Historical Materialism conference, SOAS, London, 5 November

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The HM 2015 Twelfth Annual Conference 'The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born:States, Strategies, Socialisms' will take place in SOAS, Central London, between Novenber 5th and November 8th.

 

 

Registrations now open,

and a PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME is available (PLEASE DO EXPECT IT TO CHANGE BEFORE THE EVENT)

[jondwhite]

A reminder this is this Friday and some more details

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Jamie Allinson Don't Mourn, Accelerate This paper presents a comradely critique of the Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, and the associated responses to the revival of ‘Accelerationism’ as a political position. The paper argues that the Manifesto provides a great service to the Left in reprising a future-oriented historical horizon, and a politics based on the acceptance of abstraction and complexity. The paper situates this contribution in moving beyond the bind of the contemporary Anglophone Left. This bind is characterized by the antagonism between a politics based on the future of the past, of a socialism expected to emerge from the class composition of mid-20th century industrial capitalism on the one hand, and on the other the assorted thought and practice that Alexander Galloway has dubbed ‘reticular politics’, which grasps many of the transformations of contemporary capital but remains reluctant to offer any holistic roadmap to a post-capitalist future. The paper defends Accelerationism against the criticism that is post- but not anti- capitalist, and the accusation that reinstates a Marxist subject innocent of gendered or decolonial critique. Rather, the paper argues, the problem with Accelerationism lies at a deeper level, in its assumption (of course, a basic one in historical materialism) that the post-capitalist future will be a post-scarcity one. The paper suggests the future may be entirely more troubling: that the task of communism will be not to improve modernity, but to salvage it.

