Karol Marks i problem przyszłości

Author(s): Krzysztof Świrek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 14/2018

Many share a conviction, that Marxism was a discourse that elevated futurological hubris to its extremes and its failure. Yet, do we know well, what is the actual centre of Marx’ futurological endeavour, what is the actual status of ‘future’ in his works and what do we read about when we find predictions in his works? This article is an attempt at systematic reflection upon the status of future, that in fact for Marx is not an ‘utopian assumption’, but rather is systematic elaboration of what can be read from the ‘here and now’ of capitalistic development. An important context of analysis would be the question, which one of the futures Marx thinks is possible to predict? Are the dynamics of political changes possible do predict in the same way, as the effects of general structural relationships? First part of the paper is an overview of critical conceptual tools, that in Marx’ works bring together the analysis of the present, of its historical genesis and of future necessary workings of social forms. In the second part there is an example of analysis, that for Marx was a prediction, extracted from interpretation of structural relationships, but in our times can be treated as an actual description of present social reality.

Lewicowość bez utopii – Rozmowa o książce Krzysztofa Świrka 'Teorie ideologii na przecięciu marksizmu i psychoanalizy'. Streszczenie spotkania autorskiego

Author(s): Filip Łapiński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 14/2018

Ideologie, symptomy i polityczna sejsmologia: Krzysztof Świrek, Teorie ideologii na przecięciu marksizmu i psychoanalizy

Author(s): Michał Warchala / Language(s): Polish Issue: 14/2018

Ani kapitulacja, ani śmierć – odpowiedź na recenzję Michała Warchali

Author(s): Krzysztof Świrek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 14/2018

Marxo ir Engelso visuomeninės pažinimo teorijos link ir aplink

Author(s): Aivaras Stepukonis / Language(s): Lithuanian Issue: 37/2004

The social theory of knowledge developed by Marx and Engels is unfolded in three steps: (1) by explaining the meaning of dialectic as a form both of thinking and of being; (2) by discussing the anthropological and historical materialism that pervades the original Marxist epistemological perspective; (3) by presenting Marx’s and Engels’ belief that the material means and relations of production determine the existence of society in all respects; (4) by isolating the multiple senses of ideology as they occur in the writings of Marx and Engels and by discussing the various methods of unmasking the hidden agendas of ideologies. Throughout the article, a clear and sympathetic exposition of Marxist social epistemology is combined with an insightful and playful criticism of several inconsistencies that the author of the article finds in Marx’s and Engels’ accounts of things.

The Modernization of the Russian Marxist Concept of the Nation in the Social Sciences and Humanities in the USSR in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Author(s): Vyacheslav Vilkov / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

The paper analyses the processes of modernization of the “Marxist-Leninist historical and economic” interpretation of the concept of the “nation” in social and human sciences in the USSR in the second half of the 20th century. In the paper, from the standpoint of modern scientism, on the basis of the principle of historicism, methods of systematic, comparative, discursive and content analysis, semantic innovations, determinants and leading trends of improvement of the concept of the national community were studied. The concept, which was not only the ideological core of the Marxist-Leninist “historical and economic theory of the nation”, but an important conceptual element in the whole complex of social and political sciences in the USSR, had its own dominating social communist ideology with its world-historical process narrative. The material of the article is of particular importance for adequate understanding of the history of the development of socio-philosophical and political sciences in the USSR and Ukraine in the second half of the 1960s, the first half of the 1990s, as well as for the scientific understanding of the dominant analytical and ideological prescripts of Soviet Marxism in its ideological confrontation with the Western political science, and for understanding of the theoretical foundations of nation-building and nationstate building during the years of Soviet power.

Ontological Core of the Social Concept of Global Constitutionalism: a Socio-Philosophical Analysis of Content and Evolution

Author(s): Jacek Zaleśny,Vitaly Goncharov / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2019

This article explores the development of the conceptual foundations of the social concept of global constitutionalism. It is proved that the evolution of ontological principles in global constitutionalism is due to a system of processes: 1) the convergence of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, due to the gradual washing out of the philosophical core in them, its replacement by political technologies that justify the practice of satisfying the interest of political classes and population groups; 2) the formation on a planetary scale of a single global governing class headed by a single system of elites; 3) the formation of a single financial and economic basis for further globalization of socio-political and state-legal development in national states; 4) the formation of a single general goal of the global governing class, which has a purely practical (rational) nature, subject to the logic of preserving power and property in the hands of global governing elites — the preservation and development of the world capitalist system. Thus, global constitutionalism acts as a social concept that justifies the globalization of the socio-political, state-legal, financial and economic structure of national states and societies, filling it with content. It substantiates the position that the social concept of global constitutionalism in the ontological, epistemological, methodological and axiological terms has incorporated the most rational concepts and constructs not only from neoliberal and neoconservative, but also from national socialist (Nazi) and fascist social concepts. Examines the impact on the evolution of the ontological principles of social concept of global constitutionalism content of the ontological principles and other social concepts. It substantiates the position that the ontological perception of the world picture in the framework of the social concept of global constitutionalism as a whole is built on the basis of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that prevailed in the Western world, being the most rational systemic updating of their principles. The goal of research: to investigate the genesis of the ontological principles in global constitutionalism. Subject of research: theoretical content and stages of development of ontological principles in global constitutionalism in relation to its social essence.

