Capitalism and Cultural Studies Seminar 2010

Silly season

2010-04-23T21:41:00.003+01:00

Seeing as we're all in full essay/procrastination mode, I thought we might enjoy a bit of distraction that combines both:
http://fuckyeahkarlmarx.tumblr.com/

The one about angel dust is my fave.

Good luck with the essays, comrades!

2010-03-30T23:26:00.000+01:00

As part of the Capitalism, Culture and Critique series, the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy, Goldsmiths, University of London invites you to a debate and open conversation with Luc Boltanski (l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), co-author of 'The New Spirit of Capitalism' (Verso 2005), and author of 'Distant Suffering' (Cambridge 1999), and Nancy Fraser (New School for Social Research, New York), whose most recent work is 'Scales of Justice' (Columbia 2009).

The event will take place on Thursday April 29th in RHB309 5-7, Goldsmiths, University of London and it will be followed by a drinks reception in the Senior Common room.

All are welcome so please feel free to circulate this information.

Education without Frontiers

2010-03-17T11:11:00.001Z

Education without Frontiers: Workshop, Music Food, at Goldsmiths 18 March 5pm 2010;
March 15, 2010
Education without Frontiers: Has the UK Border Agency Overstayed its Welcome?

Speakers, Workshops, Music, Food
Date: 18 March, 5pm – late
Location: Goldsmiths, University of London

We stand united, as students and staff, in opposition to the new points-based immigration rules. They frame students as suspects and turn staff into border agents. Join us, meet others, and help spread the campaign!

With Les Back (Sociology Department, Goldsmiths) Phil Booth (NO2ID), Valerie Hartwich (Manifesto Club), Sandy Nicoll (SOAS Living Wage Campaign/Justice for Cleaners), Frances Webber (Human Rights Lawyer), speakers from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, No Borders, and more.

Organised by the Students Not Suspects campaign and hosted by Goldsmiths Students’ Union and Goldsmiths UCU.

Speakers and workshops in RHB 142 (Main Building) from 5PM to 8:15PM; food/social in the Stretch 8:15-10PM, music 10pm-late.

Location: Main building, Goldsmiths, Lewisham Way, New Cross, SE14 6NW
Closest train stations: New Cross, New Cross Gate
Buses: 21, 36, 53, 136, 171, 172, 177, 225, 321, 343, 436, 453.

The event is free; register at studentsnotsuspects@gmail.com

More details about the Students Not Suspects campaign at:
http://studentsnotsuspects.blogspot.com/
Facebook: Students Not Suspects
Download a poster:
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/ucu/flyers/Students_Not_Suspects_flyer.pdf

The Arcane of Reproduction - Fortunati

2010-03-09T16:51:00.003Z

A few notes and questions/ideas on the Fortunati text in the reader.

1. The capitalist male/female relationship is an exchange between women and capital, mediated by men. This relationship operates through a juxtaposing of its formal appearance and its real functioning.
Again we see capital and the social relations around capital are prone to mystification - there is a dual character to the relationship, and a sense that the real functioning is somehow hidden from view. Exchange between the male worker's wage and the female worker's housework or prostitution work appears as such, but in reality there is an exchange between variable capital and housework, ie capital and the female worker, mediated by the male worker.
This reproduction work must appear to be a 'natural force of social labour'.

2. Female labour-power is posited as use-value, not exchange value. Fortunati says the exchange must not appear to be organised in a capitalist way. The houseworker's labour-power has no price. In what appears to be an exchange of equivalents - money/housework - the housework has no limit and no price. Therefore her exploitation is without limit. Whereas the male worker sells his labour to the capitalist for a set period of time, she sells her housework with no limit of time - till death do us part. Her chance to 'change contract' is limited.

3. Fortunati says capitalism is built upon the inequalities of power between and within classes. Why is this the case? Is gender equality impossible in a capitalist society? I think she means that women's work - housework and prostitution work - is always a capitalist exchange mediated by men, and that because women's labour-power has only use-value, not exchange-value, women face inevitable inequality. Fortunati says the only way capital can organise the production of 'labour-power' as a commodity is to define a specific process of production and its related exchanges.

4. Fortunati says the woman has two choices - sell her labour-power on the market, like the male worker, or sell it to the male worker as housework or prostitution work. Housework is a safer market. The male worker is obliged to buy housework in order to satisfy his needs (use-value) and replenish his ability to work etc. I think there's a very obvious question to be asked here. Fortunati almost seems to suggest an essentialist attitude to gender roles - the man is 'obliged' to buy housework rather than cook his own bolognese/wash his own pants etc. I appreciate that this is a fact of life for most women in the UK, let alone the rest of the world, but I don't think it is inevitable. But perhaps Fortunati is arguing that this unfair division of labour down gender lines is in fact an inevitable inequity in a capitalist society? Maybe this is explored more in the rest of her book.

5. Finally, a summary of Fortunati's concise but astute look at prostitution.
Prostitution work appears, at the formal level, to be a commodity, an exchange-value. But in reality the male worker has not received prostitution work but female-labour power. His aim is not appropriation of the value created by her labour but the satisfaction of his needs. The exchange is not an exchange of equivalents. Neither party is equal nor equally 'free' in the exchange. The prostitute cannot sell her labour-power legitimately - she is criminalised. This liberty to sell negates her personal freedom. The money is legitimate; the labour is illegitimate. But at least she sells it for a determinate time only, so she has slightly more 'choice' than the houseworker.

Deleuze, Marx and Politics

2010-03-06T13:10:00.002Z

Following on from the discussion on Thursday afternoon about Marx and Deleuze:

Deleuze, Marx and Politics by Nicholas Thoburn

"A critical and provocative exploration of the political, conceptual and cultural points of resonance between Deleuze's minor politics and Marx's critique of capitalist dynamics, 'Deleuze, Marx and Politics' is the first book to engage with Deleuze's missing work, The Grandeur of Marx.

Following Deleuze's call for an interpretation that draws new relations and connections, this book explores the core categories of communism and capital in conjunction with a wealth of contemporary and historical political concepts and movements "” from the lumpenproletariat and anarchism to Italian autonomia and Antonio Negri, immaterial labour and the refusal of work. Drawing on literary figures such as Kafka and Beckett, Deleuze, Marx and Politics develops a politics that breaks with the dominant frameworks of post-Marxism and one-dimensional models of resistance towards a concern with the inventions, styles and knowledges that emerge through minority engagement with social flows and networks. This book is also an intervention in contemporary debates about new forms of identity and community, information technology and the intensification of work."

Form and content

2010-02-27T13:14:00.006Z

Completely forgot to mention this when writing the previous post. Those of you interested in Marx's style of writing - and in issues relating to writing in general - might want to consider the extent to which his occasionally peculiar style (a mix of equations, Dante, factory reports, ancient Greek, etc.) corresponds to issues of form and content. The relation of form to content is obviously a very broad issue with lots of possible applications, but what I'm referring to here is the extent to which what you say might determine how you say it; i.e. the notion that certain forms of expression might be more or less adequate to the content that they articulate.

You don't need Hegel for this problem, and you certainly don't need him to talk about it, but he might help illustrate it. Hegel wants unity with the Absolute, and yet he has to talk about the Absolute, thus remaining separated from it in a sense. He tries to solve the problem by saying that we become one with the Absolute through the process of learning and expressing our unity with it (see also Hegel's early, oddly mystical attempts to express his system in diagrammatic form, later abandoned for being too representational, and compare this to the consequently flawed but interesting interactive Hegel found here)

Marx obviously doesn't have to worry about such problems (or at least he doesn't have the same problems; you could perhaps go from form and content in Marx to theory and practice), but he does seem to touch on issues of form and content at least once of twice. See for example p.442-3:

"...The latter aspect will not be considered until the first section of Volume 3 of this work. In order that we may treat them in their proper context, many other points relevant here have also been relegated to the third volume. The particular course taken by our analysis forces this tearing apart of the object under investigation; this corresponds also to the spirit of capitalist production."

...might be interesting to relate this to the great lists that Marx reels out in this chapter (see pages 461-2, perhaps 478 and perhaps also the summary on 447)

Cut up machine

2010-02-26T11:20:00.007Z

This is a website that features some discussion of the cut up techniques used by Burroughs, Gysin and others, as well as a few cut up generators that you can use yourself: http://www.languageisavirus.com/

There's a better cut up machine here: http://www.hamiltonsbrain.co.uk/cutup/cutup.htm
Type in a text and see what you come up with. I've put some of my own stuff into it, and have just produced two little statements that seem pretty apt here: "the writer is being example of a vaster construction" and "play on Marx's own famous opening words in words". However, as I was cheating a little by using an essay on writing techniques. So, in the interests of fair play, I used another text relating to my thesis as a whole; this produced "one speaks little of a little trite. Nonetheless, it's worth noting into an academia enthralled by postmodernism". ...Not quite sure what to make of that

Talk by Bifo

2010-02-25T22:12:00.000Z

Tues 2nd March, 6-8pm

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi presents his new book ‘The Soul At Work: From
Alienation to Autonomy’ published by Semiotext(e).

Co-hosted by: Department of Art, Sociology Methods Lab & Micropolitics
Research Group.

http://www.gold.ac.uk/methods-lab/events/

Lecture Theatre, Ground Floor, Ben Pimlott Building,
Goldsmiths, University of London SE14 6NW

Free, Open to All.

Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis

2010-02-25T21:59:00.007Z

Further to a conversation in the pub earlier this evening:
This is a really interesting essay by Ben Noys on the ideas of apocalypse and crisis. It perhaps relates to some of the stuff that we spoke about this afternoon, regarding capitalism's alleged tendencies towards its own immanent demise, and does so whilst suggesting that the claims made by theorists such as Baudrillard, Deleuze and Lyotard reflect a similarly eschatological outlook.
http://www.metamute.org/en/content/apocalypse_tendency_crisis

U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

2010-02-17T14:22:00.004Z

From The Onion:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world's largest economy.

"Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we…if we…" said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. "You know what? It doesn't matter. None of this—this so-called 'money'—really matters at all."

"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."

... http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_economy_grinds_to_halt_as

Immaterial labour links

2010-02-17T08:38:00.005Z

Some of these articles may be of interest if you'd like to look into the issue of 'immaterial labour' and its relation to autonomia, and indeed to Marx's own labour theory of value.

Immaterial labour is a concept used to explain the sense in which much of the produce of labour under contemporary capitalism does not involve producing physical things, but rather knowledge, 'affects' (the production of emotions, well being, etc.), and conducting communication. As these are intangible it can seem hard to consider them under the rubric of Marx's account.

Some writers - and I'm thinking mainly of Negri here, as he's the one I'm most familiar with - argue that this corresponds to a potential emancipation of labour from the 'tyranny' of 'measure', i.e. from regulating it and ordering it according to fixed economic laws (the implication being that any militant form of Marxism that did not ditch the labour theory of value would end up replicating a form of capitalism, or at least a form of social domination). According to this view, 'labour' should not be thought solely in terms of the workplace or in terms of physical products; rather, it should be considered as the production of the very life of society itself (Negri adopts Foucault's notion of 'biopolitics' here). This means that labour is in a position to simply shrug off the 'parasite' of capitalism and produce social life according to its own needs and desires (you can see the influence of autonomia here in the primacy given to labour over capital).

A pretty useful summary of the idea, presented via a critique, can be found here. This article may be useful as it argues against the concept on the basis of Marx's own account.

An example of Negri's rejection of the imposition of measure on labour can found here - well worth a look

...and you may also be interested in David Graeber's excellent commentary on the Art and Immaterial Labour conference held at the Tate a few years ago (more to do with the role of radicalism within art and academia than anything else if I remember righhtly, but it's a great text nonetheless).

Criticisms of the related Italian Marxists Virno and De Angelis, and of their use of the now famous concepts of 'multitude' and 'the commons' respectively, can be found here and here.

Finally, the whole of Hardt and Negri's Empire is available online here

Art and the 'right' to torture

2010-02-16T12:54:00.009Z

Bruce Anderson, columnist for The Daily Mail and The Independent, tells us that "We not only have a right to use torture. We have a duty." He attempts to justify this assertion whilst implying that a society should be judged according to its cultural artefacts rather than its barbarity ("Our enjoyment of Shakespeare and Elizabethan madrigals is not blighted by Walsingham's rack-masters in the Tower of London"), and concludes with the following question: "which is the greater aesthetic affront: torture, or the destruction of the National Gallery?"
Not exactly what Marx had in mind when talking about objects acting like subjects and subjcts being reduced to objects, but its perhaps interesting to think of this in those terms - particularly if it's compared with some of the 20th Century avant-garde stuff on doing away with the notion of making 'things' and uniting art with life itself. Read Bruce and get irritated with him here, and perhaps compare and contrast with this, this, and this

'Anarchism, Nomadism and the Working Class: Lessons from Deleuze'

2010-02-16T12:50:00.003Z

On Tuesday the 2nd of March Amadeo Policante will be giving a talk in the Politics department entitled 'Anarchism, Nomadism and the Working Class: Lessons from Deleuze'. Amadeo was a student on this course last year and is now doing a PhD. Should be very good. The abstract is below:

"According to Deleuze and Guattari the Western proletariat can be perceived from two points of view: as having to seize power and transform the State apparatus (the point of view of labor power), and as willing or wishing for the destruction of the State (this time, the point of view of nomadization power). In fact, even Marx defines the proletariat not only as alienated but as deterritorialized. We have then an objective and a subjective definition of the working class, which corresponds to an anarchist impulse and a process of capture of this same deterritorializing movement by the state apparatus. Starting from this duplicity which is always-already we may finally ask: What is today the working class? And in what ways might we approach the urgent question of how to understand and how to theorize *side
by side* with contemporary movements against capitalist enclosure?"

Tuesday 2nd march, 6-8pm in the Senior Common Room (Level 2 RHB)

No! One can't speak of a social mission in that sense!

2010-02-05T16:59:00.003Z

Heidegger (1969) critiques Marx's contention that: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; what matters is to change it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQsQOqa0UVc

(Translation is in the info box to the side of the video.)

This point came up in the seminar and Heidegger's response may be of interest.

2010-02-02T17:46:00.002Z

Keston Sutherland

"What is bathos?" (On Marx and Alexander Pope)

Wed, 3 February 2010
5 - 6:30 pm
Main Building (RHB) 308

Keston Sutherland is lecturer in English at the University of Sussex as
well as a poet and founding editor of Barque Press.

Free, open to the public, no booking required.

Keston's essay 'Marx in Jargon' (http://english.okstate.edu/worldpicture/WP_1.1/KSutherland.pdf) is great, so the talk should be good. There's a facebook site entitled 'Keston Sutherland: better than Crack', and I think we can take that as a good sign

2010-02-02T17:39:00.008Z

I was talking to Dory at the party last night about Eyal Weizman's work, which deals with the ways in which military forces have appropriated contemporary(ish) theory to help them think strategically about urban environments. It doesn't really have much connection to the material we're looking at this week, but as it's interesting and will be relevant later - and as I'll forget to mention it if I don't do anything about it now - I thought it might be an idea to post a link to the following essay:

The art of war: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord and the Israeli Defence Force

"The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools..."

http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/node/8192

2010-02-02T17:20:00.003Z

Hi,

These are a few very provisional links relating to the issue of alienation, which we spoke about very briefly last week.
Firstly, here's the Chris Arthur text I mentioned, which is useful as regards the translation of the word(s):
http://chrisarthur.net/dialectics-of-labour/appendix.html

If you want to pursue the theme further you could look at Marx's essay on Estranged Labour (from the 1844 Manuscripts), which can be found here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm the
The section on Private Property and Communism in The German Ideology might also be useful (you need to scroll down for that section if you click this link):
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a4...but of course one of the really key sections of text relating to this theme is of course the description of commodity fetishism and the 'ontological inversion' that it involves, as set out in the sections of Capital that we looked at the other week.

