Melvin A. Craig (Kivinen)

ABSTRACT“Impersonal” or “structural” forms of domination have emerged as useful analytics for understanding contemporary capitalism and developing a critical social theory which articulates the domination that capitalist society employs. To this end, Werner Bonefeld’s A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation and Søren Mau's Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital offer different ways to ground such a critical social theory through their analyses of the “silent compulsion” of economic power, recentring and reinvigorating the Marxist critique of political economy. Where these two readings converge and differ, they offer fruitful grounds for theorising power and capital, developing the stakes for freedom, and providing outlines for emancipatory political practice.

How ought we conceive of Marx today? As a philosopher, or critic of philosophy? Political economist, or critic of political economy? Idealist or materialist? A thinker of the theoretical or the practical? Or, perhaps more importantly, how are we to conceive of the relationship between theoretical analysis and practical commitments? Must theory be shown to be of practical applicability? Such questions are brought to light in Christoph Schuringa's Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy through the question of whether, and if so, how, Marx ‘actualises’ philosophy. Schuringa reads Marx as a philosopher in his own right, illuminating a number of ongoing problems internal to Marxism and with respect to the German philosophical tradition. Schuringa restages the false dispute between ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’, identifying how Marx joins and goes beyond Hegel in overcoming this false choice. Further, with the aid of psychoanalytic theory, one sees how this deadlock is itself productive for delineating a ‘true materialism’ which actualises philosophy. Extending the ‘philosophy of praxis’ attributed to the early Marx and the Frankfurt School, this commitment undergirds Marx's oeuvre as a presuppositionless science necessary for satisfying the ‘demands of reason’ of not only classical German philosophy, but contemporary critical socio-political analysis.