Social ontology in open Marxism and political Marxism: From alienation, to exploitation and back again

This article compares how Open Marxism and Political Marxism, respectively, mobilize the concepts of social form and of social property relations to produce critiques of the fetishized social ontology of mainstream or orthodox Marxism(s). Focusing on the works of Simon Clarke, Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, I show how these thinkers develop strikingly convergent readings of Marx’s critique of political economy as a rejection of an ontologically separate and asocial economic sphere. I then discuss how points of tension between Open Marxism and Political Marxism seem to emerge when we further specify the social ontologies of these currents. These tensions, however, appear to pertain more to differences of vocabulary than to a substantial theoretical opposition. This becomes clear once we understand how Open Marxist concepts of social form (and alienation) and Political Marxist concepts of social property relations (and exploitation) are in fact complementary. Social property relations can then be seen as an ontological elucidation of alienated social forms.