If you want to go beyond Marx you might want to look at Lukacs' essay Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat (very influential, but very difficult in the later sections): http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm or maybe
even Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, which is the text that I'm
most concerned with. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/ Karl Korsch's
Marxism and Philosophy might be interesting too, as it's similar to
Lukac's text in some ways. http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1923/marxism-philosophy.htmIf you get really into the alienation issue I can point towards some
of the Hegel stuff that it stems from.

2010-01-28T13:35:00.003Z

I haven't had time this week to write anything pertaining to last week's discussion, but I thought these two links might be of interest. Firstly, this is a link to collection of Marx and Engels' own comments on literature and art. They don't all relate to the issue of value - some are more to do with aesthetics, others touch on ideology - but it would be worth having a look through. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/art/index.htm

Secondly, as regards the issue of aggregations of socially necessary labour time, I'd reccomend this: http://libcom.org/library/incomplete-marx-felton-c-shorthall
it's The Incomplete Marx by Felton Shortall, and it's a text that I found very useful when reading Capital. This chapter in particular may be worth a look - http://libcom.org/library/incomplete-marx-8 - as it raises this issue:

“Against any labour theory of value that suggests that labour is the substance of value it may be objected that labour is not homogeneous -- that there exists a vast array of different types of labour -- and that therefore labour cannot serve as the single substance of the value of all commodities. To overcome such an objection it is necessary to demonstrate how the multiplicity of different labours that enter the production of commodities can be reduced to particular expressions of some universal labour-in-general which may then itself serve as the homogeneous substance of value.”

Humphrey McQueen

2010-01-25T00:51:00.001Z

A readable essay by the ever entertaining Humphrey McQueen makes some good points

http://marxmyths.org/humphrey-mcqueen/article.htm#n15

Terri Senft: For Students: Close Readings: Specters of Marx

2010-01-21T14:56:00.001Z

Terri Senft: For Students: Close Readings: Specters of Marx

2010-01-15T20:04:00.004Z

Really good documentary on chaos theory: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pv1c3/The_Secret_Life_of_Chaos/
What do these ideas do to theories about the freedom and self-determination of the individual subject (e.g. those pertaining to Marx and Marxism)?

2010-01-14T17:19:00.003Z

Hi,

Here are a few links to some of the texts discussed in the lecture and seminar today.

Firstly, this is a link to David Harvey's website which includes a series of lectures on Capital: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

John also mentioned Michael Hardt's notes on Capital (Volumes 1 - 3), but I'm having trouble finding a readable version. This one seems to have lots of items that can't be displayed properly, so I'll have a look for a better version when I have time. http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/Capital.html

We also spoke briefly about the Francis Wheen 'biography' of Das Kapital, which may be of interest as regards considering Marx as a writer. Wheen argues that Capital is a gothic novel in this excerpt; if you like it, maybe track down the book itself. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/08/politics

Also, John mentioned an essay by Nicole Pepperell called 'When is it Safe to ead Capital'. The essay looks at the first chapter of Capital in relation to Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic, and it can be found in the book of essays that he mentioned in the lecture. The essay is also available on Nicole's blog: http://www.roughtheory.org/content/when-is-it-safe-to-read-capital/

Finally, this text might be of interest in relation to the mode of presentation / mode of analysis ideas that we spoke about: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm (scroll down to section 3, entitled 'On the Method of Political Economy'). The analsysis / presentation issue is also raised in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, which can be found in the Penguin edition. The relevant quotation is on p.102, but it's worth reading the whole thing (see in particular Marx's comment about 'coquetting' with Hegel on p.103).

Cheers

Tom

A Space-hijacker answer

2009-04-04T17:40:00.004+01:00

"So, the question is, what can we plan and later build, and keep building upon, to shed ourselves of these bee skins?" Well, the correct answer is most certainly tanks, blue-colored, happy-hippies tanks with pirate flags on top. Although it didn't go all that smooth after all...

PS: It was definitely either Stalin or Zizek who asked: "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" It was the Space Hijackers who turned the question back on his feet: Bees, how many divisions have we got?

Bee-gin the Revolution?

2009-04-04T15:56:00.004+01:00

"what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax." - Marx, Capital I, p284

I couldn't help but notice this creature at Climate Camp during the G20 protest this week. It is unlikely that this architect of change was much bothered about Marx's interest in the difference between the species-being and the bee but the idea of it amused me enough.

The protest did get me thinking though, and I wonder if that little bee symbolises the fact that even at that protest, the swarms of angry anarchists and drum-beating hippes were still yet reduced to the status of bee.

The plans were made for them, as every building was boarded up and the glass-walled RBS shimmering in the sunshine was beckoning for a hit. They were caught like sardines and thrown into the Bank of England keep-net. I can't help but sort of agree conspiracy theorists on this one...a little bit.

It seems to me that although we have the ability to plan and mobilise, we're still beaten up for obstructing the streets. We can't be violent because we are disciplined and can't beat the law, and we can't be peaceful because the foundation of revolution is in violence. Ultimately, it appears as though we are to remain perpetually cordoned off in the bank of England, dressed like bees, constructing our cells in wax with neither a plan nor a purpose.

So, the question is, what can we plan and later build, and keep building upon, to shed ourselves of these bee skins? I can't help but think one-off street parties aren't quite the answer; they make some noise, and that noise needs to be made but, what now?

Worker Bees

2009-02-06T12:17:00.003Z

I thought this might be of interest to some, given Marx's bee-ing fun.

It was originally posted by N Pepperell 29/01/2009 on
http://www.roughtheory.org/content/worker-bees/

"I have to admit, I’ve never particularly thought about the industrial organisation of crop pollination, until I read this column from the New York Times discussing possible responses to Colony Collapse Disorder - the mysterious plague that causes adult bees to desert their hives, leaving honey and larvae behind. I found this image particularly striking":

…it is important to add that, here in the United States, the majority of our crops are pollinated not by wild bees, or even by honeybees like mine, which live in one location throughout the year, but by a vast mobile fleet of honeybees-for-rent.

From the almond trees of California to the blueberry bushes of Maine, hundreds of thousands of domestic honeybee hives travel the interstate highways on tractor-trailers. The trucks pull into a field or orchard just in time for the bloom; the hives are unloaded; and the bees are released. Then, when the work of pollination is done, the bees are loaded up, and the trucks pull out, heading for the next crop due to bloom.

Massive pub fights on primitive accumulation

2008-12-07T19:13:00.002Z

Hi Tom,

first of all thank you for answering. I don't know, maybe it is just me, but looking through the Grundisse I had the impression that for Marx what comes first is the free play of human creativity, living labor. His discussion of the "civilizing power of external trade" seems to point out that it is only through trade of surplus product that human products become quantitatively comparable on the base of their exchange-value - as opposed to being only qualitatively comparable as use-values. Independently from exchange the object created by our own labor is only valuable because it is useful, not as embodiment of an abstract "socially-necessary-labour-time". We can compare our home-made trinkets only qualitatively, not quantitatively. So first is human creativity, then is trade and the commodity. And what's next? Then, while all of the product of social labour comes slowly to be commodified ("not even the bones of saints can resist this alchemy"), we have primitive accumulation.

My problem with primitive accumulation in Capital is that it is something that Marx leaves at the margin of the argument, as if it was an appendix. We have to "assume the existence of a primitive accumulation". One can not understand why primitive accumulation happened in that specific moment in time and in that fashion reading Capital. It is a story of the original sin, it is not explained either theoretically or historically. Why did primitive accumulation starts? In the Grundisse you have an explanation, more or less explicit, which says it has something to do with the effect of growing English foreign trade with Holland. One could also think of a technological reason, and I guess there must be also that in Marx somewhere.

But I don't think that saying this, saying that also primitive accumulation must be dialectically explained, is to state that there is an identity between the historical content of the book and the exposition of its contents. Indeed I think Capital can hardly been thought as an historian's book, although clearly there is lots of history in it. The exposition clearly does not want to be historical. So, I am not sure, but I think I really agree with your comments on "On the Method of Political Economy".

About the mode of exposition: Marx is trying to explain "the whole movement of capital" which "seems to turn around in a never ending circle". The explanation of that circular movement takes the first 25 chapters (all of the book but 70 pages). The last part, on primitive accumulation, poses two theoretical arrows at the opposite sides of the circle of capital. One very real, violent and historical - that is the moment of primitive accumulation - the other still to come, a possibility which Marx wants to indicate. I think the purpose of the last part of Capital is to draw these two theoretical arrows. That's why Marx doesn't go on explaining the origins of primitive accumulation itself. In my understanding the origins of primitive accumulation seem to lay in commerce, "external exchange" and the rise of commodification. I don't know if you would agree with that or if you see it as problematic.

Maybe on wednesday we will end up having a massive group fight on the correct understanding of primitive accumulation!

2008-12-07T15:53:00.004Z

Nick: cheers for the link to the essay. It look's interesting, and I'll have a proper read of it tomorrow.

Amadeo: I'm not disagreeing with your comments, but just one question (in lieu of a further conversation in person, perhaps on Wednesday): does this notion of the commodity coming first mean that we end up with an identity between the historical content of the book and the exposition of its contents? In other words, does it mean that the developing arrangement of concepts and categories becomes akin to their 'real' historical development? I don't think that's what you're saying, but it does seem to imply it - and it's problematic, as the concepts are slowly moving from the abstract to the concrete, and we can't say that one epoch is any less concrete than another. It might be worth bearing in mind that Hegel himself avoids any kind of identity between a logical and historical sequence. He states this explicitly at the beginning of the Philosophy of Right (whilst explaining why private property is discussed prior to the family), and in the Phenomenology talks about the French revolution before Greek religion. One of the most useful texts that I've looked at whilst trying to figure out what Marx is up to in this wierd mode of presentation is the short piece entitled On the Method of Political Economy, also in the Grundrisse (in the introduction). In that one he talks about the need to use the commodity as the concept from which you can unfold all the others that explain society. ...but again, and as we discussed on Thursday, the emphasis that I'm placing on 'concepts' here is perhapsd problematic.

2008-12-06T09:52:00.002Z

Hey,

I stumbled across this rather good article on 'capital’s attempt to measure immaterial labour and thus (re)impose value and the law the value' which uses the UK university as an example. Might be useful for people writing the self-reflection essay, and for anyone thinking of doing a Phd. Doesn't exactly bode well for the future of Cultural Studies Departments.....

Nick

Commodity exchange and primitive accumulation

2008-12-04T17:32:00.002Z

Oi guys,

here there is a great piece of the Grundisse which I found trying to make sense of what we were discussing earlier - how is the process of primitive accumulation related with the establishment of commodity production. Which one comes first?

Here, although the wording "original accumulation or primitive accumulation" would make us think otherwise, I think Marx is saying that the origin of the capitalist mode of production rests in the sphere of exchange. It is through the "“civilizing influence of external trade" (sigh!) that the process of transition to the capitalist mode of production start to realize itself. This, I think, for two main reasons.
First of all, through external commerce the product of labour is more and more – first only the surplus product, then the all of social production – is stamped with exchange value. The product is made into a commodity which value is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time embodied in it (dead labour).
Second, capital appears in its original form of merchant capital. It is the particular power-position of the mediator – ie the possibility of “outbargaining” and “cheating” (commercial profit not only appears as out-bargaining and cheating, but also largely originates from them - Volume III) – which allows the creation of capital before it becomes able to control the two poles of production which in the first phase is only able to mediate.

Here you have the first part of the fragment titled "Transition from Circulation to Capitalist Production" in the Grundisse (you can find it in Marxists.org). Quite usefully I think it goes back to the example used by Marx in the chapter on Primitive Accumulation - ie the expropriation of the commons in England. Here, though, Marx goes one step further back in his analysis and says that the reason behind the movement of primitive expropriation was the growing commerce with Holland and the creation of new needs and new possibilities of realizing surplus production.

So, I would say, the commodity comes first. After all - if capital is dead labor which valorizes itself sucking living labor - it means that the product of human labour has first of all to take the form of dead labor - ie it must take the form of exchange-value as opposed to simple use-value - and only then can, given the right social relations are established (through violence), rise up and sucks the living.

That's also why, i guess, the chapter on commodities and commodity fetishism comes first.

Is this making any sense? Please let me know because i am trying to think this through.

Transition from circulation to capitalist production.

This movement appears in different forms, not only historically, as leading towards value-producing labour, but also within the system of bourgeois production itself, i.e. production for exchange value. With semi-barbarian or completely barbarian peoples, there is at first interposition by trading peoples, or else tribes whose production is different by nature enter into contact and exchange their superfluous products. The former case is a more classical form. Let us therefore dwell on it. The exchange of the overflow is a traffic which posits exchange and exchange value. But it extends only to the overflow and plays an accessory role to production itself. But if the trading peoples who solicit exchange appear repeatedly (the Lombards, Normans etc. play this role towards nearly all European peoples), and if an ongoing commerce develops, although the producing people still engages only in so-called passive trade, since the impulse for the activity of positing exchange values comes from the outside and not from the inner structure of its production, then the surplus of production must no longer be something accidental, occasionally present, but must be constantly repeated; and in this way domestic production itself takes on a tendency towards circulation, towards the positing of exchange values. At first the effect is of a more physical kind. The sphere of needs is expanded; the aim is the satisfaction of the new needs, and hence greater regularity and an increase of production. The organization of domestic production itself is already modified by circulation and exchange value; but it has not yet been completely invaded by them, either over the surface or in depth. This is what is called the civilizing influence of external trade. The degree to which the movement towards the establishment of exchange value then attacks the whole of production depends partly on the intensity of this external influence, and partly on the degree of development attained by the elements of domestic production -- division of labour etc. In England, for example, the import of Netherlands commodities in the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the seventeenth century gave to the surplus of wool which England had to provide in exchange, an essential, decisive role. In order then to produce more wool, cultivated land was transformed into sheep-walks, the system of small tenant-farmers was broken up etc., clearing of estates took place etc. Agriculture thus lost the character of labour for use value, and the exchange of its overflow lost the character of relative indifference in respect to the inner construction of production. At certain points, agriculture itself became purely determined by circulation, transformed into production for exchange value. Not only was the mode of production altered thereby, but also all the old relations of population and of production, the economic relations which corresponded to it, were dissolved. Thus, here was a circulation which presupposed a production in which only the overflow was created as exchange value; but it turned into a production which took place only in connection with circulation, a production which posited exchange values as its exclusive content.

