Articles Archive - Page 2 of 8 - Historical Materialism

On Jan Rehmann’s Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism: Foucault and Deleuze

Matthew KingMatthew Sharpe

A discussion of Jan Rehmann’s Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism: Foucault and Deleuze (Brill-Historical Materialism Book Series, 2022 / Haymarket 2023)

Engels after Marx: a (critical) defence

Darren Roso

With grace and humility, Engels had assumed many a great labour after Marx died. This work is of inestimable value. And without the protracted efforts of the late Engels, Marxism at the opening of the twentieth century would not have been what it became, in its Kautskyan Second International form. The task of this article is to explore that “minor part” Engels played (without any illusion about the immense difficulty of the role) and with the full view that Engels’ life after Marx remained devoted to fighting for proletarian liberation.

Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx on the Paris Commune and the Labour Question in the United States

Kyle A. Edwards

The Paris Commune was the first time the working class took political power. Frederick Douglass covered the events of the Commune closely in his newspaper. Douglass’s views on the Commune illuminate his relationship to socialist and labour movements abroad and in the United States. This essay examines the liberal analysis in Douglass’s newspaper while comparing his reaction to that of Karl Marx. Douglass’s revolutionary abolitionism did not necessarily extend to oppressed wage workers. The Commune abroad and labour unrest in the US bought to light Douglass’s free labour prescription, with its assumption of a harmony of interests between capital and workers. His reaction to the Commune exposes the limitations of his liberal political thought to take on an analysis of class conflict and labour struggles, especially when compared to contemporaries such Marx and others. This study offers a unique contribution on Douglass while juxtaposing him with a Marxist perspective.

Critical Theory without political praxis? A discussion with the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung

Walter Held [Heinz Epe]

Edited by Max Horkheimer for the Institute for Social Research, the journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung stands in admirable contrast to the usual grey publications from the emigration-circles. From Thomas and Heinrich Mann to Brecht and Feuchtwanger, from Georg Bernhard to Hart and Hiller, from Stampfer to Walcher, Münzenberg and Pieck, those only reflect the general intellectual stagnation and decay. Apart from a small number of exceptions that we will discuss later, the contributions to this journal are on the contrary characterised by a high scientific level and purity in thought and words. Most of all, the essays by Horkheimer himself attract our interest. Horkheimer attempts to address the contemporary philosophical reaction – irrationalism, neo-empiricism, ‘neo-humanism’- with the tools of dialectical materialism, which he also calls critical theory.

John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Daniel Tutt on Georg Lukács and The Destruction of Reason

John Bellamy Foster

In this interview, conducted on 10 February 2023, John Bellamy Foster speaks with Daniel Tutt about the work of István Mészáros and Paul Baran, contemporary irrationalist tendencies in left ecological thought, intensifying global class struggles and the continued relevance of Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1952), recently reissued with an introduction by Enzo Traverso by Verso in 2021. The interview is being made available in advance of a forthcoming special issue of Historical Materialism, for which Tutt is a co-editor, dedicated to Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason.

I Am Afraid of AI

A Politico-Epistemological Exasperation

Darko Suvin

I am afraid Artificial Intelligence powers (hereinafter AI) will be a key tool in the physical death or profound lesion of millions of people (for the clearest case, see Section 3 below on war) and in an immense dumbing down of all our public life, including schooling.

A Few Levels of Commentary

Fredric R. Jameson

It was always about Marx and Freud: yesterday’s form, no doubt, of the age-old philosophical antinomy: mind/body, idealism/realism, base/superstructure, in a situation in which the opposition, the gap or break, reappears again within each term. The base has its own base/superstructure problem within itself, as does the mind: there is an interminable scaling at work, a fission, whose unimaginable end-terms are nothingness and infinity. (Even in Freud there is an obvious base and superstructure in the form of the Unconscious and its consciousness, while the latter is equally divided between itself and its unconscious ‘base’ in the super-ego.)