#Accelerate and inertia

Thinking historically and systematically would appear to be something of an urgent requirement for critical theory in the Anthropocene. Yet there was a great allergic reaction to all such lines of thought in the late twentieth century from which social thought never really recovered. Recently, there has been some attempt to ...
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#Accelerate and inertia

#Accelerate in reverse

Nothing seems more urgent now than to find useful ways of thinking what Donna Haraway calls naturecultures, and to do so historically. The elimination in advance of the problem of the continuities from the natural to the cultural that is such an ingrained prejudice in the humanities and social sciences ...
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#Accelerate in reverse

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...
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Extrapolation, not Acceleration

Joseph Needham, the Great Amphibian

Like most people who teach in the humanities, I think that there are ways of understanding the present through the past. We return again and again to certain key authors as touchstones. There are two different ways of going about this, however. One is to take the succession of key authors ...
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Joseph Needham, the Great Amphibian

Heidegger and Geology

A small, handmade green book mysteriously appeared in my New School mail slot, with the intriguing title: The Anthropocene, or “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”  Its author is Woodbine, which turns out to be an address in Brooklyn where ...
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Heidegger and Geology

Capitalism Never Ends?

A discussion responding to the Capitalism Studies Manifesto and Zaretsky's "How Capitalism Will End" -- One of my frustrations as the editor of Public Seminar is knowing that there have been interesting responses to our posts, but people are reluctant to publish them on the site itself. We are trying to ...
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How Capitalism Will End

The need to organize the economic life of humanity better than capitalism does is well established. Capitalism -- by which I mean the buying and selling of labor power -- breeds inequality, as Karl Marx showed and as Thomas Piketty has just re-demonstrated. Capitalism subordinates collective needs, such as our ...
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Thoughts on Thanaticism

What does it take to inaugurate a new historical epoch, then? A name certainly helps. The “Anthropocene” has gained currency recently, and while its denotation of time is ostensibly geologic, there is surely a political edge to claiming we have moved beyond the Holocene. How many more ways can we ...
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Thoughts on Thanaticism

Slaves

The capital that made capitalism

Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage, new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation ...

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Slaves