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Carolina AlvesRevisiting credit system in Marx from the perspective of fictitious capitalThe recent financial crisis has emphasised the role played by finances in contemporary capitalism. From the heterodox perspective, this role has been explained through several different definitions of what is financialisation. Despite the considerable differences among these definitions, the relationship between industry and finance is fundamental in this debate. In Marx, this relationship can be examined considering the role played by money from which derives new forms and scales of profit-making through the financial system. That is, as a store of value, money can be represented symbolically as an asset, i.e. paper claims. This itself can circulate independently of the value that it represents. Such is the case with trade credit or a generalized system of IOUs.These paper claims were termed fictitious capital by Marx, as they tend to evade the conditions of the circulation of capital. It is this role played by money in contemporary capitalism that has resulted in a substantial accumulation of financial assets, that is, titles of fictitious capital. The examination of the role played by these tittles in the process of valorisation of capital seems fundamental to understand the role played by finances in the contemporary capitalism. In this sense, this paper firstly aims to revisit some aspect of the credit system and functions of money within the Marxist framework. Secondly, to define fictitious capital according to the Marxist literature. Then, to examine the relationship between credit system and proliferation of titles of fictitious capital. Lastly, a few final remarks are drawn focusing on the fictitious aspect of the credit system and the process of production and distribution of surplus value. Maxim Alyukov and Svetlana ErpylevaThe “Social Issue” Vs. “Common” Issues: Articulation and Displacement of Political DemandsMany contemporary protests in post-soviet countries share one common feature: despite the fact that participants are usually concerned with dismantling of the system of social guarantees, degradation of healthcare and education, low wages and pensions, social issues are not articulated as demands. What are the reasons for such disavowing? Are there common mechanisms preventing people from expression of their concerns? Using 150 in-depth interviews with Maidan activists in 5 Ukrainian cities as well as more than 200 interviews conducted on the rallies “For Fair Elections” in Moscow and St. Petersburg, we will address these questions as applied to contemporary Russian and Ukrainian societies. Interviewing participants of the rallies in Russia, we asked them if there was, in their view, any possibility to include social demands in movement’s agenda. Notwithstanding the fact that they mentioned a host of social problems needed immediate resolutions, most of them answered the question negatively.Contrary to Russian case, in Maidan movement social demands were represented implicitly. At some point almost every person we interviewed told us the story about how he faced corruption or didn’t get his salary in time. In many respects strong dissatisfaction with the situation in the country predisposed Ukrainians to join the protest. They perceived Maidan movement as the movement including all possible social issues and demands: the reform of judicial system, increase in wages, elimination of corruption and the rise of investments in production. All demands and issues were perceived as interconnected. But, as well as in case of «For Fair Elections» movement in Russia, social issues were not articulated as demands. In Russia disavowing of social problematic and any other specified demand or identity resulted in the crisis and stagnation of the movement because participants could not propose any clear positive agenda. In Ukraine this inability to articulate social demands led to the fact that new post-Maidan government has not only shelved the solution of these problems, but also has introduced further policy of austerity and social cuts. In our presentation we will address both regional and typical for all post-soviet countries reasons underlining the refusal to build the movement around social demands. We hypothesize that in Russian case one of the reasons for it was special post-soviet individualism formed as a reaction to socialist coercive collectivism. All participants’ arguments concerning this issue were based upon idea about personal autonomy and interest. First, they argued that articulation of social demands would violate freedom and autonomy of each participant. Second, they mentioned that articulation of social issues would result in the split of the unity of protest movement because different people may strive to achieve different goals and issues. Unlike Russian movement, the reasons for this in Maidan was, first, the fact the discussion about social issues was replaced by the discussion about national sovereignty and national identity. As our informants said, to be “Ukrainian” meant to be concerned with social issues and to demand for their resolution.Second, the war in Eastern Ukraine blocked social demands: people concerned with these problems redirected their energy to the support of the army and refugees. They said that at first it is necessary to finish the war and then solve social problems. Finally, it was higher level of distrust toward authorities and chronic dysfunction of Ukrainian state apparatus. It did not make sense to appeal to it, because it proved its inability to address social problems many times. Besides these regional features, Russian and Ukrainian protests were also characterized by features hindering articulation of social demands in all post-soviet countries. First, participants of both movements shared inability to identify social group they belong to, and this, consequently, led to problems with solidarity based on social and class criteria. People didn’t feel themselves a part of a social group; as a result, they didn’t deem it necessary to express demands of this group. Second, like in protests in Bosnia and Bulgaria, the “social question” in these protests was associated with socialist past, which automatically provoked dislike. Finally, the weakness of civil society institutions traditionally forming public debate about the “social question”, such as NGOs and trade unions, plays its role as well. This constellation of factors led to substitution of social problems with the rhetoric of nationalism, state paternalism or abstract “moral” orientation to “European way of living”."Kevin AndersonLate Marx and the Prospects for Revolution Outside the "Developed" WorldIn his final years, 1877-82, Marx studied three non-capitalist agrarian societies in great depth: (1) Russia's communal villages were increasingly penetrated by capitalist social relations, undermining the older agrarian collectivism, but new revolutionary movements had also grown there. (2) In South Asia, British colonialism had uprooted much of the precapitalist village structure, with many forms of revolt along the way. (3) Two millennia earlier, Rome had transitioned from an agrarian social order based upon a free peasantry to one based upon slave labor, amid both plebeian resistance and slave uprisings. These writings, some of them still unpublished, offer new insights into Marx's concept of transition.

