(April 2022 - December 2025)

Abstract: 

The following research proposal seeks to analyse and develop a new conception of subjective or identitarian refusals that contemporary political theory understands as social movements; particularly women’s movements and racial movements to encompass them with the traditional Marxist approach to the proletariat. Thus, it will explore, firstly, the concept of proletariat developed by Marx and Engels in order to analyse how the own exploitation of capitalism has been expanded to women, afro-descendants and native Americans looking to appropriate more and cheaper workforces around the globe, but also, pursuing the generation of new consumers that in the 19th and 20th century were not contemplated as so. Secondly, I will argue that the notions of oppressed and oppressors can be understood in social movements or refusals such as the women’s liberation movements. Here, understanding the dialectic between economic oppression and cultural oppression, an intersectional Marxist Feminism such as those proposed or developed by Herbert Marcuse (1974), Walter Benjamin (1991) or Vanessa Hill Collins (2002), would take place as a synthesis of the contradiction that liberal or postmodernist feminisms have built into the contemporary political philosophy. Thirdly, but based on the same dialectical movement, the racial refusals between Afro-descendants and native Americans can be understood as a response not just to the economic disparity between whites and non-withes subjects within colonial and non-colonial countries (Coulthard, 2014), but also as the rejection to “the So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized Peoples” (Fanon, 2008). 

Research question: How can be the critique of the political economy the main intersubjective paradigm between the proletariat, as the main political subject of Marxism, and the antipatriarchal and antiracist refusals under a Marxist and critical theory perspective? 

 

Main objective: Analyse how, under the framework of the critique of the political economy can be developed new forms of articulation between the Marxian notion of the proletariat and contemporary refusals such as feminism, and racial struggles. 

Introduction: 

The radical and historical contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was not based on the only vicissitude of the Advanced Industrial Society but, on the contrary, capitalist development had generated, on the one hand, the proletarian struggles framed in the trade union movements were co-opted by capitalism and that disputes focused solely on claims based on the economic and income conditions of the workers, but, on the other hand, that the conditions and possibilities of liberation were ripening in directions that neither Marxist orthodoxy nor Marx himself had been able to foresee, namely, the totality of human liberation; not only in the key of labour slavery but, in turn, of other forms of domination present in the Advanced Industrial Society, such as patriarchal and racist domination. In this sense, it can be understood that the proletariat that Marx had outlined does not shelter, apparently, all the claims of the contemporary refusal movements. 

Attempts such as those of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt with their concept of The Multitude, or Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe with their notion of The People, fail to elucidate the vigour and possibility of the critical Marxist tradition of analysing and overcoming contemporary neoliberal capitalism due to its concentration on new and different forms of exploitation that blur the critique, already made by Marx, of the economic-political apparatus of capitalism and neoliberalism, and focus on an openly ambiguous political subject in which the domination of some over others does not achieve nor is it outlined in its conceptual apparatus, nor does this theoretical apparatus allow the analysis of movements such as Occupy wall street, the new and contemporary anti-racist as Black-lives-Matter and feminist movements focused on labour openness and equality for women, the civil rights of trans women and men, or the fight for the approval of abortion. 

On the other hand, approaches to this phenomenon coming from theories such as the women’s interpretation by Martha Nussbaum (1999) from a liberal perspective that conceives the women’s liberation within the established society and also, theories of poststructuralism and postmodernism are concentrated in categories such as language or corporeity (Eagleton, 2003) that, although they can be understood under critical perspectives of the Marxist tradition, have generated a displacement of thought towards identity individualism, thus building several approaches to exploitation but that, within the framework of the subjective or identity division, or may only result in aspirations for legal recognition or insolvable disputes within the framework of the existing society. 

Thus, and understanding that “in the fields of political philosophy and social theory […] it is increasingly being noted […] the double failure of Habermasian and post-Habermasian CT to articulate a convincing analysis of the current real-world dynamics of capitalist crisis and social disintegration and to disclose possibilities for political transformation” (Schmid, 2018, p. 199), the return both to the critique of political economy as a transversal factor in the work of Marx in general and critical theory in particular, as well as to the first generation of the Frankfurt School as a theoretical and meta-theoretical paradigm for the analysis of an individual society more ideological and brutal, it is posed as an option whenever 

 “understanding how capitalism has found itself in what even mainstream economists have been calling" secular stagnation "and tracking the options it faces are now major tasks facing those working in the Marxist critique of political economy [...] Today, what Marx called “the bewitched, inverted, and topsy-turvy world” of contemporary capitalism (CIII: 969; translation modified) embraces not simply the economic antagonisms referred to earlier, but also an increasingly toxic politics in which a fast-rising far-right has been exploiting the failure of neoliberalism and left reformism to grab for power. This right represents a literally reactionary response to attempts to alleviate the oppressions on which classical Marxism is widely accused of being silent – gender, race, LGBT+” (Callinicos, Kouvelakis & Pradella, 2020, pp. 560 – 561). 

Returning to the critique of political economy: the concept of the proletariat 

Old and contemporary struggles had shown that the proletariat, the oppressed, discriminated, alienated and silenced could be represented in a wider perspective than the mere concept of the working class. The proletariat is made up of those men and women who, seeking to preserve their life or pursue a better life, must get involved in production processes, and because of it are controlled directly or indirectly by the bourgeoisie. 

Human history, Marx said, 

has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, ruled and ruling classes at different stages of social development; but this struggle has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer free itself from the exploiting and oppressing class (the bourgeoisie) without at the same time the whole of society forever from exploitation) (Marx & Engels, 1977, p. 577) 

In this sense, Marcuse dares to return to the roots of Marxism, understanding that if universal history has been the history of the struggles between the exploited and the exploiters, our contemporaneity offers us the possibility to understand this dialectic of the governed -beherrschten- and the rulers -herrschenden- in the key of dominated and dominant, or oppressed and oppressors, that is, not only between popular classes and elites but also between other forms of domination. 

In addition to the above, Marx outlines that it is the proletariat who, by generating the transition as a class from being a sein-an-sich to a sein-bei-sich, will be called upon to take on the unsolvable contradictions proper to the capitalist system in order to move towards a free social and historical stage, namely socialism. 

In this sense, if socialism must be understood as the radical and blunt opposition to the principle of existing reality if it must be a society where the exploitation of man by man is overcome and must be configured as a higher stage of freedom and human dignity, Thus, I argue that thinking about the identity of the governed in the 20th and 21st century is also thinking about how refusals appeared to be. 

Faced with the temporary impossibility of the proletariat to develop and manifest itself as a truly revolutionary force, and rejecting the forms of domination that either capitalism and the Soviet State developed within the “alternatives”, new groups of people began to appear and organised, but their common demands were not based just on material needs but approached from shores unusual for traditional Marxist thought: national liberations, sexual and racial equality, quality of education or the preservation of nature were some of the demands presented by these new groups in which, in any case, “The emancipation of sensibility [was] the common ground. It engenders a new experience of a world violated by the requirements of the established society, and of the vital need for total transformation” (Marcuse, 1972, p. 129). 

New forms of refusals: the women’s movements 

Thus, in opposition to the different forms of exploitation and domination of the left and the right, and through the notion of feminist socialism, Marcuse (1974) exemplified the need to modify the notion of socialism. This was because, even in Marx's notion of socialism, Marcuse found remnants of the performative principle of capitalist society that, in any case, would lead to new forms of domination: the hope of finding freedom in the development of productive forces through technical-scientific development led to the subordination of humanity to technology. 

Technique, by itself, has the power to promote freedom or authoritarianism, but, in the framework of the Advanced Industrial Society, technological power is economic and political power: the form, type and use of gadgets and technological goods are determined by the large economic emporiums, who, in addition to affecting the rationality that tends towards the freedom of those whom it serves, also reproduce the logic of capital, generating constantly new “needs” and forms of satisfaction. Thus, this new technological rationality “It is by no means confined to the subjects and objects of large scale enterprises but characterizes the pervasive mode of thought and even the manifold forms of protest and rebellion” (Marcuse, 2004, p. 58), which, together with the social, economic and psychological conditions that derive from alienation, decreases the possibility of change and transformation -the alternatives- because the acceptance of this reality seems to be the only reasonable methodological principle as if we were in the kingdom of freedom. 

Critical approaches within Marxism and Feminism have been developed by theorists such as Alexandra Kollontai (1973), Raya Dunayevskaya (1991) (1996), Joan Landes (1988) or Hill-Collins (2002), but their approaches do not focus on the dialectical form of oppression within capitalism: if I could use the Base and Superstructure metaphor in order to outline this approach, I would like to understand that the economic base, the one that is analysed by Marx and Engels, Lenin, David Harvey or Samir Amin, has its own dialectic of oppression that Das Kapital analyses, but, also, on the superstructure, can occur some other types of domination, repression or oppression which are transversal to the domination and repression of the economic base, namely, patriarchal and racist domination. This, of course, does not mean that there is a determination of the economic base the base on the superstructure, since, as Marx and Engels (1968) outlined " It is not that the economic situation is the only active cause and everything else is only a passive effect"(p. 206), but rather" The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure [...] also have an impact on the course of the historical struggles and in many cases mainly determine their form” (Marx & Engels, 1967, p. 463). 

Race oppression and political economy: 
Something similar, but from another perspective, happen with racial struggles within contemporary society. Regarding afro-descendants, for example, Fanon (2008) places, in the first place, the struggle for recognition as a fundamental factor of African and Afro-American emancipation within the framework of the colonization process. However, overcoming the mere notion of recognition, Fanon's dialectic manages to develop to such an extent that he understands that 

all forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same “object”: man. When one tries to examine the structure of this or that form of exploitation from an abstract point of view, one simply turns one’s back on the major, basic problem, which is that of restoring man to his proper place of it (Fanon, 2008, p. 65) 

Thus, economic, political or gender oppression or exploitation could be understood as different forms of exploitation, but as the proletariat exists just in its relationship with the bourgeois, “the Malagasy exists with the European” (Fanon, 2008, p. 72) or, in other words, the oppressed and the oppressors. 

Thus, Fanons Fanon makes it possible to make assimilation between the proletariat and the racial situation between whites and blacks or between colonizers and colonized and, furthermore, allows us to understand, on the one hand, part of the current situation, understanding that "the Negro is a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master. The white man is a master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table" (Fanon, 2008, p. 171); a key element that allows analysing that the (pseudo)non-racist society that society face today, it is only as free as is necessary to be able to make use of the cheap labour-force that certain historically excluded sectors can provide. 

However, Fanon does not develop a vision of a political economy that allows us to understand the role of the black, African and Afro-descendant population in terms of labour and racial exploitation, but he did come to understand how the main character of the capitalist economy is presented in an imperial manner (Amin, Introduction to Fanon). 

On the other hand, in the case of Native Americans, for example, José Carlos Mariátegui clearly analysed how the role of the American Indian of the 20th century and earlier could be understood as the role of the cheap labour peasantry; “The question [about the conditions of the] indigenous starts from our economy. It has its roots in the land property regime” (Mariátegui, 2015, p. 26), Thus, the relationship between the feudal mode of production characteristic of Latin American economies, and the mode of industrial capitalist production typical of European countries and the global north, can be defined as a relationship of obedience - by the mode of feudal production - and domination -by the capitalist mode of production- (Wallerstein, 2004). Thus, Mariátegui departs from the political economy in order to analyse the role of indigenous people in the capitalist system, but he conceives that “the assumption that the indigenous problem is an ethnic problem, is nourished by the oldest repertoire of imperialist ideas [...] To expect indigenous emancipation from an active crossing of the aboriginal race with white immigrants is an anti-sociological naivety” (Mariátegui, 2015, p. 42). 

Thus, nor Mariátegui because of his lack of focus on ethnicity as another dialectical manifestation of exploitation, nor Fanons because of his lack on political economy as the transversal notion of exploitation between ethnicity and labour can be “relevant to the present world-historical conjuncture” (Schmid, 2018, p. 199), but if, on the contrary, we propose a unit under an expanded notion of the concept of dialectics, as outlined by Herbert Marcuse, where on the one hand we find political economy as a distinctive and class factor that allows us to identify a relationship of oppressed and oppressors in the sense of proletariat and bourgeoisie, but, on the other hand, we find a dialectic of whites and non-whites (Quijano, 2014) as a form of oppression within the framework of the present economic system and as one more manifestation of the dialectic between oppressed and oppressors, critical theory can be considered as a theoretical and conceptual tool in force to meet the needs posed by the challenges of contemporary society from a still Marxist perspective. 

References: 

Benjamin, W. (1991). Ein Familiendrama auf dem epischen Theater. Im Walter Benjamin, Band II/2: Aufsätze, Suhrkamp. 

Callinicos, A., Kouvelakis, S., & Pradella, L. (2020). Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism. Routledge. 

Coulthard, G. (2014). Red Skin White Masks. University of Minnesota Press 

Dunayevskaya, R. (1991). Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution. University of Illinois Press. 

Dunayevskaya, R. (1996). Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future. Wayne State University Press. 

Eagleton, T. (2003). The Illusions of postmodernism. Blackwell Publishing. 

Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin white masks. Pluto Press. 

Hill Collins, P. (2002). Black Feminist thought. Routledge. 

Kollontai, A. (1973). Women Workers Struggle for their Rights. Falling Wall Press. 

Landes, J. (1988). Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Cornell University Press. 

Marcuse, H. (1974). Marxism and Feminism. Women’s Studies, 2(3), 279–288. 

Marcuse, H. (2001). Collected Papers Volume II: Towards a Critical Theory Theory of Society. Routledge. 

Marcuse, H. (2004). Collected Papers Volume I: Technology, war and Fascism. New York: Routledge. 

Mariátegui, J. C., (2015), 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Ayacucho, Venezuela, Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho 

Marx, K. y Engels, F. (1967) Marx und Engels Werke Band 37. Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin. 

Marx, K. y Engels, F. (1968) Marx und Engels Werke Band 39. Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin. 

Marx, K. y Engels, F. (1977) Marx und Engels Werke Band 4. Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin. 

Nussbaum, M. (1999). Sex & Social Justice. Oxford University Press. 

Quijano, A. (2014). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. Buenos Aires: Clacso. 

Schmid, D. (2018). The poverty of Critical Theory in International Relations: Habermas, Linklater and the failings of cosmopolitan critique. European Journal of International Relations, 24(1), 198–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117692654 

Wallerstein, I., (2004),   World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke University Press