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The starting-point for the book is its chapter on methodology. Found here are not only critiques of conventional Soviet Marxism-Leninism and post-modernism, but also a new rethinking of the classic dialectic. For the most part, however, the book focuses on revealing the new quality now assumed by commodities, money, and capital within the global economy. The market has become not only global, but a totalitarian force that is not a ‘socially neutral mechanism of coordination’. It is now a product of the hegemony of corporate capital, featuring the growth of new types of commodity: information, simulacra, and so forth. The book demonstrates the new qualities acquired by value, use value, price, and commodity fetishism within this new market, while exploring the contradictions of non-limited resources (such as knowledge) and the commodity form of their existence.
Money is now a virtual product of fictitious financial capital, possessing a new nature, contradictions, and functions. This analysis of the new nature of money helps to reveal the essence of so-called financialisation.
Capital has become the result of a complex system of exploitation. In the twenty-first-century context this exploitation includes the ‘classic’ extraction of surplus value from industrial workers combined with internal corporate redistribution of income by ‘insiders’; international exploitation; and the exploitation of creative labour through the expropriation of intellectual rent.
unconscious, as Jean Laplanche explained Marr’s position, but shows how unconscious elements can serve as catalysts for anti-capitalist actions. 2 How does Marr’s historical materialism bring a new understanding of the unconscious to queer theory? Queer theory and Soviet Marxism have been kept apart, particularly in their conceptualization of psychological concepts. Given the Cold War, a
its normative assumptions, for Marxists the communist artists and bodies were transforming and producing a new society. 2 Productivism in Soviet Marxism created not only an important theoretical and industrial infrastructure, but also a wealth of artistic creations that were actively shaping a communist horizon. As Dobrenko argued, socialist realism’s basic function was not
productivist bodies has been increasingly depicted as a tired Stalinist convention. The idea that bodies can be produced collectively, along with an understanding of the dialectical transformation of characters, has been almost erased from productions that have abandoned the aesthetic conventions of Soviet Marxism. As I showed in Chapter 3, the Cold War ideological conflict was also a
liberal ideology that saw Soviet Marxism as a fundamental political threat. In contrast to a Marxist ideology that sought to create a new communist person, the analytic of gender reinserted the priority of individual consciousness and its freedom to transform social norms. 1 In the US Cold War model, white Anglo-American masculinity was not only the adequate response to the
can materialize a politics of solidarity. 3 Second, I argue that the pay-off of historical materialism is to show the contributions of trans and queer subjects to the abolition of a regime founded on private property. If a Cold War narrative kept Soviet Marxism and queer anti-racism in conflict, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora argue that the term “queer postsocialism” seeks to
field. The key contribution of the book is to articulate a contrast between the concept of a productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet theorists, and the notion of Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. In Soviet Marxism, productive bodies were theorized against the idea of an individual identity and functioned as vehicles to achieve
relations in a revolutionary way.” 3 Soviet Marxism produced not only an ideology, but also material objects that encapsulate this radical need to overturn capitalism. Socialist objects are part of a plan, as Oushakine argued, that was “a historically specific attempt to envision – and build – a community in which dynamic things could speak for themselves, unencumbered by the
epistemology of Soviet Marxism, which was the product of an eastern European world, with a queer of color analysis, which draws on tactics that racialized queers deploy under US racial capitalism. This part of the book seeks to depart from projects that try either to offer an accurate representation of the communist past or to be subversive within liberal capitalism. My argument is neither a claim
of critical Marxism has been summarised by Aleksandra Yakovleva ( 2014 ). This idea of Marx's was widely known in critical Soviet Marxism and is now being developed by the present authors (Buzgalin and Kolganov 1998 ), Vadim Mezhuev ( 2007 ), Vladislav Inozemtsev ( 1998a, 1998b ), and others. In the West the idea has been expressed in recent decades in the work of Alvin and Heidi Toffler ( 2006 ), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri ( 2000 , 2004 ), and Slavoj Žižek and Costas Douzinas ( 2010 ). The core idea is familiar to most people in the common ‘ownership’ by