism, and Native American
spirituality. This analysis became the basis of the Radical Faeries, an ongoing movement
he founded in the early 1970s that continues to this day. Hay identified the source of
liberation for same-sex-loving peoples as their socially productive contributions, in the
form of what we might now call affective labor. I identify the origins of Hays analytic
framework in the cultural anthropology of Ruth Benedict and others in the Boas circle,
and the analysis of family labor and primitive matriarchal communism in Engels Origin
of the Family. Taking up Benedicts concept of the coconstruction of cultures and human
behavior and Engels view of a matriarchal primitive communism, Hay developed a
theory of same-sex love and gender non-conformity as a form of social labor
reproductive of what he called the internal life of the society cultural, spiritual, and
intellectual practices. Referring to these as children of the brain in context to the children
of the body produced and reared in heterosexual pair relations, Hay argued for the social
utility of a a broad variety of possible same- or similar-sex-loving relationship
configurations between subjects characterized neither as male nor female but instead
other.Hay is seen in many existing histories of gay liberation as an essentialist; while
recent scholarship has begun to examine Hays ideas more intensively, dominant accounts
of the history of American gay liberation misunderstand Hays ideas, remove them from
the genealogy in which they are best understood, and devalue the contributions of one of
the gay lefts pioneers and most interesting thinkers. Acknowledging and confronting the
settler-colonial and colonial contexts of both Hays own ideas and the intellectual tradition
in which he worked, I nonetheless seek to read Hay reparatively, to offer conclusions
about what kind of queer leftist praxis we might forge from Hays words, and identify
connections and comparisons in related areas of social movement history.
Corporeal Organisation: Marxs Analysis of the Human
Body
Soren Mau (University of Southern Denmark)
In the manuscripts known as The German Ideology, Marx states that the first fact of the
materialist conception of history is the corporeal organisation [krperliche Organisation]
of the human being. In this paper, I will attempt to clarify this overlooked concept and
demonstrate the centrality of the body in Marxs materialist social ontology. Marxs
analysis of the human body emphasises the importance of tools, which occupy a
ambiguous position on the threshold between the body and its surroundings. On the one
hand, tools are organs and an extension of the body, as Marx puts it in Capital. On the
other hand, they are much easier to separate from the rest of the body, than other organs.
They are a part of what Marx calls the inorganic body of the human being, i.e. that part of
the body, which is not a part of the body. Human dependency on tools reveals the original
porosity of the human body, and for this reason it also reveals something important about
how capital is able to reproduce itself by means of what Marx calls the mute compulsion
of economic relations, i.e. the abstract, impersonal and structural form of domination so
characteristic of capitalism. Marxs analysis of the corporeal organisation of the human
being explains why it is possible for the logic of valorisation to infiltrate our bodies by
inserting itself as the mediator of life and its conditions, and this in turn explains why it is
generally unnecessary for capital to rely on direct violence for its reproduction.
Furthermore, I will argue that Marxs analysis of the human body allows us to shed new
light on the question of humanism and anti-humanism in Marxs theory. I will argue that
Marxs social ontology does include a theoretically significant (and transhistorical)
concept of the human being, but that this concept also implies that it can never have any
explanatory role in the analysis of specific modes of production, such as capitalism. This
also has the consequence that the concept of the human being can never be the basis of a
critique. Marxs analysis of the human being undercuts any romantic critique, since it
demonstrates that there is no such thing as a natural organisation of social reproduction.
There is no original unity of man and earth; rather, there is an original separation and
hence an original need for a social mediation of the metabolism of humans and the rest of
nature a mediation that is always irreducibly political
After Intersectionality: Aboriginal Labour,
Reconciliation, Social Replication and Totality
Jaleh Mansoor (Associate Professor, University of British
Columbia)
A recent mid career survey at the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia of the
practice of a Lakota Sioux artist emphasized her turn to the wage, or market-mediated
remuneration for labour, as a peculiarly contradictory form of capture on the part of the
settler-colonial apparatus that has systematically expropriated material resources under
cover of ideologically based denigration of the cultures from which it has most benefited.
Now it turns to those previously marginalized and oppressed indigenous demographics
for labour power rather than natural resources in an exponentially growing globalised
province. This shifts terms from oppression to exploitation. Taking up a lens based
conceptual practice situated in the paradigmatic legacy of Jeff Wall, who also explored
the visual economy of the image as an index of a historically specific metabolic of capital
in the 70s and 80s in Canada, Dana Claxton radicalizes the medium to query the
particular strategies of a racialized labour to capital relationship and the equally racialized
extraction of labour-power, to move past the impasses of intersectionality and to
demonstrate the mutually constitutive operations of class and race, or rather the way in
which race is doubly coded by capitalist ideology to maximize the efficiency with which
the material extraction of labour and resources in specific tactical ways in the
contemporary political economic arena are effected. Through case studies, one based on
Claxtons etiology and one based on that of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra who stages
forms of exploitive remuneration to highlight the relationship between social
reproduction and growing surplus populations in the equally changing dynamic between
core and periphery, this paper will address the way in which discursive limits have
produced a mutual blindness on the part of Marxist analysis on the one hand and postcolonial and identity-oriented frameworks on the other, to delineate the way in which
capital doubly exploits, which is to say extracts labour power from, those it most
denigrates and devalues on a symbolic register. I examine the ideological apparatus by
which material exploitation is mobilized by capital as a means through which to procure
labour more cheaply, having denigrated its source.
