Rethinking Communism

A Plenary Session of RETHINKING MARXISM 2006, an international conference organized by the journal RETHINKING MARXISM, 26-28 October 2006, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Time and Date: 7:30-9:30 PM; Saturday, October 28, 2006

Plenary Speakers:

With Susan Buck-Morss, Stephen Cullenberg, and Kojin Karatani.

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS is professor of political philosophy, social theory and visual culture at Cornell University. She is also a renowned author and scholar whose work is considered essential reading for students of critical theory. She is widely recognized as a leading scholar of the work of the Frankfurt School, especially the cultural criticism of T. W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. She has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright fellowships and has been a Fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University. Her books include The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodore W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (Free Press, 1977); The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT, 1989); and Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT, 2000). She has also authored several influential essays, including "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered" (October, Fall 1992) and "Hegel and Haiti" (Critical Inquiry, Summer 2000). In her most recent work, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2003) she investigates the possibility of a new progressive global politic and how the Left might go beyond critique to engage real political alternatives. Her writings have appeared in Spanish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, German, Japanese, Italian, and Turkish.

STEPHEN CULLENBERG is Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Riverside. He is also former Editor of Rethinking Marxism. He is the author of The Falling Rate of Profit: Recasting the Marxian Debate (Pluto, 1994) and the co-author (with Anjan Chakrabarti) of Transition and Development in India (Routledge, 2003). He is also a co-editor (with Bernd Magnus) of Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective (Routledge, 1994), (with Jack Amariglio and David Ruccio) Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge (Routledge, 2000), and (with Prasanta K. Pattanaik) Globalization, Culture, and the Limits of the Market: Essays in Economics and Philosophy (Oxford, 2004).

KOJIN KARATANI is a Japanese philosopher who up until 2006 taught at Kinki University, Osaka. Since 1990, he has taught regularly at Columbia University. In 1975 he was invited to Yale University to teach Japanese literature as a visiting professor, where he became acquainted with the Yale critics such as Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson. He was also a regular member of ANY, the international architects' conference which was held annually for the last decade of the 20th century and which also published a famous architectural/philosophical series with Rizzoli under the general heading of Anyone. Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement (NAM) in Japan in 2000. He was the coeditor with Akira Asada of the Japanese quarterly journal, Hihyokukan ["Critical Space"]. Among his writings are Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (MIT, 2005); Architecture as Metaphor (MIT, 1995); and Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Duke, 1993).

Chair:

Yahya M. Madra teaches history of economics and political economy at Gettysburg College.  He has published in Journal of Economic Issues, Rethinking Marxism, Birikim, Toplum ve Bilim, and Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and in a number of edited volumes published by Kluwer Press and Black Rose Books.  His research fields are economic methodology, Marxian economic theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.  He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation, "Late neoclassical economics: The persistence of theoretical humanism in contemporary economic theory" at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also a part of the editorial collective of the journal Rethinking Marxism, and created the "Globalization Under Interrogation" section of RM.

About the Plenary: Rethinking COMMUNISM

In opposition to the blatant and unreconstructed assertion of "individualism" as the unquestionable truth of our times, those who identify with a broadly-defined Marxian tradition need to re-affirm communism, both theoretically and practically. It is necessary to distinguish communism not only from state capitalisms (whether they be of Keynesian or "Real Socialist" varieties) but also from the many faces of totalitarianism that demand allegiance to a common being. This, however, is only the first step. To be a viable counter-hegemonic alternative to individualism, communism must cease to be a more controversial name for worker cooperatives and become a nodal point whose lines of connection flow out of the narrow confines of the sphere of production and articulate together a network of meaning that links the economic, the cultural and the political.

Recently, there has been a remarkable revival of interest in "communism," both at practical and theoretical levels. At a practical level, recent developments in Latin America could be read as an emergence of "communism" as a nodal point that flows beyond the sphere of production. For instance, in Argentina, a fragment of communism has reemerged, rather ironically, as a response to the crisis of capitalism in the shape of worker cooperatives. Nevertheless, while the Argentinean Unemployed Workers Movement speaks directly to communism as we know it, other developments in the continent move beyond the production sphere and articulate a broader social project. Participatory budget processes at the municipal level in Brazil, the Bolivarian circles and the left-wing populism spearheaded by Chavez in Venezuela, and the highly publicized case of public health-care sector in Cuba, and most recently, the electoral success of the truly post-colonialist socialism of Morales in Bolivia, might all be read as signs of a resurgent commitment to the commune. In spite of their dispersed and disparate nature, it is possible to discern through these and other examples a robust reemergence of a viable commune-ist alternative to neoliberalism in Latin America.

