COMMENTARY ‘become a permanent migrant to the uk!’ claudia aradau Since 2005, when citizenship tests were effectively introduced in the UK, the official guidance book Life in the United Kingdom has been a veritable battleground over identity, history and knowledge. ‘Could you pass a citizenship test? ‘Most young people can’t’, the media reiterate with each […]

Dossier PROPERT Y, POWER, LAW Race, real estate and real abstraction Brenna Bhandar and alberto Toscano The crises and mutations of contemporary capitalism have rendered palpable Marx’s observation according to which in bourgeois modernity human beings are ‘ruled by abstractions’. [1] The processes of financialization animating the dynamics of the 2007–8 crisis involved the violent irruption […]

Disaggregating primitive accumulation robert nichols For nearly 150 years now, critical theorists of various stripes have attempted to explicate, correct and complement Marx’s discussion of the ‘so-called’ primitive accumulation of capital provided in Part Eight of the first volume of Capital. [1] This is perhaps especially true of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Whereas French […]

Patent as credit When intellectual property becomes speculative Hyo yoon kang Intellectual properties, the various kinds of which are known as patents, copyright and trademarks, could be regarded as central techniques of accumulation in contemporary capitalism, if immaterial knowledge is indeed what now crucially drives accumulation in a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘creative industries’. [1] In […]

Global homocapitalism rahul rao Temples of global capitalism have become increasingly vociferous of late in their opposition to homophobia. In February 2014, shortly after Uganda’s President Museveni gave his assent to a draconian Anti Homosexuality Act, the World Bank announced that it was delaying a US$90 million loan to Uganda on the grounds that the […]

REVIEWS Operation Adorno The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, ed. and trans. Susan H. Gil espie, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015. 248 pp., £63.38 hb., £18.16 pb., 978 0 81665 616 5 hb., 978 0 81665 617 2 pb. At the beginning of a talk on ‘Critical […]

REVIEWS Operation Adorno The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, ed. and trans. Susan H. Gil espie, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2015. 248 pp., £63.38 hb., £18.16 pb., 978 0 81665 616 5 hb., 978 0 81665 617 2 pb. At the beginning of a talk on ‘Critical […]

Anthropology becoming philosophy Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology, trans. Peter Skafish, Univocal, Minneapolis, 2014. 229 pp., £20.00 pb., 978 1 93756 121 5. While the debates and provocations of sixties France in the texts that make up post-structuralism, or, perhaps more accurately, ‘la pensée 68’, continue to influence contemporary philosophy […]