After dialectics: Radical social theory in a post-communist world

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 43, 2007, Pages 63-114

  Therborn, Göran ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33847709046     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (180)

1. This text grew from an initial invitation to contribute to a collection on different aspects of European social theory, focusing on the question of Post-Marxism and the Left', and was later expanded for NLR. Any survey of a field as broad as this will be liable to omissions and oversights, as well as to the political, personal and generational inclinations of its author. A shorter, more Eurocentric version of this article appeared in Gerard Delanty, ed., Handbook of European Social Theory, London 2006.
2. See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, London 1976.
3. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris 1993, p. 163.
4. See the unrivalled critical archaeology of Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, London 1998.
5. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, Paris 1979.
6. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman, Cambridge 2001, p. 71.
7. Jeffrey Alexander, 'Modern, Anti, Post, Neo', NLR 1/210, March-April 1995, p. 82.
8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991.
9. Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism was published in English in 1975; its German edition appeared in 1972 from Suhrkamp. According to the author's preface, the main elements of the theory of late capitalism were conceived in 1963-67.
10. See also Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, London and New York [1989] 2002;
11. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences, Princeton 1991.
12. Jameson himself scoffingly dismisses the doctrine's intellectual attractions: 'no one is going to persuade me that there is anything glamorous about the thought of a Milton Friedman, a Hayek or a Popper in the present day and age'; see Jameson, A Singular Modernity, London 2002, pp. 2-3.
13. Anderson, Origins of Postmodernity, p. 88.
14. Jameson, Singular Modernity, p. 1. But were asceticism, phallocentrism and authoritarianism really more characteristic of, and more universal in, modern than pre-modern cultures and societies?
15. See Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, Frankfurt 1979, pp. 314ff;
16. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt 1985, pp. 14-15.
17. Jameson, Singular Modernity, p. 215.
18. Nor should social modernism be equated with the postwar social theory of 'modernization', as Jeffrey Alexander proposed some years ago in these pages. Modernization was a particular socio-cultural theory of historical evolution, attacked by Wallerstein and others not from an 'anti-modern' position, but for its methodological nationalism and its rosy-idealist evolutionism, looking away from capitalism, exploitation, colonialism and 'the development of underdevelopment'. See Alexander, 'Modern, Anti, Post, Neo', NLR 1/210.
19. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, London 1983.
20. See Göran Therborn, 'Critical Theory and the Legacy of Twentieth-Century Marxism', in Bryan Turner, ed., The Blackwdl Companion to Social Theory, Oxford 1996.
21. See Göran Therborn, 'Entangled Modernities', European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, no. 3, 2003.
22. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation, London 2004, pp. 346ff.
23. See for example Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne;
24. Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, Cambridge 1989;
25. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization, Cambridge 1994;
26. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford 1996.
27. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, London 1992, p. 21, italics omitted.
28. Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernism, p. 166.
29. Jameson, Singular Modernity, p. 1.
30. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge 2000.
31. See Pierre Bourdieu, Réponses, Paris 1992, pp. 86, 136ff.
32. The yearbook Socialist Register has been a central focus in this field, publishing work by, among others, Aijaz Ahmad, Noam Chomsky, Sam Gindin, Peter Gowan, David Harvey, Colin Leys, Leo Panitch, John Saul, Bob Sutcliffe and Ellen Wood.
33. Régis Debray, Le feu sacré, Paris 2003, p. 7.
34. Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary, London and New York 2004, p. 6.
35. Régis Debray, Critique of Political Reason, London 1983, pp. 7ff.
36. Galateans 3:28, quoted in Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford 2003, p. 9.
37. Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek, Cambridge 2004, p. 161.
38. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA 2000, p. 413.
39. Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality, Cambridge, MA 2002, p. 24.
40. Habermas, Religion and Rationality, p. 160.
41. Habermas, Religion and Rationality, p. 162.
42. Haug, personal communication.
43. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 207.
