Lanchester, “Marx at 193,” London Review of Books vol. 34, no. 7 (April 5, 2012) →.
Alastair Fowler, “Mode and Subgenre,” chap. 7 in Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
I must reference Kojin Karatani’s essential Transcritique, which I encountered for the first time in the middle of this writing. Karatani’s point that “surplus value … comes from the difference of value systems in the circulation process … and yet this difference is created by technological innovation in the production process,” is similar to my own. The fine details of the distinction need not concern us here—it’s more important to indicate a shared debt to Kozo Uno. See Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 11.
Some posit only three, with consumption belonging to circulation. My preference for four, rearticulated as production, representation, reproduction, and distribution, reflects a desire to create a framework capable of recording more variations in the class struggle than has been possible hitherto.
Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 39.
It may be best today to substitute “reproduction” for “consumption” and “representation” for “circulation.”
Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2 (New York: Verso, 2013).
Ibid., 17–18. Originally in Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 89.
Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2, 23. Emphasis in original.
Quoted in ibid., 23. Originally in Marx, Grundrisse, 99. Emphasis in Marx’s original.
Two particularly pregnant examples would be Foucault's attempt to distinguish between the productive and juridical modes of power in his History of Sexuality; and Derrida's identification of 'the concept of production' as the reason for his distance from Marxism in his interview with Michael Sprinker included in The Althusserian Legacy.
I use 'alchemy' to signify the alchemist's contradictory desire to discover new technology for producing value, on the one hand, and then to restrict the dissemination of this technology on the other. To wit: if it really were possible to fashion gold from lead, than the demand for gold motivating the search for such a method would collapse with the resulting explosion in supply. Hence the alchemist wants to discover how to make gold, but maintain the scarcity that gives that discovery its value. This is the contradiction at the center of Marx's 'production of surplus value' insofar as it is the ultimate impossibility of restricting the dissemination of productive technology that leaves accumulators no choice but to exploit the sellers of labor-power in order to triumph in a competitive marketplace. Of course history unspools as a series of exceptions to this alchemical tendency intended to relocate or mitigate its destabilizing effects, much in the same way that the history of gravity is a history of exceptions to the speed of a falling object on account of the wind, or the presence of feathers, etc. etc.
The fascist Mircea Eliade's book, The Forge and the Crucible, is useful on the contradictions at work in the alchemical imagination.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 32, 36. I have left out Erik Olin Wright’s similar accounting in Classes (p. 9), which also privileges mode of production in the overdetermined way.
Anyone familiar with the origins of the term 'economic' in the Greek word for household, oikos, will be surprised to see it merge with 'the mode of production' a term which emerged precisely at that point when production leaves home, so to speak, as what were formerly cottage industries take up residence in the factory. Anyone familiar with the vexed history of socialist feminism in getting a hearing for these issues will perhaps be less so.
Jameson, in fairness, is representing Althusser accurately, as the latter is unable to separate Marx's notion of production - which has its origins in a struggle against the Hegelian fondness for pure spirit, on the one hand, and a second struggle, against the anarchist fascination for 'pure commercial exchange' on the other - from Althusser's own, which has its origins in the rationalist tradition of the French philosophy of science, in particular Bachelard and Canguilhem. Anti-spritualist and anti-commercialist 'production' cannot be easily reconciled with 'production' as a concept in the scientific sense that 'reflex' is a concept. The role of Hegelian-style negation in forming the former inhibits the clarity appropriate to the latter. Hence Althusser's immediate relapse, having identified the significance of production in For Marx, into a derivative, tripartite structure of economic/political/cultural more appropriate to Locke. On this last point see Kosseleck, Critique and Crisis; on Althusser's debt to Bachelard et al, see Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology; on Marx's remaining trapped within his fight with anarchists and Hegelians, a fate with which we can all identify, see J.E. King, "Value and Exploitation: Some Recent Debates" in Classical and Marxian Political Economy: Essays in Honor of Ronald L Meek and the conclusion to Samuel Hollander's The Economics of Karl Marx
I borrow the term ‘representationalism’ from the philosophy of science. See, in particular, Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening from 1983 and more importantly its discussion in Karan Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, from 2007.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 94.
Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 16.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 8.
Streeck, Re-Forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 230–272.
Ibid., 230. Emphasis in original.
Ibid., 232.
Typically represented by Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer, Bob Jessob, and Alain Lipietz.
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85–126.
Alain Lipietz: “A regime of accumulation describes the fairly long-term stabilization of the allocation of social production between consumption and accumulation.” Mirages and Miracles: The Crises of Global Fordism, trans. David Macey (London: Verso), 1987, 20.
Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979).
Lipietz: “The set of internalized rules and social procedures which incorporate social elements into individual behavior is referred to as a mode of regulation. Thus, the dominant regime of accumulation in the OECD countries during the postwar period—an intensive regime centered upon mass consumption—has a very different mode of regulation to that operating in nineteenth-century capitalism … we now refer to it as Fordism.” Mirages and Miracles, 21.
Ibid., 19.
Wendy Brown, “At the Edge: The Future of Political Theory,” in Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (New York: Princeton University Press, 2005), 68.
Fred Block, “Varieties of What? Should We Still Be Using the Concept of Capitalism?” in Political Power and Social Theory, vol. 23, ed. Julian Go (Bingley, UK: Emerald Books, 2012), 269–291.
Ibid., 278. Recall Harvey’s point about the two meanings of “production” in Marx, cited above.
Ibid., 276.
Ibid., 278.
Ibid., 280.
These four concepts come from Streeck and Kathleen Thelan, “Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,” in Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, eds. Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–39.
Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Sewell, “The Temporalities of Capitalism,” Socio-Economic Review vol. 6, no. 3 (2008): 517–37.
Ibid., 535.
This term appeared no less than fourteen times in Perry Anderson’s recent article on American politics—a repetition most worthy of analysis. See Anderson, “Homeland,” New Left Review 81 (May–June 2013), 5–32 →.
Formerly “consumption.”
I take this opportunity to thank Peter Hall, Kathleen Thelan, and Martha Rosler for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this text. None of them are in any way responsible for any errors, misrepresentations, and distortions.