On the occasion of Karl Marx's 200th birthday this year, numerous conferences, edited volumes and special issues have celebrated his work by focusing on its main achievements – a radical critique of capitalist society and an alternative vocabulary for thinking about the social, economic and political tendencies and struggles of our age. Albeit often illuminating, this has also produced a certain amount of déjà vu. Providing an occasion to disrupt patterns of repetition and musealization, Krisis (http://krisis.eu/) proposes a different way to pay tribute to Marx's revolutionary theorizing. We have invited authors from around the globe to craft short entries for an alternative ABC under the title " Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z " – taking up, and giving a twist to, Kevin Anderson's influential Marx at the Margins (2010). The chief motivation of this collaborative endeavour is to probe the power – including the generative failures – of Marx's thinking by starting from marginal concepts in his work or from social realities or theoretical challenges often considered to be marginal from a Marxist perspective. Rather than reproduce historically and theoretically inadequate differentiations between an ascribed or prescribed cultural , economic, geographic, intellectual, political, social, or spatial centre and its margins, the margins we have identified and inspected are epistemic vantage points that open up new theoretical and political vistas while keeping Marx's thought from becoming either an all-purpose intellectual token employed with little risk from left or right, or a set of formulaic certitudes that force-feed dead dogma to ever-shrinking political circles. We have welcomed short and succinct contributions that discuss how a wide variety of concepts – from acid communism and big data via extractivism and the Haitian Revolution to whiteness and the Zapatistas – can offer an unexpected key to the significance of Marx's thought today. The resulting ABC, far from a comprehensive compendium, is an open-ended and genuinely collective project that resonates between and amplifies through different voices speaking from different perspectives in different styles; we envisage it as a beginning rather than as an end. In this spirit, we invite readers to submit new entries to Krisis, where they will be subject to our usual editorial review process and added on a regular basis, thus making this issue of Krisis its first truly interactive one. The project is also an attempt to redeem, in part, the task that the name of this journal has set for its multiple generations of editors from the very beginning: a crisis/Krise/Krisis is always a moment in which certainties are suspended, things are at stake, and times are experienced as critical. A crisis, to which critique is internally linked, compels a critique that cannot consist simply of ready-made solutions pulled out of the lectern, but demand, in the words of Marx's " credo of our journal " in his letter to Ruge, " the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age " .
Monday, January 27, 2020
Rethinking surplus-value: recentring struggle at the sphere of reproduction
Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 2019
Jared Sacks
Since the 1970s, autonomist feminists have critiqued Karl Marx for failing to appreciate the sphere of reproduction as a key driver of capitalism. They have shown how unpaid reproductive work contributes to the production of surplus-value-something orthodox Marxism has refused to reckon with. This is in part because of a fetishisation of categories such as productive and unproductive labour as the theoretical building blocks of Marxism. However, if we understand Marx's critique of political economy as a method for understanding capitalism in terms of process, we are forced to rethink our understanding of categories such as surplus-value. Within current debates around the production of value under capitalism, it is useful to make an explicit conceptual distinction between where surplus-value is produced and where it is extracted. In doing so, we are foregrounding the sphere of reproduction and the key role it plays in upholding capitalist social relations.
This contrast, then, can inform the struggle against capitalism in the following ways. Firstly, it advocates for social movement unionism that transcend boundaries of production and reproduction. Secondly, it provides theoretical justification for withdrawing and disrupting reproductive labour, supporting a decentred politics of resistance outside the factory. Finally, it speaks to the importance of building autonomous movements for the production of "the commons". This paper uses examples from recent struggles in South Africa and South America to theoretically valorise the diversity of struggles that have emerged since the 1960s.
Issue: 1
Volume: 11
Journal Name: Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Page Numbers: 147-177
Publication Date: Jul 25, 2019
Publication Name: Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 2019
Jared Sacks
Since the 1970s, autonomist feminists have critiqued Karl Marx for failing to appreciate the sphere of reproduction as a key driver of capitalism. They have shown how unpaid reproductive work contributes to the production of surplus-value-something orthodox Marxism has refused to reckon with. This is in part because of a fetishisation of categories such as productive and unproductive labour as the theoretical building blocks of Marxism. However, if we understand Marx's critique of political economy as a method for understanding capitalism in terms of process, we are forced to rethink our understanding of categories such as surplus-value. Within current debates around the production of value under capitalism, it is useful to make an explicit conceptual distinction between where surplus-value is produced and where it is extracted. In doing so, we are foregrounding the sphere of reproduction and the key role it plays in upholding capitalist social relations.