Refleksje Romano Guardiniego o byciu „zagubionym w chaosie”

Author(s): Tracey Rowland / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

The text was written as a contribution to the celebration of the 92nd birthday of Joseph Ratzinger, who considered Romano Guardini to be one of the intellectual heroes of his youth. The author of the article discusses Guardini’s monograph published in 1933, entitled Das Gute, das Gewissen und die Sammlung. Among the enemies of moral life, Guardini included Immanuel Kant and his concept of absolute autonomy of conscience, Friedrich Nietzsche, according to whom Christianity is a form of slave morality, and Bolshevism (today we would call it Marxism). As was diagnosed by Guardini, those who want to make an effort to evaluate a moral act feel “lost in chaos.” Conscience is susceptible to three types of error: the search for easy solutions; the exaggeration of duties; the adoption of false interpretations resulting from following conscious or unconscious desires. In Guardini’s opinion, conscience is the living voice of God’s holiness in man. The moral law is not the law of the human ‘I,’ and Kant’s thesis is both philosophically and theologically incorrect. God gives grace of a pure conscience to man praying for the fulfilment of His will, while the sacrament of Confirmation gives man gifts of the Holy Spirit. The last part of Guardini’s work focuses on the importance of prayer and concentration, as well as the supervision of the senses.

THE CULTURE OF FEAR IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS – A WESTERN-DOMINATED INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM AND ITS EXTREMIST CHALLENGES

Author(s): Holger Mölder / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

A culture of fear is precipitated by an emotional responce to uncertainty, instability and anxiety in social discourses and relationships. It is a powerful tool in the hands of ideologies stressing on conflict between Us and Others, notable of mention are nationalism, Marxism and religious fundamentalism. Fear can be an attractive political instrument for hiding motives, evoking irrational emotions and mobilizing people under the flag of populist gains. In international politics, the culture of fear is closely related to the Hobbesian political culture, which emphasizes a permanent state of war between international actors. Deviant actors may use the culture of fear in their resistance to the international system.

Danilo Pejović – učitelj mišljenja

Author(s): Mladen Živković / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 02/154/2019

Pejović verkörpert in seiner Person das ursprüngliche philosophische Ethos und die Gelehrsamkeit. Die Stärke seines Denkens spiegelt sich in der verfeinerten Analyse des Themas wider. Sein literarisches Talent ist klar und er fühlt sich wie ein Virtuose und ein Künstler von Worten und Stil, der stellenweise poetisch ist. Er spricht leicht über die schwierigsten Themen der Philosophie. Er besitzt einen klaren, lehrreichen und enthusiastisch angemessenen, verfeinerten und raffinierten Ausdruck, der über alle unsere philosophischen Autoren hinausgeht. Dies wird bereits in den Titeln seiner Bücher, Studien, Aufsätze und Artikel sichtbar, die die Tiefe seiner Bedeutung angeben, und als würde die Bedeutung des gesamten Textes in ihnen selbst liegen. Obwohl nicht der Einzige, zeigte Pejović, dass es möglich war, anders zu denken, neue Perspektiven zu öffnen, sich der Zukunft zu öffnen, indem man aus dem marxistischen Regenmantel herauskommt, in den wir fast alle gehüllt waren. Professor Pejović demonstriert, wie sich die Evolution entwickeln kann, um auf Kommendes, Neues und Andersartiges zu treffen. Natürlich ist das Neue und Andersartige allein dadurch nicht schon hier, aber um neue Horizonte zu eröffnen, müssen wir gegen die Strömung vorgehen.

Slovenská politika v kontexte revolučných rokov 1848/49 a názory K. Marxa a F. Engelsa

Author(s): Adam Šumichrast / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2020

The study deals with the criticism of the policy of the Ľudovít Štúr and his generation during the years 1848/49 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the context of their broader analysis of the situation in the Habsburg monarchy. The paper also presents the basic characteristics of the ideas that Marx and Engels presented, as well as sketch of their attitude towards nationalism and nation. At the end, the study offers a brief overview of Štúr's reception of Marxism.

