Marx: the consciousness and the social existence that determines consciousness

[Mark Kohut]

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[image: Living in the Wreckage]
Salvage: #1 Amid This Stony Rubbish
author:  Various <https://lareviewofbooks.org/author/various>
publisher:  Salvage Publications Ltd.
pub date:  07.01.2015
pp:  235
tags:  SF <https://lareviewofbooks.org/genre/sf>
Zak Bronson <https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/zak-bronson> on Salvage:
#1 Amid This Stony Rubbish
Living in the WreckageFebruary 12th, 2016RESET
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/living-in-the-wreckage#>-
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/living-in-the-wreckage#>+
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/living-in-the-wreckage#>

IN HIS NOVEL *Railsea* (2013), China Miéville portrays a postapocalyptic
world littered with endless layers of leftover consumer waste. Salvors pick
through mountains of junk, hoping to uncover secrets from the
pre-apocalyptic world. Cut off from the past and lacking any framework for
understanding these objects, characters are left sifting the rubble,
picking through the remnants of history, and taking what is useful while
discarding the rest. As one character explains, “you don’t uncover the past
if you’re a salvor: you pick up rubbish.” *Railsea* provides an example of
what Miéville and Evan Calder Williams have termed *salvagepunk*, a genre
of postapocalyptic fiction that ranges from the post-oil catastrophe
narratives of the *Mad Max* series to the collage aesthetic of Hayao
Miyazaki’s *Howl’s Moving Castle* (2004). In these works, characters
attempt to survive by picking through the waste of the Earth, combining and
repurposing objects and ideas from the past based on their value within
hostile environments.

Anyone familiar with Miéville’s work knows that *salvagepunk* is more than
just a genre; it is also a theoretical practice. The transition from
salvage as a *noun* (something akin to garbage) to salvage as a *verb* (meaning
to repurpose) evident in *Railsea* provides a model for thinking about the
ruins that lay before us; it demonstrates a way of picking through the
rubbish in order to recreate the world anew. *Salvage*, a new “quarterly of
revolutionary arts and letters” co-edited by Miéville, continues this
intellectual trajectory, shattering our slack-jawed complacency in the face
of ecological disaster, economic disparity, and collective struggle and
inviting us to participate in a new radical political activism. “Why
Salvage?” ask the editors: “Because we are wrecked. Because we need a
strategy for ruination.” Not content to stand by as the modern world
crumbles into a postapocalyptic nightmare, the writers and artists in this
debut issue of *Salvage* provide a fantastic collection of essays, poems,
and artworks that engage with the hopeful and pessimistic realities of this
ruined and dead world, seeking to expose the already catastrophic — and
apocalyptic — nature of neoliberal capitalism in the hope of inspiring
radical change.

The collection’s centerpiece is “The Limits of Utopia,” written by Miéville
himself. Avoiding any straightforward revival of hopeful optimism,
Miéville’s essay provides a challenging discussion of deep problems facing
the planet; in particular, it focuses on the fundamental incompatibility
between environmental justice and the demands of capitalist accumulation.
Countering the once-hopeful claim that climate change would unite rich and
poor alike, Miéville notes that dreams of better worlds have become the
fantasies of corporate newspeak. “Utopias are necessary,” he writes, “but
not only are they insufficient: they can, in some iterations, be part of
the ideology of the system, the bad totality that organises us, warms the
skies, and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree.” Exploring a
range of problems — from a trash incinerator installed in the poorest
district of Los Angeles to UN-backed plans to evict citizens from their
land — Miéville portrays an increasingly polarized world where dreams of
bright futures are often purchased at the expense of the world’s most
disenfranchised. Miéville forces readers to question where they put their
faith: what we need, in his view, is more rage at the false hope offered to
us through the fractured lens of corporate solutionism. In what might be
considered a slogan for the journal’s mix of optimism and indignation,
Miéville writes that “[w]e need utopia, but to try to think utopia, in this
world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can’t afford […] we
cannot think utopia without hate.”

