Variations on Time: Reading Paolo Virno Reading Ernst Bloch

We live in an age dominated by money. As capitalism has intensified and expanded as a social form, money has increasingly colonised the production and reproduction of the human condition. We live in an age of monetarism: an age in which social and political regulation are increasingly subordinate to the dictates of ‘sound money'. We live in an age of national lotteries: an age where millions attempt each week to garner enough money to ‘free’ themselves from the grinding agony of wage labour. We live in an age in which people increasingly grasp the alienation inherent in the domination of society by money and attempt to reassert a sense of human community through the introduction of local currency and barter schemes. But we also live in an age where Marxism is supposedly dead; where we can only gaze in ironic postmodern wonder at the increasing domination of the human condition by money and its social forms. In this paper we go beyond this postmodern orthodoxy to suggest that it is not only possible to develop a historically materialist analysis of money and its social forms but also that this project is essential if we are to reclaim our humanity from the deadening alienation of money and its social forms. We explore the magical qualities of money, the qualities which have enthralled and transfixed bourgeois social science from the classical economy of Adam Smith to the present day postmodernists. We argue that the lasting legacy of Marx was to uncover the historical materiality underlying the magical appearance of money: a discovery of the alchemic properties of money capital through which money becomes more money and which involves the material subordination of living labour to the valorisation of money capital.

An increasing number of anthropologists have come to conceive the discipline [anthropology] as that part of historical materialism which is concerned with the construction of the different modes of production required to produce the knowledge of the ‘primitive’ social formation (Llobera, 1974, p. 23). This statement is not open to dispute. Whether all anthropologists agree with this ‘trend’ or would want to be associated with it is quite another matter, and one which I do not intend commenting upon here. Neither do I intend discussing the tendencies and general state of affairs within the discipline itself that have led to the renewed interest in Marx’s work over the last few years,1 except to point out that this ‘revival’, as far as British anthropology is concerned, has been influenced directly by the recent tendencies in French anthropology. There, the work of Louis Althusser, which showed that Marxism was relevant to societies other than those dominated by the capitalist mode of production, stimulated such anthropologists as Meillassoux, Terray, Rey, and others, in their attempts to apply the general concepts of historical materialism to ‘primitive’ societies, while others, such as Maurice Godelier, moved in a closely related direction by combining Marxism with the other main influence in French anthropology, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

In this article-the first of two-I reconsider Marx's dialectical method through the problem of systems and circularity, intervening in a twentieth-century impasse between technocratic systems theory and anti-systemic fragmentation.As I'll argue, the stakes remain pertinent.Attempts to theorize social systems have tended to oscillate between closed, equilibrium-oriented models that treat society as a self-regulating whole open to expert management and relativist or anti-totalizing approaches that dissolve structure into local interactions, contingency, or plural standpoints.Despite their opposition, both neutralize the problem of historical transformation by foreclosing a concept of totality as internally contradictory.Against a theory of static structure or linear causality, I reconstruct Marx's critique of political economy as a science of dynamic social forms.Following Marx's movement from the abstract to the concrete, I argue that capitalism is a historically-specific, self-reproducing totality whose coherence depends on antagonism rather than equilibrium.Circularity here isn't mere closure but the medium through which contradictions are generated, displaced, and intensified.The wage-form is the decisive hinge: it unifies circulation and production while inverting appearance and realityequality and exploitation-thereby producing the fetishized forms through which capital appears self-moving.By tracing these inversions, I show how Marx turns circular feedback from a figure of stasis into a lever of critique and practice.The result is a Marxist conception of totality, and a materialist conception of history, in which social forms persist only by being reproduced through conflictual transformation.Part One establishes this epistemology of dynamic form; Part Two shows how the same oscillation reappears within Western Marxism-partly as a symptom of the same historical pressures that also shaped cybernetics-and argues that dialectical materialism provides resources for overcoming these impasses while further developing Marx's metamorphology of social forms.