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Luca Basso“Transition” and “Communism” in the late MarxAt the center of my paper is the unstable dialectic between political movement and political power in the late Marx. I will here attempt to show how Marx’s position in this respect differed from both Bakunin’s anti-state anarchism and Lassalle’s statism. It is true that Marx rejected the coup de main, and thus the immediate destruction of the state, but it is also true that his goal was the overcoming of the state and the constitution of a free association of equal human beings – that is, not a state. A Marxian text of decisive importance in this sense was his Critique of the Gotha Programme. The state is closely linked to the interests of the class of capitalists, but at the same time it is configured as a field of forces whose outcome can seemingly not always be taken for granted. These issues had to be inserted within the question of the so-called transition phase. In order to understand this moment, it is necessary to refer to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here we see Marx’s differentiation between socialism, which still bears the ‘marks’ of the state, and communism. This distinction must be studied in all its ambivalence: on the one hand, it indicates the irreducibility of communism to socialism; on the other hand, it contains a sort of prefiguration of what will later become communism, since the relations among individuals begin to be configured differently to the manner in which they developed under the capitalist mode of production: it is a sort of ‘non-state state’. The question of the modalities of transition to communism presents certain difficulties. Sometimes it seems that his critique of the state sphere also concerns ‘the political’. Notwithstanding any such possible depreciation of politics, it is necessary to bear in mind that Marx’s critique was not directed against politics, but rather political domination – that is, a specific element of the capitalist mode of production. To uphold such a position is not to say that it is impossible to identify ‘another’ politics. For Marx a proletarian politics, being a politics of transformation, is connected with the struggles waged in order to change working conditions, and the first ‘traces’ of communism already start to emerge in these struggles: but at the same time, it also goes beyond this horizon. The relationship between movement and organisation must be interpreted not in the sense of a succession of stages, from a first purely ‘destructive’ phase to a second, ‘constructive’ one. On the contrary, there was a continual interweaving of these elements, in the sense that if the movement is political in character then it must already contain an organisational dimension, a horizon towards which it moves. For Marx the organisation cannot be configured as a negation of the ‘movementist’ impulse, but rather must try to keep open an ‘expansive’ dynamic starting from a transformative practice.

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Michael BrayWhat if ‘the party’ is populist? – Thoughts on parliamentary cretinism and socialist strategyThis paper develops elements of a theory of contemporary populism through an engagement with both current discussions (Dean, Žižek, Dussel, etc.) of ‘the party’ and August Nimtz’s recent recovery of Lenin’s electoral strategy. The latter, for all its value as historical reconstruction, seems to falter in applying Lenin’s strategy directly to contemporary conjunctures, assuming what the former discussions problematize: the pre-constituted identity of ‘the working class’ and the strict division between states and movements that grounds ‘dual power’ strategies. The former, for all its importance as a call for organization, often seems driven to substantiate its own commitment to a party that unifies, without reducing, the motley by projecting such reduction onto the figure of ‘populism’, defining a political-ontological distinction between leftist and rightist commitments. In political practice this distinction is not pre-given, as suggested by theories of ‘populism’ which include the very parties (PSUV, Syriza, Podemos) taken to (pre)figure a new party form. In our era of neoliberal fragmentation, ‘the people’ has become a central figure in antagonistic politics, expressing, in mediated fashion, the class struggles it also obscures; the tension between unity and the motely is constitutive of contemporary populist parties. Arising in moments of crisis, they always come ‘too early’, prior to a stable class identity, consolidating around a leader-figure or loosely aligning diverse social movements.Rather than reflecting a pre-constituted class, such parties provide occasions for distinct processes of class formation, processes that extend beyond the state, which they attempt to use to support or establish local institutions. Tracing out the core logic of populist parties opens onto two themes that can refine our notions of ‘the party’ and populism. First, understanding the formation-process at the core of such parties suggests that they are best understood, not as collective subjects, desires, or wills but as institutions and processes, relatively enduring but also unstable ‘crystallizations’ of a certain balance of forces. As the state is subject to the influence of popular struggles, so the party is subject to those of the dominant classes as well as movements in the streets, institutionalized electoral procedures, parliamentary forms, etc. Navigating and transforming this balance—at once ‘internal’ to the party and a function of its relations with the state and the popular masses—should be a key strategic aim, one that underpins the more familiar tension between a focus on electoral victories and engagement with social movements. Second, setting aside the notion of populism as purely ‘political’ can clarify how the rise of such parties to power, in response to fundamental shifts in the political-economic order, poses their economic policy as the critical test: how to begin the transformation of economic apparatuses under the peculiar stress of investment strikes, capital flight, elevated interest rates, etc.? How to balance immediate needs with a path towards the transformation of the social relations of production? This dilemma is the crux of a contemporary re-tracing of the line between ‘breaks’ with the predominant political-economic order and decline into ‘parliamentary cretinism’."

