Werner Bonefeld

This number of South Atlantic Quarterly supplies a wealth of Marxist reflection on the 21st-century relationships among capital, government, and populace. Several give particular attention to what I suspect of being an illusory question, namely, How is revolution possible? The "logic" of the dilemma is that since social oppression creates the political horizons for people, how can those people orient themselves to something beyond oppressive systems? But this bind is something of a Zeno's paradox, premised on assumptions of closed systems and rigid continua. In fact, society is always changing, and no change in such a complex system is so deterministic as to foreclose on the possibility of enhanced liberty.

The "Against the Day" section of this issue is concerned with the recent uprisings in Egypt and Turkey. Even though there was no "happily ever after" to the events described here, their details are perhaps grounds for encouragement.… (mehr)

This work, the first of a three-volume series dubbed "Open Marxism", is according to the authors an attempt to open up the Marxist debate by revisiting the standard terms and concepts used in Marxist analysis, and to subject them to strong philosophical critique. In this, it succeeds very well, but as a result the discussion operates at an extraordinarily high level of abstraction and technicality, which will be off-putting for all but the most serious Marxist philosophers (especially since it has no value for non-Marxists whatever).

The introductory essay, by Kosmas Psychopedis, is a discussion of the devleopment of dialectical analysis from Kant via Hegel to Marx. This spans about the first one-third of the book, and requires an extensive knowledge of all three authors, particularly Kant, to be useful. It is a good fleshing out of the conceptual meaning of dialectics as such, which is certainly useful considering the use of that term by practically everyone in the Marxist tradition, but it is written in an unnecessarily tough manner.

The second contribution, by Hans-Georg Backhaus, is titled "Between Philosophy and Science" and constitutes a discussion of the subject-object dichotomy in Marx. This is done in a lucid and useful manner, with much reference to the various phases of the German 'Historikerstreit' between the positivists and the non-positivists, as well as to Adorno. The main subject (no pun) of this discussion is to properly conceptualize the meaning of value in Marx' work, especially as contrasted with that of the classic economists.

Werner Bonefeld has written the third essay, which gives a new view of the old problem of a Marxist analysis of the state. This is probably the best essay in the volume, because Bonefeld sheds new light on the matter by conceiving the state itself to be a contradictory social formation as the result of the contradictory nature of capitalist social relations. This is a marked improvement over the functionalist and simple class struggle interpretations of the bourgeois state. Class antagonism is definitely primary in the analysis, but the difference is that Bonefeld conceives of the state as a mode of existence of the class antagonism, not as the product of it.

This, in turn, also fits the general theme of the last contribution, by Heide Gerstenberger. She discusses the development of the absolutist state out of the feudal state and criticizes the traditional Marxist view of this matter, positing the interesting but controversial claim that the primacy of the class struggle is itself something unique to the capitalist mode of production, and that class struggle is just one of multiple loci of antagonism in feudal and absolutist relations. The struggle for control over the peasantry and the land as such, for personal gain and done by means of military power, is the main vehicle for the historical development of feudalism into absolutism and absolutism into capitalism in this view. It requires far more empirical evidence than is given in this essay, but it is certainly food for thought.

Overall the collection succeeds in being a high-level discussion of Marxist philosophy, with many new and interesting insights produced. This is perhaps enhanced by the fact that the authors are not the 'usual suspects' and heavyweights of Marxist social analysis, but rather less-known ones and writing about subjects not often thoroughly analyzed in the tradition. Nevertheless, the suggestions and inklings of this book need to be developed more systematically before they can become part of mainstream Marxist methodology.… (mehr)