Open Marxism

Der durchschnittliche Universitätsprofessor schreibt in seinem Leben wohl um die drei bis vier Bücher und dazu viele Aufsätze, weil er es muss. Der durchschnittliche Peer-reviewed-Aufsatz wird indes nach Schätzungen von weniger als zehn Personen gelesen. Von den jährlich 1,5 Millionen dieser Aufsätze werden 82 Prozent aller geistes- und 32 Prozent aller sozialwissenschaftlichen nicht ein einziges Mal irgendwo zitiert.
Ein durchschnittlicher Universitätsprofessor ist der heute vor 85 Jahren in Esslingen geborene (West-)Berliner Philosophieprofessor Wolfgang Fritz Haug nie gewesen. Von 1967 bis heute hat er rund 30 Bücher geschrieben. Seit 1959 gibt er Das Argument – Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften heraus. 335 Hefte sind bis heute erschienen, in den meisten von ihnen hat Haug selbst oft bahnbrechende Aufsätze geschrieben. Seit 1994 gibt Haug das »Historisch-kritische Wörterbuch des Marxismus« (HKWM) heraus, ein gigantisches, beinahe megalomanisches Projekt, das, ohne große Ressourcen, dafür aber mit viel Idealismus und kollektiver Geistesmacht realisiert, weltweit seinesgleichen sucht, was auch der Grund ist, warum es ins Chinesische übersetzt wird.

by abraham Weizfeld PhD
Chairman of the Revolution Jewish Bundist Diaspora Movement
saalaha@fokus.name

2021-01-10

Introduction
When the meat cleaver was thrown at the Capital Police officer during the fascist insurrection of January 6th, 2021 the point of no return was launched. While this amateur act of counter-revolution was directed against the State for the cause of opposing the temerity of holding an election to replace the chosen King of Christendom, this became the point at which it is recognized that the balance of forces has been reversed. No longer were the European Christians of German extraction, together with the Anglo-American supremacists a majority; it was evident that it would never be again. Both because of immigration and the rise of minorities’ educational integration, the caste Order of the Civil Society in the United States of America is a permanent and revolutionary feature of the Society to come. The driving force of national identity has exposed and countered the force of fascist repression of Black Americans who have taken control of the public spaces of American streets together with the mobilization of such supporters from the revolutionary elements of the national minorities of the Indigenous First Nations, the Mexica and Jewish nationalities. With the recognition of this revolt of millions of younger generational activists of the Black Lives Matter, together with the Black Block and Antifa, the racist core of America came out to defend their chosen Messiah, King and Führer. The failure of this act of desperation illustrates the lack of support from amongst even the previous supporters of the Trumpist movement. This desperation has exposed populism as the failure to answer the crises that have spawned its movement. The pathetic and yet successful coup into the Capital Building was not a force in itself, but was rather facilitated by the refusal of the military Pentagon command which refused the positioning of the National Guard, when its stated intention was a matter of common knowledge. The infiltration of the military and Police forces by the fascist elements and organizations is the source of the problem.

Where then does that leave us in the Jewish Socialist Bund which has emerged from the ashes of history to present the programme necessary to provide an alternative to the racist Nation-State, in both the USA and in Palestine. We are able to form a United Front by way of the concept of National-Cultural Autonomy whereby no one national formation controls any other, other than itself. This Communalist Convergence is beyond the political doctrine of liberal electoral politics and beyond the Leninist Party mini-State formation that seeks to replace the dictatorship of one class by that of another, by means of the party paradigm. It is rather the State that is put into question and is thus undermined by the rejection of the Nation-State with the negation of the State itself by and on behalf of Civil Society.

The Modern Slavery Act was passed in 2015, ostensibly to tackle exploitation. Despite being promoted for its 'world-leading' qualities, the legislation's weaknesses have, even at this relatively early stage of its implementation, been well documented. This is unsurprising; legislators were aware they were passing a bill that could have had stronger enforcement mechanisms, opting instead for a weaker alternative. This article takes these shortcomings as its starting point to ask who, or what, benefits from the Modern Slavery Act, if not those it is purportedly aimed to help. The response is that the main beneficiaries of the Modern Slavery Act are capitalism, and the Conservative government that created the bill. The Modern Slavery Act operates through the modern slavery discourse that positions unfree forms of labour as aberrations that operate outside of capitalism, and once unfree labour practices have been framed in this way, the capitalist free market is identified not as a causal factor but as the solution. In addition, the Conservative government used the Modern Slavery Act domestically as a counterpoint to its hostile environment policy to soften their image for part of the electorate. When viewed as an artefact of capitalist thinking and state management, it becomes clear that the Modern Slavery Act makes a not insignificant contribution to the legitimacy of both capitalism and the government by conferring upon them a degree of legitimacy as the routes through which the unfree will be liberated.