For Miéville and his fellow contributors, this combination of optimism and
anger provides an oppositional politics that challenges the complacency of
the Western world in the face of crisis and catastrophe. The essays can be
seen to respond to what Mark Fisher has termed *capitalist realism*, or
“the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political
and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even *imagine* a
coherent alternative to it.” Jamie Allinson’s “Don’t Mourn, Accelerate”
builds on these ideas by looking at the impoverishment of the Left’s
response to the unending realities of crisis: instead of engaging with
anticapitalist politics, the Left has sought refuge by nostalgically
promoting a revival of organized class struggle or by turning toward the
interconnected workers of the knowledge economy to coordinate a fitful
battle against an amorphous, evasive, and decentered capitalism. Allinson
examines the internet buzzword *accelerationism*: an emerging theoretical
frame, adopted by revolutionaries and bros alike, that suggests that the
only way out of capitalism is to expedite its violent, inhuman, and
destructive forces so that it tears itself apart. Such a process does not
necessarily lead to the end of capitalism, nor will it prevent ecological
damage and worldwide disasters. Allinson, in contrast, highlights the need
for a theoretical position that works “within and against” capitalism,
which aims at hijacking the tools of industry in order to organize a
postcapitalist world.

Capitalism’s destructive capacity then takes center stage in Neil
Davidson’s engaging essay “Neoliberalism as the Agent of Capitalist
Self-Destruction.” Neoliberalism, he argues, has erased the basic division
between capital and the state which is vital to the protection of
individual citizens. Beginning by challenging fantasies of the free market,
Davidson highlights successive shifts brought about by neoliberal policies
that have slowly eradicated the state’s opposition to capitalist growth; he
further charts the ways that these shifts have led to increasingly divisive
politics evident in reactionary policies such as the repressive enforcement
of immigration laws in the United States and Europe.

Davidson’s analysis intersects with Daniel Hartley’s “Against the
Anthropocene,” which articulates a way of imagining capitalism as a
“world-ecology.” Hartley’s article expands the notion of the *Anthropocene*,
a term coined by scientists to denote a new geological epoch demarcated by
the human transformation of the environment. Geologists have generally
traced the beginning of the Anthropocene to the invention of the steam
engine in the 18th century; however, building on the work of Jason W. Moore
in his recent *Capitalism in the Web of Life*, Hartley contemplates the
world-historical changes brought about by the *capitalocene*, a moment
originating in the 15th century which led to a reorganization of social and
political life according to capitalism’s accumulation of “nature’s free
gifts.” In contemplating these changes, Hartley also advances a much
broader way of thinking about the capitalocene beyond its impact on the
natural environment. In his thoughtful elaboration on “world-ecology,”
Hartley expands capitalism’s zone of appropriation to include others forms
of unpaid labor, including colonial appropriation of land, women’s domestic
labor, and the possession of racialized and sexualized bodies — ideas that
intersect with several of the essays that appear throughout this collection.

If it isn’t already abundantly clear, the essays collected in *Salvage* focus
on rethinking the political valence of Marxism in the present. However,
rather than simply scavenging Marx’s ideas, the authors revive the spirit
of Marxist thought by creating a “salvage-Marxism” that rustles through the
legacies of the past to contemplate their contemporary value while
simultaneously integrating vital lessons from feminist, queer, and
postcolonial studies. A number of essays explore these ideas through
practical examples of ongoing sites of struggle and contestation.

