Contenu du sommaire : Pourquoi Marx ?

Marx, if we look beyond the standard misrepresentations of his work, remains a highly intriguing author, together with Engels the main figure of a major revolution in the social sciences which challenges all the established practices and conventional wisdoms of the academia. His work has hardly ever been of more relevance than in the present period of world capitalism and its unfolding worldwide crises. First and foremost we need Marx as the author of a critique of modern capitalism, the economics, the politics, the ideology and social structures of bourgeois society, which is still unsurpassed in its depth and scope. Regarding the present crisis, his analysis of the making of the world market (globalisation) and his analysis of the follies and fictions of capitalist high finance is more necessary than ever before for anyone eager to comprehend the turmoil we are in. Second, we still need Marx as a paragon of the indispensable critique of utopias, false hopes and political illusions, both left and right, both reformist and revolutionist. Last but not least, we need him as the masterthinker of the possible, of capitalism's futures and its (socialist/communist) aftermaths.

The idea of “two discoveries” in Marx is essentially known through the presentations of Engels and Stalin, which had lasting influences in the constitution of “Marxism”. They essentially insisted on a correlation of “theories” or “disciplines” hierarchically articulated (either “critique of political economy” and “science of history”, or “historical materialism” and “dialectical materialism”). But it had another, earlier and more specific, formulation offered by Marx himself, when trying to emphasize the novelty of his theory in Capital, Volume One. Marx singled out, on the one side, the “double character of labour” expressed in the value-form, on the other side the articulation of “surplus labour” and “surplus value”. In this essay, we attempt a thought experiment which considers the “two discoveries” claimed by Marx not as successive moments of a single demonstration, also not as falling apart in an “epistemological break”, but as terms of a “disjunctive synthesis”. It would subject the critique of capitalism (hence the definition of capitalism itself) to a permanent tension, with, on one side, the logic of universal commodification arising from the institution of the General Equivalent, and on the other, the comparative study of modes of exploitation and domination in different “class structures”. The resulting ambiguities in the formulation of the “communist hypothesis” in Marx are perhaps of no little import in today's renewed interest for the Marxian critique.

This article contrasts Marx's critical appropriation of Hegel in his mature works with Georg Lukács's brilliant interpretation of the relation of Marx and Hegel. Hegel and the Hegelian turn in Marxism, as powerfully represented by Lukács, however, have been strongly criticized in recent decades by structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers for whom concepts central to Lukács's project, such as totality and the historical Subject, are anti-emancipatory, expressions of domination. Nevertheless, the global historical transformations of recent decades – including the crisis of the Fordist/Keynesian welfare state, the collapse of Soviet Communism, and the emergence of a neo-liberal capitalist global order – have called into question the post-Marxist turn. These historical changes, then, suggest the need for a renewed theoretical concern with capitalism. Marx's critical appropriation of Hegel provides the basis for a critique both of Lukács as well as of post-structuralism in ways that can avoid the weaknesses of each while incorporating their strengths.

In contemporary political philosophy the category of critique has become deeply ambiguous. This article proposes to relaunch the debate about the meaning of “critique” in the work of Marx. I argue that Marx belongs to a tradition of thought whose objective is to highlight simultaneously the nature of the object studied (capitalist relations of production) and the categories in which the object is thought (classical political economy). Philosophy is radically critical inasmuch as it assumes no presupposition, either concerning the object or the categories in which the object is to be thought. This might sound like the approach of a contemporary philosopher like Michel Foucault. This is the direction in which this study aims to situate Marx in a tradition of thought starting with Hegel and reaching into our times

E. M. Wood, one of the main figures of political Marxism, is interviewed by Frédérick-Guillaume Dufour and Jonathan Martineau and discusses the different directions of her work. The main questions she is asked concern : her relationship to Marx ; her specific approach to history and how it differs from other Marx-inspired types of analysis ; the situation of contemporary capitalism ; the dead ends of intellectual debates in recent years and the challenges of the current political situation.

