This issue starts with a symposium
on Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism, edited by Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel (Zed Books, 2020). The book is an anthology of diverse Marxist-feminist contributions presented at the second International Marxist Feminist Conference, “Building Bridges—Shifting and Strengthening Visions—Exploring Alternatives,” held in Vienna, Austria, in 2016. The symposium is comprised of three commentaries, with a reply by Fakier, Räthzel, and Mulinari, and is edited by Chizu Sato. We are pleased to host this symposium in the journal to recognize, learn from, and further stimulate Marxist-feminist conversations in, across, and beyond the five International Marxist Feminist Conferences, which have gathered participants from around the world over the last decade, meeting in Berlin, Germany (2015); Vienna, Austria (2016); Lund, Sweden (2018); online, from Bilbao, the Basque Country (2021); and Warsaw, Poland (2023).
In the first commentary, Jule Goikoetxea, one of the organizers of the fourth conference, appreciates the collection of diverse and sometimes contradictory theoretical frameworks present in the anthology. With that recognition, she critiques the idealist and biologist drift both in the unitary theory school, informed by Lisa Vogel, and in some contributions on social reproduction, which argue that the subordination of women is caused by cultural values or ideas and not by material relations of production, as featured in some chapters in the anthology. Goikoetxea calls for the development of a materialist theory of patriarchy and colonialism to rethink Marxist feminism in times that require us to properly acknowledge the complexity of the humanity-nature problematic around which the anthology is formed.
In the second commentary, which shares the same objectives as Goikoetxea’s but is informed by ecofeminism, itself a pivotal dimension of the anthology, Stefania Barca identifies material relations not only of production but also those of reproduction. For Barca, reproduction should include both humans and nonhuman nature. She sees this socio-ecological reproduction as a key theoretical consideration for examining the contradictions stemming from the historical, dualist humanity-nature problematic as we look to twenty-first-century Marxist feminism. Barca views the strength of the anthology as going beyond opening spaces for constructive theoretical and political debates, reminding her and readers alike of the importance of love: the Marxist-feminist love that turns “care into the guiding principle of a revolution from the institutionalized carelessness of capitalism to a postcapitalist society that can finally be careful—that is, a society of caring by all for all, including the nonhuman life and earth systems that make our lives possible and worth living.”
In the third commentary, Jules Falquet, who participated in the fourth and fifth conferences, drawing on a perspective informed by French materialist lesbian and decolonial feminisms, echoes Goikoetxea’s and Barca’s insistence on articulating the interlocking structural relations of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and racism while inserting heterosexuality into the mix and identifying patriarchy as heteropatriarchy. Introducing French materialist feminist concepts such as sexage—introduced by Colette Guillaumin and defined as a “structural relation of appropriation” in which labor power and the laborer’s whole body are physically handled together, Falquet expounds on the productive potential that materialist lesbian feminist perspectives carry for the rethinking of exploitation, for social-reproduction debates. Borrowing a lens suggested by Barca, we can imagine the potential of materialist lesbian feminist perspectives within debates on socio-ecological reproduction taking place as part of Marxist feminism.
The symposium ends with anthology editors Khayaat Fakier, Nora Räthzel, and Diana Mulinari, responding to the three commentaries. For them, the commentaries demonstrate the anthology’s success in initiating diverse theoretical and political conversations from Marxist-feminist perspectives about the complexity of the humanity-nature problematic in pursuit of futures absent of the exploitation of either humans or nonhuman nature. However, the anthology editors do find that studies articulating the humanity-nature problematic from perspectives that link decolonial, antiracist, ecological, and indigenous perspectives with Marxist-feminist perspectives are yet sparse, both in the anthology and elsewhere. Hence, even while acknowledging the theoretical and political work done by Marxist feminists, they still see the immense amount of work ahead of Marxist feminists in connecting to diverse struggles in practice and in theory.
