This issue of Rethinking Marxism is comprised of two seemingly divergent thematic areas: Marxism and spirituality on one hand, and worker self-directed enterprises on the other. Yet these two themes do converge in complementary and overlapping ways, inviting us to explore the importance of attending to feelings and desires and to connection and community, in Marxist analysis, class struggle, and interpersonal and social well-being.
The first three essays in the issue continue from a special double issue (vol. 28, no. 3–4), edited by Anjan Chakrabarti, Anup Dhar, and Serap A. Kayatekin, as part of a collection intended to explore the underpinnings that have historically cleaved religion/spirituality from a materialist Marxism; to investigate and advance the mutually constitutive relationship between materialism and spirituality; and to seek out novel approaches and possibilities for spirituality in Marxist praxis.
In a thoroughgoing essay, Ross Wolfe gives a fascinating historical account of a relatively brief “intellectual current” known as “god building” among the Bolsheviks in the counterrevolutionary conditions of the early 1900s. Wolfe constructs his narrative from journal publications, interpersonal communications, poems, plays, novels, and literary criticism to show the origins of god building and its proponents’ intended purpose(s). Rather than reject religious desires and feelings along with religion itself, god builders sought to center those feelings as part of socialist revolution. God builders sought to bring together materialism and spirituality by striving for the full actualization of “religious feeling” through a human aspiration toward “God.” God is the fulfilled actualization of humanity, and the spiritual connection that attends this condition, through the development of socialism.
The latter half of the essay details the differing interpretations of and reactions to god building as god builders attempted to sort out and instantiate their ideas. The essay concludes with Lenin’s fervent denunciation of god building, the excommunication of one of the leading god-building figures from the party, as well as a critical position toward the relationship between religion and revolutionary politics: “Religious sentiment diminishes in precise proportion to the increased likelihood of historical emancipation.”
Gerald O. West continues this exploration of religion and revolution, arguing for the political efficacy of integrating religion into a Marxist praxis. Engaging with late-twentieth-century South African black theology and the work of Takatso Mofokeng and Itumeleng Mosala, West positions religion as container and vehicle for the “sigh of the oppressed”—an expression of both “distress” and “protest” against distress caused by the conditions of the world. Rather than an opiate that quiets and deludes, religion thus harbors the potential for liberatory struggle if informed by and joined with Marxist analysis. Part of this struggle, West asserts, can be found in the hermeneutic politics of biblical texts. Following Mosala, West argues that biblical texts are ideological records of class struggle, and that the voices of exploited classes can be identified and advanced through a historical, “backwards” tracing of redaction from text to text. Realizing biblical texts as produced through class struggle via a Marxist analysis provides the “revolutionary cultural worker” the means and impetus to interpret and mobilize biblical texts in ways that enable religious movements to “move beyond the bible as opiate.”
Whereas Wolfe locates contradiction, and West seeks reconciliation between Marxism and spirituality, Oxana Timofeeva, drawing from Hegel, Lukács, and others, puts forward a materialist understanding of spirituality as found in Marx, insisting that materialism and spirituality “must be taken together.” At stake is a flourishing of “humanity”—and here Timofeeva is referring to humans and nonhumans—through a recognition and emancipation of the soul in the labor process itself. For Timofeeva, the soul emerges through labor as individual ideas and action result in material outcomes that leave the individual and enter the broader social body where the spirit resides. The soul connects and mediates between the individual and the spirit. In capitalist production and exchange, however, the soul (labor) both emerges from and enters into a regime of control and commodification. The freedom to make choices about how to labor is confined to the conditions created through capitalist relations, and laborers are alienated from the stuff that they produce. The result is that the soul is unable to bridge the individual to the universal spirit. Under capitalism, the soul is fundamentally broken. From this perspective Timofeeva reads depression, disconnection, and other forms of suffering as “the pain of the alienated soul.” Timofeeva suggests that overcoming individualism is a necessary part of the “liberation of the soul.”
Following this first set of essays is, fittingly, a beautiful reflection on a dialogue between Serap A. Kayatekin, one of the editors of the initial special issue on “Marxism and Spirituality,” and artist and scholar Karen Werner (and her art). As Kayatekin narrates the meaning she makes of Werner’s art—some of which appears alongside the text—she deepens her connection with Werner and her relationship with history in her own life. The artwork in these pages is part of a sound installation with accompanying images that Werner produced in 2017, about a building where three generations of Werner’s Jewish family lived in Vienna prior to the Nazi occupation. Kayatekin identifies two movements in Werner’s work. The first suggests the terrible history of loss, displacement, and emptiness that the building conjures and embodies; the building represents an end along with the possibility of a beginning. And the second opens a contemplation of and striving for connection and reconnection; it reveals the importance of expression, conversation, and listening as part of a process of acknowledging historical violence. Thinking with and beyond the place-specific histories of Werner’s art, Kayatekin locates the “trauma of unacknowledged genocide” as a psychosocial obstruction to personal and political liberation: “Can democracy live in a country that lives in denial of its past? No, it cannot, just like an abusive partner cannot be rehabilitated without recognizing the act of abuse.” Kayatekin, like Timofeeva, finds solace and hope in a politics of connection toward a realization of a universalized spirit, a “unified whole.”