They Live

2008-11-27T23:02:00.003Z

I don't remember who mentioned John Carpenter's film They Live, but if you haven't seen it do watch it. It's a work of sheer, unadulterated genius. Slavoj Zizek used it's hillarious ten minute fight scene in his lecture at the Historical Materialism conference last year, but if you don't feel the need for such official intellectual endorsement you might be persuaded by the following, golden line: 'I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum.' See Randy (yes, 'Randy') Roddy Piper do his thing at the following links, but do watch the film (ideally after a few drinks)

First, Randy Roddy gets hold of some special sunglasses. Not only do they make him look dead cool; in addition, they allow him to see that all rich people, policemen, celebrities and politicians are aliens. He also notices that billboards and magazines display notices that read 'stay asleep', 'no thought', 'marry and reproduce', etc. : http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=S0GxyZCVc5M

He then gets very upset when his friend won't put the magic sunglasses on. They have a very big fight (it's not so funny when you can see the progress bar, but anyway...). http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EsZpdUUdd3I

Notes on Wagner

2008-11-27T22:44:00.005Z

Further to a conversation in the pub earlier this evening:

Towards the end of his life - in fact, I think this may have been one of the last things that he wrote - Marx made a collection of notes (for his own use) on a German political economist named Adolf Wagner. Wagner had had the temerity to summarise and explain Marx's theory of value, and predictably enough incurred Karl's wrath. A lesson to us all.

Anyway, the text is interesting, as in dismissing Wagner Marx also offers some useful comments about the account of value that he presented in Capital.

I also rather like this line:

"According to Mr. Wagner, Marx's theory of value is the cornerstone of his socialist system” (p. 45). Since I have never established a “socialist system,” this is a fantasy..."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm

I'm not going to be able to post a link to the essay on the transformation problem that we spoke about. If anyone wants a copy and didn't receive it via e-mail a few weeks back please send me a mail (cup01tb@gold.ac.uk)

Tom

2008-11-27T00:00:00.004Z

Here is something worth 6 minutes of your valuable time - a little film by an Australian comrade called Zanny

Called:

Treat (or trick)

See it here.

Treat (or trick)
Film by Zanny Begg
DVD 7min PAL
Sound Kate Carr
Camera Osama Yusif
For a full version email: zanny.b[at]gmail.com
www.zannybegg.com

Value, Price and Profit

2008-11-18T11:30:00.000Z

Hi,

I mentioned this text to Kasim last week, but thought it might be useful for some of the other people who are doing the essay questions based around enquiry and analysis into your own economic situation. It's entitled Value, Price and Profit (sometimes entitled Wages, Price and Profit), and it's the text of a speech that Marx presented to the International Working Men's Association in 1865. It's worth looking at, as he's trying to outline the essentials of his ideas in an accessible manner, and in a way that would be of use to people concerned with understanding their own circumstances.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/

Perhaps I'm being completely stupid, but I couldn't find much Gramsci at all on the internet; the Marxists.org archive just seems to have the contents of his works and little else. If anyone else can find something online please do post it here.

Cheers

Tom

Heidegger

2008-11-12T23:49:00.002Z

Just a very quick suggestion: scroll down and have a look at the post that Jeff added on Heidegger and Marx last year.

Nick: sorry to hear that the HM conference was turgid in places, but it sounds like some interesting ideas were raised; we should pick up on some of the issues that you mention in the seminar. I was only able to attend the conference on Friday, and my own experience of it was pretty much positive. Pretty much everything I saw was on Adorno; none of it was bad, but one paper (delivered by a guy named Werner Bonefeld) was excellent. Maybe worth checking out

Historical Materialism report

2008-11-12T15:16:00.002Z

Since I spent my weekend up to my neck in Marxist theory, I thought I would try and write up what little I understood of the Historical Materialism conference (which took place last weekend at SOAS, and featured a paper by our very own Tom, which I didn't see), since quite a lot of it was salient for this course, and for the upcoming essays.

The first thing I went to was an extremely turgid panel on Ecosocialism. Not really a good start, although it was useful in that I now know that the best way to approach the question of nature and the environment in Marx is through his discussion of 'ground rent' and ownership of the land, in the '1844 Manuscripts' and (apparently) in 'Capital vol. 3'. Having now read the manuscripts, the basic thrust of it seems to be that ownership of the earth is the root of all private property, and as such the origin of the process whereby capital turns living labour into dead money; the original neck form which the vampire sucked, so to speak.

Continuing this theme, there was a fantastic panel on Theories of Life Value, which tried to reformulate the theory of value for cognitive capitalism. How do you know what is living and what is dead labour when you're always on the end of a phone etc.... All stuff which has no doubt been covered in Mute Magazine or something like that (Amadeo was also at this talk and can possibly explain it better than me?).

The second talk in this panel was on bio-communism (related to this essay here- http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/hm/2004/00000012/00000004/art00001 ) , and it tried to reintroduce Marx's concept of species-being (as discussed below by Tom) in the context of bio-power and particularly the environmental crisis. The paper argued that alienation from species-being (which was formulated as a kind of vitality or life-force which is the source of labour and class struggle) has only really now begun, as a result of capital turing the earth into a 'factory planet/planet factory...subsuming life's genetic and biological production'. This paper really did a lot to help explain Marx's rather problematic attitude to nature (I know he couldn't have known, but does anyone else wince when he implies that natural resources are not commodities because they are free and unlimited?)

Other than that there were some discussions about film-noir as the anti-capitalist cinema (oooh, nice and cultural-studiesy), and about urban-space in the global south as the new ground for global struggle, although by this stage my notes are too scrappy to write up.
There was also yet another debate on marxist interptretations of the financial crisis, which was great at first but then devolved into a theological debate about the rate of profit.

Anyways, it was all good fun, and was nice to see a few people from the course over the weekend. Apologies for the rather vacuous nature of this post however, if you've just read down to here and are wondering why you bothered.....

Nick

Fear of a red planet

2008-11-12T12:15:00.004Z

A bit random perhaps, but maybe worth a mention:
Just finished listening to Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of The war of the Worlds. Fantastic, and well worth a listen. I'm sure you can hear it on Youtube or something similar, but if not you can get the script here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/mars/wow.htm
The first part is set up like a live radio news broadcast (and allegedly led many listeners to believe the invasion was really happening; the wikipedia entry on the broadcast claims this is mainly an urban legend), and the second part consists of a monologue by Welles. It includes the following conversation between himself (Pierson) and a survivor whom he's just met:

STRANGER: Life. . . that's what! I want to live. Yeah, and so do you. We're not going to be exterminated. And I don't mean to be caught, either, and tamed, and fattened, and bred, like an ox.
PIERSON: What are you going to do?
STRANGER: I'm going on. . . right under their feet. I got a plan. We men as men are finished. We don't know enough. We gotta learn plenty before we've got a chance. And we've got to live and keep free while we learn, see? I've thought it all out, see.
PIERSON: Tell me the rest.
STRANGER: Well, it isn't all of us that were made for wild beasts, and that's what it's got to be. That's why I watched YOU. All these little office workers that used to live in these houses -- they'd be no good. They haven't any stuff to 'em. They just used to run off to work. I've seen hundreds of 'em, running wild to catch their commuter train in the morning for fear they'd get canned if they didn't; running back at night afraid they won't be in time for dinner. Lives insured and a little invested in case of accidents. And on Sundays, worried about the hereafter. The Martians will be a godsend for those guys. Nice roomy cages, good food, careful breeding, no worries. After a week or so chasing about the fields on empty stomachs they'll come and be glad to be caught.
PIERSON: You've thought it all out, haven't you?
STRANGER: You bet I have! And that isn't all. These Martians will make pets of some of 'em, train 'em to do tricks. Who knows? Get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed. . . And some, maybe, they'll train to hunt us.
PIERSON: No, that's impossible. No human being. . .
STRANGER: Yes they will. There's men who'll do it gladly. If one of them ever comes after me, why. . .
PIERSON: In the meantime, you and I and others like us. . . where are we to live when the Martians own the earth?
STRANGER: I've got it all figured out. We'll live underground. I've been thinking about the sewers. Under New York are miles and miles of 'em. The main ones are big enough for anybody. Then there's cellars, vaults, underground storerooms, railway tunnels, subways. You begin to see, eh? And we'll get a bunch of strong men together. No weak ones; that rubbish -- out.
PIERSON: And you meant me to go?
STRANGER: Well, I gave you a chance, didn't I?
PIERSON: We won't quarrel about that. Go on.
STRANGER: And we've got to make safe places for us to stay in, see, and get all the books we can -- science books. That's where men like you come in, see? We'll raid the museums, we'll even spy on the Martians. It may not be so much we have to learn before -- just imagine this: four or five of their own fighting machines suddenly start off -- heat rays right and left and not a Martian in 'em. Not a Martian in 'em! But MEN -- men who have learned the way how. It may even be in our time. Gee! Imagine having one of them lovely things with its heat ray wide and free! We'd turn it on Martians, we'd turn it on men. We'd bring everybody down to their knees.
PIERSON: That's your plan?
STRANGER: You, and me, and a few more of us we'd own the world.
PIERSON: I see. . .
STRANGER: (FADING OUT) Say, what's the matter? . . . Where are you going?
PIERSON: Not to your world. . . Goodbye, stranger. . .

A busy weekend

2008-11-03T14:34:00.003Z

As every year the 5th of November breaks up the spatio-temporal continuous and bring us back to 1605. Dress up accordingly and show up in front of the Parliament. Blow it up. The day after will be dedicated in toto to the activity of cleaning up the area, because we are also eco-friendly.

Friday, the Historical Materialism Central Committee - the eternally vigilant prophet - is meeting at SOAS. In its ever-renewed struggle against the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat, it will investigate the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process. Revisionists, Utopianists and false prophets not invited. The name of the three days Confererence "Many Marxisms" is clearly just another clumsy trap for naive Trotskyists.

What: Historical Materialism annual Conference "Many Marxisms"
Where: SOAS
When: Friday, Saturday, Sunday all day
How: Orthodoxly
Why: it is not causal, it is dialectical
Who: John Johnson

http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/

Radical perspectives on the crisis

2008-10-29T15:29:00.002Z

I've not yet had a proper look at this website, but it sounds promising:

"The world is falling apart and we want to know why and what to do about it. Some of us have been studying some of this stuff for a while and others are trying to brush up quick. On this site we will post all the useful information we can find on understanding and grappling with whatever capitalism will throw at us during this exceptional period, as well as seeking exit strategies in the struggles which develop."

http://sites.google.com/site/radicalperspectivesonthecrisis/

Marx's social survey of 1880

2008-10-29T09:07:00.003Z

This is a social survey that Marx wrote in 1880, and which was published in La Revue Socialiste; I thought it might be interesting to look at in relation to the Kalinko Call Centre Communism thing. Love the way he writes of "the blackguardly features of capitalist exploitation" in the same sentence as "an impartial and systematic investigation".

http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1880/04/20.htm

A Workers' Inquiry

First published:in La Revue socialiste, April 20, 1880;
Transcribed: by Curtis Price, 1997.

Not a single government, whether monarchy or bourgeois republic, has yet ventured to undertake a serious inquiry into the position of the French working class. But what a number of investigations have been undertaken into crises — agricultural, financial, industrial, commercial, political!

The blackguardly features of capitalist exploitation which were exposed by the official investigation organized by the English government and the legislation which was necessitated there as a result of these revelations (legal limitation of the working day to 10 hours, the law concerning female and child labor, etc.), have forced the French bourgeoisie to tremble even more before the dangers which an impartial and systematic investigation might represent. In the hope that maybe we shall induce a republican government to follow the example of the monarchical government of England by likewise organizing a far reaching investigation into facts and crimes of capitalist exploitation, we shall attempt to initiate an inquiry of this kind with those poor resources which are at our disposal. We hope to meet in this work with the support of all workers in town and country who understand that they alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes form which they suffer and that only they, and not saviors sent by providence, can energetically apply the healing remedies for the social ills which they are prey. We also rely upon socialists of all schools who, being wishful for social reform, must wish for an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class — the class to whom the future belongs -works and moves.

These statements of labor's grievances are the first act which socialist democracy must perform in order to prepare the way for social regeneration.

The following hundred questions are the most important. In replies the number of the corresponding question should be given. It is not essential to reply to every question, but our recommendation is that replies should be as detailed and comprehensive as possible. The name of the working man or woman who is replying will not be published without special permission but the name and address should be given so that if necessary we can send communication.

Replies should be sent to the Secretary of the Revue Socialiste, M.Lecluse, 28, rue royale, saint cloud, nr. Paris.

The replies will be classified and will serve as material for special studies, which will be published in the Revue and will later be reprinted as a separate volume.