Urzeczowienie, fetyszyzm i praca intelektualna

Author(s): Krzysztof Świrek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 16/2019

This paper proposes a return to notions of reification and fetishism as classic but still valid tools of critical social theory. In the broad frame of analysis of modernity, these notions pointed to processes of inversion in which means were substituted for aims, and objectivistic measures were reduced to disproportionate qualities. In this text, several concepts are juxtaposed: both those that can be understood as sources for theories of fetishism and reification, and their classic and more contemporary expositions in the works of Marx, Lukács, and Debord. The author applies the notions of reification and fetishism to intellectual work, which plays a simultaneously central and subordinate role in contemporary capitalism. In the final part of the text he proposes the notion of a total intellectual: the term is meant to describe someone who objects to the reification of intellectual work and its reduction to technical and economic activity.

The Narrative of Transition in Caryl Phillips’s ‘A Distant Shore’: Mainstream, Subaltern and Subjective Narratives

Author(s): Zoltán Mogyorósi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

In recent years Anglophone authors of post-colonial heritage have been attempting to challenge the mainstream Western narratives of modernism in their literary works. Postcolonialism as a literary discourse is highly related to Neo-Marxism, as the relationship dynamics are based on the distinctive binary opposition of the hegemonic and the subaltern, so the fate of the individual is determined by a broader sense of power struggle in these narratives. Moreover, the narratives generally have fixed sides, positions contrasted to each other; men–women, black–white, upper class–working class. In some cases, the contrast between the subaltern and the hegemonic is emphasised by setting combinations of subaltern values against the combinations of hegemonic values; a white upper-class man against a black lower-class woman. However, according to some contemporary scholars of post-colonialism, approaches of this type are outdated. One of these authors is Caryl Phillips, who offers a different approach to narratives as he applies a more dynamic and relativistic one in his novel, A Distant Shore (2001). Due to the juxtaposition of different characters, there is no mere hegemonic power apparent in the text and every single character can be read as subaltern; thus Phillips extends the concept of subalternity to all the characters in the novel. In my paper, I examine the various mainstream and subaltern narratives, and then I present how the described mainstream narratives are alien to the individual, and some typical subaltern narratives are invisible or too fragmented to the society by their nature. Despite all the critical or empirical anticipations about the novel, Phillips gives a very critical attitude towards the narratives of globalism, and he fundamentally questions Western multiculturalism. I argue that Phillips’s strikingly different method of problematizing individual and social narratives does raise new questions concerning subaltern narratives, and I will support it with the theoretical background provided by scholars like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Truth and freedom as the axiological foundations of practicing science at the Lvov-Warsaw School

Author(s): Joanna Zegzuła-Nowak / Language(s): English Issue: 28/2019

The contribution is discussed of the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS) in determining the axiological dimension of science. By promoting philosophical culture and solid axiological foundations, the School members aspired to imbue the spirit of patriotism and a sense of national community in society. They believed that if science is to serve humanity, it should not develop in an infinite and recalcitrant way. Apart from defining substantive and methodological directives, the LWS scholars regarded it important to draw up axiological frameworks of scientific studies to define their proper tasks and protect them against depreciating factors. Science, in their view, should promote and develop values. As they saw it, science based on clearly defined axiological foundations should not only seek to improve man’s living, but also develop his inner life. Hence, the scholar’s mission should adhere to set values, in particular truth and freedom, imbuing scientific work with the status of crucial and at the same time autonomous field of human activity.

TRUDNE POCZĄTKI I BARIERY POWOJENNEJ ROMANISTYKI POLSKIEJ

Author(s): Bożena Czech-Jezierska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 26/2019

The rebuilding plan of Roman law science after Second World War was experiencing many difficulties. Aside from the inconvenience such as financial problems, conducting classes facilities, lack of access to literature etc., ideology barrier appeared. Socialist-oriented ideology generally left Roman law out of its legal system which rejected development of private property for the benefit of far-reaching state interference in private-law relationships and any influence on the part of the legal system of a state that allowed slavery, inconsistent with the ideas of socialism. It was based on historical and dialectical materialism and was connected with the inevitable fight of classes in society. The socialist ideology also played the decisive part in an educational system. Socialists were in principle against the study of Roman law and tried to limit his role in educating socialist lawyers – “lawyers of the new type”. They tried to conduct the reform of law studies and partly they made a success of it. In socialist states two tendencies in Roman law studies should be distinguished – “traditional” Roman law studies, referred to as “bourgeois”, and new “Marxist Roman law studies”. Some explorers of this tendency believed that it was only “Marxist Roman law studies” that required further development, while “bourgeois Roman law studies”, opposed to the former, could only provide a basis of information collected by its researchers. These polemics increased especially in breakthrough moments, when Roman law was marginalized or even abandoned in faculties of law. Exactly these turning points could prove helpful in performing periodization of Polish Roman law studies in People’s Poland began in the early 1940s.

