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New Books for 2010

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:00:24 +0000

“Marx at the Margins: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies”

A Note on Marx’s Relationship to Engels
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China
Chapter 2: Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution
Chapter 3: Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution
Chapter 4: Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement
Chapter 5: From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes
Chapter 6: Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies
Conclusion
Appendix: The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), from the 1920s to Today
References
Index

(See below for more detailed table of contents.)

Description:

Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed. To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America. But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis of non-Western societies, as well as race, ethnicity, and nationalism. While some of these writings show a problematically unilinear perspective and, on occasion, traces of ethnocentrism, the overall trajectory of Marx’s writings was toward a critique of national, ethnic, and colonial oppression and toward an appreciation of resistance movements in these spheres.

In 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels espoused an implicitly and problematically unilinear concept of social progress. Precapitalist societies, especially China, which they characterized in ethnocentric terms as a “most barbarian” society, were destined to be forcibly penetrated and modernized by this new and dynamic social system. In his 1853 articles for the New York Tribune, Marx extended these perspectives to India, while viewing the communal social relations and communal property of the Indian village as a solid foundation for “Oriental despotism.” Postcolonial and postmodern thinkers, most notably Edward Said, have criticized the Communist Manifesto and the 1853 India writings as a form of Orientalist knowledge fundamentally similar to the colonialist mindset.

By 1856-57, the anti-colonialist side of Marx’s thought became more pronounced, as he supported, also in the Tribune, the Chinese resistance to the British during the Second Opium War and the Sepoy Uprising in India. During this period, he began to incorporate some of his new thinking about India into one of his greatest theoretical works, the Grundrisse (1857-58). In this germinal treatise on the critique of political economy, he launched into a truly multilinear theory of history, wherein Asian societies were seen to have developed along a different pathway than that of the successive modes of production he had delineated for Western Europe.

During the 1860s, Marx concentrated on Europe and North America, writing little on Asia. It was in this period that he completed the first version of Capital, Vol. I, as well as most of the drafts of what became Vols. II and III of that work. But he also concerned himself with the dialectics of race and class during the long years of the American Civil War, 1861-65. Although the North was a capitalist society, Marx threw himself into the anti-slavery cause, critically supporting the Lincoln government against the Confederacy within the British and European labor and socialist movements. In his Civil War writings, he argued that white racism had held back labor as a whole, later writing in Capital that “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where in a black skin it is branded.”

Marx also supported the Polish uprising of 1863, which sought to restore national independence to that long-suffering country. He and his generation of leftists viewed Russia as a malevolent, reactionary power, a form of “Oriental despotism” based in the communal social forms and property relations that predominated in the Russian village. It constituted the biggest threat to Europe’s democratic and socialist movements. Since Russian-occupied Poland stood between Russia proper and Western Europe, Poland’s revolutionary movement represented a deep contradiction within the Russian Empire, one that had hampered its efforts to intervene against the European revolutions of 1830 and initially, those in 1848 as well. As with India and China, by 1858 Marx also began to shift his view of Russia, taking note of the looming emancipation of the serfs and the possibility of an agrarian revolution, as seen in several of his articles on Russia for the Tribune.

The labor and socialist networks that Marx helped to form in Western Europe in support of the U.S. and Poland were crucial to the founding of the First International in 1864. During his years of involvement with the First International Marx focused to a great extent on Ireland. His theorization of Ireland marked the culmination of his writings on ethnicity, race, and nationalism. British workers, he held, were so greatly imbued with nationalist pride and great power arrogance toward the Irish that they had developed a false consciousness, binding them to the dominant classes of Britain, and thus attenuating class conflict within British society. This impasse could be broken only by direct support for Irish national independence on the part of the revolutionary elements within British labor, something that would also serve to reunite labor within Britain, where Irish immigrant labor formed a subproletariat. On more than one occasion, Marx linked his conceptualization of class, ethnicity, and nationalism for the British and the Irish to race relations in the U.S., where he compared the situation of the Irish to the African-Americans. He also compared the attitudes of the British workers toward the Irish to those of the poor whites of the American South, who had too often united with the white planters against their fellow Black workers. In this sense, he was creating a broad dialectical concept of class, race, and ethnicity.

By the 1870s, Marx returned to his earlier preoccupation with Asia, while also deepening his studies of Russia. Whereas he had previously concentrated on Russian foreign policy, he now began to learn Russian in order to study that country’s internal social structure. Marx’s interest in Russia increased with the publication of Capital in Russian in 1872, especially after the book generated more debate there than it had in Germany. Some of the changes Marx introduced into the 1872-75 French edition of Capital concerned the dialectic of capitalist development out of Western feudalism that was at the heart of the book’s part eight, “The Primitive Accumulation of Capital.” In direct and clear language, Marx now stated that the transition outlined in the part on primitive accumulation applied only to Western Europe. In this sense, the future of Russia was open, was not predetermined by that of Western Europe.

