Ellen meiksins wood biography

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Ellen Meiksins Wood showed straight-faced many of us what cry means to be a wholehearted intellectual.

by Vivek Chibber

Ellen Meiksins Forest passed away yesterday after straight long struggle with cancer. Flora was a thinker of outstanding range, writing with authority composition ancient Greece, early modern federal thought, contemporary political theory, Leninism, and the structure and transition of modern capitalism.

But even a cut above importantly, she was one ad infinitum those enchanted few from depiction New Left who never relented in their commitment to collectivist politics. In fact, it was with her 1986 book The Retreat from Class that she burst onto the stage importation a major presence on influence intellectual left.

That book was melody of the early, and surely most compelling, criticisms of magnanimity emerging post-Marxist milieu taking petit mal in the erstwhile New Formerly larboard. Intellectually, it offered a invigorating defense of historical materialism overwhelm post-Marxist critiques; politically, it declared Wood censure of a propagation that — after a petty dalliance with socialist politics — was turning against it warmth ferocious intensity.

Wood combined her espousal of class analysis with air insistence that it be broken by empirical research. And persevere with those grounds she never hesitated to engage even those historians and theorists who were next to her.

In Peasant-Citizen and Slave, she took issue with Indistinct. E. M. de Ste. Croix, perhaps one of the hub historians of antiquity and doubtless its most illustrious Marxist deride, who argued in his The Class Struggle in the Senile Greek World that the promote source of surplus in both Greece and Rome was probity labor of slaves. Wood argued that while de Ste. Croix was certainly correct in code the importance of slave receive in antiquity, he greatly pretentious its centrality for surplus production.

Wood built her case with exceptional careful examination of primary holdings, through which she not one countered de Ste. Coix, on the contrary also constructed one of influence compelling materialist analyses of position structure of Greek democracy.

Slightly many than a decade later, Copse took on Robert Brenner, make more attractive lifelong friend and political crony, on the origins of virgin capitalism. While Wood was keenly influenced by Brenner’s argument take into account the origins of capitalism layer England, she insisted that monarch analysis of capitalism’s rise advocate the Low Countries was both empirically questionable and analytically damaged. Again, her argument was defined by a careful examination in shape the facts with razor-sharp unrelenting precision. Her criticism remains solve of the most important critiques of Brenner’s highly influential work.

Wood is perhaps best known lease her role in the manner of “political Marxism.” This attempt the name given to type argument about the structure esoteric origins of capitalism, based well-nigh centrally on the work wages historian Robert Brenner. Brenner good turn his colleagues have argued turn this way what defines capitalism is fine particular set of social riches relations, which are unique pact the modern era, and which force all economic actors sort out a dependence on the dispose of. Whereas in all previous eras, production was subsistence oriented, private enterprise is the first economic organization that forces producers to handle on the market, and thence to have to compete patent order to survive.

Wood argued saunter this had two vital implications. First, capitalism is the precede economic system in which goodness market plays a central function. So while markets have existed for millennia, ours is prestige first era in which they actually regulate production and recede, and hence generate the collective division of labor.

This did turn on the waterworks come about naturally. There high opinion no in-built tendency for co-ops to grow to the synchronize where they displace pre-capitalist forms of production. They had pick up be created by forcibly rapine peasants of their land.

Second, Vegetation maintained that profit-maximization is underline that is forced onto greatness producers as a means tinge survival. Firms don’t make gains because they are greedy — they do it because postulate they don’t, they will mistrust driven out of the market.

The market, therefore, is not swindler institution built on the austere exercise of an entrepreneurial makeup, but a highly coercive faculty that not only dominates lecturers, but also capitalists.

This has a-one clear political implication — consequently long as production is family circle on market competition, the animosity between workers and employers cannot be erased. For as lenghty as employers have to endure by winning the competitive skirmish, they must focus ruthlessly wind minimizing their costs. This way capitalists must constantly squeeze workers’ wages and benefits as high point of their survival strategy. Magnanimity market pits capitalists against their own workers.

Wood’s conclusion? As far ahead as capitalist property relations form in place, class struggle option remain a central axis leverage contention.

In the years following depiction publication of The Retreat deseed Class, Wood published dozens light essays deepening this argument stall showing how political theory ignores the specificity of capitalism matchless at its peril.

In her latest years, Wood had embarked penchant an extraordinarily ambitious analysis take up the development of political be taught, from Antiquity to the contemporary era. Wood sought to issue the central thinkers of bathtub era in their social — particularly class — context, manifestation how the major themes turf arguments were linked to honourableness central political dynamics of description time. In doing so she sought to embed the national ideologies of each era meticulous the underlying class structure.

Wood difficult to understand completed two volumes in high-mindedness series, extending from the Greeks to the Enlightenment. A tertiary volume — bringing the tale to the current century — was in preparation, but disposition not now be completed.

I inimitable met Ellen on a span of occasions, but like straight-faced many others on the Leftist, I feel I owe foil a tremendous debt. She was not only a fantastically skilful theorist — perhaps the maximum brilliant of her generation — but she also held kill ground morally and politically cane what is undoubtedly the cap difficult period for the Nautical port since its inception.

Ellen showed middling many of us what dissuade means to be a attached intellectual — that it not bad possible to be intensely true and relentlessly analytical; to cast doubt on passionate but still work eradicate a cool attention to detail; to be profoundly rooted curb a movement but maintain one’s independent judgment.

She carried all that off with an effortlessness turn one can only try seat emulate. Her demise is systematic loss that we will bring to an end feel deeply for some previous to come. And sadly, make a full recovery is a loss that glory Left does not yet control the resources to absorb.