44. George Yancy, ed., Cornel West: A Critical Reader, Oxford 2001, p. 347.
45. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, London 2006, p. xii.
46. Jameson, Archaeologies, p. 232.
47. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, eds, Associations and Democracy, London 1995;
48. John Roemer, ed., Equal Shares: Making market socialism work, London 1996;
49. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, eds, Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules of Accountability and Equity in Markets, States and Communities, London 1998;
50. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, eds, Deepening Democracy Institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance, London 2003;
51. Bruce Ackerman, Anne Alstott and Philippe Van Parijs, eds, Redesigning Distribution, London 2006;
52. Erik Olin Wright, 'Compass Points', NLR 41, Sept-Oct 2006.
53. John Roemer, 'A Future for Socialism', in Roemer, ed., Equal Shares, p. 37.
54. Barbara Bergmann, 'A Swedish-Style Welfare State or Basic Income? Which should have priority?', in Ackerman et al., Redesigning Distribution, p. 141.
55. See Fung and Wright, eds, Deepening Democracy.
56. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh 2000, pp. 193-4.
57. From the rich North American fascination with Utopias, one should also take note of the 2000 issue of the annual Socialist Register on 'Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias', and the captivating 20th-century history of East-West Utopias and their passing, Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld and Catastrophe, London 2000.
58. Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics, New York 1998, pp. 35, 1-2. A collective research project had already summarized the character of the times in the same terms:
59. see The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System 1945-2025, co-ordinated by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, Atlantic Heights, NJ 1996.
60. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, London 1994, pp. 355-6.
61. Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power, the US in a Chaotic World, London 2003, pp. 59, 228.
62. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, London [1913] 1963, p. 446.
63. See Arrighi's discussion of Robert Brenner and David Harvey in 'Tracking Global Turbulence', NLR 20, March-April 2003; 'Hegemony Unravelling-r', NLR 32, March-April 2005; 'Hegemony Unravelling - 2', NLR 33, May-June 2005.
64. For example see Wallerstein, 'Entering Global Anarchy', NLR 22, July-August 2003 and 'The Curve of American Power', NLR 40, July-August 2006.
65. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient, Berkeley 1998, p. 352.
66. See Laclau, 'Structure, History, and the Political', and Žižek, 'Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please', in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, eds, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, London 2000.
67. Etienne Balibar, La crainte des masses, Paris 1997, p. 242, emphasis in the original.
68. Although see for example Kees van der Piji on North Atlantic class relations, Transnational Classes and International Relations, London 1998;
69. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford 2001;
70. and Beverly Silver on the working class, Forces of Labor, Cambridge 2003.
71. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, nation, classe, Paris 1988.
72. Balibar, La crainte des masses, pp. 221-250;
73. Politics and the Other Scene, London 2002;
74. We, the People of Europe?, Princeton, NJ 2004.
75. Stacy Gillies, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, Third Wave Feminism, Basingstoke 2004.
76. Erik Olin Wright, ed., Approaches to Class Analysis, Cambridge 2005.
77. Claus Offe, Modernity and the State, Cambridge 1996.
78. Ulrich Beck, Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter, Frankfurt 2002, eh. 2.
79. John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society, London 1988.
80. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 volumes, Boston, MA 1984-87. In an interesting abstention from argument, Laclau and Mouffe dismiss Habermas's ideal of a non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument as a 'conceptual impossibility'. A tyranny of concepts?
81. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd edition, London 2000, p. xvii.
82. Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique, Paris 1990;
83. Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, New York and London 1994;
84. Badiou, 'Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou', appendix to Ethics, London 2001.
85. Balibar, La crainte des masses, ch. 1.
86. Žižek, ed., Revolution at the Gates, London 2002.
87. Laclau, 'Structure, History and the Political', in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 206; Žižek, 'Holding the Place', in the same publication, p. 321.
88. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, London 1999, p. 236;
89. Conversations with Žižek, pp. 50-1.
90. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 11, Cambridge 1993;
91. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1990, Oxford 1990.
92. Ann Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society, London 1972.
93. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, New York 1990, p. 7.
94. Kelly Oliver, French Feminism Reader, Oxford and New York 2000;
95. Dani Cavallaro, French Feminist Theory an introduction, London and New York 2003.
96. Ann Oakley, 'A Brief History of Gender", in Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell, eds, Who's Afraid of Feminism?, London 1997, pp. 29-55.
97. See Oakley and Mitchell, eds, Who's Afraid of Feminism?. For a global materialist account of sex, gender and reproductive relations over the past century,
98. see Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power. Family in the World, 1900-2000, London 2004.
99. Hildur Ve and Karin Waerness, oral communication.
100. Toril Moi, Sex, Gender and Body, Oxford 2005.
101. Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, ch. 7;
102. Politics and the Other Scene.
103. Harrison White, Identity and Control, Princeton 1992;
104. James Rule, Theory and Progress in Social Science, Cambridge 1997, ch. 5.
105. Mann, Sources of Social Power, 2 vols so far, Cambridge 1986-.
106. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 volumes, Maiden, MA and Oxford 1996-98.
107. For example, Elmar Altvater, Der Preis des Wohlstands oder Umweltplünderung und neue Welt (un)ordnung, Münster 1992.
108. Immanuel Wallerstein, 'The Rise and Future Demise of World-Systems Analysis', Review, vol. XXI, no. 1, 1998.
109. See T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds, The Brenner Debate, Cambridge 1985;
110. Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London 2006.
111. Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed, Oxford 2006.
112. Pierre Bourdieu, Les structures sociales de l'économie, Paris 2000.
113. Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death, London 2002;
114. Age Shock: How Finance is Failing Us, London 2006.
115. Michel Aglietta and Antoine Rebérioux, Corporate Governance Adrift, Cheltenham 2005;
116. Robert Boyer and Yves Saillard, eds, Théorie de la régulation, Paris 1995;
117. J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, eds, Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, Cambridge 1997.
118. Geoffrey Hodgson, After Marx and Sraffa, Basingstoke 1991;
119. Geoffrey Hodgson, Makoto Itoh and Nobuharu Yokokawa, Capitalism in Evolution, Cheltenham 2001.
120. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, New York 1991, et al;
121. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London 2006.
122. Keane, Democracy and Civil Society, p. 26.
123. John Keane, 'Introduction to the New Edition', Democracy and Civil Society, London 1998.
124. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge 1994, pp. 73ff.
125. Post-socialism has also had a generational dimension. In 1994, Ralph Miliband died; a prominent Marxist political scientist, author of The State in Capitalist Society (1969), Miliband's unrepentant Socialism for a Sceptical Age (1994) was published posthumously. In the same year his son, David, who was to become a senior Downing Street staffer and a member of Blairs Cabinet, edited a collective volume, Reinventing the Left, in which Giddens tabled a post-socialist agenda.
126. Giddens, The Third Way, Cambridge 1998;
127. The Third Way and Its Critics, Cambridge 2000.
128. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society;
129. and Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter, p. 407.
130. Walter Korpi, The Democratic Class Struggle, London 1983;
131. Korpi and Joakim Palme, "The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality', American Sociological Review, vol. 63, no. 5, 1998.
132. Alain Touraine, Beyond Neoliberalism, Oxford 2001.
133. pierre Bourdieu et al., La misère du monde, Paris 1993 [The Weight of the World, Stanford 1999];
134. Contre-feux, Paris 1998 [Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market, London 2003].
135. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, What Should the Left Propose?, London 2005, pp. 166, 24-31.
