Anne F. Pomeroy

Bertell Ollman has argued that Marx's theory of alienation and his use of the dialectical method reveal the deep dependence of Marx's project upon a philosophy of internal relations. Marx and Whitehead: A Process Reading of Capitalism, is the extension and development of this claim. The philosophy of internal relations which implicitly underlies and provides the foundations for Marx's analysis and critique of capitalism is, I claim, a process philosophy, whose most complete and nuanced articulation is to be found in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. By explicitly recognizing such a foundation, we are able establish an absolute continuity between Marx's early and later writings; the early, "humanistic" writings present the philosophical foundations for the later political-economic critique. By identifying this coherence and by exploring its processive underpinnings, the critique of capitalism, as it is expressed by the labor theory of value and the critique of wage labor, is enhanced and intensified. ;By recognizing the processive claims underlying Marx's notion of production, we ultimately see that the critique of capitalism is a critique of the form of social relations in which the wage representative of necessary labor time merely reproduces human life in an ontological fashion reminiscent of inorganic forms of process which primarily reiterate their valuative patterns, and in which the creative novelty of surplus labor time is also objectified in inorganic commodity form. Therefore, wage labor is real alienation from our ontological essence---our creative-productive activity, and so it is also alienation from the natural world, our products, and one another. Within the practice of capitalism, the processive universe is genuinely commodified. Novel creative and valuative activity is transformed into commodity or money value. Since creativity is the very engine of process, capitalism is, quite literally, anti-processive, quite literally anti-humanistic, quite literally an economy of death. It is a lived form of misplaced concreteness. The most basic contradiction in capitalism is self-contradiction. ;Finally, a processive theory of human consciousness is examined in order to articulate the emergence of dialectical consciousness as radical and transformative consciousness from within the structure of capitalism itself

Taking a cue from John D. Caputo's 1993 work, Demythologizing Heidegger, the author pursues a "remythologizing" of Heidegger's Being and Time that explores and develops the affinities between that work and Karl Marx's critique of capitalism based upon their respective expositions on inauthenticity and alienation. She suggests that Heidegger's work can deepen our understanding of the foundational existential and ontological impact of the alienation present within the capitalist form of social relations, lead us to a more adequate solidarity with those who suffer within it, and highlight the overlooked strengths of its victims thereby suggesting paths toward liberation

Judith Butler maintains that the universality of the precarity of life confirms the interdependence of lives. Such interdependence makes us fundamentally responsible for the lives of Others. Through the application of Marx’s critique of capitalism as ontological degradation, we ask whether the notions of a life and of lives as Butler outlines them in her recent works are adequate to ground moral understanding and practice, or whether, the manner in which human lives produce and reproduce themselves within the capitalist context problematizes the revision of the ethical. We therefore expand from her claim that “moral theory has to become social critique if it is to know its object and act upon it”.

It is a widely held view among scholars and commentators on the works of Jean-Paul Sartre that his corpus can be roughly divided into an early, largely a-political, non-Marxist period, and a later, more overtly political, post-liberation period. InThe Early Sartre and Marxism, Sam Coombes seeks to problematise this interpretation of Sartre’s corpus by undertaking a re-evaluation of a wide array of pre-liberation and early post-liberation writings in order to establish the extent to which views fully consistent with a certain brand of Marxism are already present therein. The later period, he argues, does not so much constitute a break from the early work as a more complete development of certain nascent themes and concerns. There are difficulties inherent in any claim that Sartre’s early work is consonant with Marxism, primarily due to the fundamental incompatibilities between Sartre’s ontological description of liberation as a project of individual freedom and the inherent hostility of interpersonal relations, and Marxism’s requirements of the development of class consciousness and social solidarity for revolutionary action. Nonetheless, the modest claim that through the 1930s and early ’40s themes and ideas are appearing in Sartre’s work that are indeed not abandoned but constitute the basis of Sartre’s later more directly Marxist writings is compelling and may serve to reopen fruitful speculative philosophical dialogue between Sartre’s early existentialism and Marxism.

Judith Butler maintains that the universality of the precarity of life confirms the interdependence of lives. Such interdependence makes us fundamentally responsible for the lives of Others. Through the application of Marx’s critique of capitalism as ontological degradation, we ask whether the notions of a life and of lives as Butler outlines them in her recent works are adequate to ground moral understanding and practice, or whether, the manner in which human lives produce and reproduce themselves within the capitalist context (now being globalized) problematizes the revision of the ethical. We therefore expand from her claim that “moral theory has to become social critique if it is to know its object and act upon it” (Butler, 2004).