Marxist Theory and Philosophy

Historical Materialism

Hikmet Kıvılcımlı’s Contribution to the Marxist Theory of HistoryHikmet Kıvılcımlı (1902-1971), a distinctive Marxist politician and thinker, and prominent figure in the socialist movement in Turkey, who still attracts attention for his original theoretical works. During his fifty years of struggle, nearly half of which he spent in prison, he produced numerous works on Marxist theory, revolutionary strategy, the economic and social history of Turkey and the Near East, and on Islam. He opposed Eurocentric interpretations of Marxist theory, trying to localize it and thus strengthen its universality.In his historical writings, as well as Marxist literature, he employed Ibn Khaldun’s thoughts, who he described as the “Marx of the Islamic Civilization”. He found the Khaldunian dichotomy of “barbarians versus civilizations” highly illuminating for understanding the social and political transformations of ancient societies. According to Kıvılcımlı, the barbarians who were the agents of “primitive communism” played not only a destructive but also a transformative role in the history. Even though civilizations had severe internal conflicts, first and foremost the unrest of slaves and other subaltern classes, these controversies never succeeded in creating the conditions for a social revolution. Thus, the force that sparked revolution came from outside of a given civilization – the barbarians. The decisive dynamic that ended the existing unequal social order and created a major revolutionary transformation were the barbarian attacks on civilizations. Of course, the barbarians did not aim to spark revolutions; their raids on civilizations were as natural as earthquakes, according to Kıvılcımlı. He therefore defined them as “historical revolutions” rather than “social revolutions”.Kıvılcımlı also reinterprets the concept of ‘productive forces’ of Marxist theory by going beyond the infrastructure-superstructure dichotomy. He emphasizes the role of cultural traditions -religion being in the first place- and the social spirit of collective action, as well as the geography and technology, in the shaping of history. In my presentation, after a very short biography of Kıvılcımlı and a general overview of his work, I will explain his “thesis of history” and its relevance todays discussion in radical theory. Muzaffer Kaya, Ph.D. University of Potsdam, Germany.Arendt, Marx and the Modern Challenge to Tradition Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition centres on a critique of the Western tradition of political thought that is born with the trial of Socrates and ends with Marx. Arendt’s account hinges on the significance of the distinction between the public and private realms. What has changed from the political life of polis to the mass society of today is the meaning of politics itself. Arendt’s idea of vita active, a Latinisation of Aristotle’s bios politikos, acts to restore a lost notion of political life back into a tradition of political thinking that has faded from view and no longer readily apparent in our political lives. Arendt’s provocation is that politics properly understood, as the life of action – speech and deed in the light of the public sphere – has vanished. The Human Condition began in part from her 1954 lecture series, ‘Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political Thought’. These lectures have been recently published in her Kritische Gesamtausgabe (2019). My paper assesses her interpretation of Marx and his Hegelian inheritance. I underscore the innovation of her account of Marx’s political philosophy, which precedes the Marx renaissance of the Anglophone New Left. However, my approach is mainly critical. By outlining the variations and modifications in her interpretation of Marx, I argue that Arendt fails to provide a coherent understanding of Marx’s place within the Western tradition of political theory. Arendt takes Marx’s dialectical thinking to promote violence as the midwife of history and to problematically inherent the theoretical baggage of Hegel’s Geist. I argue that Arendt’s interpretation of both Marx and Hegel ignores the importance of action for both thinkers. I provide a defence of Marx’s theory of history as presented in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Hegel’s account of act and deed in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This textual analysis allows for a critique of Arendt’s account of tradition.Dr Michael Lazarus, Monash University, AustraliaMarx’s Forgotten Transformation SolutionThis contribution explains that in the Grundrisse Marx considered that the discontinuity in his transformation procedure was no logical inconsistency, but a necessary feature of the disproportionate transition to capitalist production dominated by the accumulation of fixed capital. Pavel Maksakovsky, a Soviet Red Professor in the 1920s, developed a theory of ‘conjuncture’ which probably discovered this discontinuity independently. Marx’s solution to the transformation problem in Capital III did not emphasize this discontinuity.It was criticized by von Bortkiewicz as mathematically flawed and so logically inconsistent and false. Marx and Maksakovsky showed that the discontinuity was a necessary part of the transition from values to prices of production. This explanation has been almost totally ignored in the debate on the transformation problem.Bill Jefferies (SOAS, UK)Chair: Panagiotis Sotiris,

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