'Chris Arthur' tag archive

Reviews industry demands more than narrow special ism. Gorz analyses the growth of student militancy in this context, but beyond students he sees the contradiction as the source by the social democratic parties of the ‘real needs’ of the ‘modern that came to power in Europe during worker, the needs that will lead to the […]

Reviews Retrieving democracy? c. B. MacPherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, Oxford University Press, hardback E2.75, ISBN 1982 71875, paperback El.25, ISBN 1982 71891 MacPherson presents two concepts of power corresponding to the two concepts of man’s essential nature. ‘Extractive power’ is what a man has insofar as he is a consumer; it can be […]

REUIEWS m KINDS DF MWIS! only with ‘scientistic’ Harxism.” (4) The exact opposite is true. However often these two things co-exist in practice they are theoretically inconsistent. If Marxism is just a subdivision of natural science there is no place, not only for the cadre but for any self-conscious activity at all, since the revolution […]

REVIEWS Capital futures István Mészáros, Beyond Capital, The Merlin Press, London, 1995. xxvi + 994 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 85036 454 X hb., 0 85036 432 9 pb. It is now a quarter of a century since István Mészáros had his first big success in Britain with Marxʼs Theory of Alienation. In the […]

41Frantz Fanon would have been seventy in the summer of 1995 and the volumes under review celebrate the anniversary of his birth. Most of the twenty-one contributions to the Critical Reader are papers delivered at the ʻFanon Todayʼ conference held at Purdue University in March 1995; the handsomely produced The Fact of Blackness originates in […]

Reviews In the Name of the FatherElisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, translated by Barbara Bray, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997. xix + 574 pp., £25.00 hb., 07456 1523 6. In the spring of 1962, a 21-year-old woman is standing on a balcony in Paris, anxiously waiting for her father to keep his appointment with her. She waits […]

Umberto Eco once defined a sign as ʻanything we can use to lie withʼ, though exactly what lying consists in he failed to make clear. To lie is not of course just to state an untruth, since I may believe my statement to be true; but nor is it just to state an untruth knowing […]

There is a void at the heart of capitalism. It arises because of the nature of commodity exchange, which abstracts from, or absents, the entire substance of use value. What is constituted therewith is a form of unity of commodities that does not rest on any pre-given common content – which does not exist, it […]

Reviews ‘Human’Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 2003. lxii + 318 pp., £40.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 1 85984 507 X hb., 1 85984 408 1 pb. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2003. 233 pp., […]