Ό,τι ως τώρα ήταν «κανονικό» έχει εξατμιστεί. Έχουμε εισέλθει στους μετακανονικούς καιρούς, την ενδιάμεση περίοδο όπου οι παλιές ορθοδοξίες έχουν πεθάνει, οι καινούργιες δεν έχουν ακόμη αναδυθεί και τίποτε δεν φαίνεται να έχει νόημα. Για να σχηματίσουμε μιαν άποψη για το άμεσο μέλλον, οφείλουμε να κατανοήσουμε τη σημασία αυτής της μεταβατικής περιόδου η οποία χαρακτηρίζεται από τρία C: πολυπλοκότητα (complexity), χάος (chaos) και αντιφάσεις (contradictions). Οι τρεις αυτές δυνάμεις ωθούν και συντηρούν τους μετακανονικούς καιρούς, οδηγώντας σε αβεβαιότητα και διαφορετικούς τύπους άγνοιας που καθιστούν την λήψη αποφάσεων προβληματική και αυξάνουν τους κινδύνους για τα άτομα, την κοινωνία και τον πλανήτη. Σύμφωνα με το άρθρο, οι μετακανονικοί καροί απαιτούν να εγκαταλείψουμε τις ιδέες «του ελέγχου και της διοίκησης» και να επαναστοχαστούμε πάνω στις έννοιες της προόδου, του εκσυγχρονισμού και της αποδοτικότητας. Ο δρόμος προς τα μπρος πρέπει να βασίζεται στις αρετές της ταπεινότητας, της μετριοφροσύνης και της υπευθυνότητας, οι οποίες είναι απαραίτητες για μια ζωή μέσα στην αβεβαιότητα, την πολυπλοκότητα και την άγνοια. Πρέπει να φανταστούμε τους εαυτούς μας έξω από τους μετακανονικούς καιρούς και μέσα σε νέα εποχή κανονικότητας – εξοπλισμένους με ηθική πυξίδα και ένα ευρύ φάσμα οραμάτων παρμένων από την πλούσια ποικιλία των ανθρώπινων κουλτουρών.
In this book I re-examine Karl Marx's analysis of value through a detailed study of Chapter One of Volume I of Capital. The object of this study is to bring out the political usefulness of the analysis of value by situating the abstract concepts of Chapter One within Marx's overall analysis of the class struggles of capitalist society. I intend to return to what I believe was Marx's original purpose: he wrote Capital to put a weapon in the hands of workers. In it he presented a detailed analysis of the fundamental dynamics of the struggles between the capitalist and the working classes
Autonomy is the practice, the theory and the revolutionary project of the epoch of “fordism”. Its subject is the worker and it supposes that the communist revolution is his liberation, i.e. the liberation of productive labour. It supposes that struggles over immediate demands1 are stepping stones to the revolution, and that capital reproduces and confirms a workers’ identity within the relation of exploitation. All this has lost any foundation. In fact it is just the opposite: in each of its struggles, the proletariat sees how its existence as a class is objectified in the reproduction of capital as something foreign to it and which in its struggle it can be led to put into question. In the activity of the proletariat, being a class becomes an exterior constraint objectified in capital. Being a class becomes the obstacle which its struggle as a class has to overcome; this obstacle possesses a reality which is clear and easily identifiable, it is self-organisation and autonomy.
During the last ten years Marxism has come to occupy a substantial position within American academia. This is especially true in economics where, until recently, discussion of Marx and the Marxist tradition was largely confined to courses in the history of economic thought and in the economic history of the Soviet Union. The rise of an academic Marxism has been due, I would argue, to two forces. First, the struggles of students within the context of the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s carved out time and space within which politically active students could study Marxism as apart of radical economics, insurgent sociology, and so on. Second, university administrators and the business interests they generally represent have been surprisingly tolerant of the expansion of Marxist studies. This reaction to student demands is not simply a case of the “repressive tolerance” Marcuse described so vividly. The current tolerance is due, more importantly, to the need of business for new ideas during the present period of economic and social crisis. There is a long history of the capitalist appropriation of Marxist ideas which should lend credence to this suggestion. Moreover, the numerous attempts in recent years in the business press and in professional economic journals to give space to radical ideas and to evaluate current Marxist economic research demonstrates the on-going interest of business and its ideologues in the possibility of appropriating something new from Marx. Nowhere has this tolerance been more obvious than in the area of Marxist research on the theory of economic crisis." This willingness on the part of business to appropriate Marxist ideas and to use them for its own purposes has been largely ignored by Marxists working on the theory of crisis. They have, time and again, formulated their theories in ways that facilitate such appropriation. Yet this is not necessary. There is a way to read Marx and to develop Marxist theory that does not lend itself to this kind of appropriation. In this essay I do two things. First, through a series of examples, I illustrate how, in the history of Marxist work on the theory of crisis, many have forgotten the revolutionary content of Marx’s own work and thus left themselves open to the dangers of capitalist appropriation. Second, I suggest an alternative approach to the study and elaboration of Marx’s analysis of crisis that makes its political and revolutionary content explicit and thus more immune to appropriation.
Borio, Pozzi and Roggero (eds.) 2005 have characterised operaismo as ‘neither a homogenous doctrinaire corpus, nor a unitary political subject’, but rather ‘multiple pathways with their roots in a common theoretical matrix’. Starting with a diagram drawn up by Primo Moroni in the 1980s, this paper will explore a number of the ways in which those paths might be mapped out, in terms of key categories and projects, above all for the years that follow 1979.
Systematic dialectic is distinguished from historical dialectic and its logic explored. As a strategy of exposition designed to articulate the forms of a given whole it orders the relevant categories in a linear development. The dialectical justification of the transitions is the central question addressed. What is given progressively as the further determination of the abstract beginning should be read retrogressively as a grounding movement validating the earlier categories from the perspective of the concrete whole.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) The quote above comes from Karl Marx’s critique of the French President turned Emperor Napoleon III, the nephew of the French Emperor of the early eighteenth century. Napoleon III was democratically elected president of the Second French Republic before leading a coup d’état to become the Emperor of the Second French Empire. Marx’s abrasive critique of Napoleon III’s rise to power is, in my opinion, one of Marx’s best writings. One of the major problems he had with Napoleon III and the Second French Empire was that it appealed to French tradition of the Napeolonic Era, which French people adorned as a time of its great power and influence. Napoleon III lacked the leadership skills of his uncle, but he shared the name and appealed to that tradition, which gave him credibility with many French. Marx’s point was that — in a time of revolutionary distress — instead of embracing progressive or radical change, the French people and Napoleon III looked to the past to find names, symbols, imagery, that provided nostalgia for a supposed better time. In short, traditions of past generations haunt the beliefs of the living generation who cling to symbols of the past to find comfort during times of change. Marx’s quote relates to and can explain many conservative beliefs that continue to look to the past to resolve political problems.
In a contested 'swerve' in debates around communisation, issues of gender, class and race are coming to the fore. Reviewing key texts in this debate, P. Valentine discusses the material basis of the gender distinction in capitalism, and its centrality to class exploitation
Dave Marson's excellent 1973 pamphlet on the little-known mass walkouts of schoolchildren in the UK and Ireland in 1911, the same year that saw widespread industrial unrest and strikes. Their demands included shorter hours and an end to corporal punishment in the form of the cane and the strap
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