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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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Arendt, Eichmann, and Thoughtlessness

March 2, 2015 • by Christoph Menke

According to Arendt’s emphatic and paradoxical thesis, [Eichmann] was an enemy of humanity from “thoughtlessness.” “It was a sheer thoughtlessness -- something by no means identical with stupidity -- that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (285; G: 57).* This (and only this) is ...

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Thoughts on Iddo Tavory’s Visit with the Social Condition Seminar

February 24, 2015 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

In the fourth week of our seminar, Iddo Tavory joined us. He did so in three different ways. In his writing: two of his articles (one co-authored with Nina Eliasoph) were the primary reading assignments – his, on morality, and theirs, on coordinating futures. In conversation: he also contributed to ...

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An Interview with Amos Oz on Literature, Judaism and Zionism

February 23, 2015 • by Natascha Freundel

A conversation with the Israeli author Amos Oz, conducted on November 12th in the guesthouse of the Hamburg Senate, upon receiving the first Siegfried-Lenz Prize.

NF: Bruchim Habaim leHamburg! -- Welcome to Hamburg!

AO: Thank you very much. Being the first recipient of the Siegfried Lenz literary award is a great honor ...

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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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Rethinking Capitalism: Class 4

February 22, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

I think what Moishe Postone gave us Wednesday was a rather dazzling reading of Volume 1 of Capital, which can be best approached by contrasting it to other readings. Postone rejects the idea that in Capital Marx saw himself as unveiling the “real” secret of capitalism in the hidden abode ...

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Rap as News or Art?

February 19, 2015 • by Lisa Aslanian

“Rap music is the CNN of the ghetto.” – Chuck D

Rap began — Chuck D nailed it — as news from the streets. Rap riffed ghetto life, syncopated in hard rhymes and dense metaphor the raw reality of the ghetto. In Ronald Reagan’s America, blacks in the ...

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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, ...

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#Theory21c (part 1)

February 17, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

That agenda seems to me to have at least three major features. The first is the anthropocene. One can no longer bracket off nature from the social, and construct a theory exclusively on the terrain of the social. The second is the role of information in both production and reproduction. ...

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Feminism, Capitalism, and Social Transformation: Week 2 — Marx

February 16, 2015 • by Johanna Oksala

A Feminist Perspective on Productive and Unproductive Labor The debate between ‘Marxologists’ on the distinction between productive and unproductive labor has always seemed frustratingly confusing to me and yielded blindingly counter-intuitive results -- truck drivers are productive while taxi drivers are unproductive laborers, for example. The situation is not helped by ...