Open Marxism 4. Against a closing world

Marx is nowadays widely recognized as a lucid and useful thinker of capitalism but, at the same, his political project is declared definitively failed. Such a diagnosis is rooted in the context of retreat of socialism and the worker’s movement that goes back to the late 1970s. The “crisis of Marxism”, declared by some of the main Marxist thinkers of that time, is the theoretical reflection of that conjuncture and “Post-Marxism” its immanent development. However, a turning point is reached when it appears that the Post-Marxist constellation is unable to stand to the challenges of the new era of globalized capitalism, strengthened by decades of neoliberalism. Despite the persistent weakness of the political movements claiming its legacy, Marxism still hosts a string a ambitious research projects aiming at understanding the world in order to change it.

The British Journal of Politics & International …, 2010

Since the late 1980s, Open Marxism has focused on the conceptualisation of the relationship between global capital, the international system and the state—therein lies its original contribution to knowledge. This essay offers a sympathetic reflection on Open Marxist approaches to the state, which emphasises the strength of the definition ‘organisation of subjection’, yet argues that its validity is undermined by inadvertent structural-functionalist applications, by a tendency to view organisations of subjection as unitary ‘political forms’ and by assertions that the emergence of the international system is necessarily correlated to the historical globalisation of capital. The article offers a more nuanced alternative as fluid, contradictory organisation of subjection: as a social relation constituting and constituted by broader production relations, the state is a terrain of systematic intra-elite and class struggles.

2021

Marxism has enjoyed a significant intellectual revival in the past two decades. But this recovery involves a marked difference from the past. Marx and Engels, in developing their original project, conceptualized an intrinsic connection between the critique of political economy (articulated above all in Capital) and the struggle for working-class self-emancipation. In line with this self-understanding, the history of Marxism can be described as a series of rendezvous with specific mass movements, usually centered on the organized working class – the Second International (1889–1914), when Marxism became the ideology of mass socialist parties; the era of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, when the formation of the Third International marked a historic split in the labor movement between revolutionary Communist parties and reformist Social Democracy; despite its subsequent domination by Stalinism, the international Communist movement achieved an important, though problematic, alliance between the left and national liberation struggles in the Global South; finally, the worldwide explosion of wars of liberation (Vietnam, Algeria) and student and worker insurgency together with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s provided the context for a “return to Marx.” The contemporary resurgence of different versions of Marxist intellectual inquiry has developed against the background of renewed contestation of capitalism from the 1999 Seattle protests onwards, but it has not been accompanied by an advance of the workers’ movement. Furthermore, Marxism’s claim to represent the most consistent and radical social critique is challenged by intellectual currents – Post-Marxism, postcolonialism, varieties of feminist thought – that seek simultaneously to build on but also to transcend the critique of political economy, overcoming what they identify as its limitations to allow movements challenging oppression on the basis on gender, sexuality and “race,” among others, to speak.

Open Marxism 4: Against a Closing World, 2019

Capital & Class

The paper considers the origins of capitalism as a means to scrutinize critiques of Open Marxism (OM) and Political Marxism (PM), to bring these not-so-distant approaches more into dialogue and enhance the explanatory and critical capacity of both. First, OM has been criticized for its failure to provide a comprehensive account of the origins of capitalism and for analytically subordinating class struggle to the value-form. We argue these critiques render OM vulnerable to the charge that it implicitly supports a Commercialization Model, thus reproducing a self-fulfilling narrative about capitalist development, which fails to adequately account for the diverse, multiple origins of capitalism. Second, PM's historical approach focuses on specific case studies of transition, raising ontological questions about what constitutes a valid transition case. This has led to the approach being criticized for particularism or Eurocentrism. By problematizing the history/theory distinction and the issue of levels of analysis/abstraction implicit in critiques of OM and PM, and in Marxism more broadly, we argue that these critiques and binary tensions can be addressed through closer engagement between these two approaches. First, PM's account of the origins of capitalism, particularly its emphasis on the changing social relations of production, is compatible with OM and can rectify the lacuna within it. Second, OM's use of form-analysis permits the articulation of a link between origins at diverse scales, spaces and temporalities within a globally framed perspective. This joins the dots between PM's transition cases and permits a more robust account of the global origins of capitalism.

Transformation Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa

Open Marxism 4. Against a Closing World, 2020

Open Marxism opened up to Adorno's critical theory mainly to develop anticapitalist thought and posit an anti-identitarian conception of emancipatory theory and practice. The pivot of this opening was-and still is-Adorno's major work: Negative Dialectics. It must be emphasised that Adorno's idea of negation has sparked debate amongst the representatives of open Marxism but, at the same time, has also allowed for the overcoming of positive conceptions of dialectics, totality and emancipation that have characterised traditional Marxism. In this sense, open Marxism has sought to place the non-identical, contradiction, at the centre of its theoretical and practical perspective. However, as we shall show in the first section of this chapter, there is still an underlying identity in the theoretical and practical perspective of open Marxism, one that can be considered fundamental: the identity between subject and object. We believe such identity leads the representatives of open Marxism into the trap of an arguably absolute subjectivism. This means that the object is identified with the subject, implying an absolute primacy of the subject and the understanding of Marx's critique as a reductio ad hominem; the political consequence of this is voluntarism. We acknowledge the existence of different approaches amongst the representatives of open Marxism-which we cannot analyse in the present chapter for lack of space-but we do believe its overall theoretical framework is based on the identity of subject and object. Adorno's critical theory is grounded on the negation of such identity. Nevertheless, my goal is not to prove the existence of irreconcilable differences between Adorno's theorising and open Marxism; it is to take a new approach to the purpose of positing an anti-identitarian conception of theory and practice and to go deeper into negative thought. For this we must open up the critical theory of open Marxism and reveal its fundamental limitations; to this end, we shall also analyse elements of Negative Dialectics. Mario Schäbel (in this volume) also criticises open Marxism for giving in to absolute subjectivism. According to Schäbel, open Marxism is essentially a subjective idealism, for it dissolves the object within the subject dialectically. Even in its formulation of the unity-in-separation between subject and object, open Marxism performs a theoretical process that ultimately turns subject and object into one and the same, transforming their unity-inseparation into a unity-in-identity. On this I agree with Schäbel; however, unlike him, I will try to show that this subjectivism