A Review of Latest Ideas by Contemporary Marxist Studies in the West: 10 Major Trends
Author: Kong Mingan, School of Marxism, Nankai University
Date: April 2023
Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends, Issue 1, 2023
On September 29, 2017, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held the 43rd collective study on contemporary world Marxist thought and its influence. In this collective study Xi Jinping emphasized when presiding over this collective study: “One of the important characteristics of contemporary world Marxist thought is that many of them have made critical revelations about the structural contradictions of capitalism, the contradictions of the mode of production, class contradictions, and social contradictions, and have made in-depth analyses of the capitalist crisis, the evolution of capitalism, and the new form and essence of capitalism. These views help us to correctly understand the development trend and destiny of capitalism, accurately grasp the new changes and new characteristics of contemporary capitalism and deepen our understanding of the changing trends of contemporary capitalism.” Since the establishment of foreign Marxist disciplines in the 1980s, China’s foreign Marxist research has made great progress. This article intends to summarize the latest development trends of foreign Marxist thought from ten aspects as follows.
1. Contemporary Ideology Theory and Its “New” Characteristics
The term “ideology” originally came from the book “The Elements of Ideology” by the French philosopher Destiny de Tracy. In “The German Ideology”, Marx and Engels applied this concept to the criticism of modern German philosophy represented by Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. Different from Tracy’s neutral connotation of ideology, Marx and Engels mainly used the concept of ideology from the perspective of “false consciousness”, referring to the superstructure representing the thoughts of the ruling class. It is determined by social existence, and people are generally not aware of it, but consciously dominated by it, so it has the characteristics of falsehood and unconsciousness. Marx once vividly expressed this characteristic of ideology: “They are not aware of it, but they do it.”1
After Marx, Antonio Gramsci, General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, enriched Marx’s theory of ideology through the theory of “civil society” and the concept of “cultural hegemony”. He compared ideology to the “cement” in the structure of a building, and positioned ideology in the struggle for “cultural hegemony” through “positional warfare”. 2
On the basis of inheriting the ideology theory of Marx and Gramsci, Louis Althusser combined with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and greatly expanded the concept of ideology from three aspects: (1) Ideology is eternal and has no history; (2) Ideology has the function of a state apparatus; (3) The function of ideology is to interpellate individuals as the subject of ideology. 3 The above three points constitute the core of Althusser’s ideology theory.
Slavoj Žižek expanded the concept of ideology from the perspective of Freud and Lacan’s “unconsciousness” and expressed it as follows: (1) All ideologies have their own “sublime objects”; (2) Ideology is not just an idea, nor is it just a materialized state apparatus; it is “social reality” itself, but this reality is not “objective” social reality, but a reality composed of “ideological illusions”; (3) The function of ideology is mainly manifested through the form of unconscious pleasure, which is latent in the subject’s “illusion framework”. The subject uses this illusion framework to cover up the traumatic rift, thereby domesticating the subject into an ideological subject. 4 The outstanding contribution of psychoanalytic ideology theory is that it reveals the “misrecognition” mechanism of the subject in ideology, allowing people to peek into the internal logic of the operation of ideology. In other words, “ideological recognition can only succeed when ideology touches the subject’s illusion framework”5.
2. Research on Digital Capitalism and New Imperialism
Digital capitalism is a new form of capitalism in the 21st century entering the digital age. It is the product of the encounter between contemporary capitalism and the modern digital technology revolution. Dan Schiller pointed out that digital capitalism is capitalism in the information age.
First, in the era of digital capitalism, capitalists have intensified their exploitation of capitalism through digital capital, further widening the gap between the rich and the poor. This form of exploitation is achieved through a new form of labor that combines production and consumption: digital labor. In the era of digital capitalism, it is no longer the production labor and real economy of the Marx era that dominate, but digital labor and digital production. Digital labor has become an extension and deepening of capital exploitation. And digital capital can only function through digital network platforms.
