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Reading Marx
Marx's critique of political economy is vital for understanding the crisis of contemporary capitalism. Yet the nature of its relevance and some of its key tenets remain poorly understood. This bold intervention brings together the work of leading Marx scholars Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza, to offer a fresh, radical reinterpretation of Marxism that explains the failures of neoliberalism and lays the foundations for a new emancipatory politics. Avoiding trite comparisons between Marx's worldview and our current political scene, the authors show that the current relevance and value of Marx's thought can better be explained by placing his key ideas in dialogue with those that have attempted to replace them. Reading Marx through Hegel and Lacan, particle physics, and modern political trends, the authors provide new ways to explain the crisis in contemporary capitalism and resist fundamentalism in all its forms. Reading Marx will find a wide audience amongst activists and scholars.
151 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 29, 2018
15 people are currently reading
280 people want to read
About the author
Slavoj Žižek
631 books7,481 followersSlavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 5, 2024
Yazarlar, Platon'un mağarasını ve gölgelerini birilerinin değil bireylerin, çalışanların kendilerinin oluşturduğunu düşünmeyi ve Marx'ı Hegel üzerinden yeniden okumayı, Hegel'e yönelmeyi öneriyorlar.
***
"Gelecek devrimin örtük bir öznesinin olduğu, bu öznenin yalnizca doğru saptanması ve seferber edilmesi gerektiği varsayımı klasik Marksizmin en ciddi sınırlılıklarından biri gibi görünüyor; hele ki kapitalizmin dinamiklerinin, sistemden dışlananların artık sömürüye bile maruz bırakılmayıp sistemin dışında tutulduğu, dört yanı saran yeni duvarlarla içeri girmelerinin engellendiği bir toplumsal örgütlenme olarak tezahür ettiği bir zamanda.
"Eskinin meşhur yapısal karşıtlığı olan "ya sosyalizm ya barbarlık", "ya (kapitalist) barbarlık ya (sosyalist) barbarlık" arasında gidip geldikten sonra bugün askıya alınmış ve bizi totolojik bir seçimle, "ya (kapitalist) barbarlık ya (barbar) kapitalizm" ile başbaşa bırakmış görünüyor - alternatif yok.
Bundan dolayı bugün Marx okumanın (Hegel üzerinden) bilhassa felsefi bir anlam/önem taşıdığını kabul ediyoruz."
"Kapitalizmin ürettiği o "mezar kazıcıları" bu anlamda tüm alternatiflerin, potansiyel özgürlüğün son zerrelerinin mezarını kazanlardır; bu yüzden hiçbir özgürlükçü proje, çıkış yoluna işaret edecek diye kapitalizmin içkin mantığına bel bağlamamalı
ya da beraberinde sürüklenip gitmeyiz umuduyla kapitalizmin çöküşünü beklememelidir."
***
"Gelecek devrimin örtük bir öznesinin olduğu, bu öznenin yalnizca doğru saptanması ve seferber edilmesi gerektiği varsayımı klasik Marksizmin en ciddi sınırlılıklarından biri gibi görünüyor; hele ki kapitalizmin dinamiklerinin, sistemden dışlananların artık sömürüye bile maruz bırakılmayıp sistemin dışında tutulduğu, dört yanı saran yeni duvarlarla içeri girmelerinin engellendiği bir toplumsal örgütlenme olarak tezahür ettiği bir zamanda.
"Eskinin meşhur yapısal karşıtlığı olan "ya sosyalizm ya barbarlık", "ya (kapitalist) barbarlık ya (sosyalist) barbarlık" arasında gidip geldikten sonra bugün askıya alınmış ve bizi totolojik bir seçimle, "ya (kapitalist) barbarlık ya (barbar) kapitalizm" ile başbaşa bırakmış görünüyor - alternatif yok.
Bundan dolayı bugün Marx okumanın (Hegel üzerinden) bilhassa felsefi bir anlam/önem taşıdığını kabul ediyoruz."
"Kapitalizmin ürettiği o "mezar kazıcıları" bu anlamda tüm alternatiflerin, potansiyel özgürlüğün son zerrelerinin mezarını kazanlardır; bu yüzden hiçbir özgürlükçü proje, çıkış yoluna işaret edecek diye kapitalizmin içkin mantığına bel bağlamamalı
ya da beraberinde sürüklenip gitmeyiz umuduyla kapitalizmin çöküşünü beklememelidir."
June 28, 2021
Marx sonrasında değişen dünyanın bilgisine sahip günümüzden geriye baktığımızda yeni bir özgürlük okumasına girişmek, özgürleşmenin hedef ve yöntemleri üzerine düşünürken Platon, Descartes ve Hegel gibi öncü filozofların katkısıyla Marx'ı yeniden değerlendirmenin gerekliliği üzerinden bir giriş...
October 10, 2019
“This book is written by three philosophers. Its aim is to find different (and yet unexplored) ways to read Marx. This collective project dedicated to Marx’s work (Capital being one of its primary sources, though by no means the only one) is situated within the specific philosophical and political conjuncture in which we find ourselves.”
“From a Marxist perspective on the history of Marxism, we can therefore immediately learn that such impossibilities (for example, of emancipation) are not strictly ontological, but are always historically determined and thus specific. The impossibility of conceiving of an overall transformation of a given political system is not simply conceptual, but is also determined by a concrete historical situation; it hinges on a specific articulation of particular points of impossibility.”
“But, as many others – non-Marxists – have later claimed, from the history of Marxism one can also, and should, ultimately learn that converting what previously appeared to be impossible into a new possibility comes at the high price not only of tolerating violence and creating suffering for millions, including unspeakable injustices, but also of producing new structural impossibilities – or, simply displacing previous ones.”