To Abolish the Family: Communist Struggle and the
Working Class Family in Capitalist Development
Michelle OBrien (New York University)
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels speak of the “abolition of the family” as
the infamous proposal of the Communists. Following the Russian Revolution, Alexandra
Kollontai supported mass activity by women to collectivize unwaged reproductive labor,
andwith it the economic basis of the working-class nuclear family as a unit of
reproduction. In the 1970s, radical feminists and gay liberationists advanced a radical
manifold attack on the family as an institution of domination and sexual control. In each
of these moments of communist mobilization against the family, its meaning and content
took distinct and contrasting forms. Though consistently moving towards liberation and
the radical transformation of society, theabolition of the family as a vision in each
moment reflected the limits of the communist horizon. I offer a periodization to make
sense of the demand to abolish the family, and with it the emergence and decline of the
single-wage earner nuclear family as legitimating feature of working class reproduction.
The male-breadwinner, single-wage earner nuclear family as an accomplishment and
limit of the workers movement and the phase of capitalist development to which it
belongs. Drawing on the theory of the workers movement advanced by Theorie
Communiste and Endnotes, I argue capitalist dynamics from the 1890s to the mid-1970s
enabled working class movements to pursue a vision of socialism as full
proletarianization, and an affirmation of working class rule. This builds on, but is in
tension with, Regulationist-informed periodization efforts of sexual minority identity,
most notably in Drucker (2015). For Marx and Engels, the nuclear family in need of
abolition was understood only as a bourgeois social form, not available to working class
people. The restructuring of industrial production and political gains of the workers
movement, particularly through the parties of the Second International, enabled a section
of the class to assert its moral and social legitimacy, through advancing the family wage
and the single-wage earner family. This offered a solution to the crisis of working class
social reproduction and accompanied sexual deviancy that had worried Marx and Engels.
This both offered a material and political gain for the class, and was advanced in direct
opposition to Black, queer and lumpen proletarian social forms. For the duration of the
workers movement, only through universal proletarianization could the exit from the
family be imagined. The gender and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s
struggled against the single wage-earner nuclear family as an oppressive system, and
against the limits of the workers movement. Ultimately, the central dependence on the
family for working class reproduction was replaced with intensifying dependence on the
wage. The working-class family as a dominant social form was abolished, not through
communist struggle, but through the violence of capitalist development, stagnant wages,
and expanding commodification of social life. The abolition of the family as a communist
demand today calls on a vision of the generalization of care and reproduction the real
human community, recognizing that queer and gender liberation must be freedom from
both the interpersonal domination of the heteronormative family and the the impersonal
domination of the wage.Email: michelleobrien@nyu.edu
Marxs Concept of Permanent Revolution as a Philosophy of Absolute Negativity and a Transformation of Hegels Dialectic
Franklin Dmitryev (Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund)
How can Marxs ideas help us with the problem of how to make new revolutionary
beginnings in a time when the counterrevolution is ascendant, without losing sight of the
need to prepare for the equally crucial question of what happens after the revolution?
This paper, intended for the Marxism and philosophy stream, argues that answering this
question requires recognizing the centrality of permanent revolution to Marxs body of
ideas, and that it requires grasping the latter as a philosophy. The Marxian philosophy of
permanent revolution is rooted in Hegels dialectical philosophy and yet fundamentally
transforms it. The paper argues that, to comprehend the full significance of Marxs Capital
and the writings of his last years such as his Ethnological Notebooks and his writings on
Russia, it is necessary to understand them as developments of this philosophy of
permanent revolution. This is especially needed in working out how they are not simply
of historical interest but impact theory and practice today, and in helping us untangle
Marxs own ideas from what Raya Dunayevskayas Marxist-Humanism identifies as postMarx Marxism beginning with Engels. The Marxist-Humanist viewdeveloped in the 2018
volume Marxs Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day: Selected Writings
by Raya Dunayevskaya, edited by the papers presenterinforms our consideration of how
it speaks to the problems of our current moment of fascism, counter-revolution, and
revolt. The paper views Marxs explicit development of permanent revolution in his early
writings up to the March 1850 Address to the Communist League; how that concept is
involved in his 1844 Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and its consideration of second
negation or absolute negativity; its connection to the humanism and dialectic of Marxs
economic writings, including Capital; and its development on a new level with his late
studies showing a multilinear view of human development, including the Ethnological
Notebooks. The development of permanent revolution as a philosophy with many
theoretical ramifications illuminates the dual task of needed revolutionary
transformation–the destruction of the old (negation) and the construction of the new
(negation of the negation).