This is a story from the South. In the North, two recent significant events could be mentioned. The first one happened in Europe, in the summer of 2005. As a number of commentators have noted (e.g., Slavoj Zizek and Richard Wolff), the "no" vote for the European constitution was not simply a "racist" reaction to the expansion of the EU as the neoliberal elite/bureaucracy would like everyone, including the voters themselves, to believe. Rather, it included a sincere "no" against the dictatorship of the "Euro" and the tyranny of market economics that treats the economy as a depoliticized object of administration. Around the same time, another event took place in the US. In this case, the public has more or less said a decisive "no" to G. W. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security (one of the largest socialized programs of "sharing" in the world) by introducing individualized accounts. Indeed, the temptation is to be cynical and to consider these instances of resistance as last minute efforts on the part of a disappearing labor aristocracy to salvage whatever is left from the Golden Age of Capitalism. Nonetheless, such cynicism, by reducing an overdetermined event to a single cause (i.e., self-interested behavior of individual members of the working classes), would not only be conceding ground to what cynics purport to oppose (i.e., the ideology of "individualism"), but it also courts the risk of failing to seize these unique opportunities to widen the reach of the counter-hegemonic bloc against the hegemony of individualism.

Could these instances of resistance against the neoliberal onslaught and moments of commune-ist re-organization of economic flows be re-understood and re-signified as so many different fragments of communism? If we agree upon the truism that "communism" should not be based on a blueprint imposed over a population by a politburo, then shouldn't we be searching for the fragments of communism, as some of us have already begun to do, in the already enacted concrete practices of community economies, ethical economies, cooperatives, as well as communal moments of social democratic formations? Or, to formulate the same idea in a philosophical mode, could communism be anything but the name of a "concrete universal" that emerges out of this multitude of practices and experiments that foreground the commune in various ways?

Accompanying this re-emergence of communism at a practical level is the proliferating number of theoretical contributions that complicate the earlier Marxian considerations on communism. Over the last decade, a number of Marxian and post-Marxian scholars have attempted to come to terms with the Soviet experience: Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff's Class Theory and History, Susan Buck-Morss' Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Alain Badiou's Of an Obscure Disaster, and Slavoj Zizek's Revolution at the Gates can be mentioned among these efforts. At a more philosophical level, Jacques Derrida's The Specter of Marx and his concept of democracy-to-come, Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community, as well as a number of contributions to Community At Loose Ends (edited by the Miami Theory Collective) have opened the way to non-essentialist reflections on communism. In a recent attempt to bridge the gap between the philosophical and the practical, Kojin Karatani's Transcritique revisited, from a value-theoretic perspective, Marx's concept of the "association of associations" as yet another name for communism qua ethical economy. Within the field of political theory, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have continued to articulate a radical democratic project as an alternative to a social democratic Third Way that treats the economy as an object of technocratic administration governed by immutable laws. In particular, Laclau's recent work on populism (On Populist Reason) rethinks what has been hitherto demoted and denigrated by neoliberals, as well as by liberals, and begins to treat populism as one of the ways of constructing the political. Within the field of non-essentialist Marxian political economics, two different streams of debate has recently evolved side-by-side: Some of the contributors to this new theoretical movement have been interested in debating the concept of communism as an abstract ethical principle that governs economic flows (for example, Resnick, Wolff, Stephen Cullenberg, George DeMartino, Theodore Burczak, and others). Other contributors have chosen to explore the modes of subjectivity that make concrete communisms possible and those modes of subjectivity that make such communisms impossible (these thinkers include Jack Amariglio, David Ruccio, Jonathan Diskin, J. K. Gibson-Graham, the Community Economies Collective, and still others).

The central aim of this plenary, and the series of complementary panels (comprising a "platform") that contextualize and further explore the main theme, is to occasion an encounter between the concrete developments mentioned above and the renewed theoretical interest in the signifier "communism". On the one hand, it is necessary to put these invaluable theoretical insights, culled from a variety of orientations (not only philosophical but also political economic, sociological, psychoanalytical, and artistic), to the test of the "concrete real" and evaluate them from the perspective of concrete experiments. On the other hand, it is equally necessary to put these concrete experiments to the test of the "abstract concrete" and evaluate them from the perspective of theoretical speculation. It goes without saying that neither perspective could be the final arbiter of truth, for the truth arises, as an unintended by-product, from the endless movement between the two perspectives.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Yahya M. Madra OR Stephen Healy

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON RETHINKING COMMUNISM FROM THE PAGES OF RETHINKING MARXISM

Balibar, Etienne. Europe after Communism. Rethinking Marxism, 5 (3) Fall 1992.