“So, where do we stand today? What is our position in terms of this history?
First, the year 2017 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s first volume of Capital. This historical fact in itself raises a series of questions (about the philosophical, ideological, epistemological, political, and potential validity and relevance, etc., of Marx’s thought), which are determining for as well as determined by the coordinates of our present situation and the history from which it originated.”
“Rather, what you can expect is an attempt to read and thus think with Marx as a contemporary.”
“Second, our common belief is that even in the present philosophical and political conjuncture, there is a conceptual need that is yet to be determined. A need for Marx – to paraphrase the early Hegel’s famous formula of a “need for philosophy” – a need to compel us to return to Marx’s oeuvre.”
“The present historical situation is generally perceived as one in which we can observe an increasing closure of possibilities and of practical initiatives for emancipation; one can see everywhere a blatant regression to previous forms of domination and use of political power that for long seemed to have been invalidated by history but today returns with a vengeance. Think of the rise of new authoritarian modes of politics, including both “populist” nationalist movements and parties, and even more authoritarian forms of exploitation and value production – the infamous capitalism with Asian values (which after all has nothing to do with Asia as such), which seems to undo what Fukuyama assumed to be the end of history, namely the linkage of democracy and capitalism – including what may have appeared historically abandoned forms of exploitation such as slavery, etc.”
“On one side, he has been declared dead several times; sometimes he seemed buried under the charge of being one of the – if not the – ultimate culprit(s) for all the victims that the history of Marxism brought about. On the other side, as was already diagnosed by Lenin in 1917, “all the social chauvinists” – Lenin’s name for reactionaries who present themselves as emancipators – “are now Marxists (don’t laugh!).”1 “Marx” became the target of operations that suspend the radicality of what was once linked to it.”
“Without its revolutionary edge, Marx becomes canonized, a sacred name – and the sacred was always in opposition to the profane, that which is exempted from practical usage. “Marx” became “Saint Marx” (to use one of the polemical nominations that Marx and Engels themselves employed in their Holy Family). This canonizing transformation of “Marx” into “Saint Marx” detaches his name from any relation to the present situation.”
“The transformation of “Marx” into “Saint Marx” consequentially manifested itself in the form of a harmless idolatry that, for Lenin, enabled the gathering of political groups around his name that have no real connection whatsoever to the idea of emancipation or revolution.”
“For example, some “replaced the class struggle with dreams of class harmony” and thereby “even [grew] out of the habit of thinking about proletarian revolution.” Anyone was able to be a Marxist, on the basis of forgetting, obscuring, and distorting what it meant to be a Marxist. Lenin provides a detailed list of the specific operations involved in doctoring Marx(ism): for example, repression, distortion, omittance, “amelioration,” denial, the cover-up, simplification, betrayal, vulgarization, evasion, disregard, malapropism.”
“Such an idol, distorted and misrepresented, therefore enters the field of history without its revolutionary (conceptual) hammer. For Lenin, such a historical situation raises the question of how to remain faithful to Marx at a time when Marxism is being misrepresented – which is why State and Revolution seeks to undertake the project of re-establishing the truth of Marxism, returning to its fundamental principles (which for Lenin is condensed not in class struggle, as one might assume, but in the dictatorship of the proletariat).”
“Lenin attacked such a position violently – even though it explicitly recognizes the existence of classes and class struggle – by stating: “A Marxist is one who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (The State and Revolution, p. 70).”
“Today, we might modify this claim: think of the recent victory of Trump in the US. Could this not be seen as a reactionary representation of bourgeois domination, finally claiming: “Look, there are no objective facts, but there is only a reality mediated by class struggle. And this time, we won!” If those who are – traditionally – supposed to deny the existence of class struggle openly declare that there is class struggle (and one should be aware: there is class struggle!), they can no longer be criticized for stating that their position implies a class bias (and this even pertains to the criticisms of the idea of “fake news”: could it not be said that this is a peculiar assimilation of the fact that there are no neutral facts in the realm of politics?”
“This is obviously not meant as approval of Trump but as an indication that his “politics” assimilates something that previously had a possible emancipatory potential – and maybe it is thereby no surprise that Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist, having turned “Lenin” into “Saint Lenin” before).”
“The truth of Marx’s name can only be restored if it becomes effective as a truth of this specific concrete and singularly historical situation, and not simply as a transhistorical dogmatic canonical corpus – or the latter only as being part of the former. This means not judging the validity of Marx from the perspective of the historical situation, but
demonstrating the validity of a Marxist perspective for a singular historical situation. The principle is thus not what Marx is as seen through the eyes of the situation, but what the situation is as seen through the eyes of Marx.”
“One might also compare the present state of affairs with the situation in the 1960s, when Marxism was still an integral and constitutive element of philosophical, political, and cultural debate, an element whose relevance and scope were also supposed to be constantly reassigned within, and through, the historical practice and debates that reflected on and directed it. This is no longer the case.”
“As the famous saying goes: it is easier to imagine a comet hitting the earth than it is to envisage even the tiniest transformation in the workings of the capitalist system.”
“Contrary to the optimism of the Marxists of the twentieth century (especially in the 1960s), we argue that the steam of developments will not result in a rise of the working class or the destruction of the system of domination constitutive of the present world, unavoidably culminating in socialism (as everyone today knows).”
“The assumption that there is a latent subject of the future revolution that just has to be located and mobilized properly seems to have been one of the greatest limitations of classical Marxism, especially at a time when the dynamics of capitalism are manifested in a form of social organization in which those who are excluded are no longer even exploited by the system; instead, they are kept outside of it, hindered from entering by new walls built practically everywhere: the slum dwellers, the refugees, and all those referred to by Hegel as the poor rabble.”