On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>  I totally agree. Marx analysis of capitalism remains powerful and
> insightful.  I do question the premise that  economic system changes always
> come before intellectual system changes, which is what I really wanted to
> talk about.  One could also reasonably argue that Northern European
> socialism is closer to marxism than the communist party. I was admittedly
> being a little flippant. All isms do however come in for some legitimate
> resistance and probing.
> > On Feb 13, 2016, at 3:04 PM, Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > When approaching Marx's writings, personally I think it is very
> important to tease out the different threads he followed and look at each,
> if not separately from the others, at least in themselves without judging
> them by the others. His analysis of the way capitalism works, his
> philosophical thought and his predictions of how human society would
> develop are the three threads I am thinking of. The first has proved to be
> as enduring as Darwin's theory of evolution. His philosophical thought has
> proved more contentious, but many, myself included, will defend its
> profundity. But Marx was as poor a futurologist as he was a husband and
> parent, which is to say he had his virtues but they were rather
> overshadowed by his failures.
> > Yet many people justify their dismissal of marxism by referring to his
> predictions only, and refuse to engage with his politico-economic and
> philosophical work. It's a shame.
> >
> > On 13/02/2016 18:01, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> >> Marx was a smart guy but the communist party has not proven too
> impressive in healing the excesses of capitalism. And the whole theory
> about the workers paradise has not worked out that good. The thing about
> material power and economic arrangements is that whether or not they
> precede an intellectual frame, they always produce benefactors who will
> promote and defend such a frame. That generation of a belief/intellectual
> system defended by the powerful is a problem with Marxism and Capitalism.
> >>
> >>  The portion of the book I am now reading concerns the kinds of things
> being talked about. Interestingly, McGilChrist  proposes not only a kind of
> dialectic between left hemisphere ideologies/systems and right hemisphere
> ways of thought, but also between the material cultures that arise and
> either their own past or other competing cultures. It is hard in his
> tracking of key historical turning points to separate intellectual changes
> from practical material changes. Money for example favors left brain
> systems that equate symbols with goods but also promote a fluidity of
> cultural exchange. Any material culture favors and produces certain
> intellectual biases, but often seems to emerge out of
> philosophical/intellectual tendencies. ( Even the direction of signal
> communication systems like writing or pictograms mark changes in
> hemispheric bias)
> >>
> >>  The big problem right now is the discord between measuring success in
> money and measuring success in terms of widespread happiness and long term
> planetary sustainability/health/resilience/diversity.  Our material culture
> has presumed that life-forms and biospheric ecosystems are simply material
> resource pools( and dumping grounds)  rather than proceeding out of an
> emergent integrated whole and elegantly balanced living wisdom shaped by
> millions of years of evolutionary experimentation.  This bias has led to
> the delivery of machine and fossil fuel based comforts at the direct
> expense of species diversity, the suffering of the colonized, climate
> stability, clean water, clean air and thriving oceanic abundance. This bias
> also has favored the most skillfully devised sytems of control and
> violence, which appear quite practical to winners, less so to losers, but
> have many large -scale dangers as weapons systems become more powerful and
> leaders become wackier.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Feb 13, 2016, at 6:29 AM, ish mailian<ishmailian at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Why was Marx a materialist?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> http://socialistworker.org/2011/10/28/why-was-marx-a-materialist
> >>>
> >>> On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 6:22 AM, ish mailian<ishmailian at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>> In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into
> >>>> definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
> >>>> relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
> >>>> development of their material forces of production. The totality of
> >>>> these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
> >>>> society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
> >>>> superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
> >>>> consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
> >>>> general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not
> >>>> the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
> >>>> social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain
> >>>> stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
> >>>> into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this
> >>>> merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property
> >>>> relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
> >>>> >From forms of development of the productive forces these relations
> >>>> turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The
> >>>> changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the
> >>>> transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
> >>>>
> >>>> In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish
> >>>> between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
> >>>> production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
> >>>> science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic
> >>>> – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this
> >>>> conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by
> >>>> what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of
> >>>> transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
> >>>> consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material
> >>>> life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of
> >>>> production and the relations of production. No social order is ever
> >>>> destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient
> >>>> have been developed, and new superior relations of production never
> >>>> replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence
> >>>> have matured within the framework of the old society.
> >>>>
> >>>> Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to
> >>>> solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem
> >>>> itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are
> >>>> already present or at least in the course of formation.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
> >>> -
> >>> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
> >>
> >
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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