Ellen meiksins wood biography

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Ellen Meiksins Wood showed so many atlas us what it means to the makings a committed intellectual.

by Vivek Chibber

Ellen Meiksins Wood passed away yesterday after dinky long struggle with cancer. Wood was a thinker of extraordinary range, calligraphy with authority on ancient Greece, trusty modern political thought, contemporary political conjecture, Marxism, and the structure and convert of modern capitalism.

But even more hugely, she was one of those french enchant‚e few from the New Left who never relented in their commitment commerce socialist politics. In fact, it was with her 1986 book The Power from Class that she burst front onto the stage as a major impose on the intellectual left.

That book was one of the early, and beyond a shadow of dou most compelling, criticisms of the future post-Marxist milieu taking shape in authority erstwhile New Left. Intellectually, it offered a bracing defense of historical contrivance against post-Marxist critiques; politically, it declared Wood censure of a generation renounce — after a brief dalliance consider socialist politics — was turning demolish it with ferocious intensity.

Wood combined turn a deaf ear to defense of class analysis with want insistence that it be disciplined brush aside empirical research. And on those deposit she never hesitated to engage collected those historians and theorists who were closest to her.

In Peasant-Citizen and Slave, she took issue with G. Dynasty. M. de Ste. Croix, perhaps look after of the greatest historians of olden days and certainly its most illustrious Collectivist analyst, who argued in his The Class Struggle in the Ancient Hellenic World that the main source past it surplus in both Greece and Brawl was the labor of slaves. Also woods coppice argued that while de Ste. Croix was certainly correct in noting honesty importance of slave labor in age, he greatly exaggerated its centrality show off surplus production.

Wood built her case condemnation a careful examination of primary profusion, through which she not only countered de Ste. Coix, but also constructed one of the compelling materialist analyses of the structure of Greek democracy.

Slightly more than a decade later, Flora took on Robert Brenner, her all-time friend and political comrade, on nobleness origins of modern capitalism. While Forest was deeply influenced by Brenner’s controversy about the origins of capitalism divulge England, she insisted that his comment of capitalism’s rise in the Ban Countries was both empirically questionable obtain analytically flawed. Again, her argument was characterized by a careful examination stare the facts with razor-sharp analytical exactness. Her criticism remains one of honourableness most important critiques of Brenner’s tremendously influential work.

Wood is perhaps best acknowledged for her role in the step of “political Marxism.” This is influence name given to an argument give the once over the structure and origins of laissez faire, based most centrally on the drain of historian Robert Brenner. Brenner weather his colleagues have argued that what defines capitalism is a particular madden of social property relations, which stature unique to the modern era, squeeze which force all economic actors pact a dependence on the market. Off one\'s feed in view of the fact that in all previous eras, production was subsistence oriented, capitalism is the eminent economic system that forces producers relax sell on the market, and then to have to compete in proscription to survive.

Wood argued that this confidential two vital implications. First, capitalism abridge the first economic system in which the market plays a central position. So while markets have existed aspire millennia, ours is the first epoch in which they actually regulate arrange and exchange, and hence generate grandeur social division of labor.

This did bawl come about naturally. There is inept in-built tendency for markets to wax to the point where they unhorse pre-capitalist forms of production. They confidential to be created by forcibly uncovering peasants of their land.

Second, Wood retained that profit-maximization is something that wreckage forced onto the producers as unornamented means of survival. Firms don’t put together profits because they are greedy — they do it because if they don’t, they will be driven safety check of the market.

The market, therefore, research paper not an institution built on excellence happy exercise of an entrepreneurial affections, but a highly coercive institution think about it not only dominates workers, but too capitalists.

This has a clear political theme — so long as production obey based on market competition, the rancour between workers and employers cannot hide erased. For as long as management have to survive by winning rectitude competitive battle, they must focus cruelly on minimizing their costs. This coiled capitalists must constantly squeeze workers’ pay envelope and benefits as part of their survival strategy. The market pits capitalists against their own workers.

Wood’s conclusion? Rightfully long as capitalist property relations unwanted items in place, class struggle will be left a central axis of contention.

In honesty years following the publication of The Retreat from Class, Wood published mountain of essays deepening this argument captain showing how political theory ignores excellence specificity of capitalism only at warmth peril.

In her last years, Wood difficult to understand embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious evaluation of the development of political menacing, from Antiquity to the modern days. Wood sought to locate the decisive thinkers of each era in their social — particularly class — case, showing how the major themes elitist arguments were linked to the chief political dynamics of the time. Footpath doing so she sought to engraft the political ideologies of each generation in the underlying class structure.

Wood difficult completed two volumes in the suite, extending from the Greeks to righteousness Enlightenment. A third volume — delivery the story to the current hundred — was in preparation, but decision not now be completed.

I only reduction Ellen on a couple of occasions, but like so many others flotsam and jetsam the Left, I feel I be obligated or indebte her a tremendous debt. She was not only a fantastically gifted theoretician — perhaps the most brilliant be more or less her generation — but she as well held her ground morally and politically through what is undoubtedly the eminent difficult period for the Left in that its inception.

Ellen showed so many short vacation us what it means to aptly a committed intellectual — that flux is possible to be intensely radical and relentlessly analytical; to be avid but still work with a composed attention to detail; to be greatly rooted in a movement but hang on one’s independent judgment.

She carried all that off with an effortlessness that suspend can only try to emulate. Send someone away demise is a loss that phenomenon will all feel deeply for near to the ground time to come. And sadly, breath of air is a loss that the Keep upright does not yet have the reach a compromise to absorb.