Welcome to the first issue
of volume 36, in which we are pleased to welcome four new members to the Rethinking Marxism editorial board: Bengi Akbulut, Shahram Azhar, Diego Martínez Zarazúa, and Anastasia Wilson. At the same time, we bid a fond farewell to our exiting board members: Vincent Lyon-Callo, whose influence as former coeditor helped to shape recent volumes of the journal, and Ellen Russell.
In this issue, we bring you the 2023 winner of the annual Stephen A. Resnick Graduate Student Essay Award, Mabrouka M’Barek’s “Affixing the Nomads: Revisiting Marx’s Theory of ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation’ with a Deleuzo-Guattarian-Inspired Theory of the Colonial State.” M’Barek’s project of rethinking Marxism has been sparked by a seeming anomaly: whereas most Marxian theorizations and historical accounts of primitive accumulation emphasize the separation of the peasant from the land to create a working class, M’Barek has found French colonial military records documenting the colonial state’s effort to “affix the indigenous to the soil” through allotments of land to indigenous populations in Tunisia and Algeria. Two factors become especially pertinent in this realization: (1) the nomadic forms of society and subsistence in North Africa presented a different obstacle to capital accumulation than did the sedentary European peasantry, and (2) it was colonizing capital, not domestic capital, whose accumulation had been impeded. M’Barek subsequently identifies several other instances of similarly nomadic peoples being colonized by capitalist powers and thereby develops this overall comparison into a retheorization of primitive accumulation that centers both the colonial and the theoretical periphery. While prior Eurocentric iterations of Marxist theory offer useful insights about the violent process of providing capital with access to the land and labor it desires, the English experience of the enclosure movement (which featured prominently in Marx’s thinking) cannot be universalized. M’Barek incorporates feminist insights about the control of social reproduction and indigenous scholarship on the process of race making while proffering a theory of primitive accumulation appropriate to peoples and places for whom earlier literatures on primitive accumulation have proven an ill fit.
In “‘The Value of a Statistical Life’ in Economics, Law, and Policy: Reflections from the Pandemic,” Mark Silverman uses insights from the tradition of overdeterminist thinking to challenge the ubiquity of neoclassical cost-benefit analysis. Policy making in the United States is deferential to such analysis even when the undertaking requires pricing the priceless. Here, priceless means both that no market directly prices the cost or benefit in question and also that many noneconomists would consider price an inappropriate measure of value. Many of us, for example, would balk at assigning a dollar value to the loss or preservation of human life. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the application of cost-benefit calculations to the valuation of human life especially prominent and has brought the contradictions of this practice into high relief. The value of a statistical life (VSL) is calculated by observing the dollar-versus-mortality-risk tradeoffs that people make in relevant markets—for example, by analyzing pay differentials between more and less risky jobs. But such a calculation depends on a foundational assumption that people’s preferences are exogenous and stable and therefore that their actions in the market can only “reveal” what they already value. If we take as a foundational premise the view that, in contrast, agents and their subjectivities are always in the process of becoming and are mutually constituted by their encounters with one another and with the institutions that shape those interactions—a view familiar to Rethinking Marxism’s pages—then any calculation pricing the risk of mortality loses its coherence and legitimacy.
Andrea Ricci’s “Deciphering the Commodity: The Social Code of Value” explores the many variants of an analogy drawn between the exchange-value/use-value duality of commodities and the signifier/signified duality of signs. As commodities themselves have both material and communicative dimensions, the two dualities merge in Marx’s value theory and in the concept of commodity fetishism. But how, exactly? What do we gain or lose analytically with each of the possible syntheses that have been proposed? Ricci chooses to apply Hjelmslev’s more complex scheme for analyzing signs. Instead of a signifier/signified duality, Hjelmslev’s four-part scheme operates simultaneously in the two dimensions of expression/content (where expression corresponds to the signifier and content to the signified, in the simpler dual analysis) and form/substance (where form is the structured range of possibilities and substance is the specific instance). This entire arrangement is set within the larger purport (that is, the wider range of possibilities, unlimited by the existing structure within which the sign operates). Further, Ricci draws on Bolivar Echeverria’s use of Hjelmslev’s scheme to consider the commodity’s multiple contradictory simultaneities: its existence as both a material thing and a sign, as an object produced by labor under the command of capital and as an object circulating within the fetishistic reciprocal relations of the market. The real abstraction of value arises, Ricci concludes, from the universalizing tendency of capitalism to draw all production and exchange into the orbit of a single market that measures all by the same metric.