This paper attempts a critical examination of Kwame Nkrumah’s views that materialism as a form of socialism can be a panacea for the liberation of Africa from neo-colonialism. To this effect the paper scrutinizes Nkrumah’s rejection of Idealism in favour of materialism. Materialism, he argues, naturally promotes egalitarianism-a view critically looked at. It proceeds to analyze Nkrumah’s distinctive conception of materialism as a tool to fight against the vices of Western religion and politics, which constitute forms of neo-colonialism on the continent.

Reviewed by: Feng Youlan and Twentieth Century China. An Intellectual Biography by Xiaoqing Diana Lin Carine Defoort (bio) Xiaoqing Diana Lin. Feng Youlan and Twentieth Century China. An Intellectual Biography. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016. xii, 244 pp. Hardcover $135.00, isbn 978-90-04-30129-0. This monograph is a detailed intellectual biography of Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-lan) 冯友兰 (1895-1990), whom Diana Lin rightly identifies as "one of the preeminent Chinese philosophers of the 20th century" (p. 1). As Lin points out, his academic influence was not limited to China: his "early two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy was translated into English in 1948 by the eminent Sinologist Derk Bodde; its influence on the study of Chinese thought in the West was unmatched for decades" (p. 1).1 Indeed, when I started studying Chinese philosophy in the 1980s this was one of the few and almost omnipresent books on Chinese philosophy, not only in Sinology, but also at [End Page 72] Philosophy departments. Despite its enormous contribution in making Chinese thought known in the West, its success also had a serious drawback: it was soon taken as the uninspiring, established account of Chinese philosophy, one that was moreover strikingly un-Chinese. During the second part of the twentieth century, scholars were often disappointed in their search for an "authentic" understanding of Chinese philosophy in Feng's work. As Bryan Van Norden points out, "[I]n reality, Fung is one of the most Western-centric readers of Chinese thought."2 I also belonged to the generation of scholars who either neglected Feng Youlan's interpretations or chided him for presenting an uninspiring variant of unquestioned Western philosophy. In a switch from philosophy to intellectual history, this monograph shows how scholars have outgrown this critical stage and have cultivated a mature interest in the complexities of Feng's views. Due to the political turbulences since the Republican era, the psychological traumas of its intellectuals, and Feng's own choices during a near century-long life, this biography captures well the vicissitudes of twentieth-century Chinese politics. Many academic studies have been dedicated to both Feng Youlan and China's recent intellectual history,3 but this monograph is particular in its combined analysis of changing philosophical stances, political waves, and concrete events in Feng's life. Lin concludes by distinguishing two major philosophical frameworks in Feng's reflections on Chinese philosophy: in the 1930s he created a "philosophy in China," using Western notions such as intuition and logic to construe a cosmology-ontology for a world in flux; in the 1980s he attempted a restoration of "Chinese philosophy" in terms of correlative thinking to explain the interactions among humans and with nature (pp. 183-184). Her monograph, however, distinguishes between five periods corresponding with the five chapters that constitute its backbone. The first chapter shows how the young Feng (roughly from 1920s till 1934) is initially inspired by philosophers such as William James (1842-1910) and Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) to make Chinese thought well structured and compatible with Western metaphysics. The second chapter mostly treats the six major works (written from 1938 to 1946) in which Feng builds his own metaphysical system influenced by New Realism and mathematical logic. In chapter 3, Feng turns toward Dialectical and Historical Materialism (roughly between the 1930s and the 1950s) and strengthens his focus on experience, social formation, and universal truth rooted in reality while sustaining mental space to reflect on China's "abstract inheritance." This intellectual luxury is threatened in the fourth period when social contextualization and class provenance dominates all philosophical analyses (roughly in the 1960s and 1970s). The fifth and final chapter introduces Feng's second major philosophical framework, namely that of "Chinese philosophy," when he rewrites his overview into a seven-volume New [End Page 73] History (1980-1990) combining materialism with humanism, historicism, and a stress on the Confucian notion of sincerity. The materialist inspiration lingers in Feng's attention for the political context of Chinese masters. A similar attention inspired Lin's own understanding of Feng Youlan explaining his meandering thoughts throughout the turbulent twentieth century. What makes this biography fascinating is that it describes many more...

