#joel wainwright

[weil-weil-lautre]

On climate change, state power and the worlds to come.

Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright explore the possible political and economic futures of a planet under rapid climate change - from the emergence of a planetary sovereignty over a global energy system, to the fracturing of the globe into nativistic zones of control and violent exclusion - and explain why nothing is certain but radical change. Geoff and Joel are authors of the book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future from Verso.

[jewishbookworld]

Rethinking Israel and Palestine; Marxist Perspectives

Rethinking Israel and Palestine; Marxist Perspectives

Edited by Oded Nir, Joel Wainwright The Middle East seems to be in perpetual crisis. One might expect a plethora of Marxist analyses of Israel and Palestine. Yet in the literature on Israel and Palestine there are hardly any studies of class, relations of production, or the relationship between the political and economic balance of forces over time. This edited volume brings a diverse array of…

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“How climate change will affect our political theory—for better and worse

Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading? To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathanprovides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world’s political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.”

Reviews

“Urgent, provocative and elegantly executed, Climate Leviathan provides a map for climate politics in the stormy decades ahead. As the boat rocks ever more violently and we seek to set the compass, this work will be of foundational importance.”

– Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital

[lasmaracuyas]

When Marx sets up his analysis of capitalism in Capital (1867), and examines ‘abstract labor’ and the living labor-labor power distinction, describes the manifold ways that living labor exchanges with the world to produce commodities, and so on, there is no place for the material-immaterial distinction. In Capital, everything relates through material practices and forms of exchange. Hardt and Negri know this, but suggest that things have changed recently: “The form of value creation,” Negri argues, “has been modified by the hegemony – tendential but increasingly  actual – of immaterial labour (intellectual, relational, linguistic, affective, and so on)” (2008:  73). How, we might ask, does the form of value – what Marx calls ‘Wertform’ in Capital – change as a result of the ‘tendential’ hegemony of immaterial labour? Hardt and Negri do not say. Instead they offer many fascinating illustrations of contemporary life and labor (e.g. at Microsoft; 2004: 145) which are contrasted with the old days of factory work. And yet, the workers at Microsoft, who contribute their surplus value by committing their living labor, surely engage in material exchanges just as much as coal miners or anyone else. Or consider for that  matter a university professor. Her theoretical work and geography lectures may be highly abstract, but insofar as they cannot be separated from her body, her social relations, and the world, they are surely material. 

I could go on, but I must add a rather awkward comment here: I am convinced that Negri agrees with my critique on this point. Consider this passage from the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism’s  entry for ‘immaterial labour’ (Haug 2009: 177):

"In the context of neoliberal discourse, especially about the ‘new economy’ and talk about the ‘dematerialisation of the economy’, the expression ‘immaterial labour’ has had  a second life at the end of the twentieth century, this time with a broad influence, radiating even over the Left. Strictly speaking, it is a non-concept [Unbegriff ], with at most a polemical function against sedimented notions of labour from the iron and- coal age of industry…‘Of course it is nonsense to speak of “immaterial labour”. Labour is always material!’, says Antonio Negri (1996: 97)."

I simply do not know how to square Negri’s assertion here – which I view as correct – with the tremendous importance given to their thesis about the hegemony of immaterial labor in the trilogy.

...But let it pass. Shortly we arrive – at the end of their trilogy – at their ultimate claim apropos value theory: “all of the dispositifs intended to measure labor and value… are now in crisis and cannot be applied in biopolitical society. At this point we need a new theory of value” (2009: 316). A new theory of value—no small matter! And to underscore their departure from Marx, they then ask, “But will it really be a theory of value?” (Ibid.). Everything points to the answer, no. This is troublesome at several levels. To begin, these important claims are extremely vague. They fail to answer the obvious question: if we need a “new theory of value” which is not “a theory of value”, what will it be and why do we need it? Insofar as I can follow their explanation, Hardt and Negri would like to produce a theory of “life activity as a whole,” which “traverses the entire biopolitical fabric of society” (Ibid., 317). But that, I want to cry out, is what Marx’s theory of value has been all along—a theory that allows us to grasp how life as a whole in capitalist society, the entire biopolitical fabric of society, comes to be organized by value form.  In short, as Hardt and Negri have shifted their reading of Marx through the three volumes of their trilogy, they have moved steadily away from Marx’s value theory, to a point where by the end of Commonwealth they part ways with it fundamentally—yet without offering a substantive alternative. This is deeply regrettable, in my view. Retrospectively, their trilogy should be read not only as a [Communist] Manifesto for our times but equally as a critique of Capital, and one resting on highly questionable and unsupported propositions...

Let me anticipate a criticism: no, not every Marxist must repeat Marx’s arguments from Capital. Certainly not. But when a Marxist theorist of Negri’s stature proposes a radical break with Marx’s theory of value – which Marx regarded as his greatest contribution to political economy – careful analytical explanation is due. 