Abbas Jamali’s piece, “Why Agamben Cannot Save Us: A Political Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Coming Politics,’” presents us with an intellectual paradox. It praises Agamben’s core concepts regarding sovereignty, law, and life in Western philosophy and theology while also highlighting their political limitations. Jamali explores Agamben’s ideas of play, profanation, and gesture, identifying an emancipatory politics in which humans regain their “potentiality” and where sacred things are released from exile through profanation, becoming ordinary objects for new uses in a different form-of-life. For Agamben, monastic communities—especially the Franciscans—exemplify such a form-of-life within a collective in which rules align with the uses of things without ownership. Agamben believes it possible to achieve this redemptive promise in secular-capitalist societies by suspending the sacred commodity’s dominance. Jamali writes, this means to “consume ‘as if’ we do not consume, do what is legal as if it is not legal, and possess as if it is not ownership. Only with a kind of abandonment can one be free from the subjugation of capitalism.” Drawing from diverse-economies scholarship, one can consider various practices like the commoning of knowledge and belongings, the exchange of mutual aid, and the development of shared housing as accessible ways to profane the commodity form and pursue a different form-of-life. Indeed, the Tent of Nations in occupied Palestine offers a powerful vision of a form of solidarity that acts “as if” borders—across territories and between people—do not exist. But while Jamali appreciates this vision, his analysis also considers how political realities in occupied Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq hinder the actualization of Agamben’s coming community, leading to a form of “passive” individualism that can be dangerously destructive.
Johan Awang Bin Othman and Eddy Izuwan Bin Musa consider the “Productivity of the Common as Property in the Context of the Symbolic Propertization of Indigenous Knowledge: The Biopolitics of Traditional Malay Wau Bulan and Wau Kucing Kelantanese Kite Making as State Symbolic Property.” The two traditional Malay kite designs of the wau bulan (“moon kite”) and wau kucing (“cat kite”), historically distinct to the state of Kelantan, were transformed into state-controlled symbols of national Malaysian identity in the 1970s and 1980s. Representations of these kite designs continue to symbolize the Malaysian nation on currency and as the logo of the national airline. Much scholarship highlights the many cases in which appropriation of indigenous commons (both material and knowledge commons) enriches appropriators at the expense of the expropriated indigenous custodians of what then becomes another’s property. However, Othman and Musa argue that the transformation of the wau bulan and wau kucing into state-owned symbols of Malaysia does not, in fact, follow this pattern. Even as the kite designs become less distinctively associated with Kelantan, the state of Kelantan is still recognized as the geographic region in which the traditional kite-making materials grow, and the Kelantanese kite makers are still recognized as the bearers of craft knowledge. Othman and Musa find that the Malaysian state, because of its interest in the kites, directs resources to the Kelantan Kite Society and thereby to the kites’ craftspeople. The kite crafters recognize that the wau bulan and wau kucing no longer refer symbolically to Kelantan alone but rather to the larger Malaysian nation, yet this universalized status generates resources to support their continued work in the craft. Othman and Musa, following Laclau, propose that in the case of intangible biopolitical production, the conversion of a particular symbol to universal use does not preclude its continuing particularity. They argue that the Malaysian state’s appropriation of the kites has not been exclusionary but has instead been productive for the kite makers.