During the years 1879-82, Marx embarked upon a series of excerpt notebooks on scholarly studies on a multifaceted group of non-Western and non-European societies, among them contemporary India, Indonesia (Java), Russia, Algeria, and Latin America. He also made notes on studies of indigenous peoples, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. One core theme of these excerpt notebooks was the communal social relations and property forms found in so many of these societies. In his studies of India, for example, two issues emerged. First, his notes indicated a new appreciation of historical development in India, as against his earlier view of that country as a society without history. Although he still saw the communal forms of India’s villages as relatively continuous over the centuries, he now noted a series of important changes within those communal forms. Second, these notes show his preoccupation, not with Indian passivity as in 1853, but with conflict and resistance in the face of foreign conquest, whether against the Muslim conquerors of the medieval period or the British colonialists of his own time. Some of that resistance was, he argued, based upon indigenous communal forms.

If Marx’s theorization of nationalism, ethnicity, and class culminated in his 1869-70 writings on Ireland, those on non-Western societies reached their high point in his 1877-82 reflections on Russia. In a series of letters and their drafts, as well as the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto he co-authored with Engels, Marx began to sketch a multilinear theory of social development and of revolution for Russia. Russia’s communal villages were contemporaneous with industrial capitalism in the West. If a village-based social revolution in Russia could draw upon the resources of Western modernity by linking up with a revolution on the part of the Western labor and socialist movements, Russia might be able to modernize in a manner far different from capitalist development, he wrote. Moreover, a revolution in rural Russia could be the “starting point” for such an international revolutionary outbreak, he concluded.

In sum, I argue in this study that Marx developed a dialectical theory of social change that was neither unilinear nor exclusively class-based. Just as his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear direction, so his theory of revolution began over time to concentrate more on the intersectionality of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and class. To be sure, Marx was not a philosopher of difference in the postmodernist sense, for the critique of a single overarching entity, capital, was at the center of his entire intellectual enterprise. But centrality did not mean univocality or exclusivity. Marx’s mature social theory revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference, but also on occasion made those particulars — race, ethnicity, or nationality — determinants for the totality.

Academics Concerned About the Assault on Iranian Universities

admin — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:00:16 +0000

We the undersigned, academics and administrators of universities around the world express our deep concern about the deteriorating situation of universities in Iran, particularly in the aftermath of the recent Presidential elections. All signs indicate that the authorities are engaged in a major crackdown on Iranian universities and intend to impose yet more infringements on academic freedoms.

Read the full petition of Academics Concerned About the Assault on Iranian Universities

Academics' Declaration of Support for Iranian Demonstrators

admin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:00:09 +0000

Open letter of support to the demonstrators in Iran

Friday 19 June 2009

This morning Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded an end to the massive and forceful demonstrations protesting the controversial result of last week’s election. He argued that to make concessions to popular demands and ‘illegal’ pressure would amount to a form of ‘dictatorship’, and he warned the protestors that they, rather than the police, would be held responsible for any further violence.

Khamenei’s argument sounds familiar to anyone interested in the politics of collective action, since it appears to draw on the logic used by state authorities to oppose most of the great popular mobilisations of modern times, from 1789 in France to 1979 in Iran itself. These mobilisations took shape through a struggle to assert the principle that sovereignty rests with the people themselves, rather than with the state or its representatives. ’No government can justly claim authority’, as South Africa’s ANC militants put it in their Freedom Charter of 1955, ‘unless it is based on the will of all the people.’

Needless to say it is up to the people of Iran to determine their own political course. Foreign observers inspired by the courage of those demonstrating in Iran this past week are nevertheless entitled to point out that a government which claims to represent the will of its people can only do so if it respects the most basic preconditions for the determination of such a will: the freedom of the people to assemble, unhindered, as an inclusive collective force; the capacity of the people, without restrictions on debate or access to information, to deliberate, decide and implement a shared course of action.

Years of foreign-sponsored ‘democracy promotion’ in various parts of the world have helped to spread a well-founded scepticism about civic movements which claim some sort of direct democratic legitimacy. But the principle itself remains as clear as ever: only the people themselves can determine the value of such claims.

We the undersigned call on the government of Iran to take no action that might discourage such determination.

