Historical Materialism is a quarterly journal that costs $78 for a yearly sub. Like New Left Review, with which it shares editorial perspectives and an editor (the ubiquitous Sebastian Bludgeon), it is a mix of the substantive and the trivial. As a Columbia University retiree, I have access to the journal but only for issues at least a year old, like issue number one of 2012. You can find both a useful article on the trade union movement by Kim Moody and something titled “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory” that I found relatively easy to ignore.
It also publishes scholarly Marxist hardcover books at the same price point. For example, a hardcover version of Jairus Banaji’s Deutscher prize-winning “Theory as History” costs $135. Fortunately Haymarket Press publishes paperback versions of HM books, one of the ISO’s major contributions to the movement. I am not sure when HM began organizing conferences but I attended my first yesterday at NYU. I wondered beforehand why there was a need for HM Conferences when we have a Left Forum in NY as well. But it became clear throughout the day that HM addresses a need that Left Forum does not. Generally, you will find a sharper Marxist focus at HM while the Left Forum is far broader with many panels featuring movement activists. The HM conference, by contrast, is much more of an academic conference with just about every speaker holding an academic post. 10am-12pm: Neil Davidson’s “How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?” This featured Neil presenting the main ideas of his new book, followed by “discussants” Jeff Goodwin and Charles Post. Some background is in order. Post is a Brennerite, in other words an acolyte of the prize-winning UCLA professor Robert Brenner who developed a theory in the 1970s that capitalism originated in the British countryside in the 1500s quite by accident due to demographic changes brought on by the bubonic plague. Without going into any detail, the loss of population led to a series of social-economic transformations that fostered the creation of tenant farming out of but against feudal institutions. With the widespread adoption of tenant farming, Britain enjoyed a “take off” that was not possible anywhere else. That “take off” explains the rise of the British Empire and the diffusion of capitalism to the rest of Europe and everywhere else in the world. Without those diseased rats, Britain might have followed an evolution like Kenya or Uganda. For all we know, the Kenyans might have enslaved Britons and put them to work in the cotton fields of Africa if contingency had blessed them with dukes, duchesses, and diseased rats. As an ancillary of the Brenner thesis, a school known as “political Marxism” has taken root in the academy that denies that there is such a thing as a bourgeois revolution. This has led to some intriguing conclusions; among them that France was not only devoid of capitalist property relations before 1789 but even afterwards. The Brennerites have never bothered to describe the social system that existed there except to dub it precapitalist. That category, of course, includes late 18th century France, the Britain of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, as well as the igloo-dwelling Inuit people. It serves their theoretical needs even if it is rather imprecise. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/historical-materialism-conference-2013/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