Oktay Özden reviews Özgür Orhangazi’s ambitious 2020 book Türkiye ekonomisinin yapısı (The structure of the Turkish economy) and finds much to admire in Orhangazi’s analysis of Turkey’s position within global capitalism in the neoliberal era. According to Özden, Orhangazi convincingly points to several of the structural factors and contradictions that have left Turkey in economic crisis, causing great hardship for much of the population. For example, Turkey’s growth became heavily dependent on the inflow of foreign capital, but foreign capital inflows increased the value of the Turkish Lira, which in turn disadvantaged domestic producers in both domestic and export markets. The problems Orhangazi diagnoses in the Turkish economy are thus deeper than a simple policy mistake, here or there. Such contradictions can be displaced but not solved. Özden’s main critique is that, though “the book deals with the external dynamics of economic structure and is brilliant and successful at explaining these factors,” it insufficiently attends to class conflict within Turkey, especially the powerful influence of intraclass conflict among capitalists of differing interests in shaping the economic landscape.
Last, Peter Ives reviews a recent translation by Derek Boothman and Chris Dennis of Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, by Giuseppe Vacca. Alternative Modernities belongs to a strengthened exchange between Italian and Anglophone Gramsci studies. Comprised of new English translations of Gramsci’s own work and of contemporary Gramsci studies originally written in Italian, such works have facilitated fruitful scholarly exchanges. Ives considers Vacca’s book an important contribution, with a particular focus on understanding how Gramsci connected the ideas of hegemony and democracy. Gramsci is, in both Vacca’s and Ives’s view, too often misread through a dichotomous structure/superstructure model. However, Vacca argues that civil society and the state, hegemony and democracy are not exclusive of one another. Ives also stresses Vacca’s attention to Gramsci’s analysis of global, not merely Italian, capitalism. Although Vacca does not himself spell out the contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s legacy, Ives finds Vacca’s reading of Gramsci immensely valuable when attempting to think in the face of a fracturing neoliberal globalism and a resurgent populist nationalism.
As we were finalizing the issue, we received the sad news of the passing of Italian Marxist political philosopher Antonio Negri. Negri, starting with his Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (Autonomedia, 1991) and his materialist reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, and continuing with his collaborative work with Michael Hardt, has arguably been one of the most important Marxist philosophers of recent times. In Rethinking Marxism, we were lucky enough to engage with his (and Hardt’s) work in a sustained manner. When we published in 2001 the thick Dossier on Empire (vol. 13, no. 3-4) through the editorial initiative of Abdul-Karim Mustapha (with Bülent Eken), it was one of the first extensive engagements with their double intervention into Marxism and into emerging conjuncture of the post-Cold War unipolarity. Even though their analyses have been extensively criticized and engaged with over the next two decades, Negri, together with his many collaborators in the Italian autonomist movement, was able to make a very persuasive corrective to the strong capitalocentricist tendencies in Marxism by foregrounding the potential of living labor as revolutionary subjectivity under the emerging and tendential conditions of immaterial labor. We have returned to track the subsequent trajectories of his work, most notably in 2014, in a symposium on Post-Autonomia (vol. 26, no. 2), edited by Esra Erdem and Joost de Bloois, and in an extensive retrospective interview with Michael Hardt (with Ceren Özselçuk) in 2016 (vol. 28, no. 1). But perhaps most precious were the different conversations with Negri we were able to organize the translation of, and publish over the years. From the most recent backwards: an extensive conversation with Judith Revel on transcendence, spirituality, practice and immanence (vol. 28, no. 3-4); a theoretical encounter with Étienne Balibar, staged by Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk, on the common, universality, and communism (vol. 22, no. 3); a conversation on Marxism and theology with Gabriele Fadini (vol. 20, no. 4); and an interview conducted by Francesca Cadel on exile (vol. 18, no. 3). These four engagements will be accessible for the next three months through our publisher’s website. No doubt, we will continue to engage with and learn from Negri’s immense body of work in the coming years.
—The Editors