The second portion of the issue discusses the politics and possibilities of worker cooperatives, or what Catherine Mulder describes as worker self-directed enterprises (WSDEs). While on the surface there seems to be a considerable distance between the two sections in this issue, a closer look reveals that many of the same desires for connection, interdependence, and collective determination and actualization—qualities that might be understood as constitutive of spiritual connection—are prevalent.
This second conversation is structured through a book symposium, organized and edited by Chizu Sato, that engages with Mulder’s 2017 Transcending Capitalism through Cooperative Practices, and it involves three commentators with different investments in, understandings of, and desires for cooperative politics and scholarship. Mulder’s text is organized around six very different case studies of cooperative initiatives that she aims to analyze through what she refers to as New Marxian Class Analysis (NMCA), which mobilizes Steve Resnick and Rick Wolff’s theorization of class as class process—different arrangements of surplus production, appropriation, and distribution.
All three commentators find much empirical and theoretical value in the work. They found Mulder’s qualitative engagement with the divergent case studies rich with insights that not only inform Marxian and cooperative literature but are of political importance. David Kristjanson-Gural finds that “the merit of Mulder’s work is to provide evidence of the interdependence of market organizations with nonmarket and state organizations in order to demonstrate the possible types of institutional support that could develop to support WSDEs.” Jessica Gordon Nembhard describes the book as a “very unique study in a field (Marxian economics) that tends not to produce this level of analysis about cooperative enterprises nor this variety of case-study comparison, especially by U.S. researchers.” And Boone W. Shear suggests that “Transcending Capitalism makes a significant contribution toward a project of re-representing economy as not determinatively capitalist.”
Beyond these affirmations, the three commentators present different stances toward and challenges to Mulder’s work. Kristjanson-Gural systematically reviews Mulder’s text, which he describes as “very readable and highly practical.” Kristjanson-Gural helpfully explicates NMCA concepts, summarizes “the insights Mulder gleans from her case studies about the viability of WSDEs,” and then brings forward key findings, in sections that contrast communist cooperatives with capitalist cooperatives—helping to further advance Mulder’s arguments that not all cooperatives are noncapitalist—before turning to a discussion of the viability of WSDEs in relation to Mulder’s analysis.
Gordon Nembhard focuses her concerns on two omissions. First, she points to the lack of methodological reflexivity and explanation. Given the diversity of Mulder’s case studies, how and why did she choose these particular cases and methods? More important for Gordon Nembhard, however, is the lack of attention and interest in politics beyond the NMCA analysis. Of particular concern is the relationship between race and class, and a broader politics and approach which might be able to contend with both a class analysis as well as issues related to social justice and community well-being. Gordon Nembhard offers the growing solidarity economy movement as an example of the type of analysis that might help Mulder to broaden her scope beyond a Eurocentric approach in which Mulder “rarely discusses race or only mentions it superficially.”
These Eurocentric histories and analyses of cooperative movements and politics have resulted in multiple erasures, including erasures of racialized oppressions and exclusions of cooperative movements and projects as well as historical erasure of the primary role that cooperatives of all kinds—including WSDEs—have played in civil rights and liberation struggles. Gordon Nembhard’s seminal work Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) serves as a much-needed corrective to the latter.
In a similar vein to Gordon Nembhard, Shear invites Mulder to consider—and indeed, participate in—a broader politics in which WSDEs might emerge and proliferate. Accounting for the conditions of possibility for the cultivation and durability of WSDEs, Shear asserts, would “bring forward the multiple historical projects that any revolutionary effort involving WSDEs are necessarily caught up in and must contend with.” Shear goes on to argue that if, as Mulder opines, “the goal of Marxian scholars should be to rid workplace exploitation and the various processes that secure its conditions of existence,” then there is a fundamental need to address “the relational projects of patriarchal white supremacy and colonialism that not only structure inequalities and violence but mobilize and constitute capital accumulation and naturalize the class process of exploitation.” Like Gordon Nembhard, Shear also turns to the solidarity economy movement, stating that it offers “one possibility for communities to intentionally organize around and assemble their own conditions of possibility.”
Responding to both the affirmations and challenges presented by the commentators, Mulder deftly summarizes and reasserts her project. She accepts the critical engagement as making important points and laments not including a full consideration of issues related to ecological well-being as it relates to cooperatives. She maintains that since her focus was limited to demonstrating the efficacy of a new Marxian class analysis, there were necessarily omissions in her work. And Mulder relates that her next research project is set to expand her analysis to include a more robust accounting of community and movement connections to cooperatives.
Both sets of essays show the complex, overdetermined nature of exploitation, oppression, and class struggle. Taken together, they invite an exploration of and pose further questions about participating in a “Marxism that is more engaged with the reality that surrounds it and that is more relevant to a contemporary modernity that is tearing itself apart,” as the editors of the connected special issue “Marxism and Spirituality” put it (vol. 28, no. 3–4, 353). What practices are needed to create the type of collectively held subjectivities necessary for mass struggle? How do we help to advance visions and movements that can enable communities to act against and outside of the dictates of capitalist modernity? How do we—humans and nonhuman others—learn to survive well together?
—The Editors