| My dissertation responds to the criticism of Marx as a determinist thinker through an investigation of Marx's discussions of production. According to the criticism addressed, production defines the ontological horizon for Marx, and the human being can only be understood in terms of her productive capacities. Not only does Marx understand production as a metaphysical category, but he problematically elevates the capitalist notion of production to the status of a transcendent idea, projecting it onto the history and future of humankind. While he professes a desire to imagine the end of capital, his critics argue that he cannot do so because of his attachment to this concept. Marx fails to think the new--in politics or ontology. Against this criticism, I argue that Marx, rather than relying on a productivist logic, offers us tools to challenge such a logic. He offers us a method that refuses to reify certain categories, including production, and thus leaves room for the emergence of something genuinely new. The first chapter examines the relationship between capitalism and the logic of production. The second looks at two critiques of Marx's productivism: a Heideggerian critique, offered by David Lachterman, and two post-structuralist critiques, offered by Cornelius Castoriadis and Jean Baudrillard. The third chapter examines Marx's discussions of production from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts to his more mature works, including the Grundrisse and Capital . I argue that Marx's method is performative. He exhibits for us how phenomena operate under capitalism, but this does not indicate that he is eternalizing these categories. In the fourth chapter, I look at the roots of Western Marxism in the work of Lukacs, who attempted to defend Marx against the productivist appropriations of his work by the Second International. Finally, in the conclusion, I examine the work of Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, who offer the outlines of a utopian Marxism, one that embraces rather than scoffs at the revolutionary potential of hope. They also read Marx as a thinker who challenges productivism, and they use the resources they find in Marx to combat the productivism of their age. |
