Abstract: Maxime Ouellet This article consists of a reflection on the nature of technique in the writings of Marx. First, the manner in which Marx raises the question of technique from his ontology of the auto-production of species being will be presented. From there on the Marxist critique of the machine is analyzed according to its ontology of auto-production. The analysis of the machine proposed by Marx in chapter XIII of Capital allows a critical return to the now famous passage from the Grundrisse, commonly designated as a “fragment on machines” and mobilized by numerous contemporary post-capitalist theorists such as the cognitivists and accelerationists. Against their productivist vision, the aim will be to advance a reading that would allow the overcoming of the aporias resulting from the unilateral analyses of technological development under capitalism, be they progressive or romantic.
Abstract: Émilie Bernier This text proposes a reflection on the present relevance of Marx’s confidence in the movement of industrialization. The author analyzes the specific modes of capitalist value production within post-Fordist societies and depicts an intensification of exploitation as it is increasingly based on cognitive, communicational and affective processes, according to a pattern she calls the “pornographic paradigm”. Far from hindering resistance and critique, such a model portrays capitalism as a structure of relations; “biopsychic” matter as the object of domination is here one that, by definition, resists. Hence, the author defends the hypothesis that living processes have certain plastic and creative faculties leading us to envision that the continuation and development of the industrial process anticipated by Marx will reverse into idleness. In other words, productive power may yield to compositional dynamics in which its very development escapes valorization altogether.
Abstract: Éric N. Duhaime This article aims to problematize the issues linked to the increasingly central role played by science and technology in the economy. Developing our reflection from the works of Marx, we first seek to account for the concepts of formal and real subsumption developed in his day. Keeping in mind the transition of industrial capitalism to its advanced form, we then propose the concept of the virtual subsumption of social practice to capital in order to problematize the issues tied to a new monopolistic strategy put in place by large corporations in the middle of the 20th century bringing together marketing and R&D: the production and commercialization of patented inventions. The result is control over the determination of objects of future use that will take place in our societies, which precisely refers to the concept of virtual subsumption of social practice to capital.
Abstract: Pascale Bédard How might we conceive of art as an objective reality and a practice of creation, but also as a commodity, or counter-commodity' This paper takes Marx’s critique of the commodity as its starting point in order to examine the social, cultural and economic functioning of art today. It argues that the work of art has a complex and nuanced relationship with the world of the market with important consequences for the social integration of artistic labour. The principal concern in the articulation between art and the commodity form remains the question of labour, more specifically the labour of the artist himself, who seeks to make a living while maintaining a practice founded in another order of finality. In the context of contemporary capitalism, where authenticity and creativity are highly valued, artistic labour cannot be understood without questioning the notion of vocation and its social use. In that sense, questions concerning productive labour, free labour, exploitation, and fetishism can also serve to renew sociological reflections on the practice of art today.
Abstract: François L’Italien The critical theory of capital proposed by Marx in his eponymous work contains conceptual materials that can account for the formation and characteristics of a new mode of regulation of practice succeeding that which animated the political institutions of the modern world. Springing from analyses advanced in section IV of Capital concerning the typical forms of the capitalist organization, the present article argues that they can be read as a sociological contribution to the critical theorizing of the contemporary system of domination, characterized by the deployment of control mechanisms which tend to be devoid of any reflexivity or substantive aim. It is nevertheless in the mirror of a critical rereading of the Hegelian philosophy of the State that such a contribution can be fully appreciated, since it recoups within it the fundamental sociological and philosophical motive through which organizational logic, as the self-development of an objective rational principle subordinating particular practices to a totality of universal reach, is seized.
Abstract: Gilles Labelle Marx’s doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, presented and defended in 1841 at Jena, is one of his least discussed writings. When this is the case, it is often made out as a mere “moment” of his philosophical journey, as if the initial intuitions of “ancient materialism” (the triad Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius) were the distant starting point of “historical and dialectical materialism”, after having passed through the “bourgeois materialism” of the 18th century. Contrary to these readings, we will attempt here what Miguel Abensour designates as an operation of “freeing the text”, above all requiring that the thesis be read for itself, that is to say without immediately reducing it to the starting point of a course inevitable leading toward an end point more or less devoid of any mystery. In doing so, it appears that Marx, far from making Epicurus out as a “materialist”, rather makes him a thinker of “self-consciousness”, or more precisely of what Marx designates as an “abstract singularity”, to which he opposes a “concrete singularity”. Such an opposition between abstraction and concreteness allow us to understand how, as indicated in an 1857 letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx’s thesis had for him a political sense rather than simply a philosophical one in the strict sense.
Abstract: Jean-François Filion Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written in 1843 by a twenty-five-year-old Karl Marx, turns out to be a crucial work in the history of thought, whose theoretical and practically importance remains to this day. Since Marx assumes a form of anthropological optimism, ignoring the need for political mediations for subjective autonomy, we will attempt to explain how his rejection of the so-called Hegelian “mysticism” turned out to be a brilliant youthful mistake which he has reproduced, however, in his later texts. Indeed, after more than a century of social and psychological sciences, we know that the constitution of identity involves a dialectic of intersubjective recognition guaranteed by the mediation of an instituted symbolic Other. Then, we also propose to relativize the radicalness of Marx’s critique of Hegel by attempting to reinscribe the speculative thought of institutions in the ontological meaning of the emergence of life on Earth and of the role that cultural and political mediations take in maintaining and developing the human existence.
Abstract: Franck Fischbach In this article, we argue that the evolution of Marx’s thought drove him to pass from one philosophical paradigm to another, in this case from a paradigm of production to that of labour. We seek to establish that it is not simply a transition from thought regarding production to thought regarding labour, but indeed a rupture to the extent that the philosophy of labour in later Marx is an explicitly antiproductivist philosophy. Finally, we examine the consequences we can draw, for the present context of neoliberal and global ecological crises, in the thesis claiming that Marx’s ultimate position was that of an antiproductivist philosophy of labour.
Abstract: Olivier Clain The distinctions between concrete and abstract labour, on the one hand, and between surplus-value and the particular forms of value enhancement, on the other, constitute two major theoretical innovations of Capital. The article examines their significance in the critique of classical political economy and illustrates the thesis that these innovations attest to a shift in the topoï of dialectical discourse concerning the effective site of the dialectical process and the status of idealities, of theoretical idealities in particular. It shows that in the work as a whole, these displacements also affect the operators of dialectical discourse, namely negation, contradiction, the unity of identity and difference, and the manner in which the moments of the dialectical process are differentiated. In short, the article posits that Marx’s theoretical advance consisted in reconfiguring the dialectical core of critique. It argues that this is how he would be destined to remain a contemporary.
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