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David Broder‘Quando verrà Baffone…’ Italian communism and the cult of StalinThe history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from Gramsci to Berlinguer is often understood in terms of a party trying to define a ‘national’ road to socialism independent of Soviet leadership. Not only did Italy’s social conditions require that the PCI elaborate a strategy different from that followed by the Russian Bolsheviks in October 1917, but right from the start of the Cold War a party attacked for being ‘in the pay of Moscow’ was keen to insist on its organisational autonomy. However, while the PCI would indeed become a leading ‘dissident’ element in the international communist movement from 1968 onward, its intellectuals were often evasive about what the Party’s attitude toward the Soviet leadership had been in the interwar period. If Khrushchev’s Twentieth Congress ‘revelations’ and the postwar Soviet domination of the Eastern Bloc made this past adulation of Stalin politically embarrassing for the PCI, it had in fact been central to its political identity across long years of Fascist repression, with the ‘workers’ fatherland’ providing a distant hope for the jailed and suppressed militants of a crushed working-class movement.Nonetheless, the very fact that the Italian Communists were so disorganised by Fascist repression – as the PCI exile apparatus connected to the Comintern lost contact with the militants remaining on Italian soil across the 1920s and 1930s – gave Italian Stalinism a uniquely multiform character. With the process of creating a ‘Bolshevised’ party interrupted by Mussolini’s 1922 coup d’état, and the PCI leaders forced into exile in Paris or Moscow unable to train grassroots militants in following the Comintern line, communists in Italy created the most varied interpretations of Stalin’s policies, projecting their own ideas onto the distant ‘beacon of socialism’. Moreover, this fantastical veneration of the USSR reached fresh heights during World War II, with the Red Army on the march as the Fascist state began to crumble. Paradoxically, then, the height of the cult of Stalin was the moment that Italian communism was most undisciplined, with exiled leaders returning to Italy struggling to contain long-isolated militants’ millenarian belief in the ‘advent of socialism’ at the hands of the all-conquering Red Army. Togliatti and his comrades bathed in Soviet prestige at the same time as emphasising the ‘national’ and ‘democratic’ character of Russia’s war effort (as of the Italian Resistance), combatting sizeable dissident communist formations who insisted that the PCI leaders were betraying Stalin’s ‘real’ revolutionary policy. This paper is not about anti-Stalinist Marxists, but rather about the competing cults of Stalin that existed in interwar Italian communism, their different conceptions of ‘proletarian internationalism’ and Moscow’s foreign policy, and the manner in which the PCI leadership imposed

[jondwhite]

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Kostas SkordoulisThe Greek Anticapitalist Left (Antarsya) and the challenge for revolutionary strategyGreece is one of the few countries in which the forces of the far left despite their fragmentation and inherent sectarianism have succeeded in constructing a front of collaboration, the Front of the Anticapitalist Left (Antarsya). Antarsya has real social roots and plays a crucial mobilizing and organizing role in social movements but continues to be marginal at a national electoral level totally overshadowed by Syriza and the Greek Communist Party (KKE).Antarsya has failed to broaden its electoral appeal at a national level despite the leftwing political shift in Greek society that led to the election of the Syriza government. I will argue that the main reason for this is Antarsya’s failure to answer questions of revolutionary strategy linking the abstract proclamations for workers power with the concrete level of the development of resistance at a local level. I will also argue that although Antarsya is a force of resistance and mobilization at the workplaces, it has not met the challenge to elaborate upon an alternative project for the left, including questions of new forms of revolutionary organization and its connection with the dynamics of the social movements, as well as the relation of anticapitalists to a “left government” elaborating on its contradictions and the extend they can be part of a thread of a revolutionary sequence.