Value, Tribute and Capital: Empire and Merchants in the
Medieval Mediterranean
Lorenzo Bondioli (Princeton University), Nicholas Matheou (Institute for Historical Research)
In this paper we address the debate over the birth of value and the origin(s) of capitalism
by analysing the role of value production, circulation and consumption in the tributary
mode of production. Value is understood as the socially-recognised importance of social
action, as articulated within a total social system. Thus value is a useful framework for
understanding how configurations of social relations work, not a reified thing that really
entered the world at some point in history. Thorough analysis of the tributary mode, both
in formal political economy and historically, makes clear that tributary exploitations
disciplining of producers to the necessities of tribute demands, given then in the money
form, produces surplus value appropriated and circulated as tribute a process comparable
if not identical to capitalist exploitation. This tribute is distributed and realised in the
reproduction of the tributary configuration and given historical imperial class, again
showing both resonances and differences with the dynamics of capital accumulation.
Perhaps most crucially, the analysis also demonstrates the necessity of merchant
capitalism within tributary configurations, circulating a certain amount of value as capital
so as to facilitate value in the money form getting into producers hands, from which it
can re-enter circulation as appropriated tribute. Thus there appears a foundational
contradiction in the tributary mode between value circulation as tribute, and value
circulation as capital, one we explore through the historical example of the empire of
New Rome (Byzantium) in the ninth to early thirteenth centuries, particularly its
eleventh-century fiscal crisis, and twelfth-century relations with the mercantile Republic
of Venice.
A Mode By Any Other Name: Marxist Historiography of the
Byzantine Empire, and the Lacuna of the Household
Jules Gleeson
This paper will explore existing Marxist historiography of the Byzantine Empire (or
‘New Rome’), with a particular view on divergences between active scholars, andthen
consider gendered perspectives on the household as an over-arching omission across this
existing body of historical materialist social history.I will introduce an on-going debate
around whether the Byzantine Empire conformed to a mooted tributary mode of
production. John Haldon (1994) has proposed centering the social reality of surplus
extraction, as a less problematic replacement of previous Feudal understandings of
Byzantine economic relations (Harvey, 1989). Jairus Banaji has challenged any such
sweeping view of pre-modern economies as the basis for comparative history, instead
identifying the logics of labour deployment, which he takes to be modally transcendent
imperatives (2010, 2013). For instance, farm labourers both prior and under capitalism
faced similar coercive techniques used by exploitative elites. I will provide a brief
account of the discrepancies, and apparent theoretical stakes, at play in these varying
scholarly accounts..As of today, historical materialist social history of the Byzantine
Empire has largely underplayed gender relations, rarely if at all treating these matters in
an extended fashion. To correct this, I will consider the ways in which Byzantine
households (both lay and monastic) clearly served as a key unit both economic
organisation (from surplus extraction to social reproduction). This insight is not an
entirely novel one, andbeyond Marxist scholarship Byzantine social history has provided
great theoretical insights to the Byzantineoikos as a key formal unit of the Byzantine
ruling class (Magdalino 1984, Neville 2004).But Byzantine gender history and historical
materialism have yet to be put into fruitful dialogue with each other. Considering legal
sources I will present cases from the everyday exploitation of peasantry by monastic land
holders, to exceptional figures such as patriarchal eunuchs, to initiate this necessary
exchange.
Islam and Pre-Capitalism: al-Ml, Social Class, and Technology in
the Pre-Alawite Maghreb
Joe Hayns (University of Oxford)
In 1510 Sufi leader Abu Muhammad ’Abd Allah al-Ghazwani (d. 1529) said to an
initiate, anxious at the desolation of the Marrakechi plains, ’it is here that you must
establish your abode, and you shall, God willing, render this land fertile … Settle here!.
On those same plains, nearly 400 years later, a French-Morocco project to increase
agricultural productivity - hydro-power might have been used to extract 10% more oil
from the olive harvest - ended after only two seasons, due to ruling class opposition to the
innovation.This paper will argue that the second failure was in al-Ghazwanis inability to
transform the Maghrebian state from trade- to production-dependent, consequenting the
regions remaining exterior to capitalism until formal French imperialism.In Islam et
Capitalisme (1966), Maxime Rodinsons argued for a capitalistic sector across the Arabic speaking world after the 8th century AD, as based jointly on the existence of both
commercial and interest-bearing capitals, and his textual analysis of juridical and
religious rationalism in regards trade. More recently, Jairus Banaji has gone further,
arguing that the Arab trade empire from the 9th to the 14th centuries constituted a
tradition of capitalist activity.Capital-centric Marxism though claims capitalism as
defined not by the commodity form, profit-making, or even by the presence of wagedlabour-based commodity production towards profit, but rather by the dominant generality
of a social relationship between doubly free waged-labourers, and competing capitals,
with (therefore) the real subsumption of capital as defining aspect of this
system.Following this second intellectual tendency, this paper will argue that the non Ottoman Maghreb was resolved as pre-capitalist through the still-ruling Alawite dynastys
defeat of the socially and technologically progressive Sufi brotherhoods in the late 1500
to early 1600s. Debt, trade, and plunder characterised the state in subsequent period,
meaning that capitalism as a progressive social relationship appeared as an exogenous,
empire-enforced shock.
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