Following the symposium, we have three regular essays. In “Ecology, Politics, and the Crisis of Marxism,” Samuel J. R. Mercer, a member of our editorial board, extends theoretical and political conversations on the humanity-nature problematic via his engagement in the emerging-as-a-zeitgeist humanism versus posthumanism debate. Mercer analyzes two recent academic essays, one published in Historical Materialism and one in this journal, finding that both, in their own ways, offer interlinked insights: first is to argue that, in the context of the ecological crisis, posthumanism has produced an apolitical response by decentering the human subject in its theorizing of politics; and next is to call for a recovery within humanism to recenter the human subject as a way of developing the political and ethical leverage required to act in the face of crisis. For Mercer, this debate represents what Althusser would call a “crisis of Marxism”—an inability of Marxism to theoretically explain the socio-ecological conditions and offer a suitable political intervention. His reading illuminates an essentially similar ideological structure organized around the political leverage of a human subjective call for action in both posthumanism and Marxist theoretical humanism. Finding Spinozists’ theoretical antihumanism as a ready way through a current crisis within Marxism, Mercer argues that we focus not on the human subject but on class struggle and the social relations of production, insisting that “both human subjects and nature are products of a material world determined in the last instance by the social relations of production, and any injunction to ‘act’ stems from these relations.”
The essay by Travasaros Tasos, entitled “Social Constructionism: Critical Analysis from a Vygotskian Perspective,” serves as an interesting juxtaposition to Mercer’s. Tasos examines influential yet problematic variations of social constructionism: mainly absolute relativism but also subjective idealism, moral relativism, and vulgar materialism, as well as positivism in the field of the epistemology of psychology. Drawing on psychology informed by historical materialism, particularly Vygotsky’s cultural-historical school, Tasos argues that a Marxist theoretical humanism that understands the human subject and consciousness as being determined by the material relations of production overcomes both problematic relativism and positivism. This and other materialist insights enable him to reject reductionist linguistic positionings within variations of social constructionism that see objective reality as capable of being reduced to the linguistic constructions of the subject, for these positionings do not offer objective criterion to evaluate knowledge. They also allow him to reject a positivism that supports the dominant bourgeois ideology by accepting naturalism and ignoring the function of ideology that naturalizes exploitation and domination in societies comprising different social classes with differing interests. Recognizing that different discursive fields engage in predictably diverging theoretical and political problematics, even in the same historical time, the juxtaposition of the interventions by Mercer and Tasos leaves us wondering whether moving away from the focus on the human subject and consciousness could make a theoretically and politically potent Marxist intervention in other fields, such as psychology.
Since our special issue on Hardt and Negri’s Empire (vol. 23, no. 3–4), our journal has served as a space for discussions on immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism. In “Living Labor and Social Labor: A Marxian Critique of Immaterial-Labor Theory,” Zhuoqun Wang asks how to theorize revolutionary subjectivity for class struggle in the context of the objectivity of capital valorization by way of critiquing Hardt and Negri’s understanding of the relationship between capitalist immaterial labor and capital valorization. Wang identifies Hardt and Negri’s ontological reading of living labor as asocial, for it understands the capitalist living-labor process as independent from capital valorization and laborers who perform capitalist living labor as subjects separated from the process of capital valorization. For Wang, this asocial reading of living labor is troubling because it has led Hardt and Negri to see the immaterial production processes in which this asocial living labor is performed as cooperative and communicational in support of the organization of the multitude as having the potential to form postcapitalist social relations. Wang’s analysis of the relationship between the capitalist living-labor process and capital valorization, supported by antiessentialist Marxist authors, enables him to show how capital cannot expand autonomously and how it necessarily relies on individuals who participate in both capitalist and noncapitalist processes. This overdeterminist insight further enables him to identify a revolutionary subjectivity for class struggle in the context of the objectivity of capital valorization: a subjectivity not limited to those who perform capitalist living labor. This insight encourages us to explore questions concerning the relationships between noncapitalist processes and capital valorization and between the construction of the identities of individuals and capitalist and noncapitalist processes. It provides a novel means to explore how those relationships shape the transformation of the production and distribution of social surplus. These questions are helpful in responding to the challenge concerning intersectionality posed by Fakier, Mulinari, and Räthzel: to connect Marxist (feminist) theory and practice with decolonial, antiracist, ecological, and indigenous struggles. They simultaneously complicate our understanding of a revolutionary subjectivity for class struggle that might be overdetermined in the last instance by an overwhelming number of interwoven social and ecological relations.
