Marx famously argued that labor, under capitalism, alienates humans from not only the products of their labor, but from their very nature. Further, capitalist labor presents a “double freedom” for the worker that is, of course, anything but free: the freedom to either work for an exploitive boss, or to refuse, and starve. UBI would seemingly allow for way out of such a conundrum, but would it also open the door to allow humanity to regain their status as “species-beings”? I explore the idea of UBI as presenting an opportunity for meaningful work and a subversion of the logic of capital. Does UBI indeed grant workers more freedom, or does it merely contribute to the continued denigration of social relations under capital?
Issues
From Company Town to Post-Industrial: Inquiry on the Redistribution of Space and Capital with a Universal Basic Income
This paper considers what effects a universal basic income could have on disrupting social and economic inequality in the tensions of urban/rural divide. She frames her inquiry on the political economy of land and labor in the collapse of coal industry “company towns” and its structural aftermath in Central Appalachia.
We are All Housewives: Universal Basic Income as Wages for Housework
This paper proposes to orient contemporary debates over universal basic income (UBI) to broader social theory in the Marxist and Marxist-feminist traditions. Drawing on theories of labor decommodification, market socialism, and social reproduction, as well as more public-facing debates over policy, the purpose of this analysis is to better clarify the stakes a burgeoning left politics might have in pursuing the demand for UBI. Following key justifications put forward by chief proponents of the Wages for Housework movement for pursuing seemingly impractical, impossible, and politically ambiguous demands, I argue that UBI is best treated as a political perspective with both reactionary and revolutionary undercurrents. Urging caution, not dismissal, I refute more conventional economic analysis leading to common refrains against UBI, and suggest possible ways to bend UBI toward more explicitly socialist aims.
Review of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference by Grace Kyungwon Hong (University of Minnesota Press)
As social issue fatigue threatens to isolate even the most robust justice scholars and activists, Hong asks us to hold our contemporary complexities in unresolved tension. She invites us back to the table, asking us to attend to how our lives and others’ deaths are related and to how neoliberalism works to redefine, and obfuscate, these connections. To understand how racialized, sexualized, and gendered differences are produced, Hong argues that exploring death, as well as the work of neoliberal technologies to erase marginalized memories of death, reveals the uneven distribution of precarity and violence. The book will benefit any seminar or study that seeks to parse the tangled complexity of contemporary oppressions in and through U.S. American political structures, as well as any who seek an exemplar of how to do so with academic rigor, exceptional feminist citation practices, and ethical elegance.
Review of The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani by Mikko Tuhkanen (State University of New York Press)
Mikko Tuhkanen’s provocative and comprehensive study of the work of Leo Bersani deserves the status of a decisive and paradigm-shifting event in the field of critical theory. Bersani’s work, which has evolved over a period of over fifty years, emerges as something like a Trojan Horse within the hegemonic camp of critical theory for which only difference and alterity are positive and mobile. Tukhanen draws out and in so doing sharpens Bersani’s consistent call for a radical re-assessment of precisely those concepts and values connoted as negative, redundant, static, or even politically and ethically dangerous in the broad orthodoxy of critical theory: sameness, essence, narcissism, the speculative. Tuhkanen shows adeptly, through a series of engagements with Bersani’s preferred critical objects—Baudelaire, Freud, Proust, Beckett, Jean Laplanche, to name only those most prominent—how Bersani, the “essentialist villain,” has wielded the critical armory of essence against, but also within, the domain of what is construed as a pervasive ontology of loss, lack, and trauma.
Review of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing by David Parisi (University of Minnesota)
Archaeologies of Touch announces itself as an opening salvo for a new media studies subfield capable of addressing this ongoing haptic reconstruction of our media environment. Parisi charts a genealogy of haptic interfacing that begins with seventeenth-century experiments using electrostatic generators and culminates in the latest projections for virtual reality. Over several centuries, we have become rendered “haptic subjects” through an “ongoing cultural training” (43) though “tactile media”—a “shifting assemblage composed of technical elements, embodied sensations, and cultural practices” (97). No longer aiming to stimulate the full surface of the flesh, what now counts as touch-based media assures but one or a few points of contact between the tip of the finger and the screen. Far from fulfilling the fate of electronics by rebalancing the human sensorium, haptic feedback as we know it today seems a step in the opposite direction. Parisi closes his book with a spirited call to action insisting on the need for an interdisciplinary subfield of haptic media studies, on par with visual cultural studies and sound studies.
Review of Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 by Melissa N. Stein (University of Minnesota Press)
Melissa N. Stein’s Measuring Manhood tackles the complex intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and their attendant “sciences” across a century of US history. While the burgeoning fields of ethnology and sexology were equally prominent in Europe during this period, her focus on the US specifies the ways in which American “racial scientists” and sexologists differed from their European counterparts, as their research was often used to justify or bolster nation-specific cultural norms and legislation. The concept of masculinity was not simply a matter of “manhood” in the narrow sense, but carried with it a glut of other associations: humanity, civilization, citizenship, intelligence, morality, whiteness, cisgender heterosexuality, and middle-class restraint. Stein manages to convey the complexity and reciprocity of these constructions in each chapter with careful argumentation and ample examples.
