'Karl Marx' tag archive

With the publication of In Theory in 1992, Aijaz Ahmad threw a spanner into the works of what seemed at the time to be the relentless march of postcolonial theory within departments of English and comparative literary studies in the Anglo-American academy. 1 The increasing power of this purportedly new field of study was made […]

The Society of the Spectacle was written, as Guy Debord once put it, ‘with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society’. 1 Following the book’s publication in 1967, he and the Situationist International (SI) declared that it sought ‘nothing other than to overthrow the existing relation of forces in the factories and the […]

In an August 1890 letter to Conrad Schmidt, Engels ‘Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French “Marxist” of the late [18]70s:“All I know is that I am not a Marxist”.’ Even during his lifetime there was a tension between what Marx himself wrote and thought and what his followers made of it. […]

The virtual dimensions of a project The implicit diptych formed by the two successive courses delivered by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France between 1971 and 1973 – Penal Theories and Institutions and The Punitive Society – has already been the object of substantial commentary. The principal gains arising from philological or speculative soundings […]

Paul Mattick, Theory as Critique: Essays on Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2018; Chicago: Haymarket, 2019). 288pp., £110.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 9 00436 656 5 hb., 978 1 64259 013 5 pb. Paul Mattick, Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 142pp., £86.00 hb, 978 9 00441 480 […]

Marx prefaces the first edition of the first volume of Capital with a laconic proviso. ‘To avoid any possible misunderstandings’, he writes, ‘a word. I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, […]

Michel Henry, Marx: An Introduction, trans. Kristien Justaert (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 101pp., £50.00 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 1 47426 942 1 hb., 978 1 47427 778 5 pb. As a phenomenologist who prioritises the ‘appearing’ of life, Michel Henry distinguishes the foundational content of subjectivity from the horizon of pure exteriority and inert appearances. […]

When a notable philosopher, having established a reputation for rigorous argumentation and scholarship, directs a major new book toward a popular audience, a certain skepticism may be forgiven among those familiar with the earlier work. However welcome an accessible style may be, popular address too often gives way to the popularisation of philosophical concepts and […]

The general intellect of the whole community, male and female, is stunted or perverted in infancy, or more commonly both, by keeping from women the knowledge possessed by men. … The only and the simple remedy for the evils arising from these almost universal institutions of the domestic slavery of one half the human race, […]

As the articles contained in this issue of Radical Philosophy indicate, ‘social reproduction’ is today more than ever at the centre of feminist debates. Yet the same articles also express a legitimate concern that recent theorisations obfuscate the political significance of this concept and its ability to describe the changes that have taken place in […]

We gather once again to examine the question of ‘critique’. [1] We do so not just after Kant, Marx, Nietzsche and their respective descendants, but also after the innovations of the Frankfurt School (which only came to receive serious attention in France after some delay) and the critique of the foundations of psychology, to evoke […]

Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2015. xiv + 292 pp., £20.67 hb., 978 0 231 17480 0. The study of Marx in the anglophone academy – established during the boom years of sociological theory in the 1970s, when sociology was de facto […]

Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement, not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where […]

6. ^ https://sciencefiles.org/tag/lann [archive]‑hornscheidt/page/3 (accessed 9 May 2016). 7. ^ Cf. Bożena Chołuj, ‘“Gender‑Ideologie” – ein Schlüsselbegriff des polnischen Anti‑Genderismus’, in Hark and Vil a, eds, Anti-Genderismus, pp. 219–38. 8. ^ Juliane Lang, ‘Familie und Vaterland in der Krise. Der extrem rechte Diskurs um Gender’, in Hark and Vil a, eds, Anti-Genderismus, pp. 167–82, pp. […]

REVIEWS Capitalocene Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, Verso, London and New York, 2015. 316 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 1 78168 901 1 hb., 978 1 78168 902 8 pb. Jason Moore is a key figure in the World-Ecology Research Network, an international grouping […]

as if time simultaneously existed as the universal measure for labour and as given in a value where labour has been measured through time. Yet exactly this connection between time, labour and value in capitalism is money. It is not the clock that measures labour through time by quantifying it in values. Rather, this measuring […]

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 […]