{"title":"Abstract Labour and Socialism","authors":"Kamal Khosravi","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-bja10004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Should the regulation of production and distribution in a socialist society be based on the law of value? In this article we ask (1) Is this question not based on an ontological understanding of labour, on a rational and therefore conceptual understanding of abstract labour and, ultimately, a transhistorical understanding of value and the so-called ‘law of value’?; (2) is it not precisely this deception and power of the fetishism of commodities that, by eternalising value and the ‘law of value’, limits the horizon and perspective of ‘realistic politics’ (Realpolitik)?; and (3) whether this question does not treat socialism as a political situation where the solution to its ‘economic’ problem is unrelated to its very identity? In order to answer these questions, we provide a novel understanding of Marx’s fundamental category of value, its substance, form and magnitude, with the help of the German expression Formgehalt, translated as form-content.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41343539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Abstract Labour and Socialism’: An Introduction","authors":"Sam Salour","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-30210004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-30210004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The article aims to introduce the works of eminent Iranian Marxist theoretician, Kamal Khosravi, to Western readers. Over the past few decades, Khosravi has written extensively on Marx, Marxism, and Marxist methodology. Through translations and his own writings, he has worked tirelessly to introduce Iranian readers to the rich debates on Marxist methodology and value theory that have developed in the West since the 1960s. More recently, as the lead editor of the Iranian journal Critique, his writings are having an influence on the ongoing social movements as they are being disseminated and discussed amongst activists and labour leaders. In this article, we situate his writings within the developments of Iranian and Western Marxism.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41418129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Distribution of Wealth and Capital Ownership; An Empirical Application to OECD Countries around 2019","authors":"G. Reuten","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-bja10005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In discussions of the composition of wealth, a common distinction is made between non-financial assets and financial assets. Within the latter category the uncommon distinction is drawn between ‘capital ownership assets’ (referring to ownership in enterprises) and other financial assets. The reason is that capital ownership assets come with a degree of actual or potential economic power – in the sense of having the capacity to significantly influence enterprises’ policies. The article empirically applies this distinction to 24 OECD countries that report uniform data on this (in line with the OECD guidelines). For the OECD average of these countries around 2019, it is shown that whereas the top 10% of households owns 51% of the total net wealth and 68% of the total financial assets, the top 10% owns 85% of the total capital-ownership assets. For individual OECD countries, the last figure ranges from 63% (Greece) to 97% (Lithuania). The figure for the USA is near to the latter, at 94%.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49428993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Value, Exchange, and Heinrich’s ‘New Reading of Marx’: Remarks on Marx’s Value-Theory, 1867–72","authors":"Barbara Lietz, Winfried Schwarz","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-bja10003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The exclusive emergence of value and abstract human labour through exchange of mere products is a fundamental principle within the ‘New Reading of Marx’, especially that of Michael Heinrich. He invokes both Capital and the manuscript Additions and Changes, where Marx revised his value-form analysis for the second edition of Capital. However, this manuscript does not support Heinrich’s view. In the same handwritten manuscript, Marx drafted the subsection on the fetishism of the commodity with two passages that Heinrich claims as evidence for his interpretation. Against this, we elaborate Marx’s understanding of abstract human labour as the specific social character of private labour; it does not result from exchange but rather is its prerequisite. Heinrich’s attempt fails to include demand in the magnitude of value. Finally, he does not explain the value-formation by circulation and production. Rather, his one-sided view of exchange means, by way of its logical implications, that the capitalist production process is no longer the unity of the labour process and the valorisation process, but mere production of use-values.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45130698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Latin American Development in Historical Perspective","authors":"N. Grinberg","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-bja10002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The paper challenges mainstream theories of Latin American development, showing their theoretical weaknesses and pointing to their role in ideologically mediating the region’s ‘truncated’ capitalism. To that end, the paper presents an alternative view of Latin American development that starts by considering capitalist social reproduction as a worldwide process and regional/national politico-economic development as mediations in the structuring of global capital accumulation. Latin America’s specific variety of capitalism is understood to have emerged from its original transformation by expanding European capital into a place to produce raw materials under favourable natural conditions. On the one hand, this has reduced their price and that of the labour-power directly or indirectly consuming them; on the other, it has resulted in a flow of surplus-value towards the owners of those natural conditions of production. The historical development of Latin American societies has expressed the partial overcoming of that antagonistic relationship between rent-paying capital and rent-appropriating landed property.