Roswitha Scholz’s theory of value-dissociation articulates a feminist perspective with the Marxist current of value criticism. The article proposes a reconstruction of this articulation. It is a ...question of uncovering the philosophical roots that make it possible to integrate feminism and Marxism without hierarchy between the two, and this, through a strain common to the commodity fetishism and the gender fetishism. The article first proposes to find, in Marx, the deep meaning of the commodity fetishism. The article then proposes to identify the necessary additions beyond Marx to fully integrate gender fetishism into the theory of value-dissociation: through partial but complementary readings of Horkheimer-Adorno and Beauvoir.
Responding to neoliberal decentralization, Marxists pair centralization with capitalism’s abrogation. Such a view considers hierarchy to be necessary and horizontal organization as propitious to ...neoliberalism. Anarchism’s coupling of decentralization with anti-capitalism is dismissed because Marxism cannot accommodate prefigurative politics, treating horizontality as a future objective. This temporality ignores the insurrectionary possibilities of the present and implies a politics of waiting. In terms of spatiality, Marxian centralized hierarchy deems horizontality inappropriate when ‘jumping scales’. Yet by rejecting this vertical ontology we may immediately disengage capitalism through a rhizomic politics. Consequently, human geography without hierarchy gains traction when we embrace an anarchist flat ontology.
Podemos has been the object of extensive attention since its foundation in 2014. However, most of the academic works focus on its initial rise, which prevents a broader analysis of the evolution of ...its populist discourse after they reached the Spanish government in 2020. Covering this gap, this paper argues that Podemos' populism operates as a discursive logic aimed at constructing the political by spreading antagonisms. Following the post-Marxist theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Podemos' leaders understand politics as a cultural exercise whose essential component is a permanent redefinition of the people and anti-people categories according to context. Based on this framework, the paper develops a qualitative analysis of Podemos' discourse in the period 2014-2021. By focusing on the discursive manifestations of its main leaders, the paper shows the rhetorical turns that try to reconcile the contradictions between an initial street-level populism and a subsequent populism in power. Thus, the original people/caste antagonism is replaced by the classical left/right divide, which shows the difficult coexistence of two different approaches to populism within Podemos. Once in government, the reframing of the left/right dichotomy as democracy/fascism will lend continuity to a populist understanding of politics.
In this text Luce Irigaray enquires into questions pertaining to knowledge production, contemporarily derivative upon capitalist system of production and the ideology promoting sexual/gender ...neutrality, along with corporeal/bodily, class-related, and cultural non-differentiation. According to the female philosopher, the said system contributes to exploitation of not only human work, but most of all energy that fuels our ability to bond and be together. Therefore, going back to the most fundamental structure of human subjectivity determined by the sexuate difference, may prove to be not only a strategic resistance device meted out against capitalist organisation of work, but also a path leading to another world, where a coexistence acknowledging mutual/reciprocal difference may appear possible.
This is a translation of the final chapter of Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2019) by Silvia Federici. The author opposes the opinion that technological ...development brings about more freedom for society and illustrates how it is accompanied by a growing level of exploitation. According to her, the exploitation of labour is rendered possible by ”a history of the disaccumulation” of common goods and pre-capitalist capacities, connected to our immediate, non-privatised contact with nature. In the second part, Federici argues that today’s struggles in defense of the commons, often led by women, has gained fundamental and global importance. She advocates for reproductive labor as a responsible and paradoxically subversive strategy in the face of political and ecological crisis.
This essay elucidates the deep affinity between the political theories of E.H. Carr and Reinhold Niebuhr. Central to this affinity was their shared advocacy of an ongoing dialectic between vision and ...critique, or (in their words) utopianism and realism. The immediate justification for this essay is the surprising dearth of extended comparisons of Carr and Niebuhr, even though Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis acknowledges a particular debt to Niebuhr and cites Niebuhr seven times in that work. Comparing Carr and Niebuhr also reveals the Marxist roots of their dialectical approach and highlights their adamant refusal to proclaim themselves ‘realists’. The essay thus encourages the discipline of international relations to seek its genealogy in the tradition of radical political thought and to reassess the common assumption that Carr and Niebuhr are founders of the modern realist approach. In the author’s view, the ‘ultimate optimism’ of Carr and Niebuhr, though widely underappreciated, is compelling.
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