Then again, perhaps Negri gave us his explanation long ago, in his Paris lectures from the late 1970s. In lesson two of Marx beyond Marx, he claims that Marx’s “theory of value, as a theory of categorial synthesis, is a legacy of the classics and of bourgeois mystification which we can easily do without in order to enter the field of revolution”. Well, there you have it. Negri wants revolution without or against Marx’s Capital. He says as much in a recent (2010) interview, arguing that revolutionary struggles today emerge from ‘below’ in the sense that they oppose “the ‘above’ of sovereignty. Communist being is realised from this ‘below’, from the turning of constituent desires into expressions of power and alternative contents. So there can also be a revolution, as Gramsci taught, ‘against Das Kapital.’” 

He concludes his trilogy with Hardt on the same point. Negri has thus come full circle from his lectures on the Grundrisse: disavowing Marx’s theory of value in Capital, in order to write a new Manifesto

Review of Commonwealth by Joel Wainwright

[lasmaracuyas]

Reflecting upon the failures of Marxism in ‘the West’ – i.e. outside of Lenin’s circumstances – Gramsci concluded that it would not be enough for the proletariat to seize the state, since the state was no mere thing, but an ensemble of social relations that are woven through the entire fabric of society. From this well-known point he leapt to the conclusion (repeated, we have already seen, by Harvey) that communism requires a new conception of the world. 

Thus, Marxist criticism means criticizing every existing conception of the world, Marxism included. For Gramsci, Marxism necessarily works from a contradictory position, insofar as Marxists must interpret the world upon a perpetually unsettled foundation of ‘conceptions of the world’. As a critique of metaphysics, Marxism has a responsibility to bracket every ‘truth’ – even the truth represented by Lenin. Gramsci writes:

If the philosophy of praxis affirms theoretically every ‘truth’ believed to be eternal and absolute has had practical origins and has represented a ‘provisional’ value (historicity of every conception of the world and of life), it is still very difficult to make people grasp ‘practically’ that such an interpretation is valid also for the philosophy of praxis itself, without in so doing shaking the convictions that are necessary for action. (Q11§62; 1971, 406)

Yet shake those convictions it must. This implies producing effective, integral Marxist conceptions of the world – as well as the concomitant convictions toward action.

“On Gramsci’s ‘conceptions of the world’” Joel Wainwright

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Consider Gramsci’s standard illustrations of what he calls ‘ideologies’: imperialism, fascism, Christianity, free trade – but never Marxism. Indeed, Gramsci harshly criticises those Marxists who would reduce Marxism to ideology critique: he complains that Bukharin ‘has remained trapped in Ideology; whereas the philosophy of praxis represents a distinct advance and historically is precisely in opposition to Ideology’ (Q11§63; 1971, 376). By contrast, Gramsci sought Marxism to become a conception of the world, that is, it should strive to produce a kind of ‘unity of the whole mass . . . and strive to ensure that the higher intellectual stratum does not get separated from the lower’ (Q11§12; 1971, 328). Such unity cannot be achieved by a mere ‘ideology’ but requires a coherent conception of the world.

This raises an important question. Given the centrality of ‘ideology’ to Marxism in the early 20th century, what motivated Gramsci to draw this distinction and criticise ideology? I contend that it was his desire to overcome the idea–matter distinction. Gramsci called for us to ‘go beyond the traditional conceptions of ‘‘idealism’’ and ‘‘materialism’’‘ (1996, 153), and he does so via ‘conceptions of the world’, which does not carry this idealist connotation. Gramsci intuitively recognised that however much one ‘concretises’ ideology (by speaking of its material qualities or social existence), it remains indubitably shaped by the metaphysics of the idea–matter distinction. Thus, in response to Mann’s (2009) argument that we ‘need a conception of ideology as historically co-constituted by both moments of hegemony Gramsci identified: the economic and the ethicopolitical’ (2009, 338) I would reply that this is precisely what Gramsci offers us with ‘conception of the world’.

"On Gramsci’s ‘conceptions of the world'" Joel Wainwright

[lasmaracuyas]

...if, as I will argue, imperialism is fundamental to the very production and organization of the world and our knowledges of it, then this point could conceivably apply to all spaces (minimally this concerns the whole of the First World, if by this we mean the historic centers of capitalist imperialism: Europe, the USA, and Japan). In this view, in order to analyze environmental politics in the colonial present, we need to account for the practices that constitute spaces as such. This is to ask: what is it that produces the `here' and the `there' as distinct spaces each somehow particular, distinctive, and singular? The conflicts over nature that political ecologists study always already concern the forms of spatiality and worldhood that infuse the very discourses and concepts (`nature', the `here', `home', etc) that are contested. I will argue that we should dwell on the ontological presuppositions of the act of specifying our objects of study. I am suggesting that political ecologists should reject a realist approach that assumes that regions and spaces exist in a Cartesian world and are simply there for us to examine. As soon as we define a space or region as our object (`North America'; `the West'), we stand to lose sight of its becoming. We can forget that the very objectivity of a space is a problem to be explained, and not a scale of analysis to be embraced.

Joel Wainwright