{"title":"Building a Continental Policy: The South American Secretariat of the Communist International (1925–34)","authors":"M. Masso, M. Quiroga","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222052","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyses the history of the South American Secretariat of the Communist International. The objective is to carry out a critical study of the policies and strategy of the Secretariat, considering how its relationship with the Comintern and the South American Communist Parties changed over time. Our hypothesis is that during its first years of existence (1925–8) the Secretariat developed a policy based on the United Front. This changed during a transition period (July 1928–July 1929) in which it developed a stagist programme of bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the implementation of its front tactics was increasingly questioned. From 1929 to 1934, the organisation abandoned all concrete alliance tactics in the workers’ movement and electoral politics while nevertheless proclaiming its advocacy of the ‘United Front from below’. This paper is based on an analysis of primary sources, including the Secretariat’s publications, correspondence, and internal documents.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49061144","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 Ends of Capital: Terminal Crisis and the Substance of Value","authors":"David Janzen","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20222012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20222012","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Crisis is endemic to capitalism. But can it be proved that capitalism will bring about its own terminal crisis? This article frames this question in light of ongoing debates in theories of crisis and value by polemically comparing two related but divergent perspectives. The first, that of Robert Kurz and several Wertkritik authors, argues that cyclical crises of capital necessarily lead to a terminal crisis – and that this terminal crisis is already underway. The second, that of Michael Heinrich, argues that there is no way to demonstrate that capital will not continue reinventing new sites and forms for creating surplus value. Through this comparison, this article achieves two aims: first, it establishes the general point that how we understand value determines how we understand crisis; and, second, it shows limitations of the ‘terminal crisis’ hypothesis, and concludes that Kurz’s terminal crisis theory risks making crisis a transhistorical concept.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47024796","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":"Structure and Dynamics of Islamic Social Formations (Seventh–Fourteenth Century)","authors":"J. Batou","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-20221985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-20221985","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 From the seventh to the fourteenth century, the Muslim world’s key actors were free peasants working limited and scattered cultivated areas, whose communities paid heavy taxes. A distinct nomadic mode of production dominated the arid lands and their warlike pastoral tribes. Wealthy merchants and artisans controlled urban ideological production, living next to actual ruling classes, who drew exceptional material privileges from their proximity to the state. Since the latter’s status contradicted the contractual community’s values, political power was socially alienated and needed support from paid soldiers and often co-opted religious notables. The author describes Islamic social formations as real flesh-and-blood beings who developed original features on the same tributary mode of production’s skeleton. He shows that comparable dialectical oppositions enlivened them, stemming from uneven and combined development processes. Thus, their states and villages, barren lands and city markets, contractual ideology and monarchical powers were permanently in conflictual interaction.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42769292","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":"Theory and History: Brief Remarks on the Object of Capital","authors":"N. Poulantzas","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-00002069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-00002069","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44209312","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":"Introduction to Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Theory and History: Brief Remarks on the Object of Capital’","authors":"K. Baasch","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-12342069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12342069","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this Introduction I illuminate the importance of Nicos Poulantzas’s participation at a 1967 colloquium in Frankfurt commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Capital. This colloquium is the only published record of a dialogue between a representative of Louis Althusser’s interpretation of Marx and a member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and thus casts light on the relationship between these two traditions of critical social theory. After contextualising the colloquium and summarising Poulantzas’s paper, I outline some of the elements of the Frankfurt response to the Althusserian interpretation of Marx by referring to Alfred Schmidt’s contribution to the colloquium, including his reaction to Poulantzas’s paper.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46246312","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 Many Tasks of the Marxist Translator","authors":"Gavin Arnall","doi":"10.1163/1569206x-12342037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12342037","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines numerous conceptions of translation within the Marxist tradition. It begins with Antonio Gramsci’s theorisation of the concept before turning to the problem of Marxism in Latin America and how the Zapatistas have dealt with this problem. The aim is to shed light on a critical school of Marxist thinking, which requires that Marxism’s universalist claims be translated in response to changing historical conditions so that they may become concrete formulations capable of speaking to and intervening in concrete situations. Yet the Zapatistas go further by maintaining that translation must also occur between the universalist claims of Marxist theory and the competing universalist claims of indigenous Maya cosmology. The article thus underscores what can be gleaned from different modes of translation in terms of Marxism’s future and its capacity to enter into mutually beneficial alliances with distinct worldviews and ongoing social movements.","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47887035","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":"Chapter Two. Do Badgers Have Souls?","authors":"","doi":"10.12987/9780300225112-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300225112-003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46231,"journal":{"name":"Historical Materialism-Research in Critical Marxist Theory","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73266274","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}