APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING!
--------------------------

Dear List Members,

I would like to bring to your attention the latest issue of the journal 
Rethinking Marxism that features a symposium titled  "Subjects of 
Economy".  Please find detailed information and article abstracts 
below.

Warmest,

Yahya M. Madra

PS. SEE BELOW FOR THE CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CFP FOR RETHINKING 
MARXISM 2006

<http://www.rethinkingmarxism2006.org>


-------------------------------------
 
 
RETHINKING MARXISM                                    



                       a journal of economics, culture & society
 
 
Vol 18 No 2
April   2006
 
  IN THIS ISSUE: 

Editors’ Introduction
 
 
 
SYMPOSIUM: Subjects of Economy
 
Subjects of Economy: Introduction
 
Julie Graham, Jack Amariglio
This symposium reflects the multi-year conversation of participants in 
a seminar on “subjects of economy” at the University of Massachusetts 
Amherst who were interested in theorizing and practicing a politics of 
economic transformation. In pursuit of their political and theoretical 
interests, the seminar participants embarked on an extended collective 
investigation into questions of subjectivity. They aspired to move 
beyond the identity theory that prevails in poststructuralist thought, 
seeking a more complex understanding of subjectivation as both a 
recalcitrant, stalemated state of being and an opening to 
transformation. What emerges in this symposium are some theoretical 
glimpses into class subjectivity, and particularly its communist or 
communal forms, as well as some insights into the micropolitical 
processes of class transformation. 
 
Questions of Communism: Ethics, Ontology, Subjectivity
 
Yahya M. Madra
This paper is both a critique and an affirmation of the “postmodern” 
Marxist debates on communism. It claims that any serious discussion of 
ethico-political concepts, such as exploitation and class justice, 
should include how subjectivity animates class. In particular, it 
insists that communism is predicated upon a shift at the level of 
subjectivity, in the very ideological coordinates that define what is 
just and what is unjust. Rethinking class analysis by locating the 
question of sexual difference at the ethico-political and theoretical 
core of class analysis makes it possible to differentiate exploitative 
class structures and communist class structures as two distinct modes 
in which communities fail to domesticate the Real of class antagonism. 
 
Mourning, Melancholy, and the Politics of Class Transformation
 
Ceren Özselçuk
In recent attempts to problematize the relation between radical social 
change and identity politics, social theorists have drawn attention to 
affective attachments to an injured identity that are said to foreclose 
political transformation. This essay, while taking these critiques of 
identity politics seriously, questions the political demand for a 
“death of identity” that is often implied by such critiques. 
Specifically, it raises the following issues for class-transformative 
politics as they apply to the contexts of economic dislocation and 
loss: given that there is no easy or ready-made way to move beyond an 
identity politics riveted to loss and injury, how can we rethink the 
relationship between identity politics and class transformation? What 
politically empowering modalities are capable of addressing loss, such 
that they assist rather than stunt classed resubjectivation? This essay 
mobilizes the concepts of melancholy and mourning from Freudian 
psychoanalysis in order to formulate a response to these questions. The 
objective is to expand upon current political strategies of 
transformation in order to move from capitalist exploitation toward 
communism while at the same time placing the issue of resubjectivation 
and the register of affects at the forefront of revolutionary politics.
 
Cooperative Subjects: Toward a Post-Fantasmatic Enjoyment of the Economy
 
Ken Byrne, Stephen Healy
This piece explores practices within some cooperative firms as attempts 
to foster a subject who has a particular relationship with work and 
with the community economy. We call this relationship identifying or 
working in the gap: deriving satisfaction from engaging with the 
various antagonisms, conflicts, and contingencies that attend the 
cooperative and its relationship with the community in which it is 
constituted. Drawing on complementary strains of poststructuralist 
Marxian theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, we speculate that 
such subjects are post-fantasmatic in relation to the economy—not in 
the sense that they no longer have narratives that explain their 
working lives, but that these narratives do not revolve around 
capitalocentric economic fantasy and its various symptoms and 
resentments. We offer a few brief examples of worker coop members 
working in and identifying with the gap, attempting to keep the 
negativity of communal production intact through the different phases 
of collective economic activity.
 
The Economy of Joyful Passions: A Political Economic Ethics of the 
Virtual
 
Joseph T. Rebello
This paper draws an ethics of theorizing and representing the economy 
from Gilles Deleuze's concept of the virtual. Using Deleuze's work with 
Félix Guattari, I propose that social representations correspond, in 
mutual constitution, with modes of subjective investment. This implies 
that the problem of subjectivity, in particular the subject's relation 
to economy, is critical for those interested in the production and 
effects of economic discourse. After outlining what this ethics demands 
from theories of the economy, I show how antiessentialist class 
analysis provides a way of producing a Deleuzian political economy in 
line with these demands. 
 
