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Marx’s (1844) estranged labor manuscript maps processes that stultify spontaneous human relations under the division of labor in the regime of capital accumulation. For Marx, negating absolutes would put ‘Man’ back on its natural trajectory toward positive freedom. Such evacuation of mediating ‘substances’ results in either frivolity or pragmatic barbarism rather than positive freedom. Marx’s political imaginary rejected philosophical mysticism but overlooked finer points of Hegel’s dialectic that contribute to an immanent critique of Marxist political ideology. Missing from Marx’s thought is the logic of post-capitalist mediation and a trace of the subjective modalities that correspond with the objective forms of alienation. Lacking an adequate psychology, Marx did not see that he had constructed a communism that mirrored the subjective spirit of bourgeois society. We draw upon philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytic currents to remap the genome of Marxist political philosophy with a Whitmanesque imaginary congenial to free, poetic social mediation.

The belief in the inevitability of proletarian revolution came undone in the aftermath of the First World War and set into motion currents of thought and practice that crystallized into what gets identified as “critical theory.” Where orthodoxy held that the workers of the world were destined to overthrow their oppressors, the war dispelled this myth and revealed that nationalism, racism, and charisma trumped progressive social and political movements. The famous Frankfurt School was decisive in mining the various strains of critique from the classical tradition and synthesizing them with elements of contemporary thought, especially from psychoanalysis. One of the most fruitful lines of inquiry centered on the sadomasochistic character and its manifestation in the domains of politics and society. Authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality are still vitally important problems at the heart of the critical theory project. This chapter maps out the development of the theory of authoritarianism, where it succeeded, and where it failed, and points the way for fresh analyses of authoritarianism in the era of imperialism and totalitarianism.

This book emerged from the 2015 Symposium for New Directions in Critical Social Theory at Iowa State University, May 11–12. The original idea for the Symposium was proposed at an April 2007 meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago and was put into motion the next year as a biennial gathering of a handful of sociologists, Germanists, and philosophers in Ames, Iowa, with the goal of surveying the state of critical social theory in hopes of establishing vectors for future interdisciplinary research. As of June 2016, the Symposium has grown into a larger and more formally structured workshop incorporating several days of sessions devoted to the reinvention of critical social theory and critical sociology. Revised and thematically integrated papers from the 2014 meeting were published in 2016 as Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique, edited by Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell, as Volume 85 of the Studies in Critical Social Sciences (Brill). The present volume is dedicated to an exploration of the ontology of capitalist society.

Harvey makes two notable errors: on the one hand, he misrepresents the structure of Marx’s value concept and, secondly, he misconstrues the specific, synthetic-transformative function of the exchange relation itself (note the phrase ‘passed on’ as if value may have already ‘been there’ and may even persist somehow in a post-exchange ‘afterlife’) such that value is hypostatized. Additionally, as we will see later, Harvey also misplaces the price concept as a social representation of value. The above problems are worth considering, if only briefly, because when we examine the standard interpretations of Marx we find that Harvey is far from alone in spinning this familiar yarn and the consequence of doing so is the difference between ‘social science’ and critical sociology.

Much has been written about Joseph Freeman, but one aspect of his life has curiously gone unnoticed by intellectual and political historians, including his biographers. During the mid-1940s, the giant of the literary left, editor of New Masses, and cofounder of Partisan Review was a paid research and editorial assistant for the Institute of Social Research (the Frankfurt School). Though Freeman's formal involvement with the Institute lasted only a couple of years, off and on, his informal relationships with various Institute members stretched back for a decade. Freeman helped to integrate the Institute into the antifascist Popular Front; was an eyewitness to post-Front political dynamics and tensions within the Institute; translated and edited reports and articles; and, perhaps most interestingly, played a minor role in assembling the infamous Massing espionage “Redhead Group.”

During World War II, Paul Massing, a research assistant at the Institute of Social Research (the famous ‘Frankfurt School’), helped conduct one of the most important research projects in the history of Marxist sociology. Following on the Institute’s earlier work on family and authority dynamics as well as the Weimar proletariat study, the wartime American labor anti-Semitism study resulted in a massive report that was never published. This article introduces Paul Massing, his role in the labor study, and some important findings regarding the effect of union affiliation and other key variables in regard to working-class authoritarianism.