Counter-revolution, or Authentic Socialism? American Far-Left Reactions to the Czechoslovak 1968

Author(s): Jan Géryk / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

For the majority of Leftists in the 1960s, the Soviet Union ceased to be intellectually and ideologically inspiring. Both Soviet Communism and Western capitalism at that time represented “the System” which offered universal manipulability and universal marketability as its only alternative modes. Thus, the Left searched for authentic socialism, whether in the Marxist-humanist philosophy, in the Third World revolutions, or in the local socialist traditions. However, even though the global Left faced several general problems common to all Cold War worlds, there were also important contextual differences which prevented the common base from further development. Following this general context, this article will focus on the Left in Czechoslovakia and in the USA, particularly on the question whether the Czechoslovak reform movement of the late 1960s was inspiring for various groups on the US Left. With regard to the US left-wing reactions to the Prague Spring or to the resistance of Czechoslovak people against the Warsaw Pact invasion, the article will pay attention especially to the discursive dichotomy of authentic socialism vs. counterrevolution.

Feminizm postoperaistyczny i filozofia Luce Irigaray – próba uzgodnienia stanowisk

Author(s): Dawid Kujawa / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1 (13)/2019

In the present article the author endeavours to compare the main assumptions of Italian post-operaist feminism (mostly those related to the Wages for Housework campaign) with Luce Irigaray’s sexuate difference philosophy. Assuming as a departure point the notion of labour force reproduction, the author tries to prove the synergic potential sustaining between the two mentioned perspectives – the most noteworthy convergence between them is the eventually shared ontological horizon stemming from Marx’s perspective on communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

The Spell of Marx and Jeffrey Sachs: Social Theory and Post-Communist Politics

Author(s): Venelin I. Ganev / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2015

The article offers a critical analysis of the view that Marx’s critique of capitalism provides the analytical lenses necessary to understand post-communist transformations. The author examines the problematic premises underpinning this view—for example, that capitalism can be created by design, and that in the early 1990s the former “second world” constituted a tabula rasa—and insists that a proper answer to the question “How did capitalism emerge in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union?” is yet to be given. The text also identifies the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical difficulties that might ensue if analyses of post-communist politics are reduced to a critique of neoliberal capitalism.

Paradigms of the Nations Classification in European and Soviet Marxism

Author(s): Sergii Rudenko,Vyacheslav Vilkov / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2020

For the first time in the post-Soviet period, in a separate publication, prerequisites, key ideas, theoretical, methodological, ideological and political paradigms of nationalities by world and European “classics of Marxism” (Friedrich Engels, Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, etc.) are analyzed and revealed in reliance on the principle of historicism and methods of systematic, comparative, discursive and content analysis in political, philosophical and ideological aspects. Comparative research of the interpretations of the main types of nations by the ancestors of Marxism and their theoretical models, and also ideologemes, which were created in Soviet Marxism in the second half of the twentieth century, was carried out. The material of the article is particularly important for a relevant understanding of the specifics and direction of the development of philosophical and socio-political studies in the USSR and Ukraine in the second half of the 1960s, the second half of the 1980s, and for the scientific understanding of the paradigmatic, analytical and ideological prescriptions of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the nation and the communist meta narration in their confrontation with Western concepts. In the present circumstances, the results of such an analysis are essential for the creation of a correct assessment of the theoretical platform and ideological attitudes of that period Soviet authority in the sphere of national and cultural, national-state and socialist building, as well as its struggle with “bourgeois nationalism.”

Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity perceived from a Hegelian Perspective

Author(s): Carsten Lier,Vadym Tytarenko / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2020

The political protest against the former decision of Yanukovych to reject the Association Agreement with the EU quickly evolved into mass mobilization against the corrupt socio-political structures that dominated Ukraine throughout its post-Soviet history. For that reason, it became evident that Euromaidan showcased a historical process marking a transition towards the formation of a “prototype” civil society that has been virtually non-existent in the country´s post-Soviet era. In this article, in order to understand these underpinning historical dynamics, the event will be analysed through Hegel`s framework of the state and the historical dialectic. In this context, authors argue that the “Revolution of Dignity” is a historical turning point towards the formation of a new civil consciousness and self-identification with the Ukrainian state through laying down foundations for the creation of a liberal democratic state post-Maidan. As an important step of this analysis, Hegel’s and Marx’s concepts of history were examined. Firstly, Hegel’s view on the state made it possible to argue that the Ukrainian post-soviet state resulted in the alienation of citizens from the state. This idea was furthered by using Hegel’s historical dialectic to allow for an interpretation of Euromaidan as an antithesis to post-Soviet era. Finally, the focus was shifted towards the limitations of applying Hegel’s theoretical framework to the 21st century events.