Second, digital network platforms constitute the main mode of capitalist operation. From online shopping to daily consumption, from watching idol videos to daily leisure, from daily consumption to capital operation, and even financial warfare and military conflicts, digital technology and network platforms are indispensable. In the era of digital capitalism, everything is “digitalized” and “capitalized”. Interpersonal communication, entertainment and leisure, and even emotional exchanges have become the objects of digital capital capture. These daily life activities or emotional exchanges have become a means of making money in the digital age, which shows the power of digital capital. As consumers of digital products, individuals are also providers of digital labor and digital capital.
Third, digital capitalism has not only failed to eliminate the gap between the rich and the poor, but has led to the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor on a global scale. The wealth of Microsoft Capital and Apple Capital is the most typical example. In his book Digital Labor and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs focuses on the digital labor exploitation of global workers and consumers by the capitalist information and communication technology (ICT) industry under the global value chain. On the one hand, due to the international division of digital labor, workers in underdeveloped areas are mostly engaged in low-end manufacturing labor related to ICT products, such as miners in Africa, Foxconn workers in China, and software engineers in India; on the other hand, the consumption of Internet products by social media users is also a kind of digital labor. The information, emotions and other data they create will be commoditized and sold by large companies such as Google and Twitter. This seemingly entertaining way is actually free labor for capitalists, which is the so-called “play labor”. 7
It is worth noting that digital capitalism is closely related to the study of contemporary capitalism or new imperialism. The study of contemporary capitalism must first be traced back to Marx’s Capital. After Marx, the Fourth International theorist Ernest Mandel revised Marx’s theory of economic crisis in his book Late Capitalism through an investigation of 20th century capitalism, and proposed the “long wave theory” of the outbreak of capitalist crises. Mandel believed that capitalism would not frequently experience economic crises, but would have a longer periodicity, and Mandel figuratively expressed this cycle as a “long wave” (50-100 years). However, Mandel generally recognized Marx’s theory of capitalist economic crisis. Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, transformed the study of contemporary capitalism into the study of imperialism, and put forward the classic assertion that “imperialism, in its economic essence, is monopoly capitalism”8.
Since Lenin put forward this assertion, imperialism has a history of 100 years, and the emergence of digital capitalism has both accelerated the crisis of imperialism and provided it with a new way to get rid of the crisis.
Faced with the current development of imperialism, contemporary Western left-wing scholars have put forward their own views. David Harvey proposed the theory of “new imperialism” based on spatial geography through his interpretation of Marx’s “Capital” to explain the difficult problem of why modern imperialism is “dying but not dead”. Specifically, Harvey proposed the theory of “time-space repair” based on spatial geography. The so-called time-space repair means that the new imperialism transfers transnational capital to the third world and backward countries through the spatial expansion of capital under the dimension of globalization in order to seize excess surplus value. With the help of “time-space repair”, capitalism has a strong self-repair ability, which can avoid capitalist crises and delay the collapse of the capital empire. 9
Hardt and Negri also gave a new interpretation of contemporary imperialism in their book Empire. They believe that in the post-capitalist era of service-oriented and information-based production, regional differences in the economy are no longer manifested as differences in the degree of development, but rather as hierarchical differences in the international production system. The traditional industrial production and labor discussed by Marx in the 19th century are being replaced by another type of labor – immaterial labor. Immaterial labor has three forms, namely information-based industrial labor, information data service labor, and emotional labor. Correspondingly, the assembly line production model of traditional industry has been replaced by post-Fordist digital network production. The capitalist empire, relying on its dominant position in the information industry, digital capital, and data services, can still establish a control center for the production network in the context of production being dispersed around the world. The decentralization of the production process in physical space has brought about the centralization of economic management and control. Wall Street’s financial trade guides and influences the development of the global economy. 10
In short, digital capitalism and neo-imperialism have changed the traditional imperialist mode of exploitation through violent seizure of colonies, and have spawned a variety of modern capitalist forms, such as “financial capitalism”, “rent capitalism”, “welfare capitalism”, “technological capitalism”, “disaster capitalism” and other new forms of exploitation.
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