What is your trade?
Does the shop in which you work belong to a capitalist or to a limited company/ State the names of the capitalist owners or directors of the company.
State the number of persons employed.
State their age and sex.
What is the youngest age at which children are taken off (boys or girls)?
State the number of overseers and other employees who are not rank and file hired workers.
Are their apprentices? How many?
Apart from the usual and regularly employed workers, are there others who come in at definite seasons?
Does your employer' undertaking work exclusively or chiefly for local orders, or for the home market generally, or for export abroad?
Is the shop in a village, or in a town? State the locality.
If your shop is in the country, is there sufficient work in the factory for your existence or are you obliged to combine it with agricultural labor/
Do you work with your hands or with the help of machinery?
State details as to the division of labor in your factory.
Is stream used as motive power?
State the number of rooms in which the various branches of production are carried on. Describe the specialty in which you are engaged. Describe not only the technical side, but the muscular and nervous strain required, and its general effect on the health of the workers.
Describe the hygienic conditions in the workshops; the size of the rooms, space allotted to every worker, ventilation, temperature, plastering, lavatories, general cleanliness, noise of machinery, metallic dust, dampness, etc.
Is there any municipal or government supervision of hygienic conditions in the workshops?
Are there in your industry particular effluvia which are harmful for the health and produce specific diseases among the workers?
Is the shop overcrowded with machinery?
Are safety measures to prevent accidents applied to the engine, transmission and machinery?
Mention the accidents which have taken place in your personal knowledge.
If you work in a mine, state the safety measures adopted by your employer to ensure ventilation and prevent explosions and other accidents.
If you work in a chemical factory, at an iron works, at a factory producing metal goods, or in any other industry involving specific dangers to health, describe the safety measures adopted by your employer.
What is your workshop lit up by (gas, oil, etc.)?
Are there sufficient safety appliances against fire?
Is the employer legally bound to compensate the worker or his family in case of accident?
If not, has he ever compensated those who suffered accidents while working for his enrichment?
Is first-aid organized in your workshop?
If you work at home, describe the conditions of your work room. Do you use only working tools or small machines? Do you have recourse to the help of your children or other persons (adult or children, male or female)? Do you work for private clients, or for an employer? Do you deal with him direct or trough an agent?
State the number of hours you work daily, and the number of working days during the week.
State the number of holidays in the course of a year.
What breaks are there during the working day?
Do you take meals at definite intervals, or irregularly? Do you eat in the workshop or outside?
Does work go on during meal times?
If steam is used, when is it started and when stopped?
Does work go on at night?
State the number of hours of work of children and young people under 16.
Are there shifts if children and young people replacing each other alternately during working hours?
Has the government or municipality applied the laws regulating child labor? Do the employers submit to these laws?
Do schools exist for children and young people employed in your trade? If they exist, in what hours do the lessons take place? Who manages the schools? What is taught in them?
If work takes place both night and day, what is the order of the shifts?
What is the usual lengthening of the working day in times of good trade?
Are the machines cleaned by workers specially hired for that purpose, or do the workers employed on these machines clean them free, during their working day?
What rules and fines exist for latecomers? When does the working day begin, when it is resumed after the dinner hour break?
How much time do you lose in coming to the workshop and returning home?
What agreements have you with your employer? Are you engaged by the day, week, month, etc.?
What conditions are laid down regarding dismissals or leaving employment?
In the event of a breach of agreement, what penalty can be inflicted on the employer, if he is the cause of the breach?
What penalty can be inflicted on the worker if he is the cause of the breach?
If there are apprentices, what are their conditions of contract?
Is your work permanent or casual?
Does work in your trade take place only at particular seasons, or is the work usually distributed more or less equally throughout the year? If you work only at definite seasons, how do you live in the intervals?
Are you paid time or piece rate?
If you are paid time rate, is it by the hour or by the day?
Do you receive additions to your wages for overtime? How much?
If you receive piece rates, how are they fixed? Of you are employed in industries in which the work done is measured by quantity or weight, as in the mines, don't your employers or their clerks resort to trickery, in order to swindle you out of part of your wages/
If you are paid piece rate, isn't the quality of the goods used as a pretext for wrongful deductions form your wages?
Whatever wages you get, whether piece or time rate, when is it paid to you; in other words, how long is the credit you give your employer before receiving payment for the work you have already carried out? Are you paid a week later, month, etc.?
Have you noticed that delay in the payment of your wages forces you often to resort to the pawnshops, paying rates of high interest there, and depriving yourself of things you need: or incurring debts with the shopkeepers, and becoming their victim because you are their debtor? Do you know of cases where workers have lost their wages owing to the ruin or bankruptcy of their employers?
Are wages paid direct by the employer, or by his agents ((contractors, etc.).)?
If wages are paid by contractors or other intermediaries, what are the conditions of your contract?
What is the amount of your money wages by the day week?
What are the wages of the women and children employed together with you in the same shop?
What was the highest daily wage last month in your shop?
What was the highest piece wage last month?
What were your own wages during the same time, and if you have a family, what were the wages of your wife and children?
Are wages paid entirely in money, or in some other form?
If you rent a lodging from your employer, on what conditions ? Does he not deduct the rent from your wages?
What are the prices of necessary commodities, for example:
(a) Rent of your lodging, conditions of lease, number of rooms, persons living in them, repair, insurance, buying and repairing furniture, heating, lighting, water, etc.
(b) Food — bread, meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc, dairy produce, eggs, fish, butter, vegetable, oil, lard, sugar, salt, groceries, coffee, chicory, beer, wine, etc., tobacco.
(c) Clothing for parents and children, laundry, keeping clean, bath, soap, etc.
(d) Various expenses, such as correspondence, loans, payments to pawnbroker, children's schooling and teaching a trade, newspapers, books, etc., contributions to friendly societies, strikes, unions, resistance associations, etc.
(e) Expenses, if any necessitated by your duties.
(f) Taxes.
Try and draw up a weekly and yearly budget of your income and expenditure for self and family.
Have you noticed, in your personal experience, a bigger rise in the price of immediate necessities, e.g., rent, food, etc., than in wages?
State the changes in wages which you know of.
Describe wage increases during so-called prosperity periods.
Describe any interruptions in employment caused by changes in fashions and partial and general crises. Describe your own involuntary rest periods.
Compare the price of the commodities you manufacture or the services you render with the price of your labor.
Quote any cases known to you of workers being driven out as a result of introduction of machinery or other improvements.
In connection with the development of machinery and the growth of the productiveness of labor, has its intensity and duration increased or decreased?
Do you know of any cases of increases in wages as a result of improvements in production?
Have you ever known any rank and file workers who could retire from employment at the age of 50 and live on the money earned by them as wage workers.
How many years can a worker of average health be employed in your trade?
Do any resistance associations exist in your trade and how are they led? Send us their rules and regulations.
How many strikes have taken place in your trade that you are aware of?
How long did these strikes last?
Were they general or partial strikes?
Were they for the object of increasing wages, or were they organized to resist a reduction of wages, or connected with the length of the working day, or prompted by other motives?
What were their results?
Tell us of the activity of the courts of arbitration.
Were strikes in your trade ever supported by strikes of workers belonging to other trades?
Describe the rules and fines laid down by your employer for the management of his hired workers.
Have there ever existed associations among the employers with the object of imposing a reduction of wages, a longer working day, of hindering strikes and generally imposing their own wishes?
Do you know of cases when the government made unfair use of the armed forces, to place them at the disposal of the employers against their wage workers?
Are you aware of any cases when the government intervened to protect the workers from the extortions of the employers and their illegal associations?
Does the government strive to secure the observance of the existing factory laws against the interests of the employers? Do its inspectors do their duty?
Are there in your workshop or trade any friendly societies to provide for accidents, sickness, death, temporary incapacity, old age, etc.? Send us their rules and regulations.
Is membership of these societies voluntary or compulsory? Are their funds exclusively controlled by the workers?
If the contributions are compulsory, and are under the employers' control, are they deducted from wages? Do the employers pay interest for this deduction? Do they return the amounts deducted to the worker when he leaves employment or is dismissed? Do you know of any cases when the workers have benefitted from the so-called pensions schemes, which are controlled by the employers, but the initial capital of which is deducted beforehand from the workers' wages?
Are there cooperative guilds in your trade? How are they controlled? Do they hire workers for wages in the same ways as the capitalists? Send us their rules and regulations.
Are there any workshops in your trade in which payment is made to the workers partly in the form of wages and partly in the form of so-called profit sharing? Compare the sums received by these workers and the sums received by other workers who don't take place in so-called profit sharing. State the obligations of the workers living under this system. may they go on strike, etc. or are they only permitted to be devoted servants of their employers?
What are the general physical, intellectual and moral conditions of life of the working men and women employed in your trade?
General remarks.

Faust

2008-10-24T12:02:00.005+01:00

I can't remember who I was talking to, but I'm pretty sure someone said that they wanted to look at Capital in relation to literature or theatre...? If so, there's a reference to Goethe's Faust in the section that we've just read which I thought might be of interest.

On page 302, Marx describes capital as "an animated monster which begins to 'work', 'as if its body were by love possessed'." The quotation comes from a song sung in a a drinking den, and has been translated into English in a variety of different ways; the German is 'als hatt es Lieb in Leibe' which in addition to 'as if its body were by love possessed' has been rendered as 'as if it had love in its body', 'as if his frame love wasted', and, in my own copy - which sounds a bit rude - as 'love consumed his vitals'. Marx in fact liked this so much that he quoted it again in Volume 3 (p.517 of the Penguin edition, chapter 24) when describing interest: "The money's body is now by love possessed".

Faust is great, and you can find it for free on the internet. I found this version of the song here:
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/faust06.html

Brander [pounding on the table].
Give heed Give heed! Lend me your ear!
You, sirs, confess that I know what is what.
Some lovesick folk are sitting here,
And so in honour due their present lot
I must contribute to their night's good cheer.
Give heed! A brand-new song 'twill be!
And sing the chorus lustily!

[He sings.]

There once in a cellar lived a rat,
Had a paunch could scarce be smoother,
For it lived on butter and on fat,
A mate for Doctor Luther.
But soon the cook did poison strew
And then the rat, so cramped it grew
As if it had love in its body.
Chorus [shouting].
As if it had love in its body.
Brander.
It flew around, and out it flew,
From every puddle swilling,
It gnawed and scratched the whole house through,
But its rage was past all stilling.
It jumped full of in anguish mad,
But soon, poor beast, enough it had,
As if it had love in its body.
Chorus.
As if it had love in its body.
Brander.
By anguish driven in open day
It rushed into the kitchen,
Fell on the hearth and panting lay,
Most pitiably twitchin'.
Then laughed the poisoner: "Hee! hee! hee!
It's at its last gasp now," said she,
"As if it had love in its body."
Chorus.
"As if it had love in its body."

As is no doubt evident by now, Capital is full of literary references and it can be quite fun to chase them up. Francis Wheen's short biography of Capital (he's also done a biography of Marx himself, but I'm told it's not that great) stresses these literary references and describes the book as a 'Gothic novel':

"By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage - juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors' reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The Waste Land."

My own copy of this book is cicrulating in the second seminar group at the moment, but if anyone else wants to read it do say so. You can find a version of its first chapter here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/08/politics

back in fashion again - but when was it not.

2008-10-22T15:36:00.000+01:00

From BBC News:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7679758.stm

Karl Marx is back in fashion, says one German publisher, who attributes his
new popularity to the economic crisis.

Publisher Karl-Dietz said it sold 1,500 copies of Das Kapital this year - up from
the 200 it usually sells annually.

Written in 1867, sales of the tome rarely hit double digits but have been on
the rise since 2005.

Marxist economic philosophy - and in particular its Russian Leninist version -
fell out of favour with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.

"It's definitely in vogue right now," said the publisher's director Joern
Schuetrumpf.

"The financial crisis brought us a huge bump."

He suggested that it was younger Germans who were buying the book
unhappy with the direction their elders had led the country.

"There's a younger generation of academics tackling hard questions and
looking to Marx for answers," Mr Schuetrumpf said.

But he doubted their perseverance: "I doubt they will read it all the way to
the end, because it's really arduous."

Other publishers also print Das Kapital, and German media have reported that
bookstores nationwide have seen a 300% increase in sales of the book in
recent months.

And suddenly too, some of the all-but-forgotten Marxist philosophers are
having their say again, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm.

"Globalisation, which is implicit in capitalism, not only destroys the heritage
and tradition but it is incredibly unstable, it operates through a series of
crises, and I think this has been recognised to be the end of this particular
era," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Differences in the level of economic development

2008-10-19T12:16:00.005+01:00

I'm posting the letter below as a follow up to the points made by Kassim as regards the issues of a historical development from capitalism to communism and their relation to the different levels of economic development reached by different countries. There's also a lot of debate and controversy surrounding Marx's references to 'the Asiatic mode of production' (I think Spivak says something about this somewhere...? Maybe in the Critique of Postcolonial Reason?)

This letter was written in 1877, just five years before Marx's death, and corresponds to his growing interest in Russia. He'd started to think that Russia might in fact prove a fertile ground for revolution - this despite its lack of an industrial proletariat, backwards economy and great mass of peasants - had taught himself Russian, and had started to amass piles of sociological data about the Russian economy (after his death Engels apparently found a room in his house full of Russia agricultural statistics). The letter is interesting, as in it Marx describes the account given in Capital as to the evolution of capitalism in Europe as a 'sketch' specific to Europe, and as something that could not be abstractly imposed elsewhere. He thus stresses that it is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm

Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky
[Notes on the Fatherland]

Written: in French at the end of November 1877;
Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;
Publisher: International Publishers (1968);
First Published: Gestamtausgabe;
Translated: Donna Torr;
Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

The author of the article Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of M. Shukovsky is evidently a clever man and if, in my account of primitive accumulation, he had found a single passage to support his conclusions he would have quoted it. In the absence of any such passage he finds himself obliged to seize upon an hors d'oeuvre, a sort of polemic against a Russian “literary man,” published in the postscript of the first German edition of Capital. What is my complaint against this writer there? That he discovered the Russian commune not in Russia but in the book written by Haxthausen, Prussian Counsellor of State, and that in his hands the Russian commune only serves as an argument to prove that rotten old Europe will be regenerated by the victory of pan-Slavism. My estimate of this writer may be right or it may be wrong, but it cannot in any case furnish a clue to my views regarding the efforts “of Russians to find a path of development for their country which will be different from that which Western Europe pursued and still pursues,” etc.

In the postcript to the second German edition of Capital – which the author of the article on M. Shukovsky knows, because he quotes it – I speak of “a great Russian critic and man of learning” with the high consideration he deserves. In his remarkable articles this writer has dealt with the question whether, as her liberal economists maintain, Russia must begin by destroying la commune rurale (the village commune) in order to pass to the capitalist regime, or whether, on the contrary, she can without experiencing the tortures of this regime appropriate all its fruits by developing ses propres donnees historiques [the particular historic conditions already given her]. He pronounces in favour of this latter solution. And my honourable critic would have had at least as much reason for inferring from my consideration for this “great Russian critic and man of learning” that I shared his views on the question, as for concluding from my polemic against the “literary man” and Pan-Slavist that I rejected them.

To conclude, as I am not fond of leaving “something to be guessed,” I will come straight to the point. In order that I might be qualified to estimate the economic development in Russia to-day, I learnt Russian and then for many years studied the official publications and others bearing on this subject. I have arrived at this conclusion: If Russia, continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.

II

The chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy. It therefore describes the historic movement which by divorcing the producers from their means of production converts them into wage earners (proletarians in the modern sense of the word) while it converts into capitalists those who hold the means of production in possession. In that history, “all revolutions are epoch-making which serve as levers for the advancement of the capitalist class in course of formation; above all those which, after stripping great masses of men of their traditional means of production and subsistence, suddenly fling them on to the labour market. But the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the cultivators.

“This has not yet been radically accomplished except in England....but all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement,” etc. (Capital, French Edition, 1879, p. 315). At the end of the chapter the historic tendency of production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property. At this point I have not furnished any proof, for the good reason that this statement is itself nothing else than the short summary of long developments previously given in the chapters on capitalist production.

Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.

In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.

'Species-being', labour and nature

2008-10-19T12:13:00.004+01:00

The text below was sent as an e-mail on Saturday morning, as some people are still having trouble accepting the blog invitations. I thought I'd post it here anyway:

Rita raised an excellent question on Thursday, as to what
'nature,' 'natural' and 'human nature' might mean for Marx. We spoke a
little about the sense in which he holds human nature to be historically
contextual, and John pointed out that this can be seen in his account of
'species-being'.

As we said, 'species-being' is a term borrowed from Feuerbach's The
Essence of Christianity
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/index.htm),
and can be seen very clearly in one of Marx's early 1844 Manuscripts
entitled Estranged Labour
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm).
I thought it might be good to read that text alongside this week's
sections of Capital (assuming you want to do even more reading), as it
describes the sale of labour power whilst stressing the concept of
alienation.  The text also opposes alienated labour undertaken for the
capitalist to a more 'natural' conception of human activity.

(N.B. The text is entitled 'estranged' labour rather than 'alienated'
labour as Marx employs two German words for alienation: 'Entäusserung' and
'Entfremdung'. Entausserung means externalisation, objectification, i.e.
selling property, my labour power, making my intentions manifest in real
activity. Entfremdung is more to do with subjective experience, i.e. two
people feeling alienated from one another ('estranged' in this
translation). Just googled this explanation by Chris Arthur, which looks
pretty good: http://chrisarthur.net/dialectics-of-labour/appendix.html)

Anyway, back to 'species-being': as I understand it, the term can be
explained fairly quickly as follows. For Hegel, particular human
individuals were to recognise their unity with others through
comprehending the reason that underpins the universe; a little like
recognising God to be the truth and meaning of everything.

According to Feuerbach, this was too much like Christianity: for him,
partiular human beings were not to recognise their unity in some abstract,
fantastical, ideal universal posited above their real existence, but
rather in human beings themselves.  Universality would be found in the
species of humanity, and philosophy would thus allow humanity to arrive at
a self-conscious awareness of its own 'species-being'.