Cultural evolutionism and historical materialism are two fundamentally divergent theories of evolution. The nonrecognition by cultural evolutionists of Marx's distinction between “social formation” and “mode of production” has led them to interpret his thesis of the determination of superstructures by economic base as “techno‐economic change begets new levels of general evolution.” In fact, Marx's actual thesis was aimed at explaining the interrelationships between superstructures and economy within a previously established mode of production. As a consequence, Marx's analysis of how a new mode is “given” has been consistently ignored. Marx poses the problem of the origins of capitalism, not in terms of economic determinism, much less technological fatalism, but in terms of chance and necessity. In this paper, I attempt to draw the theoretical implications of such an approach in respect to general cultural evolution. [Marxism and cultural evolutionism; mode of production; economic determinism criticized; capitalism, rise of; cultural evolution, chance in]

Queer Critique and Federal Indian Policy J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (bio) When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. By Mark Rifkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 440 pages. $99.00 (cloth). $35.00 (paper). Many American studies scholars are familiar with the landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), which held that private citizens could not purchase lands from Native Americans. The case is the first in what has come to be known as the “Marshall Trilogy,” named after Chief Justice John Marshall, which also includes Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia. The trio is a staple in nearly every case relating to the question of tribal nations’ exercise of self-determination. In McIntosh, the court laid out the foundations of the “doctrine of discovery,” which created the concept of “aboriginal title” to land but denied Indian tribes the same rights to land as the European colonizers because under the Law of Nations based on this doctrine, Indians are “an inferior race of savages.” As Native legal scholars have pointed out, the court perpetuated a racist judicial language of Indian savagery to define Indian rights.1 And, as McIntosh remains authoritative precedent in contemporary case law, the language of racial inferiority still undergirds U.S. federal Indian policy that undermines Native sovereignty. For some, it may at first seem surprising to relate this legal history with the history of sexuality, but Mark Rifkin’s brilliant new book makes the connection utterly persuasively. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty, Rifkin’s second monograph, explores the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of normality and shifting forms of Native peoples’ governance and self-representation. In the title of the book, he asks the question “when did Indians become straight?” to suggest that “straight is something that native peoples might be (forced to) become,” which “opens the possibility that they may have been, and still may be, something else” (313). The book deals with the topic through a literary lens focused on historical materiality, not fixated on literary form. Rifkin, a non-Native scholar, [End Page 163] examines a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, and anthropological debates) to produce an interdisciplinary cultural and literary history that shows both how Euro-American discourses of sexuality have included Native peoples in ways that degrade indigenous social formations and how Native intellectuals have written back to reaffirm their peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination. Rifkin’s book features Native writers in several different periods whose interventions have insisted on the “coherence and persistence of native polities by examining the ways traditions of residency and social formations that can be described as kinship give shape to particular modes of governance and land tenure” (8). However, he does not offer kinship systems as a privileged model of contemporary sovereignty; instead, he marks how the enclosure of Native peoples into what he terms “Euramerican discourses of sexuality” provides a central matrix through which the sphere of politics is defined. He asserts that this “kind of queer analysis that extends beyond discussion of the policing homoeroticism and gender expression, then, can aid in developing an immanent critique of the dimensions and effects of imperial superintendence, foregrounding the role of discourses of sexuality in U.S. regulation of what will count as native governance, as well as the related self-censuring that can guide native representations of tradition and sovereignty” (25). In grappling with the questions of sexual and gender expression as he addresses the use of the discourse of tradition, he identifies and theorizes how Native peoples reckoned with what he theorizes as “the bribe of straightness,” a dynamic that “includes arguing for the validity of indigenous kinship systems (Native family formations, homemaking, and land tenure) in ways that make them more acceptable/respectable to whites, disavowing the presence of sexual and gender practices deemed perverse within Euramerican sexology” (23). He explains that “in this way, the circulation of practices and principles as tradition can engage in processes of (hetero)normalization even as it may challenge other historic...