“Are there still resources to be extracted from Marx, not only against previous forms of Marxism, but to depict an emancipatory orientation that can show itself to be in line with the present historical conjuncture? How does one read Marx to answer this question?”
“Slavoj Žižek opens his chapter in this book with a claim that is the paradigmatic premise of our reading of Marx: what we need in our contemporary situation is not necessarily a direct reading of his work, but an imagined, inventive, and experimental reading. That is to say, we need to read Marx in such a way that we can imagine how he would have answered those of his critics who have declared him dead or tamed him by over-embracing a doctored Marxist position, and who are seeking to replace him by or even make him compatible with theories of a profoundly different political and ontological orientation.”
“Ruda examines what becomes of Marx’s depiction of the very constitution of a paradigm of capitalist subjectivity (the worker) if it is read against the background of one of the oldest myths of emancipation (from all myths), namely Plato’s cave allegory.”
“Hamza takes the cue from Hegel’s theory of labor, for whom work is an activity that imprints negativity in the work itself. In doing so, he aims to model a Marxist theory of labor that exceeds the distinction of abstract and concrete labor and investigates what this means for an understanding of Marxism.”
“These three chapters can be located against a certain historical and political background of a series of different readings of Capital. Hamza has argued elsewhere that there are Marxists who read Capital especially in the light of the famous line from the Manifesto: “capitalism produces its own gravediggers” – for them, a crisis in capitalism is a crisis of capitalism, so that it produces the tools for overcoming itself. For others, Capital is read in light of another statement from the Manifesto, the one about the permanent social revolution brought about by the bourgeoisie – for them, a crisis is a moment of the perpetual internal revolution of capitalism, part of its self-reproduction.”
“Which option is more convincing? Perhaps neither. The much more frightening realization we have come to grasp is that capitalism does in fact reproduce its own logic indefinitely and it does reach an immanent limit. But this limit is not socialism or communism; it is (a regression to) barbarism: the utter destruction of natural and social substance in a “downward spiral” that does not recognize any “reality testing” in this destruction. In this sense, the “gravediggers” that capitalism produces are gravediggers of all alternatives, of the last grains of potential freedom, etc. – which is why no emancipatory project should count on the immanent logic of capitalism to point a way out or wait for its collapse in the hope that we will not be dragged along with it.”
“As stated, we will read Marx as philosophers. This cannot but remind us of Louis Althusser’s proposition from Reading Capital. He and his collaborators “read Capital as philosophers,” a reading fundamentally different from those carried out by economists, historians, and philologists before. And we should add: we do not read Capital (merely) as a political book.”
“Althusser and his students carried out a symptomatic reading of Marx’s Capital. He declared: “There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of.” By reading Capital to the letter and applying the methodology of symptomatic reading, according to Althusser, we can reach and understand the repressed essence of the text – there are always two texts in one text – that which is latent and can become apparent through such a reading. Thus, we can problematize and reconstruct the, as it were, unconscious of the text itself. Althusser goes as far as to see the existence of Marxist philosophy as being conditioned by this form of reading, because through it the concepts and its philosophy can be rendered explicit and “establish the indispensable minimum for the consistent existence” of it; starting from divulging the symptom of a given relation or of a given text.”
“Althusser and his group of collaborators set out a project of creating the philosophical foundations of reading Marx’s Capital.”
“Departing from Spinoza, the reading of Marx’s Capital was performed on epistemological grounds. Roughly put, Althusser was concerned with the question “of its relation to its object, hence both the question of the specificity of its object, and the question of the specificity of its relation to that object.” Philosophy operates in the field of knowledge and ensures its (re)production. It exists in the field of knowledge alone, preoccupied with and thinking the effects of knowledge on its own terrain.”
“In the work of Althusser, Marx’s Capital occupies a very peculiar position. It differs from the “classic economists” not only at the level of object and method; it also presents an “epistemological mutation,” thus inaugurating a new object, method, and theory. It is because of this that Althusser takes the very daring step of asking the following question (in the form of a thesis): “Does Capital represent the founding moment of a new discipline, the founding moment of a science – and hence a real event, a theoretical revolution, simultaneously rejecting the classical political economy and the Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideologies of its prehistory – the absolute beginning of the history of a science?”
“In Althusser’s understanding of science – concerning which the authors of this book have some conceptual reservations – Marx’s discovery is about the opening of a new scientific continent, that of the science of history, which, seen from within the history of sciences, is comparable to two other such discoveries: the unveiling of the continent of mathematics (by the Greeks), and the discovery of the continent of physics (by Galileo).”
“The opening up of the new continent of science presupposes a “change of a terrain,” or, to formulate it in more familiar terms, it presupposes an epistemological break. Every great scientific discovery – and for Althusser the discovery of the science of history is “the most important theoretical event of contemporary history” – involves a great transformation of philosophy.”
“The new practice of philosophy, which was inaugurated with the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, marks the end of classical philosophy. However, Marxist philosophy – that is, dialectical materialism – always comes too late, it is always behind the history of science, that is, historical materialism.”
“Althusser also maintains that apart from lagging behind the sciences, philosophy always comes after politics. But, because Capital is, in the last instance according to Althusser, the foundation or “the absolute beginning” of the history of sciences, it is a work of its own history, thus marking a break with the knowledge of modern economics, of political economy. Conceptualizing it as such, by means of a symptomatic reading, Althusser and his collaborators read Capital from an epistemological position and attempted to draw on mostly epistemological implications of a philosophical reading, in which they placed Capital.”
