Marxism Archives - Page 5 of 8

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Zizek and me

June 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It is illuminating to have comrade Zizek write about one’s work. I think his comments on Molecular Red highlight two paths among which theory can choose to move at the moment: the high road of philosophy, or the low road of something else, as yet unknown. It is less about the wrong or right ...

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Animal Spirits

May 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Rather than read books when they come out, I like to lay them down for a while. Sometimes their flavors get richer, just like wine – and sometimes they turn out to be vinegar. I set aside Matteo Pasquinelli’s book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (NAi, 2008) because I did not ...

Theory & Practice

Emotions at Work

May 7, 2015 • by Angelica Stathopoulos

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save -- the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour -- your capital. ...

Theory & Practice

On the Regulation of Sexualities

May 6, 2015 • by Lauren O'Neill-Butler

A set of well-executed arguments in Judith Butler’s essay “Merely Cultural” (1997) and Nancy Fraser’s response to it present a springboard from which we should analyze a crucial link between the social regulation of sexuality and social reproduction. An exemplary instance of this appears in the final chapter of Kevin ...

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Cognitive Mapping

May 1, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I am inordinately fond of a crappy TV show called Leverage. Its about a little band of hackers, grifters and second-story artists who steal from the rich to give to the poor. Perhaps I like it because it reminds me of my favorite childhood TV show, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Made ...

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Laruelle’s Kinky Syntax

April 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Perhaps the most original and eccentric flavor of Marxism in these times is that of François Laruelle. Introduction to Non-Marxism, (Univocal, 2015) is a translation of a book from fifteen years ago, with a rather striking new last chapter. The world might now finally be ready for him. Here are some ...

Education

O.O.P.S. vs M.O.O.C.s: Midterm Report, Part 1

April 13, 2015 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“The proponents of M.O.O.C.s (Massive Open Online Courses) look for the magic bullet, hoping to find a technological solution to the crisis in education. The O.O.P.S. (Open Online Public Seminar) project is to use the new technology, the potential of the web, to extend education’s promise.”

With these words, I closed ...

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On Hito Steyerl

April 5, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Hito Steyerl is from that era when the politics of culture was all about representation. Sometimes the emphasis was on the question of who was represented; sometimes on the question of how. The latter question drove a series of inquiries and experiments in form. These experiments tended to focus fairly ...

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(Which) Feminism against (Which) Capitalism?

March 4, 2015 • by Mayra Cotta

Why start a course on feminism reading the first volume of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto? Do Marx and Engels have anything to say about gender oppression? How deeply, if at all, is patriarchy intertwined with capitalism? In which terms can the feminist struggle be part of a systemic ...

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Feminism, Marxism and Social Transformation: Beyond Economic Monism

March 2, 2015 • by Derek Baron

Friedrich Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) has been a central text for Marxist-feminist thinkers in the 20th century and up until the present. But its centrality is not marked by a universal acceptance or agreement with the central tenets of Engels’ elaboration of Lewis ...

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Virno and History

February 23, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

He could have been talking about something that goes by many names in Paolo Virno’s Déjà Vu and the End of History, (Verso Futures, 2015). Sometimes Virno calls it potential, or the virtual, or memory, or faculty, or disposition, or even labor-power. This unquenchable fire is for Virno the source ...

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Cognitive Capitalism

February 19, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

The second is able to think more historically. For example the regulation school came up with a convincing portrait of what it called the Fordist regime of regulation. In this version capitalism has stages, each of which are qualitatively different. But it tends to be troubled by the current stage, ...