ditions and behavior. Culture, accordingly, is anz historico-psychological product. So, also, is every tradition, every custom, and every institution. There is no need, therefore, of any conflict between the historical and functional methods of studying culture. Both are necessary if there is to be any scientific understanding. On the other hand, the methods of experiment and of exact measurement employed in the natural sciences give little promise in the study of cultural development. Anyone who thoroughly understands the relativity of all cultural and social forms to processes of learning and environmental conditions would hardly argue that quantitative measurements can do much more in the study of culture than help us to determine tendencies of various phases of culture at a given time and place. However, many things in human life can be studied only as tendencies. We can record facts here and there, over perhaps long periods of time, and thus get the direction of movements, even though we cannot observe their beginnings or their ends. This study of trends, or tendenvcies, in culture is surely a legitimate study in both cultural anthropology and in sociology and constitutes one of the most interesting phases of those sciences; for the development of the culture of any human group will largely determine the direction of its social evolution. The development of culture is, accordingly, not only the differential trait of human society; but as it is the human phase of social evolution, it is the controlling factor in the development and in most of the behavior of human groups. On the practical side, moreover, the social sciences as sciences of social adjustment will no longer study human society as if it were a machine of the gods which we can only describe but not control. For if social forms and institutions have been made by culture, they have been made by man, and the human sciences will show how they can be modified by man to human advantage.

Introduction. One of the integral components of human economic life is economic accounting – a system of creating information about economic activity, which proves the history and genesis of the accounting science development. The study of theoretical and methodological approaches to the functioning of accounting in the past and the assessment of current practices through the prism of the transformation of the social system will predict the development of accounting science and practice in the future.Goal. To identify the impact of economic and social transformations of mankind on the development of accounting as a science and practice. To analyse the historical transformations of the reflection of production and accounting processes in society, to define the concept of «accounting» not only as a phenomenon, but also to understand its deep essence, to identify trends in the development of accounting activities.Research methods.The main research methods were general scientific empirical, logical and historical methods of cognition of socio-economic processes, historical and monographic analysis, logical method, methods of comparison and extrapolation, as well as methods of grouping, generalization and classification, systemic and structural approaches. Collectively, the research methods used allowed to draw reliable conclusions and recommendations. Results. The dependence of the development of accounting practice and methodology on social formations, economic transformations and user needs is proved. There are three stages of change in accounting theory, which are characterized by «accounting revolutions» by analogy with the industrial and scientific revolutions. The genesis of the development of post-industrial society allowed us to conclude that in the middle of the twentieth century. the basic methodological principles of the new formation system are formed, different from the traditional industrialism, which are accompanied by a qualitative change in the place of theoretical knowledge and information in society and economic life. Based on the analysis of trends in the development of accounting knowledge, a forecast of its development in post-industrial society is made.Perspectives. We see the prospects for the development of accounting science and methodology in its reorientation to the internal needs of enterprise management, which requires a creative and innovative approach to creating information resources, obtaining management information and forecasting.

This essay proposes to abandon the architectural metaphor of base/superstructure that has come to inform historical materialism since Marx and reconstruct a Marxian theory of social formation around the notion of ‘exchange’ (Verkher). With different degrees of dominance, different historical social formations are composed of four modes of exchange (reciprocity/gift exchange, redistribution/plunder, commodity exchange, and X) and their corresponding institutional forms. A discussion of the capital-nation-state as a particularly modern form of articulation of commodity exchange, reciprocity, and redistribution is followed by a proposal for a world republic as a regulative idea.

The Althusserian project of rigorous problematisation and reconstruction of some of the most basic concepts and propositions of historical materialism was bound to have enormously wide-ranging implications. In fields of debate where Marxist positions were already well established, in conflict both among themselves and against rival theories, the impact of structural Marxism was to undermine the established terms of debate, to pose new questions, and to re-shape the pattern of alliance and opposition between the established traditions: anthropology, the sociologies of development and underdevelopment, the debate over the nature of the Soviet Union and the other societies of Eastern Europe, theories of the state and the class structure of the advanced capitalist societies, and a number of other fields of enquiry were all affected in this way.