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Sharon SmithIntersectionality and Marxism.I would like to speak on the topic of “Intersectionality and Marxism.” This is currently a subject of debate among some Marxists and feminists in the arena of both academics and activism. My thesis is that Black feminists' concept of intersectionality (or interlocking oppressions), with its emphasis on the simultaneous experiences of gender, race, and class, is not only compatible with Marxism but can also strengthen it. The Black feminist tradition dates back to the slave-era in the U.S.—long before the rise of postmodernism. While postmodern interpretations of intersectionality are often confused with those of Black feminists, they are quite different. Intersectionality is a concept, not a theory.As such it can be applied within different theoretical analyses—with different outcomes. Although Black feminism and some currents of postmodernist theory—post-structuralism in particular—share some common assumptions and some common language, these are overshadowed by key differences that make them two distinct approaches to combatting oppression. My argument is that Marxists need to distinguish between these two approaches, rather than dismissing the entire concept out of hand.

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Panagiotis SotirisThe realism of audacity: rethinking revolutionary strategy todaySocial and political developments in Greece have led to the formation of the first left-wing government in Europe for many decades. There is a chance of a similar development in Spain. These developments and the immense pressure to make the Greek government capitulate make evident the contradictory dynamics of a conjuncture. Consequently, it is urgent to reopen the debate on the strategy of the left. Τhinking simply in terms of anti-austerity progressive governance, is not enough. What is needed is a more profound rethinking of a strategy for potential revolutionary sequences, uneven and contradictory sequences based upon the combination of government power and a strong autonomous movement from below, in a process that can perhaps described as a form of permanent dual power, aiming at not only ending austerity but also at initiating processes of social transformation. However, this requires a serious debate of the current proposals for strategy today: the conception of a progressive reformist governance that can reverse the effects of austerity in order to re-empower social movements, which is the dominant theme in the European Left; the conception of a potential new state that could institutionalize the practices and demands of movements, that underlies the practices of left governments in Latin America; the varieties of insurrectionary anti-politics either autonomous or neo-populist that have emerged in the current protest cycle; the repetition of a neo-leninist insurrectionary sequence, suggested from many tendencies of the anticapitalist left.All these experiences and conceptualizations suggest that the challenges we face refer both to the ability to use state power as part of the rupture with capitalist strategies and imperialist pressures, and to the insistence on the autonomous role of movements and forms of popular counter-power both as an excess of power from below to counter the excess of force inscribed in the materiality of state apparatuses and as sites of experimentation and collective learning. Consequently, we need to rethink both a democratic and emancipatory recuperation of popular sovereignty as a means to impose a strategy of ruptures against the pressure of global markets and the forces of capital, and the ‘molecular’ aspects of social mobilization and experimentation for the formation of a new historical bloc. This requires rethinking left strategy both as a project for hegemony, articulating alternative narratives, and as a new practice of politics, shortcircuiting economics and politics (Balibar), bringing forward the antagonistic potential of social movements and the traces of communism in struggles (Althusser), and insisting on the potentiality of a becoming-people (Deleuze).

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one for robbo

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Ted StolzeMarxism and Human HappinessIn 1843 Karl Marx famously wrote that ‘the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.’ Setting aside Marx’s specific reference to religion, how should we understand the general distinction he drew between ‘illusory’ and ‘real’ happiness? In my talk I explore a number of different theoretical resources in order to make sense of Marx’s distinction. I return to classical views of happiness—from Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus to Spinoza, Bentham, and Mill—and investigate the extent to which they provide support for, or clash with, Marx’s own perspective. In addition, I examine both Alain Badiou’s recent inquiry into the ‘metaphysics of real happiness’ and Roger-Pol Droit's objection that happiness ought not to serve as a normative orientation for philosophy, whether Marxist or otherwise. Finally, I consider how best to redraw a contemporary line of demarcation between illusory and real happiness, to take on what William Davies has called the ‘happiness industry,’ and to make good on the Marxist promise of human emancipation.

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