Contenu du sommaire : Violence de la marchandisation

Marxian Paradoxes of the Commodity He sketches a succinct interpretation of the paradoxical legacy of the Marxian legacy concerning the market. His formal distinction between market and capitalist market. His dialectical, i.e. realistic conception, of both fonctionnal and contradictory relations between market, law and State, between wage-earning and market. And the light this approach throws on the ongoing processes of commodification and on the way the fight goes on.

The Resistible Commodification of Labour The article argues that the renewed commodification of labour – the primary aim of neo-liberal policies aimed at the destruction of long-established and hard-won social rights – has played a major role in the commodification of a growing number of social practices. The process of commodification is examined by way of a number of concepts drawn from the Marxist tradition, which are then reappropriated within the current phase of the neo-liberal counter-reform. The article concludes by way of an examination of this process in relation to the issues raised by the anti-globalisation movement and, more specifically, from the standpoint of the critique of commodity put forward by Naomi Klein.

The Privatisation of Public Services : a Privatisation of Democracy ? The article argues that the role of public services goes beyond the provision of « public goods », insofar as they provide « social goods » which form the necessary conditions for the exercise of citizenship, in its political, social and economic dimensions. The article shows that the arguments put forward in support of privatisation are in fact specious, and have been refuted by what has emerged in the wake of privatisation : in essence, a privatisation of democracy, insofar as universal democracy has given way to a consumer vote conditional on a property qualification, a process carried out in dutiful subservience to the interests of financial capitalism.

Capitalism's Expansion into the Realm of the Biosphere. The extension of the rule of industrial property over living organisms and their components – genes and cells, both human and non-human – since the end of the 1970s, has gone along with the emergence of new markets in science, biotechnology and in health. The article argues that the filing of patents to protect private claims on living matter is a development which promotes the establishment of a monopoly control over inventions in the fields of medicine and agronomy, while at the same time fostering a restriction in exchanges within the scientific community. The article therefore argues the case for a declaration that genomes, human and non-human, be considered as a common good, in terms both of the research carried out for the improvement of plants and health and of the accessibility of the medical innovations resulting from such research.

Dr Christopher May. Commodifying the « Information Age » : Intellectual Property Rights, the State and the Internet Information and communication technologies are seen as one of the key catalysts of the compression of space and time which globalisation has heralded. However, only the reification of the (global) market makes plausible an argument for a significant decline in the efficacy of the state, or the claim that we have entered some new phase of global economic organisation. Reifying the market obscures the underlying supports on which information age capitalism continues to rest, most importantly the continuing centrality of commodification for capitalism's global reproduction. In this article I examine the commodification of the « new economy » which has emerged across the Internet. Drawing on Marx (and Marxist) work on the role of law in capitalism I stress that the centrality of intellectual property rights to the « new economy ». This suggests we need to recognise the continuing processes of capitalist commodification, not celebrate a new epoch of economic organisation.

Fetishism and Interpassive Subjectification What happens when, in the face of postmodern capitalism, the subject watches as its activity falls prey to the strange forces embodied in the objects present in its immediate environment ? To answer this question, we must take up again the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism. In doing so, we must combine a structural approach with the more traditional approach drawing on the category of reification. The phenomenon of interpassive subjectification, like the omnipresent imperative of frenzied activity, can thus be shown to be one of the emblematic traits of the contemporary versions of our fetishised universe.

Gadgets : the Religion of Objects in a Comprehensively Administered Society The fall-out from commodity violence is evident in the current status of gadgets, here considered as an ideal-type. The article therefore puts forward an analysis of four instances of gadgetised subjectivity, whose interpenetrations can be located in the categorical architecture of the « new » and the « post ». The task of a psychodynamics of gadgets would therefore involve an unravelling of the links between dead objects and subjectivities converted into a mystico-positivist substance.

Commodification and Economic Theory The question of « commodification » cannot be separated from the more general question of the definition of the market, or from the particular conception of the market to which one subscribes. The article argues that the conception of the market which prevails within the dominant economic theory is – paradoxically – an extremely centralised vision of the « perfect » market, a conception which undercuts the claims put forward in support of the putative « efficiency » of « market mechanisms », the theoretical status of which is, to say the least, somewhat blurred.

Econometrics : Ideology in Equations ? Within the terms of the dominant theory, unemployment can only be the consequence of excessive wage-levels. The procedures resorted to in support of such a hypothesis do however tend to violate a reality which remains stubbornly recalcitrant, even when the most sophisticated devices of formalisation are adopted. Since the domination exercised by the dominant economic model is not a function of its actual epistemological productiveness, it is worthwhile to reflect on the operational conditions governing a field that is polarised between theory and ideology.

The State against Public Service ? the Hidden Side of Endogenous Growth Models of endogenous growth are generally considered to be endowed with the following properties : 1. A macro-dynamisation of the general Walrasian equilibrium ; 2. A rupture with the Solow paradigm ; 3. A capacity to identify the forces which are currently driving technical progress and growth, by way of an increase in externalities and yields ; 4. A rehabilitation of state-intervention, particularly in the social field ; 5. A capacity to effect a rapprochement between the neo-classical and heterodox paradigms. The article, arguing that such positions, which have given rise to a consensus, are seriously flawed, casts light on the latter's « hidden side », in particular the ambiguities lurking at the heart of its redefinition of the role of the State.

The Politics of Gilles Deleuze and the Random Materialism of the Late Althusser A cursory reading of the writings of the late Althusser in which the philosopher attempts to devise a « random materialism » might lead us to regard them as the matrix from which a number of post-structuralist conceptions of politics, including that of Gilles Deleuze, have sprung. Our intention in the present article is to demonstrate the partial nature of such a filiation. To do so, the article focuses on the relationship between the late Althusser and the Deleuzean conception of politics. It will thus examine the refusal, common to both philosophers, to elaborate a totalising theory of the political and their concomitant invocation of a principle of contingency. Such an affinity should not however disguise the differences between Althusser and Deleuze with regard to the manner in which the actualisation of such a programme is to be envisaged.

David Simard. A Kantian Marx ? The historical experience of Stalinism has led some Marxists to endeavour to save Marx by way of an enterprise of moral reconstruction. Denis Collin thus hopes to find the principle of Kantian morality hiding in Marx's opus. Such a strategy does not merely attempt to reconcile the unreconcilable. The path it adopts is one which leads to a reidealised version of certain tendencies which, in their naturalised avatar, had paved the way to Stalinism and, by establishing a norm outside of praxis, had justified various enterprises of domination

Unusual Marx « Peuchet : vom Selbstmord » (1846 is to a large extent composed of – translated – excerpts from Peuchet, a former head of the French police archives under the Restoration. This small and almost forgotten article is, in fact, one of the most powerful indictments of womens' oppression ever published under Marx's signature and a precious contribution to a richer understanding of the evils of modern bourgeois society, of the suffering that its patriarchal family-structure inflicts on women, and of the broad and universal emancipatory scope of socialism.