“Unlike Althusser’s collective endeavor, this book is neither a follow-up and product of a seminar on Marx, Capital, and the critique of political economy (it did not originate from any common engagement in a university), nor is it the product of a secretive philosophical cell (that might be comparable to Althusser’s “Spinoza circle”). We also do not want to propagate the discovery of a new scientific terrain that Marx’s mind and feet touched first.”
“Our approach to Marx and to the critique of political economy is much more partial or engaged. We experimentally attempt to raise the question not of what can be practically done with Marx today, but of what can and what needs to be philosophically (re-) thought – and to examine what are productive (and what are unproductive) tools for doing so. This will not lead us to offer a comprehensive philosophical outline for reading Marx in the twenty-first century; rather, each of the chapters you are about to read is a partial, particular, or concrete reading attempting to bring out an unexpected (or repressed or obscured) universal dimension in what might even seem marginal and appear to originate from just a (sometimes even only distant) sideways glance at Marx.”
“Rather, in each of our respective readings we engage in an attempt to produce something unexpected (in and/ or from Marx), and readers will judge for themselves whether this experiment works and where precisely it may, will, or has failed. Thus, this book might be read as a contribution to an unexpected reunion of Marx(ism).”
“This book is an attempt to create an unexpected reunion with Marx, not to bury him and us once and for all, but to reflect on possible ways of how to reunite emancipatory thinking (again) with his name: since maybe we have only a few things left to do, and we shall join him soon, and “soon the day will dawn” – philosophy’s hour has always been the moment when day turns to dusk. So, let us begin doing what needs to be done: reading Marx.”
“From a Marxist perspective on the history of Marxism, we can therefore immediately learn that such impossibilities (for example, of emancipation) are not strictly ontological, but are always historically determined and thus specific. The impossibility of conceiving of an overall transformation of a given political system is not simply conceptual, but is also determined by a concrete historical situation; it hinges on a specific articulation of particular points of impossibility.”
“But, as many others – non-Marxists – have later claimed, from the history of Marxism one can also, and should, ultimately learn that converting what previously appeared to be impossible into a new possibility comes at the high price not only of tolerating violence and creating suffering for millions, including unspeakable injustices, but also of producing new structural impossibilities – or, simply displacing previous ones.”
“So, where do we stand today? What is our position in terms of this history?
First, the year 2017 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s first volume of Capital. This historical fact in itself raises a series of questions (about the philosophical, ideological, epistemological, political, and potential validity and relevance, etc., of Marx’s thought), which are determining for as well as determined by the coordinates of our present situation and the history from which it originated.”
“Rather, what you can expect is an attempt to read and thus think with Marx as a contemporary.”
“Second, our common belief is that even in the present philosophical and political conjuncture, there is a conceptual need that is yet to be determined. A need for Marx – to paraphrase the early Hegel’s famous formula of a “need for philosophy” – a need to compel us to return to Marx’s oeuvre.”
“The present historical situation is generally perceived as one in which we can observe an increasing closure of possibilities and of practical initiatives for emancipation; one can see everywhere a blatant regression to previous forms of domination and use of political power that for long seemed to have been invalidated by history but today returns with a vengeance. Think of the rise of new authoritarian modes of politics, including both “populist” nationalist movements and parties, and even more authoritarian forms of exploitation and value production – the infamous capitalism with Asian values (which after all has nothing to do with Asia as such), which seems to undo what Fukuyama assumed to be the end of history, namely the linkage of democracy and capitalism – including what may have appeared historically abandoned forms of exploitation such as slavery, etc.”
“On one side, he has been declared dead several times; sometimes he seemed buried under the charge of being one of the – if not the – ultimate culprit(s) for all the victims that the history of Marxism brought about. On the other side, as was already diagnosed by Lenin in 1917, “all the social chauvinists” – Lenin’s name for reactionaries who present themselves as emancipators – “are now Marxists (don’t laugh!).”1 “Marx” became the target of operations that suspend the radicality of what was once linked to it.”
“Without its revolutionary edge, Marx becomes canonized, a sacred name – and the sacred was always in opposition to the profane, that which is exempted from practical usage. “Marx” became “Saint Marx” (to use one of the polemical nominations that Marx and Engels themselves employed in their Holy Family). This canonizing transformation of “Marx” into “Saint Marx” detaches his name from any relation to the present situation.”
“The transformation of “Marx” into “Saint Marx” consequentially manifested itself in the form of a harmless idolatry that, for Lenin, enabled the gathering of political groups around his name that have no real connection whatsoever to the idea of emancipation or revolution.”
“For example, some “replaced the class struggle with dreams of class harmony” and thereby “even [grew] out of the habit of thinking about proletarian revolution.” Anyone was able to be a Marxist, on the basis of forgetting, obscuring, and distorting what it meant to be a Marxist. Lenin provides a detailed list of the specific operations involved in doctoring Marx(ism): for example, repression, distortion, omittance, “amelioration,” denial, the cover-up, simplification, betrayal, vulgarization, evasion, disregard, malapropism.”
“Such an idol, distorted and misrepresented, therefore enters the field of history without its revolutionary (conceptual) hammer. For Lenin, such a historical situation raises the question of how to remain faithful to Marx at a time when Marxism is being misrepresented – which is why State and Revolution seeks to undertake the project of re-establishing the truth of Marxism, returning to its fundamental principles (which for Lenin is condensed not in class struggle, as one might assume, but in the dictatorship of the proletariat).”
“Lenin attacked such a position violently – even though it explicitly recognizes the existence of classes and class struggle – by stating: “A Marxist is one who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (The State and Revolution, p. 70).”