Marx really likes this, but thinks it has drawbacks (see the famous Theses
on Feuerbach:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm).  These
drawbacks basically boil down to the claim that although Feuerbach had
succeeded in bringing philosophy down from the clouds, he still concieved
material reality in static, immobile terms (i.e. the human species as an
absolute rather than a historically contingent category).  Reality is
subject to historical change, and - crucially - human beings are capable
of serving as the agents of change. The real nature of human beings is the
capacity to shape and consciously experience history, and it is in this
respect that Marx ends up with a notion of 'species-being' based around
formative activity. This can be seen fairly clearly in the essay on
Estranged Labour.

Anway, all of this can be summed up in the famous exhortation from the end
of the Theses on Feuerbach (also the inscription on Marx's grave in
Highgate Cemetary): "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point is to change it." Philosophy thus becomes
political economy: rather than interpreting the world as it appears to us,
the task that Marx sets himnself is to figure out how our social relations
compose our world, and to thereby wrest control of human history from the
economy.

2008-10-14T11:08:00.002+01:00

Sorry, still have to figure out how this works ;-)

Slavoj Zizek - 'From The Critique of Religion to the
Critique of Political Economy'

Registration essential – Standard £10            
Birkbeck Staff and all Students £5

Credit card booking will be available soon. If, in the
meantime you would like to send a cheque and book a place
please click here for a booking form.

Saturday 6th December, 2.30pm, Room B01, Clore Management Centre,
Birkbeck College

2008-10-14T11:04:00.000+01:00

Should be worth attending:


Slavoj Zizek - 'From The Critique of Religion to the Critique of
Political Economy'


Registration essential –         Standard £10             Birkbeck Staff
and all Students £5

Credit card booking will be available soon. If, in the meantime you would
like to send a cheque and book a place please click here for a booking form.

Saturday 6th December   2.30pm   Room B01    Clore Management Centre,
Birkbeck College

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/news/critiqueofreligion

freedom x 2?

2008-10-14T10:10:00.002+01:00

comments seem broken, so this is also a response to Rita's intersting earlier post (with links).

Hi Rita

I wish I'd had time to respond earlier, but the vampire is at my throat, my labour is not my own. Funny that.

Anyway, a possible and interesting way to read Marx might be through his comments on slavery - there are quite a few more coming up - from wage slavery through to slavery proper. (no freedom for labour in the white skin when in the black it is in chains')

There would be reason to move carefully though - in the cited passage in your post (Rita's post), Marx refers to 'the concept of human equality'. This "concept" gained popularity in popular opinion, I guess, after the declaration of the rights of man, after the 'liberty, equality, fraternity' of the French and after the abolitionists [we 'commemorated' the so-called abolition of slavery last year by noting its replacement with indentured labour etc etc - see posts on my blog about the slaver statues on Goldsmiths town hall. Paul Hendrich had done good work on this, as had Les Back. The ship above the clock is not just any old boat].

So, I think it would be a great way to generate an opening into Marx by tracking together Aristotle, concept of equality (equivalence, substitution, relation) and slavery - with perhaps the notion of freedom. And what must be said about the double sense of freedom in the lecture on thursday (which I elaborated in detail in an essay on, of all people, Crispian Mills, in "Critique of Exotica".

thanks heaps Rita, good stuff.

2008-10-12T21:40:00.002+01:00

This is an answer to Rita's post. Since my computer doesn't seem able to open the comments' page only for this time I leave it here instead.

Hi Rita,

it seems to me that contemporary liberal-democratic societies have indeed rised the "equality of all men" to the level of undeniable, unresistable truism. Ideology at its purest. The doctrine of human rights, together with liberal obsession with "tollerance", maybe can show us this tendency in its most clear, crystalline form. I would be careful though. When we talk of human rights - as when Marx talks of modern, widespread notions of human equality I would claim - we really talk of a particular "cult of abstract man".

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion.

Liberal notions of human equality and Christian cultus of abstract man are strictly related, intimately connected. Both have nothing to do with material equality – which it seems to me is what you are referring to saying “There is certainly a lack of equality or we wouldn't have the economic system we have today”. This disjunction between liberal “cultus of abstract man” and material (in)equality is today at the very heart of the ideological apparatus of liberal-democratic societies, but already at the time of Marx one could have noticed – and he certainly did - on the one hand increasing legal equality (abolition of slavery), on the other growing material inequality. As expressed brilliantly by Anatole France:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." (from The Red Lily, 1894)

By the way, many of the laws Anatole France refers to were first developed in England during the period of so-called primitive accumulation which seems only to reinforce the relationship between liberal abstract equality and the management of growing material inequality.

I don’t think Marx is here trying to say that he has the privilege to live in an age where people are considered as equals but that only in the space created by the disjunction between abstract equality (free labor) and material inequality (surplus labor) can philosophy come to grasp the “secret of the expression of value”.

Hope it makes sense.

Marx 1 - Aristotle 0?

2008-10-12T00:46:00.004+01:00

I have a question to raise, before we all get stuck in to chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6 (why not 5?) about one or two paragraphs in chapter 1.

On page 151/152 Marx is talking about Aristotle and the way he first analysed the value form, yet had 'no concept of value'. Marx goes on to claim that Aristotle was unable to identify human labour and its relationship with commodity value because:

"Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour powers."

He then goes on to suggest that:

"The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour...could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion." (all in 1st para of 152)

Is he suggesting that he lives in a society whereby this is the popular opinion? He later mentions that it was 'historical limitation' which prevented Aristotle from understanding the relation of equality. Is it just me, or is this an alarmingly sweeping statement?

He repeats himself over and over and over again about the linen and the coat but completely brushes over something which I think is extremely important. I know we are supposed to consider the idea of average labour power, but I feel this is a different point entirely? To suggest that he is privileged enough to live in an age where people are considered as equals seems absurd? There is certainly a lack of equality or we wouldn't have the economic system we have today. Surely it thrives on the inequality? On cheap labour in China etc?

I don't understand how he can make the argument that Aristotle didn't figure it out before him because of historical limitation. I can deal with him presenting the concept that people/labourers have to be considered equal before you can make the connection between labour and value, but why state that he only deduced this before Aristotle did because he lives in a society where people are considered equal? I just don't think they are, or have ever been.

Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I'd be really interested to know if this equality of people thing is approached later, or has been commented on elsewhere?

Harvey at the ICA in Nov 2008

2008-10-11T12:50:00.001+01:00

David Harvey on the Communist Manifesto

20 November 2008

David Harvey, American geographer and author of seminal book The Condition of Postmodernity, has written the introduction to a brand new edition of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. On a rare visit to the UK, he comes to the ICA to talk about the contemporary relevance of the manifesto, how it might inspire a new generation of political activists and how it might be rewritten for contemporary times. Harvey will be in conversation with Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Invitation to Terror.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

Date Time Venue Book
Thursday 20 November 2008 6:45 pm Cinema 1

'On the Method of Political Economy'

2008-10-10T15:55:00.003+01:00

(Cheers Amadeo, that looks geat; I'll have a proper read tonight)

I've made reference to this text for two weeks running in relation to the mode of enquiry/mode of analysis issues, and as such thought I ought to signal it here with a weblink:

From 'On the Method of Political Economy' (a subsection of the introduction to the Grundrisse):

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm

"When we consider a given country politico-economically, we begin with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc.

It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations...."

N.B. the words Vorstellung and Begriff have Hegelian connotations that are worth bearing in mind; Hegel's use of Vorstellung is sometimes translated as 'picture thought', as it means an inadequate conceptual representation that remains distinct from its object. Begriff refers to the Hegelian Concept (sometimes translated as Notion) which basically means the metaphysical mechanics underlying reality. Previous philosophy understood things as Vorstellungen, Hegel grasps the Begriff (Spirit - human self-consciousness, society, philosophy etc. - thus effectively becomes the self-consciousness of the universe). Borgeouis economics only got the surface appearances of capitalism, Marx gets the essential categories and concepts underlying it (this leads characters like Lukacs to posit Marxist thought, when actualise in the Party, as a kind of self-consciousness).

...that's an awful explanation; I'm writing this at work. I'll try and clarify next Thursday if required.

Engels' synopsis of Capital

2008-10-10T14:20:00.001+01:00

This is a synopsis of Capital, Volume I, written by Engels in 1868.
Supporting our right to be lazy...

in HTML: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/1868-syn/index.htm
and in PDF: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engels_Synopsis_of_Capital.pdf

Vix Pervenit (On Usury and Other Dishonest Profit)

2008-10-10T13:57:00.004+01:00

I follow Tom's suggestion and I leave here a couple of words on what I was saying yesterday regarding the relationship between commodity fetishism and the Catholic ban on usury. I do it even if, most probably, as someone said: "it's madness".

This will be indeed a very short post - just a bunch of confuse ideas caused by the accidental reading of an encyclical of Pope Benedict XIV called Vix Pervenit, On Usury and other dishonest profit. Nevertheless I thought it could be interesting to try to follow Marx in his speculations about the relationship between commodity fetishism and religious fetishism. In particular, I found myself wondering if one could see the Catholic ban on usury as a revealing instance in which our two favourite fetishisms, coming finally to recognize each other as conflicting belief systems, engaged in an hegemonic struggle over workers' fantasies and desires.

I try to explain myself. When confronted with the challenge of showing us the secret workings of that mysterious thing that is the commodity Marx can't find anything better than dragging us on a flight up in the misty realm of religious faith. He then shows us, side by side, two different types of fetishism: religious fetishism and commodity fetishism.

"There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands."

I would suggest that the Catholic Church was most certainly aware of the fetishistic character of the commodity, of the super-human power of the trinket which not only dance and move through the market but even seems to reproduce itself through the mysterious workings of finance, banking and usury.

What is it happening today in that most magic realm of finance? At first sight, what we have is matter giving birth to matter, wealth springing up most mysteriously from the hands of the capitalist. Or better, what we have is matter destroying itself out of stubborn free will, disappearing, collapsing, imploding in spectacular explosions.

Isn't there something truely diabolic in the art of financial speculation? God is marginalized, pushed on the margin by this act of creation: He neither blesses the capitalist with the miracle of creation, nor He curses him with the necessity to work. The capitalist as thus a new fetish: money. A new godly thing which finally frees him from the "original sin" opening up a new Eden where work, sacrifice, muscular strain is forgotten. Value is not a product of labour - "congealed labour-power" - value comes from value, directly, out of magic multiplication.

I mean, the Church clearly had to get a little bit upset about that. And that is probably the reason why usury was condemned by many theologians and effectively banned after the Council of Trento (1545-1563). As far as I know St.Thomas Aquinas has written quite a lot on usury and his positions seem to point exactly to the fetishistic character of usury. St Thomas quotes Aristotle as saying that "to live by usury is exceedingly unnatural". Practicing usury is diabolic since it means nothing else than "to make money simply by having money" without neither work or risk implied. This in total disregard both of the labor theory of value and, most importantly, of the word of God: "In sudore vultus tui ovesceris pane: you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow". (Genesis: 3,19)
Only God can make tables dance, reproduce and turn on their heads. Not the market!

It seems to me, thus, that the Church, and Aquinas in particular, had a fairly good grasp on the dangers of commodity fetishism. And they weren't the only: Judaism and Islam equally apply some kind of ban on usury (but I don't know much about it).

It seems like religion is an extremely jealous creature, it doesn't like fellow fetishisms coming alone. But what about commodity fetishism, isn't it a far more social and tollerant lad? And aren't they united in their "cultus of abstract man"?

Strange relationships...

(For reference: http://www.ewtn.com/library/ENCYC/B14VIXPE.htm ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_of_Thomas_Aquinas#Aquinas_and_usury ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury ).

2008-10-06T10:55:00.002+01:00

Hi (great post by Judy below; anyone else want to comment?)

Thought this might be of interest; I have a tendency to read Marx as a philosopher, and wish I had a greater facility with the economic stuff:

Public Meeting

Tuesday October 21st

7pm Conway Hall, Red Lion Square

MARX and the credit crunch

Istvan Mezsaros, author of Beyond Capital

Chris Harman, editor, International Socialism journal

Richard Brenner, author of The Credit Crunch - a Marxist Analysis

A global credit crunch. Banks collapsing. Prices soaring. Recession looming. Conventional economic theory appears to have no coherent explanation. Government stumps up hundreds of billions to rescue the bankers - and demands that working people's pay be held down and spending cut on public services. At this meeting, three Marxist writers examine the roots of this great crisis in the nature of capital itself. Tracing the current crisis to its origins, they show how workers can resist paying the price for a crisis they never made, and set out the case for systemic change.

Where's Wally?

2008-10-05T14:16:00.002+01:00

After attending the lecture and seminar for this course I felt rather adventurous. I'm particularly relieved that we're encouraged to read the text afresh and for ourselves (in so far as that is possible).

However, after reading what Luckacs had to say about totality as opposed to particulars and analysing fragments, I'm confused about our approach to the text.

I understand the distinction between analysis and presentation and that Lukacs criticises certain economists for focusing on Marx's formulae / the particulars of the text and their failure to understand history as a totalising process, rather than the coherence of his analysis as a WHOLE.

However, while Marx's analysis as a whole is fascinating and revolutionary (literally), what I find equally if not more compelling is to read the text in order to explore the different images, references and subplots that are contained within it (have I missed the point if I call these images/metaphors/sentences fragments - or even trinkets?????) and the ambivalence/contradictions/disjunctures/ambiguities contained within these trinkets themselves and what happens or what you can see when you put them next to each other.

After the lecture I felt really inspired and that I could approach this text as MYSELF(s) but then I wondered if I am supposed to be looking for Wally after all- I mean, looking for the analysis, the 'point' of the text, what he MEANS to say about capitalism, rather than the relationship between what he means to say and the way he says it. I felt that Lukacs didn't want Marx to be read with too much attention to all of the other characters on the page (the vampires etc), only on where Wally (the main analysis) was located.

But then maybe I'm the wally and I'm taking Lukacs too personally.

Housmans Radical Booksellers

2008-10-04T14:38:00.006+01:00

I just wanted to shamelessly promote an endangered bookshop in Kings Cross:

http://www.housmans.com/index.htm

They have loads of stuff on anarchism, situationalism, marxism- yet they have no particular allegiance to anything (which perhaps puts them in a rather precarious position). They run lots of events which are free and at which they serve wine and afterwards people stand around and talk about Syd Barrett and Guy Debord.

links

2008-10-02T13:24:00.005+01:00

...Thought I might add a couple of links too:

Firstly, I wanted to remind people to look at the Marxists.org library:

http://www.marxists.org/

I've found it to be enormously useful in the past, as they have just about everything there for free (including all sort of other stuff: Clausewitz, Lao Tse, Machiavelli, Kant, Hegel, etc.). very useful if you're trying to track down a quotation, check something of just want free access to a text.

I thought this next one might be useful to some of you: when I first started trying to make sense of Capital I found one book (reccomended by John) to be patricularly useful: Felton Shortall's The Incomplete Marx. It's very dry, but very helpful, as it basically gives you a run through of Volumes 1, 2 and 3. It stresses the centrality of class struggle and revolution to Marx's work, and describes Capital as an unfinished project. There's a copy in the library (I think), but you can get in free from the library of a site called Libcom:

http://libcom.org/library/incomplete-marx-felton-c-shorthall

I know Felton, so if anyone is particularly keen I can probably put you in touch.