Review of Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and The Crisis of Racial Burnout by Lynn Mie Itagaki (University of Minnesota Press)
Lynn Mie Itagaki contributes to cultural and comparative race studies by uncovering the implications of what she calls the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion—a constellation of events spurned on by the Rodney King verdict—for intersecting groups and communities including women, immigrants, Black, Asians, and Latina/o-Americans. Each chapter provides a different context (family, education, neighborhood) for structures and discourses that perpetuate civil racism, while at the same time illuminating specific acts of resistance and subversion that occur, in each instance, through media, activism, and art. Itagaki’s methodology moves beyond critical literary analysis to provide important social commentary and critique that will prove useful to interdisciplinary scholars seeking to learn about racial formations in the neoliberal U.S. context.
Review of Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in US Political Culture by Dana Cloud (Ohio State University Press)
Dana Cloud’s marvelous new book provides just the sort of deep understanding and practical guidance needed for thoughtful and effective political engagement in the Trump era. In three fascinating case studies, Cloud demonstrates the impotence of naked facts and the power of mediation. First, she compares the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, both of whom leaked classified information in acts of patriotic resistance. Second, in a chapter on the 2014 television series Cosmos, Cloud seeks to explain the show’s enormous rhetorical power. Third, Cloud compares the revolutionary rhetoric of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to that of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements. As we live through the devastation wrought by a Trump presidency, as we seek to make sense of it all in our scholarship and our classrooms, as we resist his attempt to reengineer of reality and search for ways to reassert our own reality, the reality of the people, Reality Bites comes not a moment too soon.
Review of The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time by Edward LiPuma (Duke University Press)
Edward LiPuma outlines a sociohistorical theory of the market that positions derivatives trading as initiating a new form of capitalism. The book also confronts the narratives that the financial sector tells itself about the causes and aftermath of the financial crisis, revealing the social relations that underpin the entire enterprise. LiPuma exposes the wild-seeming speculation of hedge fund managers and traders as a rationale that disappears the social aspect of its own ritual induction and relational mode of production and reproduction. An understanding of the social underpinning of financial markets, LiPuma hopes, can lead to a politics of “just optionality” where the same methods for betting on securitized commodities (assets made liquid) like housing mortgages can be transferred into wagers that further the collective good. For Marxists, LiPuma has an urgent message: existing theories of the market are incomplete without an understanding of how financial capital, led by derivatives trading, has transformed the means by which capital reproduces itself.
Review of The Pink Tide: Media Access and Political Power in Latin America edited by Lee Artz (Rowman & Littlefield)
The ‘Pink Tide’ refers to the unprecedented succession of electoral victories of socialist-leaning populist presidents in the region, starting with Chavéz’s victory in 1998. This anthology explores media reforms in countries that most consistently reelected progressive candidates, specifically Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Brazil. Through these case studies, Artz seeks to show that the primary indicator of democracy and social justice is the extent to which governments give the population direct access and control of the means of communication. Despite the complexities of the different cases, Artz presses that public participatory media, by promoting and prefiguring a socialist society, is an integral part of the democratic struggle that must be actively and continuously pursued by social movements.
Editors’ Introduction: Marxism and Cultural Studies
Cultural studies as a discipline and intellectual practice is deeply indebted to Marx, even as the field of cultural studies has contested, revisited, and updated Marx’s work. This issue points to a number of resonant threads currently active under the umbrella of cultural studies and opens possibilities for historical mapping of the many and varied aspects of marxist thought, in and out of the academy. The authors in this issue direct us toward and augment our understanding of the multi-faceted and inextricable links between questions of capital and questions of race, class, and gender power that have been the focus of US research in cultural studies especially within the past thirty years. In this issue, we continue and expand our editorial emphasis on the role of cultural studies in explaining and challenging the ongoing, intersectional significance of material power relations.
Decommodified Labor: Conceptualizing Work After the Wage
A way to think labor after finanancialization, decommodifed labor refers to an emptying out of the same wage relation that nonetheless continues to structure our lives. “Working hard or hardly working” needs a new conjunction: in an age of decommodifed labor, one finds oneself working hard and hardly working. I suggest that decommodified labor offers cultural critics a form for isolating labor today that takes account of its relation to the wage, that may assist in periodizing the capital-labor relation, and that also highlights financial change alongside labor’s durational necessity under capitalism.
Imagined Immunities: Abjection, Contagion and the Neoliberal Debt Economy
This paper addresses the pervasiveness of contagion as a structure of feeling by putting Maurizio Lazzarato’s biopolitics of indebtedness in dialogue with Roberto Esposito’s insight that debt is the very condition of both community and its dialectical opposite, immunity. Where Esposito does not sufficiently engage the role of financialized or neoliberal capitalism within the contemporary crisis, Lazzarato develops a Marxian account of debt that complements Esposito’s “immunitarian biopolitics,” revealing it as an intrinsically capitalist one, and allows us to ground it in contemporary power structures through Marx’s figure of M-M’.
Vital Forces: Marx and the Tension of Capitalist Affect
This article juxtaposes Marx’s critique of capitalism with recent developments in affect theory. My central argument is that a critique of the tension of capitalist affect is fundamental to a Marxian account of capital: on the one hand, capitalism amplifies the potential affective capacity of bodies through its development and organization of productive forces; on the other, it captures this increase to enrich the bourgeoisie, immiserate the proletariat, and reproduce capitalism. I also sketch the ways that an affective interpretation can provide insight into anti-capitalism resistance and post-capitalist life within Marx’s theoretical and philosophical project. Ultimately, reading Marx’s critique of capitalism for its resonances with Deleuzean-Spinozan affect theory not only generates a newfound apprehension of the affective register of that critique, but also adds to the critical repertoire of affect theory.