28 research outputs found
Sean Sayers' Concept of Immaterial Labor and the Information Economy
The concept “immaterial labor” is one of the most hotly debated topics
in contemporary social theory. In his 2007 work The Concept of Labor: Marx
and His Critics, Sean Sayers offered an extensive response to several critical
redefinitions of labor (Habermas, Benton, Arendt) and immaterial labor
(Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri). Sayers returned to the subject in his more
recent book, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes.1 As one of the
few accounts that contests the contemporary Marx critics with regard to
fundamental concepts such as labor and immaterial labor, his contribution
should be taken seriously
Engels’ Intentions in Dialectics of Nature
Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx
and Engels’ works has been somewhat a common but rather
unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’
Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a
case in point. A bold line seems to shape the entire Engels debate and
separate two opposite views in this regard: Engels the contaminator of
Marx’s materialism vs. Engels the self-started genius of dialectical
materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has not enjoyed so far is a
critical reflection upon the relationship between different layers of this
text: authorial, textual, editorial and interpretational. Informed by a
historical hermeneutic, inquiry into the elements that structure the
debate on “Dialectics of Nature,” and into the different political and
philosophical functions attached to it, makes it possible to relocate the
meaning of “dialectics” in a more precise context. Engels’ dialectics is
less complete than we usually think it is, but he achieved more than
most scholars would like to admit
The Karl Marx Problem in Contemporary New Media Economy: A Critique of Christian Fuchs’ Account
This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs’ approach of Web 2.0 economy.
Here, Fuchs’ views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification
of users’ data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation
of Marx’s laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate,
and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs
fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary phenomena of Web 2.0
economy. It is possible to avoid Fuchs’ errors, and another approach is possible to
remake Marxism relevant for an analysis of the new media econom
Marx and Engels on Planetary Motion
For decades, the question of whether dialectics applies to nature has been a hotly debated topic in the Marxian literature. A number of authors have claimed that the Marxist outlook on nature and natural sciences has been for-mulated by Engels alone. According to this view, Marx, unlike Engels, was concerned not with trans-historical laws governing the universe but with some particular laws of society. This anti-Engels camp, so to speak, mainly tended to draw bold lines between Marx and Engels, and charged Engels with dis-torting Marxʼs original ideas of dialectics by some kind of reductionism, sci-entism and positivism that might also end up in an obsolete idealism. Engels was „following Hegelʼs mistaken lead“ by extending „the method to apply also to nature“. However, dialectics was „limited ... to the realms of history and society“.2 Some others objected to this view, and characterized any at-tempt to sharply contrast Engels with Marx as concealed mysticism and idealism. For the pro-Engels camp, Engelsʼs conception of nature was „in full conformity“ with Marxʼs materialist philosophy.4 Dialectics of nature was „no invention of Engels“. On the contrary, „it was worked out in collaboration with Marx and had his full agreemen
Karl SchmĂĽckle and Western Marxism
Born in 1898 in South-West Germany, the son of a lumberjack, a student of Karl Korsch in
Jena, a colleague of Georg Lukács in Moscow, a militant of the Communist Part of Germany
(KPD), and later a member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPB),
SchmĂĽckle was a prominent Marx expert, a literary critic and an editor of the first Marx-
Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA1). This article examines whether SchmĂĽckle can be called a
Western Marxist. To this end, it first investigates the theoretic, geological and social patterns
of Western Marxism and then detects similarities and differences between SchmĂĽckle and some
pioneering figures of Western Marxism. My main contention is that Western Marxist historiography
potentially excludes much of what stands and falls with Schmückle’s intellectual biography
and political identity. The way Western Marxism would read SchmĂĽckle leads to the
conclusion that SchmĂĽckle was a Westerner and a Marxist, but hardly a Western Marxist. This
suggests that either Western Marxism applies to him in a very loose sense or, alternatively, the
term can be empirically falsified in Schmückle’s case
Carchedi's Dialectics: A Critique
Several years ago Guglielmo Carchedi (2008; 2012) published in S&S two
interesting pieces on Marx’s dialectics and mathematics. His basic aim was to
discover whether Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts provide a new insight into
Marx’s dialectics. The reading he suggested was addressed to Marx alone, i.e.,
without Hegel and Engels. This, he argued, is the only way to grasp Marx’s
dialectics if one wants to understand Marx in his own terms. Since Marx never
explicated his notion of dialectics, we ought to derive it from Marx’s own work.
To this end, Carchedi first defined “dialectics as a method of social research”
(Carchedi, 2008, 416), and then listed three principles of dialectics: 1) “all
phenomena are always both realized and potential”; 2) “they are always both
determinant and determined”; 3) they are “always subject to movement and
change” (ibid.). Later he added a fourth principle: 4) “social phenomena’s
movement (change) is tendential” (Carchedi, 2012, 547). He emphasized
that these principles are limited to society and not to be confused with nature,
because society, unlike nature, necessarily involves “human volition and
consciousness” (ibid.). For this reason, “Engels’ dialectics of nature cannot be
applied to society” (ibid.), a claim he also asserted in his book Behind the Crisis
(2011, 37–8)
Engels’ Conceptions of Dialectics, Nature, and Dialectics of Nature
Engels’ name stands and falls today with a variety of his contributions to socialist thought and Marxist philosophy. Yet there is one particular component of the Marxist body of thought that has been subject to a group of controversies for quite some time for which Engels is usually held responsible: dialectics and dialectics of nature. It is curious and ironic that a theoretical contribution to an intellectual tradi tion within the history of European political philosophy could be perceived and depicted as a major distortion of that tradition. In Engels’ case, this irony is captured by the phrase “the Engels problem.” In this chapter, I will first briefly summarize what “the Engels problem” is about and lay out its connection to the reception his tory of Engels’ dialectics. Then, I will delve into the general outlines of Engels’ dialectics and focus on his intentions, tasks, and purposes in pursuing dialectics in some of his prominent works on this theme from 1870s to 1880s, most notably in Anti-Dühring and the Dialectics of Nature. In the final section, I will briefly discuss some of the open questions of Engels’ natural dialectics