On September 24, 2024 Lou Turner (Urban and Regional Planning, UIUC) and Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology, UIUC) gave a lecture on “Marxism” as part of the ongoing Modern Critical Theory lecture series organized by Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory at UIUC.

Lou Turner’s lecture, titled “Marx: ‘The Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists,’” started with the young Karl Marx. “The ruthless criticism of all that exists” is a quote from a letter Marx wrote to his friend, Arnold Ruge. In it, Marx aimed to define radicalism and tried to rethink the nature of the criticisms of the time while situating them in the larger condition of philosophy at that historical moment, which was becoming “mundane” for him. These thoughts were linked to the emerging thinking of the group the “Left Hegelians” (also known as the “Young Hegelians”), of which Marx was a part. Turner then showed a letter Marx wrote to his father when he was 19 years old, a philosophy student at the University of Berlin. In the letter, Marx confessed his love for poetry and how whatever he poetically produced (“more rhetorical than poetical thoughts”) and shared with his girlfriend, Jenny, cannot be divorced from his “attacks on the present times”—“where nothing is natural”—and how he stood in “complete opposition” to all of it. Furthermore, Marx’s interest in law and cameralism, as depicted in the letter, could be seen as examples of his systematic thinking where he was thinking of creating a new system of law. This also manifests his very early engagement with the questions of public administration and the state.

Moving on to “the levels of abstraction of the volumes of ‘Capital’’ in all six volumes of Marx’s Capital, Turner noted that every volume operates on a different degree of abstraction. He also noted that Volumes II (The Process of Circulation of Capital) and III (The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole), were published after Marx’s death by Friedrich Engels. In these works, that Marx takes credit for two main contributions to the critique of political economy. One of them is the split in the category of labor—labor and labor power—the use value of labor and the exchange value of the labor. The other contribution is his theory of surplus value which is the incongruity between what labor produces and what it is paid.  Turner then moved to Marx’s ideas on how production trumps consumption, Antonio Gramsci’s ideas on the contradictions inherent to the process of intellectualizing, and the theory of the declining rate of profit. This theory of the declining rate of profit, according to Turner, connects Marx’s understanding of the cyclical nature of crisis under capitalism. Finally, he concluded by discussing the late Marx where Marx was interested in Anthropology, specifically as an empirical science. In addition, he pointed out that Marx spent a decade of his life studying non-capitalist societies and studying gender—which, contrary to the normative understanding, was his first intellectual project. Marx returned to it again nearing the end of his life!

Zsuzsa Gille's lecture, titled “Marxism and Materiality/Nature,” started with her autobiographical position growing up in Hungary under the aegis of the Soviet Union where Marxism as an ideology and a theoretical tool was ubiquitous. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was completely enamored with orthodox Marxism and was rather intolerant to more critical exegeses coming from within Marxism, like the Gramscian thought or the Frankfurt School. Gille stated her conviction that Marxism is the most “credible and old” form of materialism. The centrality of Marxian materialism stands on understanding how base (the field of production, forces of production, natural resources, level of technological sophistication) defines the superstructure (law, politics, culture, religion, education). Materiality was defined by Gille as the “physical world that surrounds us: nature, man-made objects, our bodies and even broadly, the way space is organized around us, and the complete practices and technologies we employ in our everyday lives.”

One of the problems in Marxist materialism as argued by its critics, according to Gille, is its technological determinism. As argued by the sociologist Donald MacKenzie in “Marx and the Machine,” not only technology but also the labor process are valorization processes. The argument is that while labor is responsible for all surplus value as understood by Marx, when workers have to work at a particular pace in a particular amount, more than an argument centered on technology, in a particular condition of productivism, it is about how production can generate surplus value and ultimately profit. This argument, according to Gille, also debunks the ideas of other de-skilling theorists who argue that technological innovations are tied to the capitalist management making itself independent of labor and labor’s control over the production process, and subsequently, making labor more disposable.

The second argument regarding Marxist materialism is the Marxian idea that only labor produces surplus value and that nature is oblivious to it. Here MacKenzie informs us that although Marx didn’t think that nature by itself produces surplus value, capitalism and even non-capitalist economic societies are dependent on the use value that nature produces. According to Gille, this Marxian blindness to the value generation of nature emanates because Marx provides us with a theory of capitalism and capitalism that is “by and large blind to nature’s value-generating capacity.”

She articulated a third problem with Marxist materialism: the issue of scale, especially encountered in neo-Marxist geography’s engagement with global capitalism. David Harvey is a prominent figure here. In Gille’s view, the Marxian epistemological assumption that “local = particular/concrete; global = general/universal” overgeneralizes the influence and the undergirding power of global capitalism over its local forms.

The fourth and final problem in Marxist materialism, as diagnosed by Gille, is dualism, especially the dualism of society and nature. Here the Marxian enabling of the dualism that sees society as external to nature comes from the enlightenment tradition of scientific rationality and mastery of nature. Gille noted Marx’s infatuation with the Enlightenment tradition where he “endorses human mastery over nature while critiquing its specific forms in capitalism.” Finally, Gille concluded with an explanation of the debates of new materialisms and their ability to make us think that matter is not static in a way “that allows predictability and mastery,” Causality is multipronged, and new materialism—antithetical to the classical Marxian tradition—invites us to think about how “human consciousness is embodied and is informed by embodied ritualized practices.”

The emphasis on abstraction and the intellectual variegation one finds in Capital (vis-à-vis the influence of Engels), as outlined by Turner, and the nature-society dualism of Marxism shown by Gille, made me think about Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene. Saito tries to synthesize these two arguments. Challenging the perceived Marxian complacency to Promethean and teleological productivism that created the “conditions” for its ecological indifference, one of the arguments Saito makes is that Marxian concepts such as “metabolic rift” that describes the rift capitalist production creates between humans and nature, were marginalized in the posthumous volumes of Capital, as edited and published by Engels. This explains the editorial influence Engels had on Marx’s writing and the growing intellectual gulf (post-publication of Capital Volume I) between Marx and Engels—especially on ecology. In sum, Marxian abstractionism and critiques around its nature-society dualism are never more important than today in the ongoing ecological catastrophe we experience.

The lecture’s timing coincided with the anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s death a few days before (22 September). Jameson was acclaimed by Terry Eagleton in a recent reflection as “the finest theorist of all.” Eagleton’s praise of Jameson, apart from him being a brilliant cultural critic and his wide-ranging works on aesthetics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and psychanalysis, especially comes from, perhaps one of Jameson’s finest oeuvres, Marxism and Form. Despite his initial reservations of Jameson’s work being another of the several pedantic critiques on “vulgar Marxism”, Eagleton found Jameson’s book to be “stunning,” especially for its crucial contribution to bringing forth the works of European Marxist thinkers (some of them also known as “Western Marxists”): T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre. I mention Jameson’s death and the commentary from Eagleton because it resonates with the trajectory of the MCT lecture which offered a critique of orthodox Marxism (in particular for its historical silence on the questions of nature and ecology), while simultaneously highlighting Marxism’s continued intellectual, philosophical, political, social, and cultural relevance. Jameson would have encouraged this kind of engagement with Marxism.