In the chapter on the object of historical materialism, we indicated that a mode of production exists as a double combination of invariant elements, and that this combination determines which of the practices will be determinant in the last instance in the social formation, in which this mode is articulated. Consequently, the solution to the problem we posed in the last chapter would seem to be relatively simple.

Nowadays, social activities in the real world (e.g., meetings, discussions, parties) are more and more popular and important to human life. As the number of contacts increases, the implicit social graph becomes increasingly complex, leading to a high cost on social activity organization and activity group formation. In order to promote the interaction among people and improve the efficiency of social activity organization, we propose a mobile social activity support system called GroupMe, which facilitates the activity group initiation based on mobile sensing and social graph mining. In GroupMe, user activities are automatically sensed and logged in the social activity logging (ACL) repository. By analyzing the historical ACL data through a series of group mining (group extraction, group abstraction) algorithms, we obtain implicit logical contact groups. We then use the sensed contexts and the computed user affinity to her logical groups to suggest highly relevant groups in social activity initiation. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The article summarizes, expands and substantiates scientific knowledge about legal transformation as a component of modern legal development. The problems of transformations are understood by scientists of various directions and branches of social knowledge, primarily philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, economists and lawyers, since historical progress is directly determined by the ideas of democracy, freedom, free market, law and statehood. The points of view available in the specialized literature regarding the understanding of social transformation, its types, forms, trends and factors are analyzed. Social transformation covers the entire sphere of relations and interests (needs) in society, is the basis of the material and ideological structure on which both theory and practice of human life are based. Social transformation means the process of transformations in society, in particular in the cultural, political, economic and legal spheres. Qualitative and quantitative indicators of these transformations depend on many reasons and factors – internal and external, purposeful and spontaneous, objective and subjective, etc. Based on the study and systematization of transformational issues in legal science, the essence of legal transformation is revealed, under which it is proposed to understand qualitative and quantitative, substantive and formal, progressive and regressive, rational and irrational, regular, random and tendentious transformations of legal matter, legal life,legal reality, legal phenomena and processes under the action, influence, in the context, in the conditions of internal and external, purposeful and spontaneous, objective and subjective causes and factors (globalization, European integration, digitalization, sustainable development, etc.). The prerequisites for determining the common, distinctive and special features of legal transformation and legal reform within the framework of the development of the theory of the latter are outlined. Legal transformation is a component (component) of legal development along with such legal changes as formation, functioning, destruction, and is also carried out in the form of legal evolution, legal revolution, and legal reform. Turning to transformational (transformative) processes in legal reality is intended to continue the scientific search for an optimal, effective model of legal development, initiated by domestic scientists, in fundamentally new realities – in the conditions of war and post-war state reconstruction. Key words: development, social development, legal development, changes, social changes, legal changes, transformation, social transformation, legal transformation, transformation of legislation, transformation of the legal system, reform, social reform, legal reform, theory of legal reform.

This chapter analyses capitalist globalization and develops an historical materialist analysis of the transnationalization of the state. It argues that the nation-state is an historically specific form of world social organization that is in the process of becoming transcended by capitalist globalization. The chapter distinguishes analytically between a number of related terms: nation, country, nation-state, state, national state, and transnational state. Historical materialism is emancipatory precisely because it allows to cut through the reification that results from naturalizing historical arrangements and reveals the historical specificity of existing social forms. The supra-national organizations function in consonance with transformed national states. They are staffed by transnational functionaries that find their counterparts in transnational functionaries who staff transformed national states. These transnational state cadres act as midwives of capitalist globalization. Under capitalist globalization, the linkage between securing labour and territoriality is changing, and national labour pools are merging into a single global labour pool that services global capitalism.