“Today, we might modify this claim: think of the recent victory of Trump in the US. Could this not be seen as a reactionary representation of bourgeois domination, finally claiming: “Look, there are no objective facts, but there is only a reality mediated by class struggle. And this time, we won!” If those who are – traditionally – supposed to deny the existence of class struggle openly declare that there is class struggle (and one should be aware: there is class struggle!), they can no longer be criticized for stating that their position implies a class bias (and this even pertains to the criticisms of the idea of “fake news”: could it not be said that this is a peculiar assimilation of the fact that there are no neutral facts in the realm of politics?”
“This is obviously not meant as approval of Trump but as an indication that his “politics” assimilates something that previously had a possible emancipatory potential – and maybe it is thereby no surprise that Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist, having turned “Lenin” into “Saint Lenin” before).”
“The truth of Marx’s name can only be restored if it becomes effective as a truth of this specific concrete and singularly historical situation, and not simply as a transhistorical dogmatic canonical corpus – or the latter only as being part of the former. This means not judging the validity of Marx from the perspective of the historical situation, but
demonstrating the validity of a Marxist perspective for a singular historical situation. The principle is thus not what Marx is as seen through the eyes of the situation, but what the situation is as seen through the eyes of Marx.”
“One might also compare the present state of affairs with the situation in the 1960s, when Marxism was still an integral and constitutive element of philosophical, political, and cultural debate, an element whose relevance and scope were also supposed to be constantly reassigned within, and through, the historical practice and debates that reflected on and directed it. This is no longer the case.”
“As the famous saying goes: it is easier to imagine a comet hitting the earth than it is to envisage even the tiniest transformation in the workings of the capitalist system.”
“Contrary to the optimism of the Marxists of the twentieth century (especially in the 1960s), we argue that the steam of developments will not result in a rise of the working class or the destruction of the system of domination constitutive of the present world, unavoidably culminating in socialism (as everyone today knows).”
“The assumption that there is a latent subject of the future revolution that just has to be located and mobilized properly seems to have been one of the greatest limitations of classical Marxism, especially at a time when the dynamics of capitalism are manifested in a form of social organization in which those who are excluded are no longer even exploited by the system; instead, they are kept outside of it, hindered from entering by new walls built practically everywhere: the slum dwellers, the refugees, and all those referred to by Hegel as the poor rabble.”
“Are there still resources to be extracted from Marx, not only against previous forms of Marxism, but to depict an emancipatory orientation that can show itself to be in line with the present historical conjuncture? How does one read Marx to answer this question?”
“Slavoj Žižek opens his chapter in this book with a claim that is the paradigmatic premise of our reading of Marx: what we need in our contemporary situation is not necessarily a direct reading of his work, but an imagined, inventive, and experimental reading. That is to say, we need to read Marx in such a way that we can imagine how he would have answered those of his critics who have declared him dead or tamed him by over-embracing a doctored Marxist position, and who are seeking to replace him by or even make him compatible with theories of a profoundly different political and ontological orientation.”
“Ruda examines what becomes of Marx’s depiction of the very constitution of a paradigm of capitalist subjectivity (the worker) if it is read against the background of one of the oldest myths of emancipation (from all myths), namely Plato’s cave allegory.”
“Hamza takes the cue from Hegel’s theory of labor, for whom work is an activity that imprints negativity in the work itself. In doing so, he aims to model a Marxist theory of labor that exceeds the distinction of abstract and concrete labor and investigates what this means for an understanding of Marxism.”
“These three chapters can be located against a certain historical and political background of a series of different readings of Capital. Hamza has argued elsewhere that there are Marxists who read Capital especially in the light of the famous line from the Manifesto: “capitalism produces its own gravediggers” – for them, a crisis in capitalism is a crisis of capitalism, so that it produces the tools for overcoming itself. For others, Capital is read in light of another statement from the Manifesto, the one about the permanent social revolution brought about by the bourgeoisie – for them, a crisis is a moment of the perpetual internal revolution of capitalism, part of its self-reproduction.”
“Which option is more convincing? Perhaps neither. The much more frightening realization we have come to grasp is that capitalism does in fact reproduce its own logic indefinitely and it does reach an immanent limit. But this limit is not socialism or communism; it is (a regression to) barbarism: the utter destruction of natural and social substance in a “downward spiral” that does not recognize any “reality testing” in this destruction. In this sense, the “gravediggers” that capitalism produces are gravediggers of all alternatives, of the last grains of potential freedom, etc. – which is why no emancipatory project should count on the immanent logic of capitalism to point a way out or wait for its collapse in the hope that we will not be dragged along with it.”
“As stated, we will read Marx as philosophers. This cannot but remind us of Louis Althusser’s proposition from Reading Capital. He and his collaborators “read Capital as philosophers,” a reading fundamentally different from those carried out by economists, historians, and philologists before. And we should add: we do not read Capital (merely) as a political book.”
“Althusser and his students carried out a symptomatic reading of Marx’s Capital. He declared: “There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of.” By reading Capital to the letter and applying the methodology of symptomatic reading, according to Althusser, we can reach and understand the repressed essence of the text – there are always two texts in one text – that which is latent and can become apparent through such a reading. Thus, we can problematize and reconstruct the, as it were, unconscious of the text itself. Althusser goes as far as to see the existence of Marxist philosophy as being conditioned by this form of reading, because through it the concepts and its philosophy can be rendered explicit and “establish the indispensable minimum for the consistent existence” of it; starting from divulging the symptom of a given relation or of a given text.”
