open marxism excerpts link
I’ve mentioned on here that I think the Open Marxism tradition has important insights on how to think about capitalist society, the capitalist state, and how the two relate. Very briefly, Open Marxism refers to a set of thinkers who emerged from the Conference of Socialist Economists in the UK (the organization that publishes the journal Capital and Class) or who were influenced by the people came out of the CSE. If I remember correctly, the term ‘open marxism’ comes from the German writer Johannes Agnoli. It was propagated in English by Werner Bonefeld, a former student of Agnoli, in an article in the late 80s in a journal called Common Sense, published by the Edinburgh CSE group, and further in a multi-volume anthology series called Open Marxism. The anthologies collected work by some people in the Common Sense milieu, some people in the broader CSE, and some other interlocutors around the world - heterodox Marxists like Antonio Negri and Harry Cleaver, for instance. After the term spread somewhat, it’s been retroactively applied to include people influential in Open Marxism, like Simon Clarke. So it’s sometimes a historical actors’ terms and sometimes a lineage term not used by members of the tradition.
In case it’s of interest to anyone, I put together a bundle of material from the tradition in a google drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Nr6-Fj8W9CadpOaaa0bM0bqH2P11SSuU?usp=sharing It leans more toward people retroactively included in the tradition than people who used the term. There’s a loose distinction among Open Marxism people between people who are primarily theorists and people who are primarily empirical qualitative social scientists. The stuff in the folder focuses on theoretical work by those empirical type of scholars. I’ve numbered them in the order I’d suggest engaging them and in which I plan to engage them. The folder has excerpts from some books and dissertations, focusing on theorizing capitalism, crisis, the state, etc at a high degree of abstraction. (All the dissertations are by students of Simon Clarke or students of Peter Burnham, who was a Clarke student.) I didn’t count the pages, I’d guess is maybe a thousand pages of stuff? A lot of it’s double spaced because dissertations. It’s a few books worth of material basically, so not quick, but it’s also less material than it looks like in the folder so it’s doable to people who are looking for more theory of capitalism and the state. Most of the works excerpted from and all the authors excerpted have done work connecting the theory to empirical inquiry in valuable ways, anyone interested could chase up that work (if you can’t find it, let me know). I’ve mentioned Jack Copley’s book Governing Financialization, he works in this tradition and his book’s a great example of a well theorized work of empirical inquiry.
I want to mention as well this short essay https://www.rhunter.org/pdfs/hunter-2021-PREPRINT.pdf and this longer chapter https://rhunter.org/pdfs/Hunter-Marxs-critique-constitution-capitalist-state-PREPRINT.pdf by Rob Hunter. They’re very smart and draw on this tradition, and work that’s resonant with it like that of Tony Smith. (Rob’s the one who put me onto Tony Smith, whose book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism I've mentioned a few times and is very good, very relevant to all this stuff. Rob's also one of the two people who finally got me to read Simon Clarke seriously, the other being Chris O'Kane. Intellectually life-changing stuff for me.) Rob’s the co-editor of the book on the capitalist state that my longer social murder chapter is in - https://link.springer.com/book/9783031361661. He's also done some covid-related writing at Peste - https://www.pestemag.com/lost-to-follow-up/tktk - and is part of the editorial collective at Legal Form - https://legalform.blog/ - if people want to check out more of his stuff.
I’m very aware that not everyone has the time and disposition to read this stuff, so no pressure intended at all (really!). But I figure some people might be interested so I wanted to put this stuff together. I also am convinced that this general perspective has a lot of insights to offer for understanding important pandemic-relevant aspects of capitalist society (and just in general, it’s a powerful body of thought for critical understanding of capitalism). So more uptake of this stuff would be good, which doesn’t have to mean everyone reads all of it, rather it means more of us working through this material and summarizing it and applying it to try to make the perspective it advances be the go-to explanatory framework for more people (or rather, part of that framework). Time permitting I hope to go through this stuff more closely later and write up notes to try to do some of that digesting, but other folks engaging it too would be great imho.
I don’t think I have the wherewithal to do it myself but I think a fairly fleshed out open marxist account of public health in general, pandemics in general, public health now and the covid pandemic, is something that would do a lot of good intellectually and politically, to the degree that ideas on paper/screen can do any good politically. I think that would happen best, or at least fastest, by many people take on pieces of it with some redundancy (in the sense of we read the same stuff, replicate some of the same work) but not with everyone reading all the elements that feed into it.
On that, I'll add that part of the challenge of responding, at the level of critical thought, to the pandemic and of similar crises is that we really need collective forms of intellectual practice with knowledge distributed deliberately within the collectivity - not everyone needs to read everything, not all thinking is reading and writing, etc. I don't think what I'm doing is important in any big deal sort of way but I do sort of hope that I can do some thinking here that digests work so that people who want to dive into the weeds can do so but don't have to, and likewise other people doing that work on these and other themes benefits me as well. That all came out wonky (as per!) Trying again: the individual who reads and knows everything is an illusion and a bourgeois one, none of us with jobs and obligations have the time for that and defaulting to 'I must myself read all the things!' is a mistake, one that makes people unhappy and inhibits collective learning and thinking. I don't mean here to say everyone should read all this stuff. I do think more people should though and should help put forward this perspective to others, and develop the ideas further as well. This theoretical perspective has a lot to offer in my opinion, as I've said, which is not at all to say it's an as-is sufficient set of positions to just take up nor to say everyone needs to read all of it. We need more practices of collective/collaborative intellectual work to get the division of labor right over time I think, that's a work in progress I think (at least in my corner of the world anyway).