Purpose This paper explores the domain of the symbolic imaginary to comprehend the mechanisms and effects of neoliberal deregulation (anomie) and reckless capital accumulation within and external to the US imperial core with special emphasis on the war on terror, the figure of the suicide bomber, and the internal manifestations of social liquidation in the appearance of the rampage shooter. The concept of the piacular developed by Durkheim is expanded to demonstrate the contrast between the “variable” or human forms of terror with “constant” or mechanized form of the piacular as it appears in the form of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone. The apparently disconnected image of the drone flying around up there somewhere in the clouds is intimately connected with seemingly unrelated phenomenon of mass murdering martyrs and fanatics down here on the ground. Lastly, the prospects for an anti-drone movement are touched upon and suggested as a fulcrum point from which to “touch” the synthetic point where terror, rampage, and revenge unify. Methodology/approach Unique to this paper is the development of a dialectical, formal, conceptual “geometry” rooted in Durkheim’s classic analysis of suicide for disclosing the hidden analogs obtaining in the relationship between suicide bombings and rampage shootings and their conceptual fusion in the form of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone. Findings Capitalism linked to global defense and security operations produces its own terrifying nemeses as both causes and effects. Rather than something that has to be defeated, terror is an enemy that cannot be defeated but neither can it prevail against an empire. Likewise, the rampage shooter is not merely an individual in need of psychiatric care but a product of domestic policies that sacrifice everything for security and war. These two figures are “mirror opposites” or speculative doubles of one another, which when we attempt to comprehend the image of the seemingly unrelated drone machine what were find is the unexpected synthesis of the twin logics of terror and rampage at work in the sky. Social implications If people hope to live in a society ruled democratically rather than imperial subjects they must know where to apply moral and political leverage. Suicidal bombers and lone shooters are definite problems, but focusing on the defects of individuals diverts the critical gaze from the larger problem of foreign policy, domestic austerity, and, perhaps, the war on the drone represents a unique opening within the aggregate system to push back against the abstract, imperial system of global and domestic hegemony. Originality/value This paper represents a new and unique synthesis of Durkheimian and interpretive sociologies with various strands of critical social theory providing new optics for the analysis of international terrorism, domestic mass murders, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in the wars on terror.

Faith in working-class revolution and the inevitability of socialism all but evaporated in the wake of the First World War when nationalism and patriotism triumphed over the principles of international solidarity and, as Perry Anderson put it, “The unity and reality of the Second International, cherished by Engels, was destroyed in a week” ([1976]1979, p. 14).1 The notion of revolutionary inevitability seems embarrassingly naive today (to the point that, now, discussions of radicalism are much more likely to focus on intellectuals rather than labor movements)2 but prewar optimism was, in many ways, justified and, in fact, the idea of inevitability was shared across the political spectrum and not merely a symptom of the left. Dreading the rise of “plebian radicalism” Rudolf Sohm, for example, wrote that “The people is [sic] already aware of its powers. Already it has recognized itself as the real nation. The battalions of the workers are about to form, that they may thrust from its throne the bourgeoisie, the monarch of the present. More and more clearly are shown the signs of a movement, the aim of which is to destroy the entire social order, the State, the Church, the family….” (Smith, 1998, p. 38).

American society was virtually saturated with antisemitic propaganda during the years of the Great Depression and WWII. Father Coughlin was by far the most famous and wide-reaching voice of intolerance during the 30s but within his shadow moved an army of small-time and lesser-known demagogues as well as the spontaneous creations of thousands of baleful, shop floor poets. This chapter grasps the social logic of working-class antisemitism by gathering together the recurring theoretical elements and situating them within the core processes of alienation and the exchange of commodities as the prototype form of social and moral relations. Antisemitism exists because society has failed to achieve the form of an ethical order. Regardless of whether society is good or a moral abortion people subordinate themselves to it; only rarely do segments of society mobilize and rise up in opposition to the prevailing order.Keywords: American society; Father Coughlin; Great Depression; working-class anti-Semitism; WWII

This chapter looks at worker attitudes toward ?Jewish' norms of conduct, table manners, dress, clannishness, aggressiveness, and sexual deviance. Antisemitic workers seemed to be hostile to the entire notion of solidarity but upon closer inspection antisemites were more inclined to sneer at democratic forms of cohesion rather than simply denigrating all forms of collective life. Classic fascist and antisemitic propaganda traditionally portrays Jews as sexually perverse and rapacious. In the American context, though, the Institute discovered much to their astonishment that workers were virtually unaffected by stereotypes portraying Jews as sexually deviant. Antisemitic conceptions of ?Jewish personal qualities' were quite revealing in that complaints about hygiene, clannishness, and aggressiveness reflected a structural feature found endemic to antisemitic ideology as a whole: a preoccupation with boundaries and barriers between the pure and impure, the clean and the dirty.Keywords: aggressiveness; antisemitic workers; clannishness; Jewish personal qualities; sexual deviance; solidarity; table manners