Klaus Dorre´ Capitalist Landnahme and the Double Ambivalence of Modernity

TORRES, ESTEBAN

Jena

Workshop; Workshop Sociological Marxism; 2018

Institut für Soziologie, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena

The hypothesis that I propose to dialogue with Klaus' text within the framework of the title of the proposed seminar is that Marxism is profoundly sociological insofar as it assumes a double ambivalence of modernity: a first ambivalence that is expressed from the relation between private appropriation and public appropriation, and a second ambivalence that is synthesized in the relation centre/periphery. The first ambivalence is mainly contained in the sociological sensibility of Marx and German Marxism and the second has been elaborated mostly from the Global South from the creative appropriations of the method of classical social thought, including Marx's method. From such a coordinate I will say that the category of Landnahme developed by Klaus fits almost exclusively to the first ambivalence but without closing the possibility of theoretically developing the second. If the first ambivalence is structured from the evolution of the logic of capitalist expansion the second one does it from the evolution of the logic of colonialist and/or imperialist expansion. In this vision ofmodernity one ambivalence is not prioritized a priori over the other. Recovering a term of astronomy, term that in turn Slavoj Zizek developed in a 2006 text2 , we could say that both ambivalences are observed in parallax, depending on the point of view and the position of the observer. The center-periphery relationship is a dynamic equation that does not necessarily fit the relationship between Global North and Global South. The expansion of China as a global power shows that the center can move towards the Global South. In anycase, the Global North continues to be the dominant block in the social game of global appropriation.