The proliferation and differentiation processes in critical approaches on agrifood relations since the late 1980s can be seen as the rise of critical agrifood studies. When compared to the peasant studies of the era between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, critical agrifood studies signifies a radical theoretical reorientation in the field that especially becomes apparent in the post-developmentalist turn manifested in the contemporary agrarian/peasant question formulations. On this ground, by focusing on the last three decades, this study argues that the contemporary literature on the agrarian/peasant question is characterized by a divide between political-economic and post-developmentalist understandings, which can also be seen as an impasse. This study, through a critical analysis of the implications of the neoliberal restructuring of agrifood relations for the agrarian/peasant question in social theoretical terms, claims that reformulating food regime as capitalist food regime on the basis of Marxism understood as a critical theory of society, and the agrarian/peasant question as the agrifood question of capitalism can provide a way out of this impasse by bringing the strengths of both political economic and post-developmentalist frameworks together.

... In the words of Müller-Armack, an ordo-liberal proponent of some considerable repute who coined the phrase ... as a forum for determining the “rules of the game” and as an umpire to ... entered into, the definition of the meaning of property rights, the interpretation and enforcement ...

There is an antagonistic dynamic within the human in contemporary society: the struggle of labour and capital, the capital relation, is within us. This is the psychology of capital, which also entails that the class struggle – as the capital relation – also runs through us and fractures and divides our personhoods. It is argued that this monstrous psychology must be dissolved within capital: there is no outside or beyond to appeal to. We must side against ourselves as currently constituted. This can be achieved through forming and strengthening alternatives within and alien to capital, in collective and communising practices, and intellectual attacks. The argument has significant consequences for class and freedom in the project of leaving capital behind.

Keywords: capital, psychology, class, freedom,
dissolution, alternatives, communisation

We write against a closing of the world. Walls are going up around us. The wall on the USA border with Mexico, the walls that UK Brexiteers would build, the walls being constructed by left and right nationalisms all over the world: walls of exclusion, of borders, often walls of hatred, walls of pain. Intellectually and academically too, walls are going up around us. In the universities (where the four of us work), the walls of academic correctness are growing bigger: the pressures of competition, insecurity and the precarity of academic work, combined with quality assurance committees, lists of indexed journals, and quantitative criteria of assessment, make it harder, especially for students and young academics, to write what they want to write. To say what they want to say. The disciplines of the social sciences are becoming just that: disciplines. While resistance struggles continue and expand outside academic walls, critical thought is being squeezed out of the universities, reframed in innocuous forms or simply sidelined. Gradually, often without us noticing it, critical terms become taboo. They become ‘durty words’ (Brunetta and O’Shea 2018). Increasingly, these durty words begin to be whispered, until they fall out of use altogether. ‘Revolution’ is the most obvious one, but also ‘class struggle’, and ‘capital’ too. The more atrocious the barbarity of patriarchal and colonial capitalism becomes, the less we can name it.
Radical thought has not come to an end though. Not at all. The critique of capital exists. But it survives mainly in the shadow of the criticism of the forms of expression of capital: authoritarianism, neoliberalism, the financialisation of the economy, policy failure, the crisis of representative democracy, etc. We write against the closure of the world, then, because we see a danger in some of the present struggles today: that we only demand regulation, job creation, distributive justice, transparent democracy, etc. In our view, these criticisms and demands are  necessary and important but they are incomplete without a critique of capital

วารสารกลุ่มมาร์กซิสต์ศึกษาแห่งมหาวิทยาลัยธรรมศาสตร์ ประกอบไปด้วย
- แนวทางการศึกษามาร์กซิสต์เบื้องต้น โดย รชต เอี่ยมตระบุตร
- คำแถลงจัดตั้งกลุ่มมาร์กซิสต์ศึกษาแห่งมหาวิทยาลัยธรรมศาสตร์
- การจัดกลุ่มศึกษา ของ กลุ่มมาร์กซิสต์ศึกษา
- บทความพิเศษ

The Supreme Entity is the real owner of Its creation, not any created individual or individuals within the creation. The entire animate world is a vast joint family. All members of this joint family have equal rights to enjoy the creation and to all-around progress. This is the message of P. R. Sarkar, the founder of a global movement of spiritually-oriented and socially-minded intellectuals, artists and writers called Renaissance Universal. P. R. Sarkar (1922-1990) was a spiritual teacher (also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) and guru in the tradition of Shiva and Krishna and was the founder of the international socio-spiritual movement Ananda Marga (“The Path of Bliss”) -- Richard Gauthier, Department of Chemistry and Physics, Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa, California, USA, November 8, 2020.