“Althusser and his group of collaborators set out a project of creating the philosophical foundations of reading Marx’s Capital.”
“Departing from Spinoza, the reading of Marx’s Capital was performed on epistemological grounds. Roughly put, Althusser was concerned with the question “of its relation to its object, hence both the question of the specificity of its object, and the question of the specificity of its relation to that object.” Philosophy operates in the field of knowledge and ensures its (re)production. It exists in the field of knowledge alone, preoccupied with and thinking the effects of knowledge on its own terrain.”
“In the work of Althusser, Marx’s Capital occupies a very peculiar position. It differs from the “classic economists” not only at the level of object and method; it also presents an “epistemological mutation,” thus inaugurating a new object, method, and theory. It is because of this that Althusser takes the very daring step of asking the following question (in the form of a thesis): “Does Capital represent the founding moment of a new discipline, the founding moment of a science – and hence a real event, a theoretical revolution, simultaneously rejecting the classical political economy and the Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideologies of its prehistory – the absolute beginning of the history of a science?”
“In Althusser’s understanding of science – concerning which the authors of this book have some conceptual reservations – Marx’s discovery is about the opening of a new scientific continent, that of the science of history, which, seen from within the history of sciences, is comparable to two other such discoveries: the unveiling of the continent of mathematics (by the Greeks), and the discovery of the continent of physics (by Galileo).”
“The opening up of the new continent of science presupposes a “change of a terrain,” or, to formulate it in more familiar terms, it presupposes an epistemological break. Every great scientific discovery – and for Althusser the discovery of the science of history is “the most important theoretical event of contemporary history” – involves a great transformation of philosophy.”
“The new practice of philosophy, which was inaugurated with the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, marks the end of classical philosophy. However, Marxist philosophy – that is, dialectical materialism – always comes too late, it is always behind the history of science, that is, historical materialism.”
“Althusser also maintains that apart from lagging behind the sciences, philosophy always comes after politics. But, because Capital is, in the last instance according to Althusser, the foundation or “the absolute beginning” of the history of sciences, it is a work of its own history, thus marking a break with the knowledge of modern economics, of political economy. Conceptualizing it as such, by means of a symptomatic reading, Althusser and his collaborators read Capital from an epistemological position and attempted to draw on mostly epistemological implications of a philosophical reading, in which they placed Capital.”
“Unlike Althusser’s collective endeavor, this book is neither a follow-up and product of a seminar on Marx, Capital, and the critique of political economy (it did not originate from any common engagement in a university), nor is it the product of a secretive philosophical cell (that might be comparable to Althusser’s “Spinoza circle”). We also do not want to propagate the discovery of a new scientific terrain that Marx’s mind and feet touched first.”
“Our approach to Marx and to the critique of political economy is much more partial or engaged. We experimentally attempt to raise the question not of what can be practically done with Marx today, but of what can and what needs to be philosophically (re-) thought – and to examine what are productive (and what are unproductive) tools for doing so. This will not lead us to offer a comprehensive philosophical outline for reading Marx in the twenty-first century; rather, each of the chapters you are about to read is a partial, particular, or concrete reading attempting to bring out an unexpected (or repressed or obscured) universal dimension in what might even seem marginal and appear to originate from just a (sometimes even only distant) sideways glance at Marx.”
“Rather, in each of our respective readings we engage in an attempt to produce something unexpected (in and/ or from Marx), and readers will judge for themselves whether this experiment works and where precisely it may, will, or has failed. Thus, this book might be read as a contribution to an unexpected reunion of Marx(ism).”
“This book is an attempt to create an unexpected reunion with Marx, not to bury him and us once and for all, but to reflect on possible ways of how to reunite emancipatory thinking (again) with his name: since maybe we have only a few things left to do, and we shall join him soon, and “soon the day will dawn” – philosophy’s hour has always been the moment when day turns to dusk. So, let us begin doing what needs to be done: reading Marx.”
November 3, 2025
From different angles we get a better understanding of he real meaning of MARXISM as revolutionay, emancipatory Power by thinking AS MARX would live TODAY. (his eternal universal idea that we could examine as a repetition of the same or a repetition of an excess in Deleuzian terms.)
What does it means to exit the CAVE of Plato where workers are chained as prisoners?
==> What could make them ready to leave the cave? and also : What about prisoners cannot even imagine the outside of the cave and don't want to be liberated? (P.71) . Cf. Arab spring as no having lasting effects (p.8)
If you have still troubles to understand Zizek's explanations of concrete universality , redoubling, negation of negation, abstraction of abstraction .... in this book you get more approaches, metaphors to get a better understanding also from Zizek himself (first chapter) and Agon Hamza (third chapter).
Very insightful is Frank Ruda's essay (second chapter) to show what abstraction really means in Marx once you read him through Hegel: abstraction is not just “making things general,” it is a two-step reduction that produces a new kind of being. (i will limit myself to chapter 2 but the other chapters contains many insights and new links you can make)
My personal notes with regard to chapter 2:
First abstraction
Capitalism never starts from a pure universal. It always begins by picking out one concrete, particular function and letting that stand in for the whole (hegemonize). In Marx’s case: out of the many human capacities, labor-power is isolated as the representative capacity. This is already an 1st abstraction: the living, many-sided human being is reduced to one determinate activity (“now a mouth, now an anus, now a hand”). Abstraction here = particularization: taking one slice of the human and letting it hegemonize/ represent “the worker.”
2/ Second abstraction (= essentializing) - (p. 76-77)
But capitalism doesn’t stop there. It takes that already-reduced function and re-presents it (a particular) as an essence. The first step said: “this is what you do.” The second says: “this is what you are.”
