Marxism Archives - Page 4 of 8

Feature

Theses On The Philosophy Of The FKA-Anthropocene, Feat. Shia LaBeouf, Part I

March 23, 2016 • by Jonty Tiplady

Walter Benjamin’s strategy in the Theses on the Philosophy of History was to focus on a non-human moment in human time and to present this instance on blast in his prose style. What I mean by “blast” here is the fact that the message had to be pirated past ideological ...

Theses On The Philosophy Of The FKA-Anthropocene, Feat. Shia LaBeouf, Part I

Theory & Practice

Althusserians Anonymous (the relapse)

February 26, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

1. Old versus Young Marx I am a recovering Althusserian. For decades now I have been Althusser-free, for the most part, but we all have our lapses. The first step to becoming a recovering Althusserian is to recognize that you have no control and are unconsciously always a little bit Althusserian ...

Uncategorized

Marcel Mariën

January 27, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Mariën had a colorful life. From a working class family, he left school at fifteen to become an apprentice photographer, but after discovering René Magritte, became instead an apprentice to the Belgian Surrealists. Briefly a prisoner of war, he claimed to have spent the remainder of the war years smuggling ...

Uncategorized

Imaginal Politics

November 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

To any follower of the news, it may seem these days harder than ever to figure out what is real and what is delusional, and whether the delusional is an individual psychopathology or perhaps something more general. As Chiara Bottici puts it: “We live in a society of spectacles that ...

Uncategorized

The Capitalocene

On Jason Moore

October 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso 2015) is an important book, in that it brings together the immense resources of world systems theory, critical geography and a certain strain of ‘green’ Marxism. Even though it refuses such terms, it does ...

Uncategorized

Blog-Post for Cyborgs

On Donna Haraway

September 24, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Donna Haraway was born in the forties, trained as a biologist, and radicalized during the Vietnam war years. Lodged at the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980, Haraway is, on her own admission, a product of both cold war techno-science and the struggle ...

Uncategorized

Benjamedia

August 27, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Benjamin thought that there were moments when a fragment of the past could speak directly to the present, but only when there was a certain alignment of the political and historical situation of the present that might resonate with that fragment. Applying this line of thought to Benjamin himself, we ...

Theory & Practice

Pasolini: Sexting the World

July 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

His original and perceptive theory of neo-capitalism came from direct engagement with the problems of making a postwar, post-Fascist culture. His commitment to the Grand Old Cause of the people was both moral but also erotic, even carnal. He wanted – needed – to cock-suck the world. Such was his ...

Uncategorized

On Galloway

June 21, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Take the tv show, 24. In what sense could one say that the show is ‘political’? It certainly appears so in a ‘red state’ sort of way. The Jack Bauer character commits all sorts of crimes, including torture, in the name of ‘national security.’ But perhaps there’s more to it. Galloway draws ...

Uncategorized

Lazzarato and Pasolini

June 15, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I have a passing acquaintance with the work of Felix Guattari, but the person who perhaps knows his work best is Maurizio Lazzarato. His recently translated book Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Semiotext(e), 2014) shows the ongoing usefulness of the “anti-sociology” (120) that Guattari elaborated, both alone and in ...

Uncategorized

From Metaphyiscs to Meatphysics

June 10, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

The mark of a major body of work is that it will support more than one interpretation, all of which are coherent and persuasive, and each of which is open-ended enough for further elaboration. So it is with Marx. But at least one possible path of interpretation and elaboration seems ...

Uncategorized

Communal Luxury

June 6, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

One of the constant labors required of an open, creative, critical and radical thought is a constant reconstitution of the archive from which present conceptual armatures might most usefully be drawn. Its not just a question of harping on certain well-known proper names, but constituting, over and over, a milieu ...