Subjectivity, Enjoyment, and Development: Preliminary Thoughts on a New 
Approach to Postdevelopment
Chizu Sato
Over the past two decades postdevelopment critics, who often draw on 
the analysis of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, have challenged 
developmentalism by making visible mechanisms of power within the 
apparatus of development. While these analyses have opened certain 
fields of the possible, the continued strength of developmentalism 
suggests that we must extend the postdevelopment project. This essay 
draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism to illuminate one set of 
possibilities not visible within the existing postdevelopment analytic. 
Working with Development as a social fantasy, this paper examines the 
formation of the subject and the role of enjoyment in stabilizing 
modern and postmodern society. The last section of this paper 
tentatively maps a few directions in which this approach may extend the 
postdevelopment project. 
 
Orientalization of Exploitation: A Class-Analytical Critique of the 
Sweatshop Discourse
 
Kenan Erçel
Having long been confined to the lexicon of labor historians, the term 
‘sweatshop’ is back in common parlance. Conjuring up an image of 
squalid premises where a host of dreadful working conditions and 
abusive labor practices prevail, the term has been instrumental in 
galvanizing great numbers of Western consumers against world-renowned 
brand names and retailers for mercilessly exploiting Third World 
workers. Commendable as its agenda is, the enchantment of the 
antisweatshop movement with the appalling labor practices and dismal 
working circumstances overseas is problematic insofar as it normalizes 
and thus lends justification to production relations at home. A Marxian 
critique of the orientalist underpinnings of the sweatshop discourse 
also calls into question the widely held conviction that Third World 
labor is ‘exploited’ by Western capital. By shifting the focus of 
attention from unequal exchange—whereby the Third World is understood 
to be short-changed by Western-based multinationals—to exploitative 
relations within the Third World, a class-analytical approach puts on 
the map a level of analysis that is typically short-circuited in the 
sweatshop literature, i.e. the local conflict between capital and 
labor.
 
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
 
Possible Models
Jenny Perlin
 
The fantasies offered by global capitalism assume a variety of forms. 
One of the most enticing, at least during the past half-century, has 
been the enclosed shopping mall. While many older malls have died 
(those in the United States can be tracked at deadmalls.com), creating 
urban and suburban greyfields, other, even more elaborate and larger, 
ones are being constructed and expanded, from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 
(where the biggest shopping mall in North America is located) to 
Beijing, China (site of the world's largest mall, with even grander 
ones projected for Wenzhou and Qingdao). Here, Jenny Perlin uses stills 
and text from “Possible Models,” a 16-mm stop-motion animation, to 
probe the allure of freedom in capitalism's ongoing attempts to create 
economic and social paradises: the failure of the Southdale Center to 
live up to its designer's dream of a utopian urban environment, replete 
with parks, schools, and apartment buildings; the Mall of America and 
the Mall of Dubai as examples of the new transcultural, supranational, 
theme-park super-mall; and the plans for a “freedom ship,” a floating, 
self-sustained, tax-free, mall-based community that encircles the 
globe.
 
Remarx
 
Guglielmo Carchedi
This essay examines whether the European Union, already the most 
powerful economic and financial rival of the United States, can develop 
its military arm to a level compatible with its economic and financial 
weight. It concludes by suggesting a parallel between European currency 
and the European military. The ECU started as virtual money that 
evolved into the Euro to become a real danger for the U.S. dollar. At 
this point, the nascent EU army is only a potential threat to a still 
unchallenged U.S. military power, but a parallel and ominous evolution 
is under way.
 
Reviews
 
 
Economics in Real Time: A Theoretical Reconstruction, by John McDermott
Asatar Bair
Postmodernism, Economics, and Knowledge, by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack 
Amariglio, and David F. Ruccio
Joseph Childers 
 
Notes on Contributors
 
 
If you are not a current subscriber to this publication, you can 
request a free sample issue here.

To subscribe to this journal, please email: [log in to unmask]

RETHINKING MARXISM 2006
 
We want to take this opportunity to remind readers that now is the time 
to send their proposals and to register for the sixth in the series of 
international conferences sponsored by RM, Rethinking Marxism 2006, 
which will be held from 26 to 28 October at the University of 
Massachusetts in Amherst. The conference web site, 
www.rethinkingmarxism2006.org, includes the official Call for Papers, 
as well as additional information concerning the submission of 
proposals and preregistration. The sessions, workshops, and events 
planned for the conference w ill serve as a unique opportunity for 
scholars, students, and activists to gather in one place to critically 
examine the state of contemporary Marxism and its ability to 
confront—by recognizing and learning from, as well as expressing and 
shaping—the new demands for economic and social justice in the world 
today. We look forward to seeing you there.