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49309550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20230002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20230002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135374719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Planning Daemon: Future Desire and Communal Production","authors":"Max Grünberg","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-bja10001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Within the planning discourse two poles have materialised over the last decades: a participatory ideal guided by substantive rationality, opposed to an algorithmic governmentality subordinated to instrumental reason. This rift within socialist thought is also observable when it comes to the discovery of needs. The paper understands this discovery procedure primarily as a forecasting problem and demonstrates how many authors dedicated to a participatory planning process call for consumers to write down their desires in the form of wish lists. As a response to this epistemically questionable discovery procedure, the state of the art in capitalist demand-forecasting at enterprises like Amazon is presented, where machine-learning algorithms excel at modelling interrelated time series on a global level by extrapolating demand patterns in real-time. The paper closes with a proposal to reconfigure this predictive apparatus for socialist ends and raises questions concerned with the political implications of centralising decision-making in black-box algorithms.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47591667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pandemic Capitalism: Metabolic Rift, World-Ecology Crossing Dialectical Biology","authors":"Jacopo Nicola Bergamo","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20232092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20232092","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this article, I contrast two of the main schools of thought within eco-Marxism, namely Metabolic Rift (MR) and World-Ecology (WE). These differ above all else in their accounts of the ontological status of society and nature. The Covid-19 pandemic constitutes a moment of concretisation of this long-standing debate, which is able to dissolve at least in part its issues. The article consists of four parts. I begin with a summary of the two schools of thought and their core stances, before proceeding to unpack their respective theoretical points of contention. I subsequently proceed to explore the conceptualisation of health according to the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin through the model of dialectical biology. In the third section, I unpack the conceptualisation of the Covid-19 pandemic by the epidemiologist Robert Wallace, before finally concluding with the contrasts of the two schools in the light of dialectical biology.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44139640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Missives for the Future? Michael Löwy’s Close Encounters with the US Left","authors":"Alan Wald","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20232035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20232035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The oeuvre of Brazilian-born and Parisian-educated Michael Löwy is widely recognised as the achievement of an exacting revolutionary cultural worker who integrates theory with his political duties, and labours hard at his craft so that the poetic imagination can reclaim and thereby re-enchant the reified reality of capitalist modernity. Nevertheless, when we come to Löwy’s reputation in the United States we face a curious situation. There is no doubt that his work is known and respected among many activists and scholars. Yet from the perspective of the needs of the Marxist Left, the disparity is striking between what Löwy has to offer as a militant thinker and the actuality of his impact. The search for an explanation of such a discrepancy must begin with a preliminary stab at what I regard as a ‘Löwyian’ interpretation of Michael Löwy’s life and writings. The method includes an exploration of his possible ‘elective affinities’, defined in a broad sense, with the cultural and political work of US radicalism since the 1960s. Are there analogies, kinships, or attractions of meaning that have entered into a relationship of reciprocal appeal and influence? In the end, however, I conclude that the disproportion between potential and actual stems largely from fractional perceptions of his accomplishment that are rooted in the peculiarities of US Marxist thought in general and of US Trotskyism in particular. Such partial and one-sided assessments are a profound barrier because the achievement of Michael Löwy needs to be understood in its totality.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46761211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Passages of a Marxist Critique of Art in Peru: From Artworks to Plastic Objects (1976–82)","authors":"Mijail Mitrovic Pease","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20232095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20232095","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay explores the theory of the plastic object as it was developed by the Peruvian art critic Mirko Lauer in the 1970s and 1980s, in dialogue with other ideas related to the Teoría Social del Arte (Social Theory of Art) developed in Latin America. Focusing on the Peruvian cultural debate, the author reconstructs Lauer’s trajectory and emphasises his critique of ‘Marxist aesthetics’, and explores them as conceptual tools for discussing the horizon of contemporary art today.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49053078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}