This contrast, then, can inform the struggle against capitalism in the following ways. Firstly, it advocates for social movement unionism that transcend boundaries of production and reproduction. Secondly, it provides theoretical justification for withdrawing and disrupting reproductive labour, supporting a decentred politics of resistance outside the factory. Finally, it speaks to the importance of building autonomous movements for the production of "the commons". This paper uses examples from recent struggles in South Africa and South America to theoretically valorise the diversity of struggles that have emerged since the 1960s.
Issue: 1
Volume: 11
Journal Name: Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Page Numbers: 147-177
Publication Date: Jul 25, 2019
Publication Name: Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Recent key developments in critical theory by Cinzia Arruzza, Rosemary Hennessy, and Kevin Floyd have approached questions of gender and sexuality through the lens of ‘the cultural’. Building on the Lukácsian critique of reification, these critics have sought to revise and develop the outmoded field of ideologiekritik (especially its elaborations on the notion of ‘false consciousness’) with new analyses of how gendered social relations are defined by commodity exchange. In part, my aim is to show how insights and concepts from this work can help to extend and deepen a Marxian critique of gender and social reproduction in ways that may be especially useful for grasping, at a systemic level, what is often understood only in terms of gratuitous or symbolic violence. To present these insights and concepts at an angle somewhat askew from their original frameworks, most notable in this regard is Arruzza’s clarifying attention to the relationship between gender and the logic of capital accumulation and her emphasis on the production of gender as an active social process, and Hennessy’s concept of ‘outlawed need’, which provides a way to conceive of gendered social relations as a movement of negative dialectics.
At the same time, this chapter argues that any theory of social relations based at the level of exchange or circulation falls short of accounting for the relationship of gender to capital’s general laws of motion, and thus for gender’s continued existence (in this way, my argument resonates with Moishe Postone’s critique of what he calls traditional Marxism’s focus on ‘the sphere of distribution’, as opposed to ‘the form of labor (hence of production) [which] is the object of Marx’s critique’ (Postone, 2005: 69). Far from theoretical nitpicking, this point has significant consequences for social reproduction feminism because a focus on the reification of gender at the level of exchange necessarily excludes a consideration of how gender is produced through reproductive activities that, as we shall see, are defined by their unpaid and unsubsumed status – in other words, their dissociation from exchange.
The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, 2019
With the revival of Marxist-feminist critique, the concept of "reproduction" has acquired a new sense of urgency in Marxist theory. Marx viewed reproduction expansively, as the process through which capitalist society reproduces itself both materially and socially. But he also missed a key stage in his theory of capitalist reproduction when he wrote that the worker reproduces himself, requiring only "a certain quantity of the means of subsistence, " as if by magic the commodities "he" consumed turned themselves into hot meals, ironed shirts or bathed babies. This chapter will highlight some of the central aspects of Marx's theory of capitalist reproduction, including his models of simple and expanded reproduction and his reproduction schemas from Capital, Vol. II, where he explains how capitalism requires expanded reproduction in order for accumulation to take place. Following this, it will briefly gesture to some of the other ways in which Marx's writings have informed theories of capitalist reproduction that focus on periodic developments in the capital-labor relation; systemic crises in capital's ability to reproduce itself; and the expulsion of labor from cycles of accumulation. Finally, it will address Marxist-feminism's substantial and recently sharpened critique, which demonstrates how the gendered labor of social reproduction--the reproduction of commodity labor power, but also of capitalist social relations writ large--constitutes the very ground upon which capitalist reproduction is built, as well as a key site of resistance to capitalist forces.
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx
Queer Capital: Marxism in Queer Theory and Post-1950 Poetics
Doctoral Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018
Nat Raha
This creative and critical doctoral dissertation undertakes a detailed consideration of the uptake of Marxism in twenty-first century queer theory, constituting this body of work as the field of queer Marxism. The dissertation analyses significant contributions to the field, such as the work of Rosemary Hennessy (2000, 2013) and Kevin Floyd (2009), alongside the key concepts elaborated in Marx’s Capital, value, labour and the commodity, in order to establish a solid theoretical basis for queer Marxism. The thesis includes an invigoration of Marxist feminist social reproduction theory through a queer and trans studies perspective, establishing the concept of queer and trans social reproduction through a synthesis of historical materialist methodology and intellectual herstories of queer and trans activist groups Wages Due Lesbians and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The thesis argues that queer Marxism elaborates an interrelation between economic and cultural spheres that understands their influence on material conditions and affect in the political present. It elaborates the affective condition of transfeminine brokenness in the context of contemporary challenges facing liberal transgender politics.