Biewener, Carole. Loss of Socialist Vision in France. Rethinking Marxism, 3 (3-4) Fall-Winter 1990.

Boettke, Peter. Rethinking Ourselves: Negotiating Values in the Political Economy of Postcommunism. Rethinking Marxism, 10 (2) Summer 1998.

Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. Rethinking Marxism and Liberalism from a Radical Democratic Perspective. Rethinking Marxism, 3 (3-4) Fall-Winter 1990.

Burczak, Theodore. Socialism after Hayek. Rethinking Marxism, 9 (3) Fall 1996/97.

Byrne, Ken and Stephen Healy. Cooperative Subjects: Toward a Post-Fantasmatic Enjoyment of the Economy. Rethinking Marxism, 18 (2) April 2006.

Cullenberg, Stephen. Socialism's Burden: Toward a "Thin" Definition of Socialism. Rethinking Marxism, 5 (2) Summer 1992.

DeMartino, George. Realizing Class Justice. Rethinking Marxism, 15 (1) Spring 2003.

Diskin, Jonathan. From Communism to Capitalism: Rethinking the Boundaries of Class Analysis. Rethinking Marxism, 17 (4) Winter 2005.

Escobar, Arturo. Discourse and Culture in the Undoing of Economism and Capitalocentrism. Rethinking Marxism, 11 (2) Summer 1999.

Gabriel, Satya J. Rethinking the Past—for the Future. Rethinking Marxism, 17 (4) October 2005.

Garreton, Manuel Antonio. The Ideas of Socialist Renovation in Chile. Rethinking Marxism, 2 (2) Summer 1989.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. Waiting for the Revolution, or How to Smash Capitalism while Working at Home in Your Spare Time. Rethinking Marxism, 6 (2) Summer 1993.

Lippit, Victor D. Who Appropriates the Surplus? Rethinking Marxism, 17 (4) October 2005.

Madra, Yahya M. Questions of Communism: Ethics, Ontology, Subjectivity. Rethinking Marxism, 18 (2) April 2006.

Marable, Manning. Socialist Vision and Political Struggle for the 1990s. Rethinking Marxism, 3 (3-4) Fall-Winter 1990.

Moon, Michael. Valuable Class Time. Rethinking Marxism, 11 (2) Summer 1999.

Noonan, Jeff. Socialism, Individuality, and the Public-Private Distinction. Rethinking Marxism, 12 (3) Fall 2000.

Nuñez Soto, Orlando. Social Movements in the Struggle for Democracy, Revolution, and Socialism. Rethinking Marxism, 2 (1) Spring 1989.

Özselçuk, Ceren. Mourning, Melancholy, and the Politics of Class Transformation. Rethinking Marxism, 18 (2) April 2006.

Prychitko, David L. Hayekian Socialism: Rethinking Burczak, Ellerman, and Kirzner. Rethinking Marxism, 10 (2) Summer 1998.

Resnick, Stephen and Richard Wolff. Communism: Between Class and Classless. Rethinking Marxism, 1 (1) Spring 1988.

Roche, Diane and James R. Stormes. "Let Us Lift up Our Hearts": Communal Class Processes in the Success of a Low-Income Community. Rethinking Marxism, 8 (3) Fall 1995.

Ruccio, David F. Failure of Socialism, Future of Socialists? Rethinking Marxism, 5 (2) Summer 1992.

Saitta, Dean J. Marxism, Prehistory, and Primitive Communism. Rethinking Marxism, 1 (4) Winter 1988.

Screpanti, Ernesto. Freedom and Social Goods: Rethinking Marx's Theory of Communism. Rethinking Marxism, 16 (2) April 2004.

Tabak, Mehmet. Marxian Considerations on Morality, Justice, and Rights. Rethinking Marxism, 15 (4) October 2003.

Vlachou, Andriana. The Socialist Transformation of China: Debates over Class and Social Development. Rethinking Marxism, 6 (4) Winter 1993.

Wolff, Richard. Marxism and Democracy. Rethinking Marxism, 12 (1) Spring 2000.