AGAMBEN, Giorgio, Università IUAV di Venezia, Venice

ALAMDARI, Kazem, California State University, Los Angeles

ALLIEZ, Eric, Middlesex Universtiy, UK

AMSLER, Sarah S., Language and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham

ANDERSON, Kevin B., Professor of Sociology and Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

ASAD, Talal, Graduate Center, City University of New York

BADIOU, Alain, École Normale Supérieure, Paris

BALIBAR, Etienne, Paris X, Nanterre, and University of California, Irvine

BALKAN, Nesecan,Hamilton College

BANUAZIZI, Ali, Professor of Political Science and Director, Program in Islamic Civilization and Societies, Boston College

BAYAT, Asef, Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies, Leiden University

BEHROOZ, Maziar, Associate Professor of Middle East History, San Francisco State University

BENHABIB, Seyla, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven

BEYER, Vera, Kunsthistorisches Institut der Freien Universität Berlin

BIENIEK, Adam, Jagiellonian University, Chair of Arab Studies, Institute of Oriental Philology, Cracow, Poland

BOCHENSKA, Joanna, Dept. of Kurdish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland

BOGDAN, Jolan, Dept. of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, UK

BOSTEELS, Bruno Bosteels, Cornell University

BRAULT, Pascale-Anne, Professor of French, Dept. of Modern Languages, DePaul University

BRUNO, Michael, Dept. of Philosophy, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR

BRUSTAD, Kristen, Associate Chair, Dept. Of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin

BURGE, Tyler, University of California, Los Angeles

BURGERS, Jan-Willem, Australian National University

BUTLER, Judith, University of California, Berkeley

BUTT, Gavin, Senior Lecturer & Programme Leader in MPhil / PhD,

CARDIN, Maryam, IUT of the University of Marne-la-vallée

CHOMSKY, Noam, MIT, Cambridge MA USA

COHEN, Joshua, Stanford University

COLE, Juan R. I., Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan

DABASHI, Hamid, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York

DE CARO, Mario, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Rome

DI LUCIA COLLETI, Laura, Conseillor Province of Venice

DOGRAMACI, Sinan, University of Texas at Austin

DOLEZALEK, Isabelle, Freie Universität Berlin

DOMINIAK, Piotr, Chairman of ASK Association in Raciborz, Poland

DORFMAN, Vladimiro Ariel, Duke Universtiy, Durham, North Carolina

DÜTTMANN, Alexander Garcia, Goldsmiths College

EHSANI, Kaveh, Assistant Professor of International Studies, DePaul University

EISENSTEIN, Zillah, Professor of Politics, Ithaca College

ENGELMANN, Stephen, University of Illinois at Chicago

EPSTEIN, Barbara, History of Consciousness Dept., University of California, Santa Cruz

FALK, Richard, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University

FARHI, Farideh, Dept. of Political Science, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

FARNOODY-ZAHIRI, Nelly, UCLA

FASY, Thomas M., Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City

FATIMA KHAN, Mahruq, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

FIELD, Hartry, Professor of Philosophy, New York University

FORAN, John, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

FRIEDLAND, Roger, Professor of Religiou Studies and Sociology, UCSB

GAJEWSKA, Katarzyna, University of Poland

GANDJBAKHSH, Amirhosseing, Research Director, National Health Institute, Washington DC

GANZ, David, Universität Konstanz, Germany

GARRETT, Don, Dept. of Philosophy, New York University

GASIOROWSKI, Mark, Political Science and International Studies, Louisiana State University

GLOGOWSKI, Aleksander, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland

GODMILOW, Jill, University of Notre Dame

GOLE, Nilufer, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

HÁJEK, Alan, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

HALLWARD, Peter, Middlesex University, UK

HASHEMI, Nader, Assistant Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics

HEGASY, Sonja, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin

HERRERA, Linda, Institute of Social Studies (The Hague)

HIBBARD, Scott, DePaul University, Chicago

HOEFERT, Almut, University of Basel

HONNETH, Axel, University of Frankfurt, Germany

IVEKOVIC, Rada, Collège international de philosophie, Paris, Université Jean-Monnet, Saint-Etienne

JIMENEZ, Maria, Université Paris Sorbonne, Paris IV

KAPLINSKY, Raphael, Professor of International Development, The Open University, UK

KESHAVARZIAN, Arang, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University

KHOSROVANI, Sahar, University of Maastricht

KORBEL, Josef, School of International Studies, University of Denver

KOWALIK, Tadeusz, professor of economics and humanities, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw

KOWALSKA, Beata, Jagiellonian University, Poland

KOZLOWSKI, Pawel, Professor of economics, Polish Academy of Sciences

KUMAR, Victor, University of Arizona

LARRIVÉE, Pierre, Aston University, Birmingham

LEMISCH, Jesse, Professor Emeritus, History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, USA

