Labor & Creativity
Reading and Reflecting on A. F. Pomeroy’s
Integrative Perspective on Marx and Whitehead
This 9-week learning circle provides a discussion-based study of Anne Fairchild Pomeroy’s text Marx and Whitehead, which systematically links Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy to Marx’s dialectical critique of political economy, identifying deep resonances between the two in order to develop a pathway for the vital integration of these two great thinkers into a more comprehensive perspective.
Marx needs Whitehead to ground his claims regarding the proper ethos and telos of human life and its productive-processive interaction with, for, and as a part of the world as a relational unity; Whitehead needs Marx to focus on the destructive aspects of capitalism as a form of world productive-process.
–Anne Fairechild Pomeroy
This 9-week learning circle involves a discussion-based study of Anne Fairchild Pomeroy’s text Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism (2004), facilitated by Kazi Adi Shakti. Each session will focus on one chapter, exploring the themes of creativity, labor, alienation, care, and justice, as they arise in the speculative process thought of A.N. Whitehead and the critical materialist thought of Karl Marx, through the integrative perspective that Pomeroy offers. We will examine the coherence of Pomeroy’s integrative perspective and see how it might offer real-world applications to social movements at large and to our daily lives as workers and creators in an increasingly precarious and unstable economy amidst ongoing ecological catastrophe.
Anne Fairchild Pomeroy passed away in 2023. She had a long career as a Professor of Philosophy at Stockton University, where she taught courses such as Process Philosophy, Critical Social Theory, Modernity and its Critics, African American
Philosophy, Feminist Theories, Philosophy of the Other, Power and Society, Existentialism and Film, & Marxism and Economics. Her diverse intellectual background speaks to a contemporary integral perspective which a current generation of students of process philosophy are looking for.
Schedule & Logistics
We will meet weekly on Tuesdays from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM Pacific, beginning on November 12th. We will take a break during the Christmas holiday, so we won’t meet on December 24th or 31st. The reading group will span nine sessions, coinciding with the book’s structure.
- Nov 12: Marx and Whitehead (chapter 1)
- Nov 19: The Dialectics of Process (chapter 2)
- Nov 26: The Process of Production (chapter 3)
- Dec 3: Being and Beings (chapter 4)
- Dec 10: The Labor Theory of Value (chapter 5)
- Dec 17: Time and Labor (chapter 6)
- Dec 24: no meeting
- Dec 31: no meeting
- Jan 7: Alienation (chapter 7)
- Jan 14: Misplaced Concreteness (chapter 8)
- Jan 21: Solidarity (chapter 9)
Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common sense notion of ‘thing,’ as something that has a history and has external connections with other things, with notions of ‘process,’ which contains its history and possible futures, and ‘relation,’ which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations.
–Bertell Ollman
Recommended Publications, Websites, and Media
- Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism, by Anne Fairchild Pomeroy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004): E-Text (Google) | Hard Cover (Amazon)
- For those not familiar with Whitehead’s work, C. Robert Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy and Donald Sherburne’s A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality are good places to start.
- For those not familiar with Marx, the Communist Manifesto, co-written with Friedrich Engels, is a classic, and Ernest Mandel’s Introduction chapter to Marx’s Capital Volume 1, which can be found in the Penguin edition, is well-regarded as a succinct primer on Marx’s critique of political economy.
If you need assistance obtaining a copy of any of the texts, please email the facilitator at adishakti1994@gmail.com.
About the Facilitator
Kazi Adi Shakti is an artist and independent researcher studying and theorizing on the intersections of Process Philosophy, Madhyamaka Buddhism, Western Marxism and Ecofeminism, with a special focus on the unique role each might play in a holistic soteriology that includes them all. Kazi blogs regularly on her site, holo-poiesis.com.
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