==> Reductive Essentializing = Surplus abstraction
==> Redoubled abstraction generates a Reductive Surplus
==> A contingent, historically produced function is reified into a nature. That’s why the Marx calls it a “second nature” or “domestication”: habit, repetition, mechanization make the reduced function appear natural. This is the moment where the abstracted function becomes a new genus: “the worker.” Not the living human, not even the animal, but a third term generated by a surplus of abstraction.
cf. footnote 80, p. 158 : " ... money is abstract: as a general equivalent it is a particular commodity that only relates to all particular commodities by essentializing the form of particularity (commodities). There can be a further universalization of the (general operation of) the particularization of particularities, when abstraction is again applied to itself, redoubled, and this relation is what Marx calls capital . This is why capital appears as money generating money (self-realizing value) and as a abstract relation to abstraction. In capitalism all is reduced to the perpetuation of this operation."
UN-ANIMAL
Key -insight: the worker in capitalism is not simply ‘reduced to an animal’. An animal is still a whole organism. The capitalist worker is less than that: a “stunted monster,” an un-animal (P. 81): i.e. neither animal nor human (because the fragments are organized by an alien social abstraction).
==> This is what they call a surplus-abstraction: once you abstract from the living human to labor, and then from labor to “labor as your essence,” you don’t return to nature, you produce something over-and-beyond nature : a being whose “essence” is its own vanishing function.
From here we can make the transition to mechanization. Marx, as read here, does not say: “man is replaced by the machine.” He says something subtler: "... the worker reduced to the mechanical side of habit." (p. 92).
==> The human being becomes mechanical before the machine replaces him. Habit, routinization, domestication : "The worker becomes the "second nature" (p.92) and forms a PARADIGMA/ transcendental horizon (c. Heidegger)
But this analysis of reduction is not complete:
==> Capitalism cannot only be understood from mechanism, capitalist society needs also a binding chemical power: capitalism is mechanism + chemism. Here we use Hegel's Logic of Science (P.94)
- Mechanism = the reduction of human activity to isolated, abstract movements.
- Chemism = the binding power that makes all these isolated, abstract movements still hang together in one social body (chemical social power, the Big Other) as immanent causes to entities which make them move (money, value-circulation, the market, the state).
"A chemical end is one that determines me internally, but I can nonetheless never influence it, as I will never directly encounter it" (p.95)
"...something beyond the individual's reach (the chemical power), which inherently drives them into the reductive and reifying identification of being and have an end (into mechanism). (p. 96)
Shadow world
So capitalist “nature” is a composite, it naturalized itself as if it were a natural necessity:
It dismembers (mechanism) and it glues (chemism): capitalism can only work it produces a whole shadow-world that still functions. (= constantly revolutionise itself: innovation, new forms of labor,...)
This leads directly to the Plato's cave-motif: Marx’s analysis of capitalist abstraction shows that capitalism builds a modern version of Plato’s cave. Only, here the point is sharper than in Plato: the workers are not only the prisoners looking at the shadows: they themselves are the shadows, reproducing their their own cave, producing the chains that binds them to the system,...., "shadows multiply" (p.98)
"The frame itself is always also part of the enframed content" (Derrida, quoted on page 53, chapter 1) but you can also make link to the Zizekian insights as "Parallax view" as the subject perceiving reality from its distorted/partial 'subjective' standpoint. (cf. p. 55)
A world of shadows: : globalization, the circulation of capital, the capitalist globe, the worker as self entrepreneur (= new shadows in Capitalism's self- revolutionizing)
And here comes the Hegelian-Lacanian twist : we should not look “behind” the shadow for the real "....there is nothing to be seen” behind the shadow unless we go behind it ourselves."(p. 99, quoted from Hegels Phenomenology, p. 103, p. 114 in the Dutch (NL) version and p.223 of Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology)
To break the spell, how to turn the gaze .. this chapter ends by returning from MARX to HEGEL and returns to MARX again:
"... the human being “wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.”
(quoted from Phenomenology, p19 or p28 in the Dutch translation)
Total abstraction (capitalist dismemberment) is not only a loss: it is also the point from which a different organization of the abstract : a different cave, a different use of shadows, becomes thinkable.
In this text while reading, I can "feel" some universality, difference and repetition, ...
What does it means to exit the CAVE of Plato where workers are chained as prisoners?
==> What could make them ready to leave the cave? and also : What about prisoners cannot even imagine the outside of the cave and don't want to be liberated? (P.71) . Cf. Arab spring as no having lasting effects (p.8)
If you have still troubles to understand Zizek's explanations of concrete universality , redoubling, negation of negation, abstraction of abstraction .... in this book you get more approaches, metaphors to get a better understanding also from Zizek himself (first chapter) and Agon Hamza (third chapter).
Very insightful is Frank Ruda's essay (second chapter) to show what abstraction really means in Marx once you read him through Hegel: abstraction is not just “making things general,” it is a two-step reduction that produces a new kind of being. (i will limit myself to chapter 2 but the other chapters contains many insights and new links you can make)
My personal notes with regard to chapter 2:
First abstraction
Capitalism never starts from a pure universal. It always begins by picking out one concrete, particular function and letting that stand in for the whole (hegemonize). In Marx’s case: out of the many human capacities, labor-power is isolated as the representative capacity. This is already an 1st abstraction: the living, many-sided human being is reduced to one determinate activity (“now a mouth, now an anus, now a hand”). Abstraction here = particularization: taking one slice of the human and letting it hegemonize/ represent “the worker.”