MARTINON, Jean-Paul, Dept. of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, UK

MASROUR, Farid, Dept. Of Philosophy, New York University

MCFARLAND, Andrew, Political Science Dept., University of Illinois,
Chicago

MCINTYRE, Michael, International Studies, DePaul University, Chicago

MEHDIZADEH, Hamidreza, Illinois Institute of Technology

MEMMI, Paul, Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense

MOALLEM, Minoo, UC Berkeley

MORUZZI, Norma Claire, University of Illinois at Chicago, Political Science, History, Gender and Women’s Studies

MOSES, Claire G., Dept. of Women’s Studies, University of Maryland

MOSHTAGHI, Nazgol, University of South Florida

NAST, Heidi, DePaul University, Chicago

NATCHKEBIA, Irina, Tbilisi University

NEGRI, Antonio, Collège International de Philosophie

NESPOULOUS, Jean-Luc, Université de Toulouse, Le Mirail et Institut Universitaire de France

NOYAU, Colette, Dépt des Sciences du langage, CNRS, Université Paris-Ouest

OBDRZALEK, Suzanne, Dept of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College

PATTERSON, Ian, Director of Studies in English, Queens’ College Cambridge

PETTIT, Philip, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

PHELPS, Christopher, Dept. of History, The Ohio State University

PIRVELI, Marika, Szczecin University, Poland

POTTER, Robert, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

PRÉVOST, Sophie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris

PRINZ, Jesse, Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York

PROUST, Joëlle, Director of Research, Institut Jean-Nicod, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ecole Normale Supérieure

PSTRUSIŃSKA, Jadwiga, Head of Dept. of Interdisciplinary Eurasiatic Research, Institute of Oriental Philology, Jagiellonian University, Cracow

RAKOWIECKA, Karolina, Jagiellonian University, Cracow

RAKOWIECKI, Jacek, Collegium Civitas, Poland

RANCIÈRE, Jacques, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis)

REZAEI ,Ali, Dept. of Sociology, University of Calgary, Canada

RIGGLE, Nicholas Alden, Philosophy, New York University

ROMAN, Richard, University of Toronto

ROSENTHAL, David M., Professor of Philosophy, Cognitive Science Concentration Graduate Center, City University of New York

ROSS, Eric B., Visiting Professor of Anthropology and International Development Studies, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

SAHNI, Varun, Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Ganeshkhind, Pune

SANBONMATSU, John, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dept. Of Humanities and Arts, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA

SCHAEFER, Karin, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

SCHELLENBERG, Susanna, Professor of Philosophy, Research School of the Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra

SCHIBECI, Lynn, (retired) Dept. of History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

SCHIELKE, Samuli, Centre of Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin

SCHRECKER, Ellen, Professor of American History at Yeshiva University, New York

SCHWABSKY, Barry, Senior Critic in Sculpture (retired), Yale University

SEDGWICK, Sally, University of Illinois, Chicago

SHAHSAVARI, Anousha, Persian Lecturer, University of Texas at Austin

SHEIKHZADEGAN, Amir, University of Freiburg

SIEGEL, Susanna C., Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge

SIMPSON, Dick, Head of the Political Science Dept., University of Illinois, Chicago

SINGPURWALLA, Rachel, University of Maryland, College Park

SOSA, Ernest, Rutgers University Philosophy Department

SPERBER, Dan, Institut Jean Nicod, CRNS, Paris

STEINSEIFER, Martin, Universität Giessen

STUART, Jack, Minneapolis, MN

Tabb, William K., City University of New York

TAVAKOLI-BORAZJANI, Farifteh, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Iranistik

TAVAKOLI-TARGHI, Mohamad, Professor of History and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto

TISSBERGER, Martina, Freie Universität Berlin, Dept. of Educational Sciences and Psychology

TOHIDI, Nayereh, Professor and Chair, Gender and Women’s Studies Dept., California State University, Northridge

TOSCANO, Alberto, Goldsmiths College, UK

UNGER, Peter, Professor of Philosophy, New York University

VAHDAT, Farzin, Vassar College, New York

VAN BLUEMEL, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, MA

VAN BRUINESSEN, Martin, Chair of Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies, Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, Utrecht University

VICTORRI, Bernard, Directeur de recherché CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris

WATZL, Sebastian, Dept. of Philosophy, Columbia University

WHITE, Stephen, Dept. of Philosophy, Tufts University

WINANT, Howard, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

ZIAI, Hossein, Director of Iranian Studies, UCLA Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Los Angeles, CA

ŽIŽEK, Slavoj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and the European Graduate School

ZUK, Agnieszka, University of Nancy

ZUPANCIC, Alenka, Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts