Jeanne Schuler

Western Marxism's Dialectic of Defeat:

Western Marxism can no longer be called ’the unknown dimension’ of Marxism. Under that title in 1972, Dick Howard and Karl Klare’s study uncovered the ancestors of the New Left by tracing the current of critical Marxism back to the failed European revolutions after World War I. Historical awareness deepened with a stream of scholarly translations and studies of individual thinkers and schools. Gramsci, Lukacs, Korsch, Horkheimer and Adorno moved in from the theoretical periphery as their work became more widely known. Their ideas provided an alternative tradition to the stale orthodoxy promulgated by the Soviets and their sympathizers. Though retrospective in mood, this research is not separable from the defeat of New Left movements and the subsequent need to examine the prospects for radical change within industrialized societies. As in 1922, political defeat was followed by a burst of theorizing. If the texts and journals of the sixties and seventies did not rival Histoiy and Class Conscious-

Social Form and the ‘Purely Social’: On the Kind of Sociality Involved in Value

“Social Form and the ‘Purely Social’: Toward a better Understanding of Value and the Value-Form” wonders what sort of sociality is involved in societies where wealth is produced on a capitalist basis and where wealth takes the social form of the commodity. This question is explored with special reference to what Marx calls the value-form, that is, to his claim that value must be expressed in exchange-value, more particularly, in the (antagonistic) polarized relationship between commodity and money, the universal equivalent.