Political Theory

H04(b) - Marx and beyond

Date: Jun 2 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Laticia Chapman (University of Alberta)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Caleb J. Basnett (Mount Allison University)

Coercion and Capacity in the Social Monastery: William Tilleczek (Université de Montréal)
Abstract: This paper offers a new reading of Foucault's Discipline and Punish for the sake of two main interventions. (1) To show the presence of Marx's theory of alienation in Foucault's thought, so often considered radically anti-marxist. (2) To use this theory of alienation – combined with the notion of ‘ascesis’ (training) prominent in Foucault’s final works – to insert Foucault's thinking about discipline into a general narrative about freedom, power, and practices of the self today. I argue that the problem diagnosed by Foucault is not discipline as such but rather the alienating political framework in which contemporary disciplinary procedures are caught up. In itself, discipline is a mode of ascesis: the strict application of certain rules, the obedience to which allows the subject to gain new capacities and overcome previous limits. In this sense, discipline is not anathema to but rather constitutive of freedom, both political and ethical. Thus, the normative thrust of Foucault’s work is not to be rid of discipline but rather to critique the political structures that tie our disciplines and their attendant generation of capacities to the dispossession of these same capacities (as occurs in factories, for example). Or, as Foucault would once put the question: “how to disconnect the increase of capacities and the intensification of relations of power?” This approach will help us to rethink the abundance of self-disciplinary practices today and ask questions about their place in the generation of – or alienation of – freedoms and capacities in the neoliberal world. I conclude by putting Foucault into conversation with MK Gandhi and Simone Weil on the question of discipline and/in activism.

A Critique of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program: Stefanos Kourkoulakos (University West)
Abstract: Several options for addressing the scarcity, non-systematic, and fragmentary nature of Marx’s writings on communism have existed. Among the prevailing and respected ones has been the elevation to nearly canonical status of his Critique of the Gotha Program, a rather poorly drafted and inherently flawed short text tightly-bounded to narrow conjunctural circumstances. Mining the Critique with its apparently promising dictum, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, for guidance and resources towards communism constitutes a disservice and an obstacle to any notion of communism as a genuinely democratic alternative to capitalism. The obstacle cannot be removed without a thorough and cogent critical assessment of the Critique. Such is my task herein. I pursue it by posing the following overarching question: How communist is Marx’s communism in the Critique of the Gotha Program, and how well is it grounded? I argue that Marx’s conception of communism in the Critique is beset by serious problems: i) it is deeply rooted in capitalism as its necessary precondition, source, and foundation; ii) its conceived structure and economic mechanisms are closely modelled on capitalism, either as its mirror images or inverted mirror-images; iii) amplifies and universalizes a distinctly capitalist viewpoint; iv) falls into self-contradiction by turning out to be the opposite of what it professes to be, namely, a speculative and utopian perspective on communism, rather than a scientific one; v) its notion of scientificity is a non sequitur.

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as Marxian Praxis: Class Struggle, Fetishism, and the Critique of Capitalist Domination: Nicolas Gauvin (UQAM)
Abstract: Adorno is often portrayed as a cultural theorist detached from questions of class and political economy. Perry Anderson, among others, has argued that Adorno’s supposed indifference toward Marx’s critique of capitalism marks a decisive rupture with the Marxist tradition (Anderson: 1976). Drawing on recent scholarship and a close textual analysis of Negative Dialectics, this paper challenges that assumption. I argue that Adorno was, in fact, a committed Marxist who placed at the centre of his philosophy the key categories of marxist political economy, particularly those of fetishism and exchange (Braunstein: 2022, Chanson : 2023). While he rejected, following Lukács, the notion of the proletariat as the subject-object of history, class struggle nonetheless remained fundamental to his critical theory (Bonefield & O’Kane : 2022). My first aim is to show that Negative Dialectics should be understood not as an abstract method of immanent critique, but as a form of praxis grounded in the antagonisms of capitalist society (Adorno : 1966). The second aim is to contrast Adorno with the so-called “thinkers of difference” (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida) who often share his critique of identity but eschew the dialectical and socio-economic grounding of his thought (Cook: 2011, Dew: 2007). Unlike them, Adorno does not merely affirm difference through resistance; he envisions the possibility of overcoming domination itself. In this sense, the utopian anticipation that permeates his work retains a determinate social horizon: the abolition of capitalist oppression. For Adorno, the outlines of this emancipated world are not purely speculative. They emerge within the very struggles of the oppressed class confronting it.

Wilhelm Reich and Karl Marx: The Politics of Sexual Liberation: Jeremi Dolecki (Northwestern University)
Abstract: In this paper, I argue for the revival of Wilhelm Reich’s Freudo-Marxist political theory by critically situating it within a broader canon of Karl Marx’s materialist tradition. Reich, a radical Austrian psychoanalyst, produced influential writings on the rise of fascism in the 1930's and 1940;s. While Marx placed the emphasis on the exploitation of labor and the ideological effects of commodity fetishism, Reich built on that critique by linking the origins of a personality that is submissive to authority to sexual repression and authoritarian attitudes in the nuclear family. Throughout the paper, I highlight areas where Reich agreed with Marx and where he departed from his thinking. Drawing on Reich’s Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism, the paper reconstructs his argument that sexual modulation and character formation function as the corporeal basis of class rule. I argue that Reich’s notion of “character-armor” constitutes a radical supplementation of Marx’s conceptual toolkit, rendering internalized domination as a biological force, thereby relocating the terrain of political struggle into the body. In conclusion, the paper situates Reich as a forerunner of biopolitical thought, whose insights on the intersection of desire, repression, and social structure anticipate later work in critical theory and feminist philosophy.