The aim of the article is to develop some considerations about the ways of reading Marx in the twentieth first century. The author claims that what is actually necessary is a completely new approach to the Marxian texts. Today Marx has to be red as a great classic of political and philosophical thought, and this means that it is necessary to discuss and to criticize the Marxian arguments with the same accuracy which is needed to read a page of Aristotle or of Kant. This means further that it is very important also to discover the main aporias in the Marxian thought ; and the author tries to show which kind of problems we meet if we confront seriously with some fundamental Marxian themes as the theory of history, the theory of the revolution, the labour theory of value. Marxian thinking is not a perfect and coherent construction. But the contribution of Marx to critical thought is in any case important because only Marx has a so clear view of the fundamental antinomy of modernity : the paradox of a form of domination which is at the same time based on the fundamental assumption of the equality of all men.

This article assesses the relevance today of two different kinds of Marxism : (1) traditional, “classical” or determinist Marxism and (2) non-traditional or overdeterminist Marxism. These two Marxisms are compared and contrasted to show how and why they yield different notions of socialism and communism, class, the place of economics in Marxism, causation, and epistemology. The authors explain why the overdeterminist version is preferred to the determinist and what this choice suggests about a new Marxian politics for the 21st century. The latter aims to yield a society with a new kind of economic freedom for workers : one in they collectively receive and distribute the gross profits they produce.

Historians don't seem to be concerned by the “back to Marx” trend observed in many fields during the last decade. After an initial, very limited breakthrough in the inter-war years, Marxism irrupted in the academy in the 1960's, when it established its hegemony on historical studies, merging with a multiplicity of social sciences. This “golden age” was followed by an epoch of decline, the climax of which was reached in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin's wall. Since this turning point, historiography has being shaped by the return to neoconservative tendencies (the paradoxical survival of cold-war anticommunism) as well as by the emergence of postmodernism, which marginalized the traditional Marxist paradigms. Instead of reducing this change to a theoretical battle, the author interprets the decline of Marxist historiography as the result of a political defeat. The absence of any utopian horizon at the beginning of the twentieth first century explains the persistence of this decline. Once liberated from both teleology and Eurocentric views – its secret tendencies from the time of its transformation into a “science” – Marxist historiography could reinvent itself and redefine its goal, which does not consist in the “application” a preformed theory but, according to E.P. Thompson, in “recovering, explaining and to understanding its object : real history”. Such a reinvention means, in the wake of W. Benjamin, to conceive the past not as definitely closed but as a whole of experiences and recollections to “reactivate” in the struggles of the present.

In this article, I examine Bourdieu's conception of symbolic domination as based on misrecognition and compare it with Gramsci's notion of hegemony based on consent. Drawing on research in workplaces in the US and Hungary I show how both theories are flawed. Gramsci does not appreciate the importance of mystification as a foundation for stable hegemony in advanced capitalism while Bourdieu's notion of misrecognition, based on the notion of habitus, is too deep to comprehend the fragility of state socialist regimes. Comparative analysis, I argue, calls for a framework of domination that depends on a conception of homo ludens rather than homo habitus.

In this article, I analyze the nature of neoliberal multiculturalism put in place by South-American governments following the Indian mobilizations of the 1980's and the abandon of the model of development based on the corporatist and social state. Following the work of neo-Marxist and post-structuralist currents in anthropology, I seek to account for the new political rationality, which strives to produce functional individualities and to governmentalize civil society through the expansion of the logic of the market in territories that lie at the periphery of globalized capitalism. By examining the links between multiculturalism and neoliberalism, I aim to overcome the opposition between culturalist and anti-culturalist idealisms. I also interrogate the politicization of culture and the production, through Indian struggles, of a new anti capitalistic universalism that integrates the critique of universalism as universalization of particular values.

Sumit Sarkar, one of the leading Indian historians of his generation, participated in the Indian-British Subaltern Studies Collective that established new standards in the historiography of colonialism in the 1980's. In this Interview, Déborah Cohen and Urs Lindner ask him about the achievements and oversights of the Subaltern Studies project, the prospects of global history, Marx's eurocentrism and the problem of religion.