Left Hemisphere by Razmig Keucheyan

Author:Razmig Keucheyan [Keucheyan, Razmig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78168-231-9
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

CAPITALISMS OLD AND NEW

Marxism traditionally combines economic analysis with political and/or cultural theory. According to this paradigm, the base determines (in complex fashion and through mediations) the superstructures, which presupposes that these two instances must be studied conjointly, on pain of missing the overall logic of the system. What Marxists called ‘economics’, moreover, only coincides in part with what classical economists understand by the term. When they argue that the economy ‘determines’ the superstructures, Marxists are not claiming that everything is explained by economic processes as ordinarily conceived. As it determines the superstructures, the ‘economy’ changes its nature and enters into a relationship of mutual (dialectical) influence with them. However that might be, in the classical forms of Marxism, economics and politics and/or culture are closely intertwined.

With Western Marxism there emerges a tendency to autonomize the analysis of the superstructures. In Gramsci, Lukács, Sartre and Althusser, the economy is less salient than in the preceding generation of Marxists. The reasons for this autonomization are various. For example, they stem from the ‘glaciation’ of Marxist economics – the fact that it was increasingly placed under the control of the Communist parties. Autonomization also derives from the professionalization of the ‘profession’ of economist (and other disciplines in the human sciences), which tends to reduce interdisciplinarity. It is interesting to note in this regard that the authors who will be discussed in this section on contemporary capitalism are mostly professional (academic) economists.

The disconnection between economic and political and/or cultural theory is further accentuated in current critical thinking. In other words, the latter has continued the tendency to autonomization initiated by Western Marxism. For example, Jameson relies on the analysis of ‘late capitalism’ formulated by the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, but it plays an ‘auxiliary’ role, rather than being the veritable motor of his analysis. Today there exist remarkable studies of the development of capitalism, undertaken by such authors as Robert Brenner, Claudio Katz, François Chesnais, Robert Pollin, Elmar Altvater, Robert Wade, and Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy. We also find studies of the superstructures, whether politics or culture. But these two domains of critique are now disjoined. An interesting question is whether this disjunction might in the future be reduced and, if so, on what conditions. A certain pessimism is in order here. This issue is part of a more general problem, which is the critique of the division of labour, of which the division of intellectual labour is one aspect.

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