I'm not sure if this next one is a good idea or not, but I thought it might be worth mentioning the theory discussion forum at Libcom:

http://libcom.org/forums/thought

I've used that forum on several occasions; sometimes to run ideas past people, to ask questions, or just to relieve boredom. There are almost always online reading groups of Volume 1 that you can look at or participate in, as well as endlessly convoluted and heated debates about the more confusing aspects of what Marx was trying to say and do. Please don't take anything that anyone says there as gospel, and obviously don't reference postings when writing an essay (at least not unless you're doing some complicated anthropological study of Marxist internet forums). That said, I thought discussion there might provide a helpful supplment to the seminars (should anyone find themselves to be really eager).

Cheers

Tom

Marx and Philosophy Society

2008-10-02T08:39:00.003+01:00

The next Marx and Philosophy Society meeting takes place on the 25th of October. Some of the talks look good (particularly Chris Arthur's and Andrew Chitty's, both of whom are worth seeing in their own right):

http://www.marxandphilosophy.org.uk/

Anarchist Bookfair

2008-10-02T08:34:00.003+01:00

The London anarchist bookfair takes place on the 18th of October. It's the biggest annual gathering in the U.K. of anarchists and associated lefty activist types, and is always worth a visit; loads of books, thousands of leaflets and pamphlets, and lots of talks and events. Details can be found at the link below:

http://www.anarchistbookfair.org/

Historical Materialism conference

2008-10-02T08:26:00.004+01:00

The Journal Historical Materialism will be holding their annual conference next month, at the School of African and Oriental Studies. They haven't got the timetable set up on their website yet, but it's bound to be worth a visit; last year's event was good, and involved some very interesting papers.

MANY MARXISMS

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2008

7-9 November 2008

School of Oriental and African Studies, Central London

Organised in collaboration with the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher 
Memorial Prize Committee and with Socialist Register.


Organised in association with the International Initiative for the 
Promotion of Political Economy, the journal Situations and the Journal 
of Agrarian Change, and with the assistance of the Faculty of Law and 
Social Sciences of SOAS.


Ever since its foundation in 1997, Historical Materialism has sought 
to contribute to the intellectual recomposition of the global Left by 
serving as an international venue for critical Marxist research. The 
journal's initial wager - that Marxism remains a vital, and 
heterogeneous and many-faceted political and theoretical tradition - 
has been borne out in a conjuncture where Marxist thinkers have amply 
demonstrated the critical resources at their disposal (witness recent 
debates on imperialism and neoliberalism). Within the academy, the 
facile dismissal of Marxism seems to have run out of steam, and the 
attitudes of new generations of students and researchers have changed 
accordingly. Marxist intellectuals are no longer simply forced to 
survive in hostile conditions or to retreat into isolated academic 
subcultures, despite an often adverse global political context. In 
this setting, they face new challenges, which this conference seeks to 
address


How can we develop the plurality of Marxist debates, fields and 
schools without making concessions to eclecticism, narcissism or 
compartmentalisation? How do we square the concrete multiplicity of 
Marxisms with the strong commonalities in intellectual vocabularies, 
theoretical sources and political aims? Hasn't the question of the 
diversity of Marxism - of many Marxisms - accompanied the tradition’s 
entire development, a testament both to its internationalist horizon, 
and to the inexhaustible potential of its many critical insights and 
conceptual formulations? What strategies can allow us to confront, and 
perhaps overcome, some of the disparities or even misunderstandings 
born of these processes of differentiation?



Having tried to foster a form of critical cosmopolitanism and debate 
in past conferences, bringing together thinkers working in different 
fields, and out of different traditions, this year's Historical 
Materialism conference wants to emphasise problems and opportunities 
raised by the existence of 'Many Marxisms'. To this end, it aims to 
take stock of recent developments in Marxist thought, surveying the 
most vibrant recent debates; to confront critical moments in the 
historical development of Marxism; to identify crucial concepts and 
areas of research that can cut across any preconceived academic 
specialisation or geographical isolation of Marxism; to reflect on the 
ways in which Marxism has and continues to intervene in mainstream 
intellectual debates; and, finally, to generate a space in which the 
outlines of the many twenty-first century Marxisms may be delineated.



THE FULL TIMETABLE AND ONLINE REGISTRATION DETAILS WILL BE AVAILABLE 
SOON



For more details, please contact: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk

THEMES COVERED WILL INCLUDE:

Approaching Passive Revolutions * Art and Capitalism * Aspects of 
Imperialism * Base and Superstructure * Beyond Global Value Chain 
Analysis in Commodity Studies * Bolshevism: Yesterday and Tomorrow * 
Capitalism / Knowledge Capitalism * Capitalism and Architecture * 
Climate Change, Sustainability and Socialism * Contemporary Radical 
Thought and Marxism: Agamben, Holloway, Zizek * Early Modern 
Capitalism * Ecological Crisis and Marxist Theory * Everyday Life * 
Finance and Neo-Liberalism * Financialisation and Crisis * Food Crisis 
* From the Grundrisse to Capital * Future of World Capitalism * 
Historical Materialism and Late Development * Historiography in the 
Development of Marxism * International Financial Institutions * Is 
Today's Capitalism Actually-Existing Barbarism? * Labour-Process and 
Resistance * Latin American Left Today * Learning from Enemies and 
Rivals: Schmitt, Strauss, Weber * Life, Politics & Capitalism * Many 
Marxisms and India * Many Marxisms: Key Figures * Many Marxisms: 
Problems and Polemics * Marx and Fetishism * Marx on World Economy and 
World Politics * Marxism and Cinema: Film Noir and Neo-Noir * Marxism 
and Metropolitics * Marxism and Philosophy * Marxism and the Sciences 
* Marxism Outside the West * Marxism, Feminism and Women’s Politics * 
Marxisms and Literature * Marxisms and Religion * Marxisms and 
Southern Africa * Marxisms and Violences: Gender and Race * Marxist 
Theories of Practice * Modes of Foreign Relations * Monetary Policy 
and Banking under Neoliberalism * Money * Negativity and Revolution * 
North East Asian Marxisms and Socialisms * On the Concept of Surplus 
Populations * Perspectives from Althusser * Perspectives from Marx’s 
‘Jewish Question’ * Philosophies of Revolt and Revolution * 
Philosophy in the Early Marx * Political Categories of Marxism * 
Political Economy and Economics Today * Politics of the Promotion of 
Global Competitiveness * Racism, Class and Politics * Restructuring, 
Capital and Labour * Revolutionary Politics in the Middle East * 
Sexual Liberation: Historical Materialist Approaches * Situationism at 
the Limits: Must we Burn Debord? * Socialism in Search of an Economic 
System * State in the Bolivarian revolution * Theories of Class * 
Theories of Imperialism * Time, Temporality, History * Transformations 
in the Neoliberal State * Uneven and Combined Development: Towards a 
Marxist Theory of ‘the International’? * US Financial Power in 
Crisis * Utopianism * Value: Political and Economic Dimensions * 
‘Western’ Marxism and the Anti-Colonial World/Intellectuals * 
Windows on Empire: Perspectives from History, Culture and Political 
Economy * Workerism: a Generation Later *

The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush

2007-12-13T11:34:00.002Z

The Second Empire, or The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush
Michael Hardt

We seem doomed to historical repetition. In fact, there is a surplus of ghosts from the past wandering through our current scene. The difficulty is to cast out the false specters and see which great historical events and figures are really being repeated today.

In some respects, the Iraq war and the current global mission of the US government seem to repeat the old European imperialist projects. The present efforts not only to impose new regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq but also more generally to remake the political landscape of the Middle East and even "reshape the global environment" are conceived and presented using the old terms of the civilizing mission of European powers. President Bush might imagine himself donning the cloak of the great noble imperialists, educating the savages and bringing civilization to the world. We must have the courage to help them, he says, and they will thank us later. Or, in a more venal vein, the efforts to control the vast oil fields in Iraq and the Middle East certainly recall numerous imperialist wars to accumulate wealth, such as the British attempts a century ago in the Boer War to gain control of the great South African gold mines - blood for gold yesterday, blood for oil today.

Despite these resemblances, however, the old imperialisms do not help us understand what is central in our contemporary situation. These comparisons are really just ill fitting clothes that hide what is going on underneath. The real historical repetition is much closer to home. The United States is now repeating the Gulf War of 1991, certainly, but that is really merely an element in a much more important historical repetition: the coup d'Etat within the global system - a new 18eme Brumaire, this time a repetition of father and son, not uncle and nephew. By coup d'Etat here I mean a usurpation of power within the ruling order by the unilateral, monarchical element and the corresponding subordination of the multilateral, aristocratic forces.

The coup d'Etat of Bush father was conceived at the time as the creation of a new world order. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the bi-polar cold war order, the first Gulf War helped establish the terms of the new global power structure. The United States, as the sole remaining superpower, would take precedence over all other powers, but it would not rule the world alone. The US role in the first Empire navigated a path that combined superiority and collaboration. The United States would exercise monarchical powers, especially in military matters, but within simultaneously collaborate in a broad global power system constituted by a network of powers of varying capacities and forms, including the other dominant nation-states, particularly Europe and Japan, along with major capitalist corporations, supranational organizations such as the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF, and numerous others. The essential feature of the first Empire, once again, is that the monarchical superiority of the United States did not contradict or obstruct the participation of the various aristocratic forces in the global power system.

The coup d'Etat of Bush son, which often goes under the name of unilateralism, takes one step further in the concentration of global power in the hands of the monarchical United States. What is abundantly clear in the new US doctrine of pre-emptive strikes and global political restructuring is that the United States is attempting to subordinate radically all aristocratic powers. The United States believes it can rule the world alone or, rather, with merely the aid of passive vassals. Other powers are thus advised to support it and follow its lead, not so much because they are necessary but really for their own good, because failure to follow the US lead will weaken them further and ultimately make them irrelevant.

While Bush son plays the young Bonaparte, then, the United Nations and the European nation-states, particularly France and Germany, find themselves in the position of the 19th century French bourgeois parliamentary parties, insisting on multilateralism against the unilateralism of the Emperor. This is the real historical repetition. In fact, the struggle between the United States and the United Nations, the US efforts to divide and weaken Europe, and the conflicts within NATO are much closer to the essential core of the current developments than even the war on Iraq. This is where the hierarchy of the second Empire - new world order 2 - is being worked out today.

Every historical repetition, however, comes with a difference, and it is not merely that the first event has the weight of a tragic creative transformation whereas the second presents a grotesque masquerade. The coup d'Etat of Bush son resembles that of the father in that both of them seek to concentrate greater power in the hands of the United States. In the first Empire, however, the monarchical role of the United States in the new world order was balanced by a broad aristocratic participation in a network of numerous different powers. Today this dual nature of Empire - US superiority plus broad collaboration - seems to have broken down completely. On one side, a united Europe, the United Nations, and other multilateral powers threaten to pose an effective alternative to the United States and undermine its global superiority. (One should not underestimate the threat posed by the Euro to the global monetary monopoly of the dollar.) On the other side, Bush the son's second Empire attempts to separate the United States from all other powers and render collaboration unnecessary. From both sides we can see that the concord of monarchic and aristocratic ruling powers of the first Empire has been shattered, and seems today increasingly impossible.

In response to the coup d'Etat and the formation of the second Empire in 19th century France, when the forces of revolution seemed at the lowest point, Marx sought reasons for optimism. He did not advocate, of course, taking the side of the multilateralist bourgeois parties against the unilateralist Emperor. Rather he saw the conflicts among the ruling powers as a passage through purgatory, in which the seemingly inexistent revolutionary forces were merely tunneling underground, hidden from view, waiting for the right time to spring forth. We too have no intention of taking sides with any of the forces struggling for power at the pinnacle of the global hierarchy - the United States, Europe, the United Nations, Blair, Chirac, etc. Today, however, different from Marx's time, the forces of revolution are working in full view. They matured during the first Empire and enter into the second with growing powers. This is perhaps the most important difference, a difference that may free us from the tragic cycle of historical repetition.

Published in Global Magazine

Berkeley and the Mass Ornament

2007-12-03T15:35:00.001Z

After the references to Siegfried Kracauer in the seminars last week I thought this was worth posting.

An amazing clip from Bubsy Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1935.

This is the perfect example of the 'mass ornament' as discussed by Kracauer.

Hardt on Charlie Rose

2007-12-02T19:05:00.000Z

Thanks to Carina for sending this. The bit with Hardt starts after 32 minutes.

As well as Empire as a pdf.

Dreampolitik

2007-11-30T01:36:00.000Z

Here's an inteview with Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy.

It's at www.againstthegrain.org 11.05.07

Mon 11.05.07| Playing the Game

Much of the Left ignores or denigrates things like celebrity media, violent video games, and slick advertising. But according to Stephen Duncombe, there's much progressives can learn from commercial culture and popular fantasies. In this follow-up interview, the author of Dream reveals what the Left can learn from the best-selling video game Grand Theft Auto.

From banlieues to South Bronx via Watts

2007-11-30T01:27:00.000Z

First here's a short text by Baudrillard on the 2005 riots in France.
http://newleftreview.org/?view=2595

Second a text by the Situationists on the 1965 Watts Riots.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.Watts.htm

Third a Percee P video featuring footage from the film 80 Blocks from Tiffany's, which I'm going to try to get a bootleg copy of over the break. Email if interested.

Lonely Planet and Iraq

2007-11-28T11:07:00.000Z

I haven't gotten a chance to watch this documentary yet myself, but apparently it's the first to reveal that the American officials responsible for reconstructing Iraq were consulting a Lonely Planet guide from 1994 for key information. Thought it might be interesting for those of you writing or interested in issues surrounding tourism.

Sex and Capitalism

2007-11-23T14:03:00.000Z

This interview sounds relevant as a follow up to the discussion around Fortunati's text yesterday.

Mon 11.19.07| Liberating Sex
What does capitalism do to sex and sexuality? And what does socialist theory have to say about sexual desire and sexual arrangements? In his essay in Toward a New Socialism, Michael Hames-Garcia reviews various socialist perspectives on gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on same-sex desire. He also comments on certain trends in gay and lesbian organizing since the 1970s.

Against the Grain is often quite good and it's worth subscribing to the podcast if one does that sort of thing.

Burroughs and Century of the Self

2007-11-23T13:00:00.000Z

Thanks for Marc for sending a link to this feature-length Burroughs documentary.

I also noticed a link on the Google video site to Adam Curtis' Century of the Self. This is definitely worth watching, as is his documentary The Power of Nightmares. I don't know how much they have to do with each other but would could perhaps think about them in terms of control. Here's a link to Deleuze's short, readable text 'Postscript on Control Societies'.

Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ideology Critique

2007-11-20T10:22:00.000Z

From Zizek's lecture at Historical Materialism:
John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) is one of the neglected masterpieces of the Hollywood Left. In its most memorable scene, the hero, an unemployed construction-worker who lives in an LA shanty-town, puts on a pair of glasses he found in an abandoned church, and notices that a billboard in front of him now simply displays the word "OBEY," while another billboard urges the viewer to "MARRY AND REPRODUCE." He also sees that paper money bears the words "THIS IS YOUR GOD," etc.- a beautifully-naïve mise-en-scene of ideology: through the critico-ideological glasses, we directly see the Master-Signifier beneath the chain of knowledge – we learn to see dictatorship IN democracy. When the hero tries to convince his friend to put the glasses on, the friend resists, and a long violent fight follows, worthy of Fight Club (another masterpiece of the Hollywood Left). The violence staged here is a positive violence, a condition of liberation – the lesson is that our liberation from ideology is not a spontaneous act, an act of discovering our true Self. We learn in the film that, when one looks for too long at reality through critico-ideological glasses, one gets a strong headache: it is very painful to be deprived of the ideological surplus-enjoyment. To see the true nature of things, we need the glasses: it is not that we should put ideological glasses off to see directly reality as it is”: we are “naturally” in ideology, our natural sight is ideological.

Sean Eisenstein

2007-11-18T00:30:00.000Z

Here is some commentary by Darren:

Heidegger says "Thus, where Enframing reigns, there is /danger/ in the highest sense." Then he quotes Holderlin, "But where danger is, grows the saving power also."

As the 'beings of light' erupt through the mechanical video frame, we suggest that the salvation might literally manifest itself visually.

An old article of mine makes some sense in this light:
http://www.darrenflint.com/text/Eisenstein%20Feedback.doc

"Quite a different (though no less curious) application of the Eisenstein feedback method is the experimental generation and observation of autonomous ‘beings of light.’ ... These orbs may remain stable for several days at a time. Those with a rich history of interaction may appear to be stable for minutes or hours at end before suddenly and unexpectedly erupting with flashes, self-generated ‘appendages’ or rapid changes in colour or size. It is curious to note that such complex behaviours are associated with many visually-comparable hallucinogenic phenomena including hypnagogic visuals and ‘earth lights.’ It seems fair to say that these strange properties of Eisenstein feedback warrant further investigation."

Heidegger on Marx

2007-11-08T00:47:00.001Z

This seems to be the transcript (taken from the youtube site)...

Richard Wisser: ... Do you think philosophy has a social mission?

Heidegger: No! One can't speak of a social mission in that sense! To answer that question, we must first ask: "What is society?" We have to consider that today's society is only modern subjectivity made absolute. A philosophy that has overcome a position of subjectivity therefore has to say no in the matter.

Another question is to what extent we can speak of a change of society at all. The question of the demand for world change leads us back to Karl Marx's frequently quoted statement from his Theses on Feuerbach. I would like to quote it exactly and read out loud: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; what matters is to change it." When this statement is cited and when it is followed, it is overlooked that changing the world presupposes a change in the conception of the world. A conception of the world can only be won by adequately interpreting the world.

That means: Marx's demand for a "change" is based upon on a very definite interpretation of the world, and therefore this statement is proved to be without foundation. It gives the impression that it speaks decisively against philosophy, whereas the second half of the statement presupposes, unspoken, a demand for philosophy.

The Simpsons on Outsourcing

2007-11-07T09:22:00.000Z

Thought I'd post this in the main blog so everyone definitely sees it. It's particularly relevant to the last 200 or so pages of Capital but worth looking at now regardless. Thanks to Claudia for posting it:

Must Crush Capitalism

2007-11-02T17:57:00.000Z

Links galore

2007-11-02T14:43:00.000Z

I'm trying to remember most of the books, films, and sites mentioned yesterday. Remind me if I forgot something:

Thanks Ban for the link to the Class Against Class library, featuring texts by Negri, Tronti, Panzieri, and Cornelius Castoriadis from the French group Socialisme Ou Barbarie (of which Lyotard was also a member).

The book I mentioned in class yesterday on the development of Taylorism in France is From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness by Bernard Doray. They've got it in the library. Gramsci has a key essay called 'Americanism and Fordism' in his Prison Notebooks. Anyone looking for a fictional representation should look at Jeffrey Eugenides' novel of incest and hermaphroditity (and Fordism) Middlesex (he also wrote The Virgin Suicides).

Call Centre Communism is available for download here...
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/lebuk/e_lebuk.htm

...and is critiqued by Riff Raff here:
http://www.riff-raff.se/en/6/callcenters_en.php

On a lighter note, the book I mentioned by Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The use of political violence in Italy, is taken up in the context of 9.11:

'Willan turned up numerous indications that the famed Toni Negri was indeed involved with the Red Brigades, but most likely as an operative of the Italian secret services, run by the FBI (not the CIA; apparently there was a bit of a turf war going on between the two agencies. Just as the lie that the CIA does not operate within the U.S. has been exposed, so too has the notion that the FBI does not operate abroad). Although now considered a "martyr" by the Left, a victim of a frame-up by the Italian judicial system, the more likely fact is that Negri is still working for the integrated U.S./NATO/Italian secret services, as an informer and a "disinformation" agent. Isn't it amazing that Harvard University Press has published his "bestseller" Empire (co-authored with Michael Hardt) — Harvard publishes books by convicted terrorists? Well, yes, maybe, if the publication is part of a special operation to undermine the anticapitalist movement. The book has been ably dissected and exposed for the objectively reactionary obfuscation that it is. Among the crimes we know Negri is guilty of is successfully infecting Marxian critique with postmodernism. It is probably no coincidence that "autonomist Marxists"; refuse to see the real significance of September 11, and the coming globalization of the "strategy of mass terror through mass murder".'

Ullmer's film noir Detour (1945), one the cheapest and most profitable films ever made apparently:

Slaughtered Lambs

2007-10-29T22:40:00.000Z

I'm not sure how much the categories and concepts we've encountered thus far help us to think through this example, but I thought it was worth posting a link to an article in today's Guardian regardless. The article is being framed in terms of 'animal welfare', but I think it's interesting to think about it in terms of (so-called free) markets, supply and demand, and price/value.

The Politics of Utopia

2007-10-28T22:52:00.001Z

Here is a link to the pdf of the Jameson essay, 'The Politics of Utopia', that I mentioned in the seminar. Anyone interested in sci-fi or utopia should definitely check out his Archaeologies of the Future, which features chapters on Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

Marxism vs. Neoclassical economics

2007-10-26T11:56:00.000+01:00

In light of Masashi's presentation yesterday that asked some important questions about the differences between marxist economics and neoclassical economics I found a link that might be useful:

A book by Wolff and Resnicks, Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical. I haven't looked through it myself but they have it at Senate House. There is a review of the book in Monthly Review as well.

If anyone has any other reading recommendations please email me and I can add them or put them in the comments.

Dance of the Dialectic

2007-10-26T11:51:00.001+01:00

In the second seminar yesterday I mentioned Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic as a good book on Marx's methodology and dialectics as a whole. There are a few chapters of it available on his NYU web site here.

Gold Farming

2007-10-26T09:19:00.000+01:00

This is another interesting case study to test Marx's categories against:

The Sacred Conspiracy

2007-10-19T19:37:00.000+01:00

A nation already old and corrupted which will courageously shake off the yoke of its monarchical government in order to adopt a republican one will only be able to maintain itself by many crimes, for it is already in crime, and if it wants to pass from crime to virtue, that is, from a violent to a gentle state, it will fall into an inertia which will soon result in its certain ruin.
SADE

That which had a political face and imagined itself political will unmask itself one day and reveal itself to be a religious movement.
KIERKEGAARD

Today solitary, you who live separated, you will one day be a people. Those who appointed themselves will one day form an appointed people – and it is from this people that will be born the existence that surpasses man.
NIETZSCHE

What we have undertaken should be confused with nothing else, cannot be limited to the expression of an idea and even less to what is justly considered art.

It is necessary to produce and to eat: many things are needed that are yet nothing, and this is equally the case with political agitation.

Before fighting to the bitter end, who thinks to leave his place to men it is impossible to look upon without feeling the need to destroy them? But if nothing could be found beyond political activity, human greed would meet nothing but the void.

WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS, and insofar as our existence is the condemnation of all that is recognized today, an internal requirement wants us also to be imperious.

What we are undertaking is a war.

It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light. It is to late to want to be reasonable and learned, which has led to a life without attractions. Secretly or not, it is necessary to become other, or else cease to be.

The world to which we have belonged proposes nothing to love outside of each individual insufficiency: its existence is limited to its convenience. A world that can’t be loved to death – in the same way a man loves a woman – represents nothing but personal interest and the obligation to work. If it is compared with worlds that have disappeared it is hideous and seems the most failed of all of them.

In those disappeared worlds it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in the world of educated vulgarity. Civilization’s advantages are compensated for by the way men profit by it: men of today profit by it to become the most degraded of all beings who have ever existed.

Life always occurs in a tumult with no apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and reality in ecstasy and ecstatic love. He who wants to ignore or neglect ecstasy is a being whose thought has been reduced to analysis. Existence is not only an agitated void: it is a dance that forces us to dance fanatically. The idea that doesn’t have as object a dead fragment exists internally in the same way as does a flame.

One must become firm and unshakeable enough that the existence of the world of civilization finally appears uncertain. It is useless to respond to those who are able to believe in this world and find their authorization in it. If they speak it is possible to look at them without hearing them, and even if we look at them, to only “see” that which exists far behind them. We must refuse boredom and live only on that which fascinates.

On this road it would be vain to move about and to seek to attract those who have vague impulses, like those of passing the time, laughing, or becoming individually bizarre. One must advance without looking back and without taking into account those who don’t have the strength to forget immediate reality.

Human life is defeated because it serves as the head and reason of the universe. Insofar as it becomes that head and reason it accepts slavery. If it isn’t free, existence becomes empty or neuter, and if it is free, it is a game. The earth, as long as it only engendered cataclysms, trees, and birds was a free universe; the fascination with liberty became dulled when the earth produced a being who demanded necessity as a law over the universe. Man nevertheless remained free to no longer respond to any necessity. He is free to resemble all that is not he in the universe. He can cast aside the idea that it is he or God who prevents everything else from being absurd.

Man escaped from his head like the condemned man from his prison.

He found beyond him not God, who is the prohibition of crime, but a being who doesn’t know prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless, who fills me with anguish because he is made of innocence and crime. He holds a weapon of steel in his left hand, flames like a sacred heart in his right hand. He unites in one eruption birth and death. He is not a man. But he isn’t a god, either. He is not I, but he is more I than I: his belly is the labyrinth in which he himself goes astray, led me astray, and in which I find myself being he, that is, a monster.

What I think and represent I didn’t think or represent alone. I am writing in a small cold house in a fishing village; a dog has just barked in the night. My room is next to the kitchen of Andre Masson, who is moving happily about and singing. At the very moment I am writing he has put on the phonograph a recording of the overture of “Don Giovanni.” More than anything else, the overture of “Don Giovanni” ties what is given me of existence to a challenge that opens up a ravishment outside of the self. At this very instant I look upon that headless being, made up of two equally strong obsessions, become “Don Giovanni’s Tomb.” When a few days ago I was in this kitchen with Masson, sitting with a glass of wine in my hand while he, suddenly imagining his own death and that of his kin, his eyes fixed, suffering, almost crying out that death had to become an affectionate and passionate death, crying out his hatred for a world that made weigh even on death its worker’s hand, already I could no longer question that the lot and the infinite tumult of human life are open not to those who exist like poked out eyes, but to those who are like clairvoyants, carried away by an upsetting dream that could not belong to them.

Georges Bataille 1936

Bataille's Tombstone

2007-10-19T13:59:00.000+01:00

Georges Bataille
1897-1962

Those substances where the eggs, germs and maggots swarm not only make our hearts sink, but also turn our stomachs. Death does not come down to the better annihilation of being - of all that I am, which expects to be once more, the very meanings of which, rather than to be, is to expect to be (as if we never received being authentically, but only the anticipation of being, which will be and is not, as if we were not the presence that we are, but the future that we will be and are not); it is also that shipwreck in the nauseous. I will rejoin abject nature and the purulence of anonymous, infinite life, which stretches forth like the night, which is death. One day this living world will pullulate in my dead mouth.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

2007-10-18T19:59:00.000+01:00

I've kept the image small for the feint of heart. If you click on it you'll see a bigger version. More images can be found here.

The image was sent to Bataille in 1925 by Adrien Borel. 'The torture victim was Fu Chou Li, guilty of murdering Prince Ao Han Ouan. The emperor's leniency granted that he should not be burned as decreed, but cut to pieces, into a hundred pieces: cut up alive. Georges Dumas may have been and Adrien Borel certainly was present at this execution on 10 April 1905, and brought back photographs of it.' (From Surya's biography, p. 93)

I still can't find the bit I paraphrased in class though. I'll keep looking.

Bataille on Crustaceans

2007-10-18T19:56:00.000+01:00

Crustaceans. – One day, Gérard de Nerval went for a stroll in the gardens of the Palais-Royal with a living lobster on a leash. The idlers crowded around him, flabbergasted and roaring with laughter at the strange retinue. One of his friends having asked him why he was making such a fool of himself, Nerval replied: ‘But what are you laughing at? You people go about readily enough with dogs, cats and other noisy and dirty domestic animals. My lobster is a gentle animal, affable and clean, and he is at least familiar with the wonders of the deeps!’
A painter friend of mine said one day that if a grasshopper were the size of a lion it would be the most beautiful animal in the world. How true that would be of a giant crayfish, a crab enormous as a house, and a shrimp as tall as a tree! Crustaceans, fabulous creatures that amaze children playing on beaches, submarine vampires nourished on corpses and refuse. Heavy and light, ironic and grotesque, animals made of silence and of weight.
Of all the ridiculous actions men take upon themselves, none is more so than shrimping. Everybody has seen that elderly gentleman, bearded and red-faced, a white piqué hat on his head, wearing an alpaca jacket, his trousers rolled up to his thighs, a wicker basket on his belly, his shrimping-net at the ready, hunting shrimps in a rock-pool for his dinner. Woe betide the poor shrimp that lets itself be caught! In desperation she wriggles, she slides, she flutters in the triumphant fingers. Elastic animal flower, graceful and lively as mercury, petal separated from the great bouquet of the waves. She is also a woman. Who has not heard of La Môme Crevetteı?
Among crustaceans, the crab known as the ‘sleeper,’ the image of eternal sleep, is the most mysterious, the most deceitful, the shiftiest. It hides under rocks and its mobile eyes watch for passing prey with a cruel malice. It walks sideways. It combines every fault. There are men who resemble it.
The crayfish and the lobster are nobles. They are cultivated like oysters and tulips. They are present at all human ceremonies: political banquets, wedding breakfasts and wakes.
All these beasts change their carapaces, grow old, harden, make love and die. We do not know whether they suffer or if they have ideas concerning ethics and the organization of societies. According to Jarry it would appear that a lobster fell in love with a can of corned beef…
Crustaceans are boiled alive to conserve the succulence of their flesh.

Georges Bataille (Taken from Encyclopedia Acephalica) Translated by Iain White

Erik Satie

2007-10-18T19:13:00.000+01:00

Here's a link to some Erik Satie mp3s.

For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

2007-10-11T20:54:00.000+01:00

Here's a great letter by the young Marx to Arnold Ruge from 1843, often published under the name 'For a ruthless Criticism of Everything existing'. I thought it was quite relevant to today's discussions about the Marxism(s) radical self-critique.

For a Ruthless Criticism

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be – as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion – to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

In short, therefore, we can formulate the trend of our journal as being: self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires. This is a work for the world and for us. It can be only the work of united forces. It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are.

Assorted links from today's seminars

2007-10-11T20:45:00.000+01:00

Steve McQueen's Gravesend (2007) defetishizing coltan?

Darwin's Nightmare defetishizing Nile perch?

Fukuyama and the End of History

2007-10-10T22:53:00.000+01:00

Thought I'd provide a link to the infamous 'End of History' essay by Francis Fukuyama that Derrida refers to several times. At the very least it's interesting for capturing a certain zeitgeist.

'The End of History?'

Fukuyama's biography is quite interesting. He was one of the founders of Project for a New American Century, the infamous neo-conservative think thank in the US, but has since split with the movement and even written a book attacking them.

Welles Hearst Capital

2007-10-05T10:25:00.000+01:00

In reading Capital, if anything about beginnings should be considered necessary, it might be good just to start with what is immediately at hand. There is much much discussion and theory about this, and its probably naïve to simply say that materialism might start with things themselves, but why not start with the objects, commodities, souvenirs or detritus of our lives? There surely is enough stuff of which to take account in our contemporary world. Plenty of junk. Marx himself has much to say on waste and shit, and in volume three of Capital it becomes crucial (see here)

But we are not at volume three as yet, by any means, though it is a key to the beginning of volume one, where Marx starts with a immense collection of commodities, its is also crucial that materialism as material-ism would have to take account of all this stuff from the perspective of the whole, of totality (Lukacs). This will never be easy or straightforward – an impossible accounting, which must nevertheless be our aim. Even if documentation of all this stuff is forever incomplete and that in all the varied and multiple efforts, interpretation is, or should be, always contested, to do so still betrays a totalizing ambition. We might also call this a reckoning to come. The collection is messianic, the collector divine (Benjamin).

But that is to get ahead of things a little, the task here is to start to read a text, and then to relate it to our present conjuncture.

There are many possible starts.

I want to begin with something, or even someone, who might seem the total antithesis of the celebrated critic of capitalism. Marx was not a rich man, however well bred, well married, well educated, he was in and out of the pawn shop, knew a lot, intimately, about debt, borrowing, credit, and – as is very well known – relied upon a certain moneybags called Freddy Engels very often to get by. Engels though, whatever his peculiar foibles in taking up with two sisters, riding to hounds, effecting a mourning jacket and partiality to fine liqueurs, does not deserve to be lampooned as much as the figure with which I want to begin. I choose a character from the not too far removed history of Capitalism, though glossed through a film – I have in mind the life of William Randolph Hearst. Moneybags. As portrayed by Orson Welles in the film Citizen Kane.

Kane is (stuff about snow globes... as in post here and here).

...
Is it possible to reclaim Citizen Kane from all the readings that have passed over it so much? What residue will need to be cleared away so as to see this film anew? Is that even possible? So many biographies of Welles, but an oblique angular take on this overwritten film can perhaps still reveal something about our perspective today.
...

Hearst, however, cannot be reclaimed. Conrad suggests that Hearst papers created both the gossip column and celebrity (Conrad 2OO3:145). Andre Bazin Points out that the controversy over Kane as Hearst was a consequence of the rivalry between Hearst gossip columnist Louella Parsons and her rival Hedda Hopper. (Bazin 1958/1991:57). Conrad also notes, a page earlier, that Welles had written a forward to Marion Davies posthumously published memoir of her time with Hearst at San Simeon.

Was Hearst’s hostility to Kane reason for the industry to fear exposure, through Hearst papers, of Hollywood’s foibles – sex, payola – or rather its employment of ‘aliens at the expense of American labour’ (Leaming 1985:209)? His support for the working man may well have got him called communist in his youth, but it was always a misnomer.

The importance of rumour in the reception of Kane is clear, but what then of the unspoken exclusions in the Hearst story, the bits of narrative not voiced: Hearst as moneybags plundering the material culture of the world, the arrogance of his taking photos in Luxor where the flash damages the art of millennia...

Hearst thought WW1 a financial venture for Wall Street tycoons and his defence of regular soldiers, even deserters, and pro-Irish anti-imperialists was impressive – for example his campaign in support of British diplomat Roger Casement who was eventually hung for seeking German military support for Irish independence. Such campaigning was however not without financial benefit to Hearst’s own purse in the form of ever growing newspaper sales to those who approved of his anti corruption stance. His position on WW2 entailed a meeting with Hitler, but an abstentionism that became a liability. He rapidly became an advocate of anti-communism in the post WW2 era and had campaigned against pro-Soviet U. S. Films from the early forties, such as 'Mission to Moscow' and 'North Star' (Pizzitola 2002:409).

Hearst, an anti-communist, muck-raking, armaments and finance capital moneybags with a vendetta and a deep resentment (Rosebud)? What then of his concern about ‘alien’ labour? What of his early 'investigative' journalism? Despite denials by Hearst that he orchestrated it, Kane, the film, was branded communist, only saw restricted release, got bad early press, and took several years before being recognised the 'greatest film of all time' etc etc... the rest is cinema history. Welles was investigated by FBI agent Hoover (Pizzitola 2002:398) and his directing career never recovered, despite The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil, he was forever dogged by studio interference and funding troubles.

So lets find that image from the film that encodes it all - a hammer end Sickle on the façade of the Inquirer (see accompanying still). Then the multiple perspectives of the Kane film can be twisted to do allegorical service for a reading of Capital ("hat tip Rough Theory"). Immediately following the newsreel sequence that (re)starts the the film after Kane's snow globe death, the camera moves through a neon sign and down through a glass window to Susan's table and the first of five or six interviews which structure the rest of the film. These are not consecutive, temporally concurrent, and can even be contradictory, they do not add up to an explanation of the life of Kane, yet by the end, when the ice of the snow globe has turned to the fire of the furnace that consumes all that collected junk, we do perhaps know a little more than before, can examine things in a more nuanced way, and we maybe even get to know something of Hearst.
The different windows on the story of Kane also offer an allegorical way into reading Marx’s Capital – the initial newsreel section something like the commodity fetish chapter, a platform that warns, as does the very first sentence, that things are not what they appear, that the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails only presents itself as an immense collection of commodities

Although the film begins and ends with the No trespassing Sign, it is Welles I think who does want, and wants us, to trespass. His camera passes through the chain mesh, and again through various windows and signs to examine and inquire. This is something like the metaphoric architecture that governs the presentation of Das Kapital. The theatrical references to drawing back curtains (before the wizard of Oz, duex ex machina), the ocular, vision and camera lucida that ‘at first look’… implies always a second, and third, look, the ghost commentary so beloved of Derrida, and much more.

JH - Oct 2007

Bazin, Andre 1950 Orson Welles

Leaming, Barbara 1985 Orson Welles, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson

Conrad, Peter 2003 Orson Welles: the Stories of His Life, London: Faber and Faber.

Pizzitola, Louis 2002 Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion and Propaganda in the Movies, New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida on Ghosts

2007-10-05T00:21:00.001+01:00

From Ghost Dance

Capital the Unfinished Masterpiece

2007-10-04T23:53:00.000+01:00

Hello everyone. Welcome to the 2007 blog.

Sorry to start with a recycled post but I think this article from The Guardian serves as a quite good introduction to a reading of Capital. It discusses Capital in relation to Balzac's The Unfinished Masterpiece.

'The poet of Dialectics'

Marcuse

2007-01-30T14:45:00.000Z

LENIN'S TOMB has posted a Danish documentary about Marcuse , his support for the radical movements of the 1960s, and his clash with Governor Ronald Reagan. It includes commentary by people like his student Angela Davison (his involvement helping kick down doors in occupations of the university senate at UCSD etc) , and he himself talks about branding, planned obsolescence and alienation. Fred Jameson is in it, and there is an amusing section of attempts by conservatives to buy out Marcuse's job contract. Its an hour long - but worth a Look. Ahh, he paid anonymously for the door he smashed. Strange. The bit with the Marine Recruiter is funny too - very topical still.

The Greeks vs. The Germans

2006-12-13T19:34:00.000Z

Thanks to Neville for sending this round...

Surely Marx wouldn't have been so contemplative?

Immaterial Labour and Empire

2006-12-13T11:28:00.000Z

Two great texts on immaterial labour and Empire respectively. The first is by Steve Wright that wrote Storming Heaven and the second is by Brian Holmes, who has recently done some interesting stuff on the clash between the weapon-petro dollars alliance and the techno-merger dollars alliance in contemporary capitalism.

http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/12/27/0513241&mode=nested&tid=9
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/09/27/131214&tid=9

Multitude

2006-12-11T11:52:00.000Z

Just in case anyone is still reading this and that this anyone is interested in the concept of the multitude...

http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/4-3index.htm

Bougainville

2006-12-09T00:39:00.000Z

Occasionally I update on Bougainville stuff (here and here and here) but the latest I have is this (and someone certainly should dissertate on the topic...):

This interview first ran around 0549 GMT

By James Attwood

Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

SYDNEY (Dow Jones)--Papua New Guinea's government expects to agree terms with Bougainville authorities next year to lift a moratorium on mining in the battle-scarred island and resume operations the following year.

Give us two years and mining will restart in the Panguna mine," PNG mining minister Sam Akoitai told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday.

Anglo Australian miner Rio Tinto Plc. (RTP) shut the massive Panguna copper and gold mine in May 1989 after repeated attacks on infrastructure and workers by secessionist rebels.

Speaking on the sidelines of a PNG mining conference in Sydney, Akoitai said both the Bougainville autonomous government and foreign investors are keen to resume activities in the minerals-rich South Pacific island once fiscal arrangements are agreed.

"Bougainville is a place where every man and woman will swim across to," he said, when asked about the current level of investor interest.

"I've been approached by many many companies who are interested in doing exploration in Bougainville and also companies interested in talking about Panguna," he said.

"But my approach would be I'd rather work with the devil I know than getting somebody new to come in and start again," he said, referring to Rio Tinto subsidiary Bougainville Copper Ltd. (BOC.AU)

"I've had the opportunity to work with Bougainville Copper for nine years and think they're doing a very good job."

Besides holding the position of PNG national mining minister, Akoitai is also the parliamentary member for Central Bougainville.

Panguna produced about 180,000 tons of copper a year to rank as the world's third-largest copper mine. It remains closed despite a 1998 cease-fire and the formation of an autonomous island government.

Any decision on resuming mining at the dismantled operation is estimated to cost around US$1 billion.

Before any decision can be taken, however, stakeholders must complete a review of new fiscal and operating terms for exploration and mining on the island, Akoitai said.

The long-delayed review process is expected to begin in the first quarter of next year and take "months" to complete, he said, adding the benefits for Bougainville would have to be significantly better than current terms.

"It's an issue close to me. I'm from Bougainville and I also represent the electorate where the mine is. I would want the review process to be concluded quickly so we can decide the future of mining in Bougainville."

"The whole reason the government in Bougainville asked for this review process to began is so we can sort out the outstanding issues and then perhaps start mining from a clean sheet."

Benefits for the local community would have to be in line with new benchmarks of modern mines, he said, without elaborating.

Akoitai said Australia's Ord River Resources Ltd. (ORD.AU) and Gallipoli Mining Pty Ltd are among companies to make recent approaches to authorities on the possibility of exploring in Bougainville.

-By James Attwood, Dow Jones Newswires; 612-8235-2957;

2006-12-05T16:16:00.000Z

The Spotnicks

Hardt on Iraq

2006-12-05T08:28:00.000Z

Many argued that the US unabashed unilateralism post-9.11 refuted many of Hardt and Negri's claims in Empire. Here's an editoral Hardt wrote in the Guardian in the build up to the war...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,861942,00.html

All of Empire Online

2006-12-05T08:24:00.000Z

Militant Esthetix

2006-12-05T08:08:00.000Z

Lots of stuff on Benjamin, Adorno, and Frank Zappa among others...

http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk:80/

Marx's bottom

2006-11-25T21:58:00.000Z

If you're not already thinking of Marx as an eccentric and lovable uncle I hope this will do the trick...

Taken from Francis Wheen's Marx's Dad Kapital: A Biography

'By the end of 1865 Das Kapital was a manuscript of 1,200 pages, a blotted mess of crossings-out and indecipherable squiggles. On New Year's Day 1866 he sat down to make a fair copy, "licking the infant clean after long birth pangs". It took just over a year. Even liver trouble and carbuncles couldn't thwart him: he wrote the last few pages standing at his desk when an eruption of boils on the bottom made sitting too painful. Engel's experienced eye immediately spotted certain passages in the text where the carbuncles had left their mark, and Marx agreed that they might have given the prose a rather livid hue. "At all events, I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day," he cursed. "What swine they are!" The boils disappeared as soon as he complted the last page. "I always had the feeling," Engels told him, "that that damn book, which you have been carrying for so long, was at the bottom of your misfortune, and you would and could never extricate yourself until you had got it off your back." Feeling as voraciously fit as 500 hogs", Marx set off for Hamburg in April 1867 to deliver the manuscript and oversee its printing...'

Caliban and the Witch

2006-11-24T21:04:00.000Z

Here's an audio interview with Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

http://aud1.kpfa.org/data/20060711-Tue1200.mp3

Capitalism and Cultural Studies Seminar 2010

Silly season

Education without Frontiers

The Arcane of Reproduction - Fortunati

Deleuze, Marx and Politics

Form and content

Cut up machine

Talk by Bifo

Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis

U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

Immaterial labour links

Art and the 'right' to torture

'Anarchism, Nomadism and the Working Class: Lessons from Deleuze'

No! One can't speak of a social mission in that sense!

Humphrey McQueen

Terri Senft: For Students: Close Readings: Specters of Marx

A Space-hijacker answer

Bee-gin the Revolution?

Worker Bees

Massive pub fights on primitive accumulation

Commodity exchange and primitive accumulation

Transition from circulation to capitalist production.

They Live

Notes on Wagner

Value, Price and Profit

Heidegger

Historical Materialism report

Fear of a red planet

A busy weekend

Radical perspectives on the crisis

Marx's social survey of 1880

A Workers' Inquiry

Faust

back in fashion again - but when was it not.

Differences in the level of economic development

Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky[Notes on the Fatherland]

II

'Species-being', labour and nature

freedom x 2?

Marx 1 - Aristotle 0?

Harvey at the ICA in Nov 2008

'On the Method of Political Economy'

Engels' synopsis of Capital

Vix Pervenit (On Usury and Other Dishonest Profit)

Where's Wally?

Housmans Radical Booksellers

links

Marx and Philosophy Society

Anarchist Bookfair

Historical Materialism conference

The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush

Berkeley and the Mass Ornament

Hardt on Charlie Rose

Dreampolitik

From banlieues to South Bronx via Watts

Lonely Planet and Iraq

Sex and Capitalism

Burroughs and Century of the Self

Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ideology Critique

Sean Eisenstein

Heidegger on Marx

The Simpsons on Outsourcing

Must Crush Capitalism

Links galore

Slaughtered Lambs

The Politics of Utopia

Marxism vs. Neoclassical economics

Dance of the Dialectic

Gold Farming

The Sacred Conspiracy

Bataille's Tombstone

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Bataille on Crustaceans

Erik Satie

For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

Assorted links from today's seminars

Fukuyama and the End of History

Welles Hearst Capital

Derrida on Ghosts

Capital the Unfinished Masterpiece

Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky
[Notes on the Fatherland]