136. See the Verso series, Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestos, London 2006 and forthcoming.
137. Richard Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality, New York 2003;
138. The Culture of the New Capitalism, New Haven, CT 2006;
139. Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality, Berkeley 1998;
140. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, Cambridge 2001.
141. Michael Burawoy and Erik Olin Wright, 'Sociological Marxism', in Jonathan Turner, ed., Handbook of Sociological Theory, New York 2002, p. 484.
142. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, p. 151.
143. See also the discussion of Derrida's book in Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations, London 1999.
144. Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx, Manchester 1998, p. 2.
145. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. ix.
146. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, interviewed by Giovanna Borradori, Chicago and London 2003.
147. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action; Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne.
148. Offe, Modernity and the State.
149. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict, Cambridge, MA 1995.
150. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, London 2003, p. 127.
151. Göran Therborn, 'Understanding and Explaining Inequality', in Therborn, ed., Inequalities of the World, London 2006, pp. 186ff.
152. Régis Debray, Media Manifestos, London 1996;
153. Transmitting Culture, New York 2000.
154. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, London 1992;
155. Liquid Modernity.
156. See respectively: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, London 2002, p. 4;
157. Ticklish Subject; Revolution at the Gates.
158. Respectively: Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 413, italics omitted;
159. Multitude, Cambridge, MA 2004, pp. xi and 358.
160. Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA 2006, pp. 253ff, 326ff, 292-3.
161. Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žiž ek, p. 32.
162. Respectively: Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 43, 336;
163. Multitude, pp. 348-50, 358.
164. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 350.
165. Castells, Information Age, vol. 3, p. 346, italics omitted.
166. Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor, p. 177.
167. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 65.
168. Das Argument, a quarterly journal edited by the philosophical-feminist couple Wolfgang and Frigga Haug, remains an important platform for European Marxism, as does Prokla, an abbreviation for 'Problems of Class Struggle', directed by the veteran economist Elmar Altvater. There is not room to consider the whole field of left-wing journals, but mention should be made of Socialist Register, noted above, and Capital and Class. For a fuller account of this field (in which NLR has its place) see the preliminary version of this essay referenced in footnote 1. On the other hand, if Les Temps Modernes survived the death of Sartre and de Beauvoir, it is hardly a major left publication any more. More directly politically oriented journals have been more vulnerable: in Britain, the once lively Marxism Today folded with the ending of the Soviet Union. In Italy, La rivista del manifesto gave up in 2004. New journals have also been started, with powerful backing: Historical Materialism is put out by Brill, a university publisher in Leiden; the American-edited Rethinking Marxism is published by Routledge.
169. Ollman has continued his dialectical teaching into the new millennium, now provided with a choreography of dialectical investigation, Dance of the Dialectic, Urbana, IL 2003, p. 169.
170. Postone summarizing his own book, 'Critique and Historical Transformation'. Historical Materialism, vol. 12, no. 3, 2004, p. 59.
171. Bob Jessop and Charlie Malcolm-Brown, eds, Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought, 4 volumes, London and New York, 1990;
172. Second Series, Bob Jessop and Russell Wheatley, eds, London and New York, 1999.
173. As a small sample, see, for example, Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism', An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, Cambridge 2003;
174. The Resources of Critique, Cambridge 2006.
175. Alan Sica and Stephen Turner, eds, The Disobedient Generation, Chicago 2005.
176. Burawoy and Wright, 'Sociological Marxism', pp. 459-86.
177. Burawoy and Wright, 'Sociological Marxism', p. 473.
178. 'Sociological Marxism', p. 474.
179. 'Sociological Marxism', p. 46on.
180. In so far as they have survived, most of the European Communist Parties and their successors have shown little interest in intellectual Marxism. Most of the Eastern European ex-cps have situated themselves well to the right of Scandinavian Social Democracy. The innovative and self-critical East German PDS and its Rosa Luxemburg Foundation do retain some commitment to Marxism, and so do the two remaining 'orthodox' parties, the Greek and the Portuguese.