In a Remarx piece entitled “Is Marx’s Philosophy of Labor Soluble in an Ontology of Life? Michel Henry’s Rereading of Marx,” Richard Sobel asks us to think about the relationship between living labor and “life” through French philosopher Michel Henry’s (1922–2022) phenomenological interpretation of Marx. According to Sobel, Henry’s phenomenological interpretation is ontological—and vitalist, to be more specific—yet his ontological reading did not separate living labor from capital. Faced with the then dominant structuralist interpretation of Marx, Henry’s attention to Marx’s phenomenological descriptions of workers’ lives enabled him to conceptualize individuals as defined, not abstractly by consciousness, but concretely by praxis. His phenomenological reading, focused on individuals’ subjective points of view, understands life directly experienced by living individuals as the original foundation for life and the economy only as a secondary domain. Living labor, which comprises work in a dialectical relationship with dead labor, is understood as the application of the force of life that living individuals exercise together with the Earth. Taking Henry’s phenomenological interpretation and vitalist ontology seriously, Sobel’s essay poses questions like: How do these phenomenological interpretations of life and living labor provide new insights on capital, surplus value, exploitation, and emancipation? More specifically, what would become possible if we interpreted capitalist exploitation at the ontological level, where living individuals experience subjective life via vital praxis, and not simply at the objective level of social relations? Last, in relation to Wang’s essay in this issue, how does the productivity of the ontological reading of capitalist exploitation compare to questions made possible by the overdeterminist humanist insights enabled by Wang’s analyses?
Also, in this issue is “Toward a Joyful, Generous, and Fluid Left: An Interview with Kristen R. Ghodsee,” an edited transcription of an interview conducted by Maliha Safri and Ryan Watt as part of Rethinking Marxism’s podcast series, Overdetermined. The interview transcript was edited for publication by editorial board member Kenan Erçel. Recorded in September 2021 during the Covid pandemic, the conversation mainly revolves around Ghodsee’s three most recent books, her historical insights from Eastern European feminism under state socialism, and the social-reproduction debates of that period on gender and work (particularly unpaid work), with their sharp contrast with capitalism and the state in the United States during the pandemic. The conversation also extends to Ghodsee’s writing style, which integrates multiple methods, including fiction, to attract larger audiences to political conversations, along with the importance of face-to-face political organizing, through the “human connective tissue” found beyond capitalist online platforms, to build movements. For those new to socialism and communism or to Second World feminism, Ghodsee’s interview serves as a highly educational and inspiring introduction. We encourage our readers to listen to the whole episode of the podcast, which includes a discussion on how successes and failures are attached differently to capitalism and socialism and how statistics and indexes are deployed in the service of those narratives. Our podcast series also features interviews with Slavoj Žižek, our former editor David F. Ruccio, and Anjali Vats.
We conclude this issue with a book review. Jared C. Bly finds Recovering the Later Georg Lukács: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, by Matthew J. Smetona (MIT Press, 2023), to be a “tour de force of the later works of Lukács.” This is supported by an exhaustively evidenced claim concerning Lukács’s critique of reification as the operative method in the framework of Geschichte, which provides the methodological unity of Lukács’s middle (between 1918 when he turned toward Marxist-Leninism and 1923 when he published History and Class Consciousness) and later period (after 1924 until his death in 1971). Through his meticulous reading of the later Lukács, Smetona develops the concept of dereification to grasp the reification of social development from the standpoint of dialectical totality as a theoretical practice for the current conjuncture. Even though Bly identifies some weaknesses in Smetona’s study, such as insufficient interrogation of the reification hypothesis and insufficient discussion of Lukács’s contribution to the field of philosophy, he finds the concept of dereification a helpful methodological strategy for other theoretical and aesthetic practices beyond Lukács’s own applications.
—The Editors