Queer Marxist theory is then deployed in an extended literary analysis that focuses on the work and life of gay femme poet John Wieners, and is finally developed in a creative portfolio – a collection of poems of sirens / body & faultlines. On the basis of archival research, the thesis situates Wieners’ writing and political activities of the 1970s in the Gay and Mental Patients’ Liberation movements of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, as a form of queer labour, which includes the production of Gay Liberation newspaper Fag Rag and the publication of Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike (1975) by Boston’s Good Gay Poets. Furthermore, reading letters, journals and other poems through a Mad Studies lens, I elaborate Wieners’ survival of numerous psychiatric incarcerations from 1960 – 1972 in the context of institutional homophobia, and its influence on his politics and aesthetics.
of sirens / body & faultlines develops a linguistically-innovative queer lyric, elaborating experiments in language and life, amid contemporary transformations of capital and neoliberal regimes of social and economic divestment in London. Inhabiting the present tense and attending closely to to its material conditions, the poems deploy language and its visual permutations on the page in the service of queer and trans life and a queer of colour, anti-capitalist politics that refuses assimilation, attempting to rupture the syntax of homonormativity and transnormativity. The poems capture moments of political and affective affirmation and tumult, provide radical elaborations and defamilarisations of trans and queer embodiment under the conditions of neoliberal capital disinvestment, wage labour, and queer life while dreaming in the service of queer and trans world-making.
Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Doctoral Thesis, University of Sussex
Doctoral Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018
Nat Raha
This creative and critical doctoral dissertation undertakes a detailed consideration of the uptake of Marxism in twenty-first century queer theory, constituting this body of work as the field of queer Marxism. The dissertation analyses significant contributions to the field, such as the work of Rosemary Hennessy (2000, 2013) and Kevin Floyd (2009), alongside the key concepts elaborated in Marx’s Capital, value, labour and the commodity, in order to establish a solid theoretical basis for queer Marxism. The thesis includes an invigoration of Marxist feminist social reproduction theory through a queer and trans studies perspective, establishing the concept of queer and trans social reproduction through a synthesis of historical materialist methodology and intellectual herstories of queer and trans activist groups Wages Due Lesbians and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The thesis argues that queer Marxism elaborates an interrelation between economic and cultural spheres that understands their influence on material conditions and affect in the political present. It elaborates the affective condition of transfeminine brokenness in the context of contemporary challenges facing liberal transgender politics.
Queer Marxist theory is then deployed in an extended literary analysis that focuses on the work and life of gay femme poet John Wieners, and is finally developed in a creative portfolio – a collection of poems of sirens / body & faultlines. On the basis of archival research, the thesis situates Wieners’ writing and political activities of the 1970s in the Gay and Mental Patients’ Liberation movements of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, as a form of queer labour, which includes the production of Gay Liberation newspaper Fag Rag and the publication of Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike (1975) by Boston’s Good Gay Poets. Furthermore, reading letters, journals and other poems through a Mad Studies lens, I elaborate Wieners’ survival of numerous psychiatric incarcerations from 1960 – 1972 in the context of institutional homophobia, and its influence on his politics and aesthetics.
of sirens / body & faultlines develops a linguistically-innovative queer lyric, elaborating experiments in language and life, amid contemporary transformations of capital and neoliberal regimes of social and economic divestment in London. Inhabiting the present tense and attending closely to to its material conditions, the poems deploy language and its visual permutations on the page in the service of queer and trans life and a queer of colour, anti-capitalist politics that refuses assimilation, attempting to rupture the syntax of homonormativity and transnormativity. The poems capture moments of political and affective affirmation and tumult, provide radical elaborations and defamilarisations of trans and queer embodiment under the conditions of neoliberal capital disinvestment, wage labour, and queer life while dreaming in the service of queer and trans world-making.
Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Doctoral Thesis, University of Sussex
New Labor Forum, 2015
LGBT/Q people make up a disproportionately high number of the people in many of these low-wage sectors
Amber Hollibaugh
This essay begins to explore and articulate the concept of queer precarity. Queer precarity emphasizes the particular vulnerabilities of LGBT, queer, and GNC (gender non-conforming) people to the current economic transformations. Contrary to the myth of gay affluence, research from at least the mid-1990s shows that queer and gender non-conforming people are more vulnerable to poverty than their straight and cisgendered male or female counterparts. Yet this myth is sustained by the mainstream LGBT movement and too often shared by the progressive and activist labor movement. It is a particularly destructive myth for labor organizers because LGBT/Q people make up a disproportionately high number of the people in many of these low-wage sectors. The concept of queer precarity centers LGBT/Q lives, as our multiple genders, sexualities, and orientations intersect with the lived realities of class and race. This essay seeks to develop a new political vision that centers sexuality, gender and desire in our movements for social and economic justice.