2/ Second abstraction (= essentializing) - (p. 76-77)
But capitalism doesn’t stop there. It takes that already-reduced function and re-presents it (a particular) as an essence. The first step said: “this is what you do.” The second says: “this is what you are.”
==> Reductive Essentializing = Surplus abstraction
==> Redoubled abstraction generates a Reductive Surplus
==> A contingent, historically produced function is reified into a nature. That’s why the Marx calls it a “second nature” or “domestication”: habit, repetition, mechanization make the reduced function appear natural. This is the moment where the abstracted function becomes a new genus: “the worker.” Not the living human, not even the animal, but a third term generated by a surplus of abstraction.
cf. footnote 80, p. 158 : " ... money is abstract: as a general equivalent it is a particular commodity that only relates to all particular commodities by essentializing the form of particularity (commodities). There can be a further universalization of the (general operation of) the particularization of particularities, when abstraction is again applied to itself, redoubled, and this relation is what Marx calls capital . This is why capital appears as money generating money (self-realizing value) and as a abstract relation to abstraction. In capitalism all is reduced to the perpetuation of this operation."
UN-ANIMAL
Key -insight: the worker in capitalism is not simply ‘reduced to an animal’. An animal is still a whole organism. The capitalist worker is less than that: a “stunted monster,” an un-animal (P. 81): i.e. neither animal nor human (because the fragments are organized by an alien social abstraction).
==> This is what they call a surplus-abstraction: once you abstract from the living human to labor, and then from labor to “labor as your essence,” you don’t return to nature, you produce something over-and-beyond nature : a being whose “essence” is its own vanishing function.
From here we can make the transition to mechanization. Marx, as read here, does not say: “man is replaced by the machine.” He says something subtler: "... the worker reduced to the mechanical side of habit." (p. 92).
==> The human being becomes mechanical before the machine replaces him. Habit, routinization, domestication : "The worker becomes the "second nature" (p.92) and forms a PARADIGMA/ transcendental horizon (c. Heidegger)
But this analysis of reduction is not complete:
==> Capitalism cannot only be understood from mechanism, capitalist society needs also a binding chemical power: capitalism is mechanism + chemism. Here we use Hegel's Logic of Science (P.94)
- Mechanism = the reduction of human activity to isolated, abstract movements.
- Chemism = the binding power that makes all these isolated, abstract movements still hang together in one social body (chemical social power, the Big Other) as immanent causes to entities which make them move (money, value-circulation, the market, the state).
"A chemical end is one that determines me internally, but I can nonetheless never influence it, as I will never directly encounter it" (p.95)
"...something beyond the individual's reach (the chemical power), which inherently drives them into the reductive and reifying identification of being and have an end (into mechanism). (p. 96)
Shadow world
So capitalist “nature” is a composite, it naturalized itself as if it were a natural necessity:
It dismembers (mechanism) and it glues (chemism): capitalism can only work it produces a whole shadow-world that still functions. (= constantly revolutionise itself: innovation, new forms of labor,...)
This leads directly to the Plato's cave-motif: Marx’s analysis of capitalist abstraction shows that capitalism builds a modern version of Plato’s cave. Only, here the point is sharper than in Plato: the workers are not only the prisoners looking at the shadows: they themselves are the shadows, reproducing their their own cave, producing the chains that binds them to the system,...., "shadows multiply" (p.98)
"The frame itself is always also part of the enframed content" (Derrida, quoted on page 53, chapter 1) but you can also make link to the Zizekian insights as "Parallax view" as the subject perceiving reality from its distorted/partial 'subjective' standpoint. (cf. p. 55)
A world of shadows: : globalization, the circulation of capital, the capitalist globe, the worker as self entrepreneur (= new shadows in Capitalism's self- revolutionizing)
And here comes the Hegelian-Lacanian twist : we should not look “behind” the shadow for the real "....there is nothing to be seen” behind the shadow unless we go behind it ourselves."(p. 99, quoted from Hegels Phenomenology, p. 103, p. 114 in the Dutch (NL) version and p.223 of Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology)
To break the spell, how to turn the gaze .. this chapter ends by returning from MARX to HEGEL and returns to MARX again:
"... the human being “wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.”
(quoted from Phenomenology, p19 or p28 in the Dutch translation)
Total abstraction (capitalist dismemberment) is not only a loss: it is also the point from which a different organization of the abstract : a different cave, a different use of shadows, becomes thinkable.
In this text while reading, I can "feel" some universality, difference and repetition, ...
August 19, 2022
Decent little book despite some jargon. A familiarity with Hegel is very much required. Rather than saying anything truly substantial, the book is rather an experiment of how one can draw connections between Marx and: Descartes, Plato and Hegel. The exercise is rewarding but feels a bit like eating popcorn.
The argument that Marxism as a practice should return to Hegel is interesting, but who really has the time to read, let alone competently understand Marx and Hegel? Perhaps this is sympomatic of the wider trend of theorisation within marxism and its gradual divorce from practical application. The last gasps of an increasingly desparate dream.
But as always, reading philosophy is fun and reading about marxism is fun.
7/10
The argument that Marxism as a practice should return to Hegel is interesting, but who really has the time to read, let alone competently understand Marx and Hegel? Perhaps this is sympomatic of the wider trend of theorisation within marxism and its gradual divorce from practical application. The last gasps of an increasingly desparate dream.
But as always, reading philosophy is fun and reading about marxism is fun.
7/10
July 11, 2021
Slavoj's piece on OOO is particularly great here
June 20, 2022
Interesting, although I didn’t find anything here of too much value. The chapter on Plato was very good, as was the chapter on Hegel, but i struggled with the first one on OOO
October 21, 2025
Super ambitious
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews