Critique of Political Economy – (COPE): Volume 1

 

Andrew Kliman

CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY – (COPE): VOLUME 1 NOW OUT

Editors: Andrew Kliman and Alan Freeman

 

The editors have now made the first volume of Critique of Political Economy accessible to the public online.

 

See Volume 1 (from September 2011) at: http://copejournal.com/critique-of-political-economy-vol-1/

 

You can also see papers from the International Working Group on Value Theory (IWGVT) at the same site, see: http://copejournal.com/iwgvt-papers/

 

The COPE / IWGVT website is currently under construction, and more material will uploaded there in the weeks ahead, see: http://copejournal.com/

 

***END***

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Ruth Rikowski at Serendipitous Moments: http://ruthrikowskiim.blogspot.co.uk/

Marxism and the Critique of Value

Modernism

MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF VALUE

The editorial board of Mediations is pleased to announce the publication of our latest dossier, Marxism and the Critique of Value.

This double issue is being published simultaneously as a book, which can be downloaded as a free PDF from M-C-M′ (http://www.mcmprime.com) and which is also available in paperback (ISBN 978-0989549707).

Consisting of some 400 pages of new translations from the German-language Wertkritik tendency, Marxism and the Critique of Value presents a landmark effort to complete the critique of the value-form begun by Marx.

The full text can, as always, be accessed at mediationsjournal.org, where it is accompanied by book reviews by Roberto Schwarz, Josh Robinson, Barbara Foley and Kanishka Chowdhury, and Matthew Moraghan.

 

DOSSIER: MARXISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF VALUE

Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group

Volume 27, Nos. 1-2 Fall/Spring 2013-14

 

Editors’ Note

 

Norbert Trenkle: Value and Crisis: Basic Questions

Norbert Trenkle tackles fundamental questions posed by the critique of value. How does it differ from other Marxisms? What are the consequences of the critique of value for the category of labor and for the labor theory of value? What is its relationship to socialism as an economic project? What is the relationship between the value-form and capitalist crisis? Can the critique of capitalism still be undertaken from the standpoint of labor?

 

Robert Kurz: The Crisis of Exchange Value: Science as Productivity, Productive Labor, and Capitalist Reproduction

As long as value is allowed to hold sway as an element of second nature, the Left will not be able adequately to understand the developments in the productive forces that characterized the twentieth century. Robert Kurz lays out the fundamental coordinates that tie the critique of value to the theory of crisis.

 

Claus Peter Ortlieb: A Contradiction between Matter and Form: On the Significance of the Production of Relative Surplus Value in the Dynamic of Terminal Crisis

Building on the insights of Capital I, and dispatching common liberal misunderstandings of those insights, Claus Peter Ortlieb makes the case for what mainstream economists euphemistically call “secular stagnation”: that is, an economic crisis that cannot be resolved by economic means.

 

Roswitha Scholz: Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body

Can there be a feminist materialism that does not rely on the fundamentally anti-Marxist materialism of the body? What is the relationship between capitalism, patriarchy, and feminist deconstruction? Roswitha Scholz introduces the concept of “value-dissociation,” under which capitalist societies necessarily consign labor that does not valorize capital — but that is nonetheless essential to its production and reproduction — to a subordinate, feminized zone.

 

Norbert Trenkle: The Rise and Fall of the Working Man: Towards a Critique of Modern Masculinity

In order to be able to understand the current economic crisis in particular and the emergence and development of capitalism in general, Norbert Trenkle argues, it is necessary to account for capitalism’s gendered social dimension. What can the connection between modern masculinity and the logic of modern labor tell us about the current crisis and the relation between capitalist form and its corresponding social structures?

 

Ernst Lohoff: Off Limits, Out of Control: Commodity Society and Resistance in the Age of

Deregulation and Denationalization

Despite all violent disagreements, mainstream Left and Right agree that what is at stake is the role of the state: is it “off limits” or “out of control”? But what if the role of the state — as with the flight to finance — is epiphenomenal to an underlying crisis-process? What are the possible political responses? Ernst Lohoff argues that rather than a rearguard defense of the state, the slogan of free access could organize a plausible Left project.

 

Robert Kurz: World Power and World Money: The Economic Function of the U.S. Military Machine within Global Capitalism and the Background of the New Financial Crisis

In an article written in the initial stages of the 2007-8 financial crisis, Robert Kurz traces its origins to the Reaganite policy of “weaponized Kenyesianism” that stabilized the world dollar economy and established the dominant flows of debt and goods that would persist until the onset of the crisis: phenomena that are generally recognized on the Left as well as on the Right only in inverted form.

 

Norbert Trenkle: Struggle without Classes: Why There Is No Resurgence of the Proletariat in the Currently Unfolding Capitalist Crisis

Class struggle played a historically indispensable role in the constitution of the working class as a subject conscious of its pursuit of a social mission. But can a class subject point to a future beyond capitalist social relations today? Is “declassing” a mere appearance? Or, on the contrary, do contemporary attempts to think struggle in class terms, no matter how sublimated, diguised, misrecognized, or sophisticated, lead up a blind alley?

 

Ernst Lohoff: Violence as the Order of Things and the Logic of Annihilation

How, after the end of the Cold War and the universalization of a supposedly pacifying market logic, are we to understand contemporary violence? The answer, suggests Ernst Lohoff, lies in the emergence of modern subjectivity and its origins in the Englightemnent: origins deeply bound up in the emergence of the value-form.

 

Robert Kurz: The Nightmare of Freedom: The Foundations of “Western Values” and the Helplessness of Critique

Are freedom and equality Left values? Certainly they inform historical Marxism and anarchism as much as liberalism. But what if the concepts themselves are bound up with the logic of the market? What if freedom is only a naked function of the valorization process — a moment in capital’s self-mediation — that is, of universal unfreedom? Utopias of circulation, of markets without money, suddenly look wildly implausible.

 

Karl-Heinz Lewed: Curtains for Universalism: Islamism as Fundamentalism in Modern Social Form

In most writing about political Islam — even from the Left — it is understood, even where a vulgar “clash of civilizations” thesis is rejected, to be fundamentally other to Western social and political forms. Karl-Heinz Lewed argues that political Islam is nothing other than a form of appearance of a general world crisis, one which makes its first appearance in the failed modernizations of the Third World. Political Islam is one attempt to resolve an impasse central to the Enlightenment mobilization of the dialectic of universal and particular: a dialectic which itself owes its historical resonance to the emergence of the value form.

 

Robert Kurz: On the Current Global Economic Crisis: Questions and Answers

How can we understand the current global economic crisis? What can we expect to happen in the next few years? How will this crisis force us to rethink critique, the nature of global social movements, and concepts such as revolution? For Robert Kurz, the critique of value is at the same time an analysis of the crisis, and the analysis of the crisis is of necessity a critique of value.

 

Robert Kurz: The Ontological Break: Before the Beginning of a Different World History

The debate over globalization seems to have reached a moment of exhaustion. Why? The process underlying globalization is, if anything, still in its initial stages. The endpoint we have reached is rather a categorical one: the exhaustion of an entire universe of historical concepts, which, argues Robert Kurz, we now have to learn to do without.

 

 

BOOK REVIEWS

Roberto Schwarz reviews Robert Kurz’s The Collapse of Modernization

Josh Robinson reviews Ernst Lohoff’s and Norbert Trenkle’s The Great Devaluation

Barbara Foley and Kanishka Chowdhury review Kevin B. Anderson’s Marx at the Margins

Matthew Moraghan reviews Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades

 

Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literacy Group: http://www.mediationsjournal.org/

First published in: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/mediations-27.1-2-marxism-and-the-critique-of-value

 

**END**

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

IIPPE Training Workshops Programme 2014

Dud Capitalism

IIPPE TRAINING WORKSHOPS PROGRAMME 2014

International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE)

Continuing its Training Workshops programme, the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE) announces TWO forthcoming training workshops

 

1. Monday June 9 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London: a one-day workshop on The Political Economy of Finance

Confirmed speakers include Simon Mohun and Tony Norfield. The morning will focus on productive and unproductive labour, and then what Marx had to say about interest and the rate of interest. The afternoon will focus on the relevance of the contribution of Hilferding, followed by a critical survey of some contemporary approaches to financial appropriation, against the empirical backdrop of the importance of finance in the contemporary world.

We seek an audience of undergraduate and postgraduate students, junior academics and activists, who have a particular interest in acquainting themselves with the relevance of Marxian political economy to the world of finance.

If you wish to apply to attend this workshop, please send a note to that effect, before Thursday 15 May with your name and occupation/affiliation, to Serap Saritas: 548340@soas.ac.uk (This workshop has a small amount of financial support from the Amiel and Melburn Trust to cover reasonable travel costs within the UK from outside London.)

 

2. Monday 15 September at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Naples, Italy (the day before the IIPPE Annual Conference in Naples): a one-day workshop on The Political Economy of Value and Price.

Confirmed speakers include Simon Mohun and Marco Veronese Passarella. The morning will focus on the labour theory of value and Marx’s account of the formation of prices of production. The afternoon will focus on some contemporary Marxist approaches to value and price.

We are seeking an audience of undergraduate and postgraduate students, junior academics and activists, who could be attending the IIPPE Annual Conference, and have a particular interest in acquainting themselves with some of the basic principles of Marxian political economy and its controversies. If you wish to apply to attend for this workshop, please send, before 30 June 2014, your name and occupation/affiliation, to: s.mohun@qmul.ac.uk

 

First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/international-initiative-for-the-promotion-of-political-economy-iippe-announces-two-forthcoming-training-workshops

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Labor Process / Valorization

Labour

LABOR PROCESS / VALORIZATION

40 years after Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman

Deadline for submission of articles: January 31, 2014
(Articles in Portuguese and English)

Guest Editor
Elcemir Paço Cunha
FederalUniversity of Juiz de Fora (UFJF)

“The distinctive capacity of human labor power is, therefore, not its ability to produce a surplus, but rather its intelligent and purposive character, which gives it infinite adaptability and which produces the social and cultural conditions for enlarging its own productivity, so that its surplus product may be continuously enlarged. From the point of view of the capitalist, this many-sided potentiality of humans in society is the basis upon which is built the enlargement of his capital” (BRAVERMAN, 1998, p. 38).

The purpose of this call is fostering discussions on the labor process in the capitalist mode of production, having in mind the 40th anniversary of the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century, by Harry Braverman. As is generally known, this book resumed the discussions of Sociology of Work worldwide by evoking the links between the labor process and the monopoly phase of capital. From this copious influence, remained the so-called Labor Process Theory, which engenders discussions and events abroad (http://www.ilpc.org.uk/). The discussions from Braverman’s book, under the critical guidance of Micheal Burawoy, also, prompted considerations that, right or wrong, staked out the conditions for setting what came to be the Critical Management Studies (KNIGHTS and WILLMOTT, 1990).

Additionally, all movement in the different chains that put on hold the category work discussing its validity for a social criticism or its centrality to social life (Jürgen Habermas, Claus Offe, and Andre Gorz, and resonances in the recognition theory as it appears in Axel Honneth, in addition to authors having even postmodernist attitudes, such as Zygmunt Bauman), also served to greatly deviate research on the work problem (compare, notwithstanding, to different movements which do not claim such centrality under the terms of criticism, as György Lukács, Ernest Mandel, István Mészáros, etc.). Not by chance, the so-called Organizational Studies, which partly reflect on the issues of social and economic sciences, manifest the tendency to pass off the problems of the labor process as valorization process of capital by preferring other themes also important that, however, keep away from the key determinations of this sociability observed, whose guiding core is still (against the most varied prognoses) the logic of value.

Therefore, celebrating this work by Braverman means opening the possibility for discussions which bring up the issues directly associated to work and labor process in the capitalist production, addressing, by way of example, these possible points:

· Issues concerning the centrality of work;
· New expressions of work degradation;
· Work, work division, and command technique (administration) at work;
· Work, State, and social policies;
· Work and new expressions of the “social question”;
· Work and feminism;
· Others.

We would like to invite authors to prepare theoretical and empirical papers.
Cadernos EBAPE.BR is an online journal on Administration published in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, by EBAPE/FGV (BrazilianSchool of Public and Business Administration of Getulio Vargas Foundation) and it is an open access journal – http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/cadernosebape/index. All approved papers will be published in the original language. The Cadernos EBAPE.BR is classified by the CAPES Qualis system as B1.

The authors should follow the guidelines for submitting articles to Cadernos EBAPE.BR in:  http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/cadernosebape/pages/view/normas.

The articles should be submitted through the link: http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/cadernosebape/login  

You must register as an author, if you have not done it previously.

The deadline for article submission is January 31, 2014.

Note: please indicate in the field “AUTHOR’S COMMENTS” (bottom of the page – 1st stage of the procedure) that your article is for the special issue: “Labor process/appreciation 40 years after Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman”.

Specific questions about the special issue should be directly addressed to the guest editor: Elcemir Paço Cunha (elcemirpacocunha@gmail.com).

Guest Editor
Elcemir Paço Cunha
Associate Professor of the Post-Graduation Programs in Social Service and Law at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de For a

 

**END**

 ‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

 Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

The New Left Book Club: https://rikowski.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/the-new-left-book-club-call-for-papers/  

Ingo Elbe Translation Project

Karl Marx

INGO ELBE TRANSLATION PROJECT

From Chris O’Kane:

Ingo Elbe’s Marx im Westen is the authoritative theoretical history of West German Marxist Theory providing a brilliant and lucid account of the intricacies of the debates over Marx’s theory of Value, the State Derivation debate and Revolutionary Theory. The work is therefore essential for understanding the work of German theorists who have been translated in the Anglophone world such as Michael Heinrich and Heide Gerstenberger as well as the influence these debates had on the Anglophone work of the CSE, Open Marxism, Value-Form Theory and Political Marxism.

Unfortunately, such authority also comes at a price: the book’s length has prohibited any press from being able to translate it. This is why I am soliciting volunteers to translate selections from Marx im Westen in order to make it available to the English reading public.

Those willing and able to contribute to such a project please contact:  theresonlyonechrisokane@gmail.com

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/ingo-elbe-translation-project

 

**END**

 

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales); and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Delhi Historical Materialism Conference 2013: Update

Karl Marx

DELHI HISTORICAL MATERIALISM CONFERENCE 2013: UPDATE

The organisers of the Delhi HM Conference (3-5 April 2013) are appealing to supporters and readers of HM for contributions towards the airfares of 2 speakers from abroad whom we’ve got down for our plenary sessions. The rough target is 1200 pounds in total.

Any donations, however small, would be most welcome!  http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/delhifunds

Please also note that the conference venue has now been shifted to the Convention Centre in JNU. There is an extra conference day as well, 5th April.

Here’s a small sample of what’s on offer from a total of 48 sessions and 3 plenaries:

* Alberto Toscano and Matteo Mandarini,‘The Communist intellectual: Lessons from some Italian debates’;

* Andreas Merkens, ‘Counterhegemony, political education & pedagogy in Antonio Gramsci’;

* João Arsénio Nunes, ‘The revolutionary thought of Alvaro Cunhal’;

* Jeff Goodwin, ‘How kings survived the Arab spring’;

* Gilbert Achcar on the Arab uprising & its aftermath;

* Ajit Zacharias on domestic labor, value of labor-power and poverty;

* Pranav Jani and Nivedita Majumdar on postcolonial theory;

* Teesta Setalvad and Harsh Mander on Gujarat ten years after the genocide;

* Apoorvanand, Ishwar Singh Dost, Kumar Rana and Kamal Chenoy on the crisis of the Indian left;

* Brinda Bose on ‘Queer matriarchies’;

* Jean Dreze on ‘Anarchist thought & the future of the Left’;

* Moinak Biswas on ‘The political film in crisis’;

* Javed Anand on the Muslim Right in India & Pakistan;

* Saroj Giri on Maoists in Nepal;

* A LeftWord Books panel on ‘Communist histories’;

* Soma Marik on Rosa Luxemburg & the party;

* Uday Chandra on the ‘State, popular resistance & “democracy” in the forests of eastern India’;

And loads more including the launch of Vivek Chibber’s new book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital; films by Kluge and others; books…

Submissions Update: https://rikowski.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/historical-materialism-conference-in-delhi-submissions-update/ 

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/delhi-historical-materialism-conference-3-5-april-2013

**END**

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales); and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Marx and the Frankfurt School – Call for Papers

Theodor Adorno

MARX AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL – CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

6TH INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THEORY CONFERENCE OF ROME

Stream on Marx and the Frankfurt School: New Perspectives and their Contemporary Relevance

May 6-8, 2013

John Felice, Rome Center of Loyola University Chicago

Recent years have seen a flourishing of new perspectives on the contemporary relevance of Karl Marx’s thought. Very little of this thought has been applied to the relationship between Marx and the work of the Frankfurt School. Instead much of the work on Marx and the Frankfurt School is still approached through paradigms such as the Marxist Humanist discourse of alienation or of scholarly interpretations established by Jurgen Habermas, Martin Jay and Gillian Rose. This stream aims to bring together the best contemporary scholarship offering new perspectives on the relationship between Marx and the FrankfurtSchool and to consider the contemporary relevance of this relationship.

Possible topics include:

·      New assessments of the relationship between Marx and major figures from the Frankfurt School including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas and Honneth.

·      New assessments of the relationship between Marx and minor figures from the Frankfurt School including: Sohn-Rethel, Kracauer, Kirchheimer, Löwenthal Neumann, Pollack, Wittfogel, Negt, Kluge, Schmidt, Backhaus, Reichelt.

 ·      Comparative accounts of different figures from the Frankfurt School’s interpretation of Marx.

 ·      New assessments of theories central to Marx and thinkers from the Frankfurt School such as critique, society, reification, second nature, natural history, commodification, fetishism, value, money, exchange, equivalence, ideology, domination, class, capital, social reproduction, epistemology, subjectivity etc.

 ·      New assessments of the reception and the influence of the Frankfurt School’s relation to Marx in national and international contexts.

 ·      Importance that the ideas of Marx and the Frankfurt School have for contemporary theories of capital, social domination, subjectivity, the state, epistemology, class, critical pedagogy, emancipatory politics, and issues of crisis, social reproduction, ecological catastrophe etc.

 ·      Criticisms different Marxisms or critical theories might have of thinkers from the FrankfurtSchool.

 ·      Criticisms the thinkers from the FrankfurtSchool might have of Marx and different Marxisms.

 ·      Productive and elective affinities between Marx, figures from the Frankfurt School and other Marxists such as Bataille, Bensaid, Foucault, Open Marxism, Althusser, Heinrich, Kurz, Dieter Wolf, Castoriadis, Illyenkov, Bogdanov, etc.

 ·      Productive and elective affinities between Marx, figures from the Frankfurt School and other Marxist schools such as Autonomism, Political Marxism, Open Marxism, communisation and value-form theory.

 

If you are interested in presenting a paper or organizing a panel (of up to 5 speakers), please submit a 1-2 page abstract by February 28, 2013 (including name and institutional affiliation). Abstracts should be submitted by email to the stream coordinator Chris O’Kane at theresonlyonechrisokane@gmail.com

Decisions regarding the program will be made by March 2013.

 

First published at: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/cfp-stream-on-marx-and-the-frankfurt-school-new-perspectives-and-their-contemporary-relevance-1

 

**END**

 

‘The Lamb’ by William Blake – set to music by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw3VloKBvZc

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

 

Glenn Rikowski’s paper, Critical Pedagogy and the Constitution of Capitalist Society has been published at Heathwood Press as a Monthly Guest Article for September 2012, online at:

http://www.heathwoodpress.com/monthly-guest-article-august-critical-pedagogy-and-the-constitution-of-capitalist-society-by-glenn-rikowski/

 

Heathwood Press: http://www.heathwoodpress.com 

Historical Materialism – Volume 23 Number 3

Karl & Jenny Marx

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM – VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3

Now Out: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/1569206x/20/3

 

CONTENTS:

 

Economics and Political Economy Today: Introduction to the Symposium on Fine and Milonakis

Author:  Sam Ashman

pp. 3–8 (6)

 

From Fetishism to ‘Shocked Disbelief ’: Economics, Dialectics and Value Theory

Author:  David McNally

pp. 9–23 (15)

 

Political Economy: History with the Politics Left Out?

Author:  Roger Backhouse

pp. 24–38 (15)

 

Sixteen Questions for Fine and Milonakis

Author:  J.E. King

pp. 39–60 (22)

 

‘From Political Economy to Economics’ and Beyond

Author:  Steve Fleetwood

pp. 61–80 (20)

 

From Freakonomics to Political Economy

Authors:  Ben Fine; Dimitris Milonakis

pp. 81–96 (16)

 

Why We Need to Understand Derivatives in Relation to Money: A Reply to Tony Norfield

Authors:  Dick Bryan; Michael Rafferty

pp. 97–109 (13)

 

David Craven (1951–2012): Marxist Historian of Art from las Américas *

Author:  Steve Edwards

pp. 111–112 (2)

 

David Craven – In Memoriam

Author:  Stephen F. Eisenman

pp. 113–115 (3)

 

Marxism, Art and the Histories of Latin America: An Interview with David Craven*

Author:  Angela Dimitrakaki

pp. 116–134 (19)

 

David Craven: A Select Bibliography

pp. 135–136 (2)

 

Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, Gail Day, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010

Author: Benjamin Noys

pp. 137–144 (8)

 

Bolivia’s Radical Tradition: Permanent Revolution in the Andes, S. Sándor John, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009 ‘I Sweat the Flavor of Tin’: Labor Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia, Robert L. Smale, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Author:  Joseph Choonara

pp. 145–158 (14)

 

Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1: The False Messiah, Alan Hart, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2009; Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 2: David Becomes Goliath, Alan Hart, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2009; Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 3: Conflict Without End, Alan Hart, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2010

Author:  Max Ajl

pp. 159–180 (22)

 

Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism: State Transformation in Turkey, Yıldız Atasoy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Author:  Eren Duzgun

pp. 181–200 (20)

 

Everyday Life and the State, Peter Bratsis, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006

Author:  Elmar Flatschart

pp. 201–212 (12)

 

Empiricism

pp. 213–218 (6)

 

Notes on Contributors

pp. 219–222 (4)

 

Back Issues

pp. 223–224 (2)

 

Originally published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/now-out-historical-materialism-20.3

 

**END**

 

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

‘The Lamb’ by William Blake – set to music by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw3VloKBvZc

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Glenn Rikowski’s MySpace Blog: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski/blog

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

 

Glenn Rikowski’s paper, Critical Pedagogy and the Constitution of Capitalist Society has been published at Heathwood Press as a Monthly Guest Article for September 2012, online at:

http://www.heathwoodpress.com/monthly-guest-article-august-critical-pedagogy-and-the-constitution-of-capitalist-society-by-glenn-rikowski/

 

Heathwood Press: http://www.heathwoodpress.com 

 

The Individuality Pr♥test: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transcontinental/the-individuality-prtest

 

I Love Transcontinental: http://ihearttranscontinental.blogspot.co.uk/

 

 

Finance and the Realization of Value in the “Social Factory”

Capitalism in Crisis

FINANCE AND THE REALIZATION OF VALUE IN THE “SOCIAL FACTORY”

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers ( AAG ) Annual Meeting 2013, Los Angeles April 9 -13th

Finance and the Realization of Value in the “Social Factory”

Co-organized by Mark Kear (Simon Fraser University) and Lana Swartz (University of Southern California)

Session Overview

This session explores the changing role of money and finance in the realization of value outside traditional sites of production, and through social processes and activities not historically associated with value production. Over the last three decades geographers have documented dramatic transformations in the nature of labor in affluent capitalist states. These transformations have been attended by a growth in insecure, casualized, and irregular employment; a blurring of work and non-work time as well as a rise in the prominence of “entrepreneurial,” “affective,” “creative” and “immaterial” labour. Italian autonomists (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2010, Marazzi 2011, Vecellone 2007) argue that these shifts in the nature of work have dispersed and decentralized the valorization process to a point where ‘the whole society is placed at the disposal of profit’ (Negri, 1989: 79 cited in Gill and Pratt 2007) – turning society into a “social factory” for the production of value. This “real subsumption of society under capital,” however, creates challenges for the regulation of productive processes and the realization of value created beyond the “factory gate.”

With these challenges in mind, we hope to explore how innovations in payments systems, banking, financial analytics and credit scoring products as well as other financial apparatuses (e.g. loan products, mobile apps, transaction services, etc.) enable the capitalization and regulation of diffuse value producing activity (in the home, online, etc.), and help capture surpluses produced through such activity. According to Hardt and Negri (2009: 289) “only finance is able to oversee and compel the flexibility, mobility and precariousness of biopolitical labor-power;” however, the specific financial devices (Muniesa, Millo and Callon 2007) and mechanisms through which everyday activities and forms of sociality are rendered sources of economic value remain largely unstudied.

The current efforts of financial institutions, state regulators and consumer advocates to build a more “inclusive” financial system, develop new products, and harness new data sources, promise to produce new “spaces” into which financial markets can expand and “empower” the excluded. Some of these efforts lay new infrastructures of value transfer and production, while others work to privatize and “ride the rails” of public systems (Maurer 2012). We hope this session will facilitate a rewarding and critical discussion about this post-subprime crisis future of financialization – its vectors, contradictions, geographies, and targets for resistance.

Possible paper topics and themes include:

– Money and payment infrastructures

– Financial empowerment, financial inclusion and financial citizenship

– Behavioral finance, financial education and financial subject formation

– Geographies of transactional finance

– Biocapitalism / cognitive capitalism

– South-to-north policy transfer / finance and the “bottom of the pyramid”

– Asset-based welfare and neoliberalization

– Mobile banking and prepaid cards

– Finance and precarity

– Financial ethnography

– Consumer finance, social protection and personal responsibility

– Finance and class

– Resistance to financialization

– Finance and the commons

– Financial reform

– Finance and measurement (e.g. data, scoring, and risk)

– Finance and social capital

– Debtor-creditor relations

– Finance and philanthrocapitalism

Submissions need not be limited to these suggestions; we welcome abstracts with expansive interpretations of these topics and themes.

Please send proposed titles and abstracts of up to 250 words to Mark Kear ( mkear@sfu.ca ) and Lana Swartz ( dswartz@usc.edu ) by October 1st , 2012.

References

Gill, R., & Pratt, A. (2008). In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work. Theory Culture and Society , 25 (7-8), 1–30.
Marazzi, C. (2011). The Violence of Financial Capitalism . Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Maurer, B. (2012). Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space. Journal of Development Studies , 48 (5), 589–604.
Muniesa, F., Millo, Y., & Callon, M. (2007). An introduction to market devices. Socialogical Review , 55 (2), 1–12.
Negri, A., & Hardt, M. (2009). Commonwealth . Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Press.
Vercellone, C. (2007). From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism. Historical Materialism , 15 (1), 13–36.

First published at: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/2nd-cfp-aag-2013-la-9-13-april-finance-and-the-realization-of-value-in-the-social-factory

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski’s paper, Critical Pedagogy and the Constitution of Capitalist Society has been published at Heathwood Press as a Monthly Guest Article for September 2012, online at:

http://www.heathwoodpress.com/monthly-guest-article-august-critical-pedagogy-and-the-constitution-of-capitalist-society-by-glenn-rikowski/

Heathwood Press: http://www.heathwoodpress.com

Value, Money and Crisis: A Workshop on the Work of Hans-Georg Backhaus

Money

VALUE, MONEY AND CRISIS: A WORKSHOP ON THE WORK OF HANS-GEORG BACKHAUS

The Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London invites you to:

Value, Money and Crisis: A Workshop on the Work of Hans-Georg Backhaus

Presentations by Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva, responses by Chris Arthur and Werner Bonefeld

4 June 2012
Room 137, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, University of London
4-6 pm
All welcome

Hans-Georg Backhaus is one of the most provocative thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Together with Helmut Reichelt, Alfred Schmidt, and Hans-Jürgen Krahl, he was at the origin of the Neue Marx-Lektüre. Building on Adorno’s critical sociology, Backhaus has been engaged in a problematization of the Marxian critique of political economy which takes seriously its roots in Hegel’s Logic. Questioning orthodox Marxism and Engels’s legacy, he has advanced a whole-scale reconstruction of Marxian theory, confronting the inconsistencies in Das Kapital, and rescuing Marxism as a critical theory of society. The most important of his essays were collected in Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur marxschen Okonomiekritik (The Dialectic of the Value Form: Investigations into Marx’s Critique of Economics) by the German publisher Caira. Very few of them are available in English, but the seminal contributions (in particular his 4-part Materials for the Reconstruction of Marx’s Theory of Value) have now been published in Italian under the editorship of Bellofiore and Redolfi Riva. At the core of Backhaus’s reconstructive project is the uniqueness of Marx in building the only monetary theory of value available to us, together with a full recognition of the fetish character and the displaced/perverted nature of contradictory capitalist reality. Backhaus’s contributions put the question of the ‘constitution’ of capitalist social ‘objectivity’ once again on the agenda of Marxian theory and politics. They are essential today for anyone preoccupied with building an analysis of the crisis – one that would not only depart radically from mainstream economic theory, but go far deeper than Neo-Ricardianism and Keynesianism.

Riccardo Bellofiore has published books on Marx, Luxemburg, Minsky, Napoleoni, globalization, and the current economic crisis. With Giovanna Vertova he has a FB page, Economisti di classe. He teaches at the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Tommaso Redolfi Riva studied Philosophy and History of Political Economy in the Universities of Pisa and Florence. Together with Riccardo Bellofiore he is the editor of Hans Georg Backhaus, Dialettica della forma di valore, Roma, 2009.

Chris Arthur is the author of The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital.

Werner Bonefeld teaches at theUniversity ofYork. He recently edited Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future: Insurrection, Movement, Commons.

 

Further information: http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/calendar/?id=5410

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

‘Stagnant’ – a new remix and new video by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic

Kosmoprolet Issue 3

Aesthetics

KOSMOPROLET ISSUE 3

Kosmoprolet #3  is now available in print. 

The Editorial can be found in English here: http://www.kosmoprolet.org/english

Contents:

• Editorial
• Arabischer Frühling im Herbst des Kapitals
• Jenseits der Agrarrevolution
• Schranken proletarischer Emanzipation. Zur Kritik der Gewerkschaften
• Fragebogen zur Leiharbeit
• Der Existenzialismus als Zerfallsprodukt revolutionärer Theorie
• Zwischen Arbeiterautonomie und Kommunisierung.
• Eine Kritik an den “28 Thesen zur Klassengesellschaft”
• Über die Kommunisierung und ihre Theoretiker
• Proletarische Bewegung und Produktivkraftkritik

 

Addendum, 13.50 GMT, 28th December 2011: There is a translation app on this journal’s site which allows you to read the content in English. It works really well. … Glenn

**END**

‘Maximum levels of boredom

Disguised as maximum fun’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales)  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a new song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism

Karl Marx

MARX AND THE ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM

Kieran Allen
Released June 6th 2011
PB / £ 16.99 / 9780745330020 / 215mm x 135mm / 248pp

If we are serious about finding a different way to run the post-credit crunch society, we must start by introducing alternatives to undergraduates. Kieran Allen begins the task with an accessible and comprehensive look at the ideas of Karl Marx.

Dispensing with the dryness of traditional explanations of Marx, Allen shows how Marx’s ideas apply to modern society. The first section briefly outlines Marx’s life and the development of his work, then goes on to clearly explain his key theories, including historical materialism and surplus value. The second section examines alternatives to capitalism, the concept of ‘anti-capitalism’ and provides concrete, contemporary examples of Marx’s theories being put into practice in today’s world.

This book provides a crucial alternative for undergraduates in sociology and politics.

Kieran Allen is a sociology lecturer at University College Dublin. His books include Max Weber: A Critical Introduction (Pluto, 2004) as well as a number of works on Irish society and politics.

For further information, to request a review copy or to speak to the author please contact Jon Wheatley at jonw@plutobooks.com or on 0208 374 6424

PLUTO BOOKS

345 ARCHWAY ROAD, LONDON, N6 5AA
TEL: 0208 3482724 FAX: 0208 348 9133 http://www.plutobooks.com

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com