Issue: 3
Volume: 24
Page Numbers: 18-27
Publication Date: 2015
Publication Name: New Labor Forum
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Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (1970s-2010s)
Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2018
Margot Weiss
Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on post-1970s LGBT/queer cultures and politics. This essay reviews how, by privatizing social services, fostering consumer citizenship, and promoting corporate welfare and urban redevelopment, neoliberal policies have pit “deserving” gays and lesbians against “undeserving” others: the same-sex married couple vs. the “welfare queen,” the gay/lesbian consumer-citizen vs. the poor queer, and the gay gentrifier vs. the “dangerous” other. Historicizing these oppositions reveals the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, race, and social policy that remain central to queer politics today.
Page Numbers: 107-120
Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.). New York: Routledge
Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2018
Margot Weiss
Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on post-1970s LGBT/queer cultures and politics. This essay reviews how, by privatizing social services, fostering consumer citizenship, and promoting corporate welfare and urban redevelopment, neoliberal policies have pit “deserving” gays and lesbians against “undeserving” others: the same-sex married couple vs. the “welfare queen,” the gay/lesbian consumer-citizen vs. the poor queer, and the gay gentrifier vs. the “dangerous” other. Historicizing these oppositions reveals the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, race, and social policy that remain central to queer politics today.
Page Numbers: 107-120
Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.). New York: Routledge
Towards a Queerer Labor Movement: the politics and potential of LGBT-labor coalitions
Publication Date: Jul 1, 2013
Abstract
examines the relationship between the contemporary US labor movement and LGBT workers. Through an investigation of the ways in which minoritized subjects resist injustice in our contemporary neoliberal climate, I provide a new theory social movement building. Using a combination of media analysis,ethnography, and participatory action research, I argue that the union movement is an ideal place from which to struggle for LGBT justice—through and alongside the struggle for racial and economic justice. Further, given the weakened state of organized labor in the US, I contend that labor’s explicit inclusion of and attention to LGBT workers will also strengthen the union movement. In many ways, the labor movement is already doing this important work, and LGBT and labor communities are benefiting from the shift toward what some scholars and activists describe as
social movement unionism
. Rather than approaching oppression and discrimination through a single-issue lens, union members and leaders have developed campaigns,training's, and strategies that acknowledge how the struggles faced by LGBT workers are connected to the struggles faced by the working-class more generally. More than just suggesting that these issues are interrelated, the coalitions I discuss have workedto point out that these positionalities are not mutually exclusive—unlike the mainstream gay rights movement, LGBT-union efforts center the fact that not all LGBT people are wealthy and white. However, there are still ways in which some facets of organized labor fail as a vehicle for social change, and through this critique, I argue that a truly liberatory social movement unionism could be possible with the guidance of radical militancy and critical queer politics
Abstract
Towards a Queerer Labor Movement: The Politics and Potential of LGBT- Labor Coalition
examines the relationship between the contemporary US labor movement and LGBT workers. Through an investigation of the ways in which minoritized subjects resist injustice in our contemporary neoliberal climate, I provide a new theory social movement building. Using a combination of media analysis,ethnography, and participatory action research, I argue that the union movement is an ideal place from which to struggle for LGBT justice—through and alongside the struggle for racial and economic justice. Further, given the weakened state of organized labor in the US, I contend that labor’s explicit inclusion of and attention to LGBT workers will also strengthen the union movement. In many ways, the labor movement is already doing this important work, and LGBT and labor communities are benefiting from the shift toward what some scholars and activists describe as
social movement unionism
. Rather than approaching oppression and discrimination through a single-issue lens, union members and leaders have developed campaigns,training's, and strategies that acknowledge how the struggles faced by LGBT workers are connected to the struggles faced by the working-class more generally. More than just suggesting that these issues are interrelated, the coalitions I discuss have workedto point out that these positionalities are not mutually exclusive—unlike the mainstream gay rights movement, LGBT-union efforts center the fact that not all LGBT people are wealthy and white. However, there are still ways in which some facets of organized labor fail as a vehicle for social change, and through this critique, I argue that a truly liberatory social movement unionism could be possible with the guidance of radical militancy and critical queer politics
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