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Beetham Gardens by Miquel Galofré
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“Institutionalised homophobia exposes the hollowness of our aspirations to “first world” status. It punctures the Trini delusion of cosmopolitan...”
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“There are various ways of dealing with the fact that all lives, including those of the people we love, have an end. The end of human life, which we...”
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Treated myself to a banana split for breakfast before my last day of school and oh my god it was too good - banana filled with...
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The question is how we react to this great prejudice against women. The rule of law and social activism certainly are crucial. But no matter how...
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“Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is...”
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Word x 100 !!! Via @imanisublime #PR #cancer #truth #woc
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Homosexuality has a long history in Africa, says anthropologist Patrick Awondo, contrary...
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“I think marriage in general is not a healthy institution in our society. If people want civil rights, then that’s what I feel we should be fighting...”
Claudia Cumberbatch Jones (15 February 1915—24 December 1964) was a Trinidadian journalist, who applied her skills to becoming a political activist and black nationalist through Communisum.
Jones’s most well-known lasting contribution in the UK is the Notting Hill Carnival…. Britain’s first Caribbean carnival.
“Her funeral on 9 January 1965, was a large and political ceremony, with her burial plot selected to be that to the left of her hero, Karl Marx, in Highgate Cemetery, North London.”
Trinidad and Marx = LOVE!
(via highgatedreams)
In this, he was a notable precursor of Karl Marx. Private property, he wrote, brings war, poverty and class conflict in its wake. It converts “clever usurpation into inalienable right”. Most social order is a fraud perpetrated by the rich on the poor to protect their privileges. The law, he considered, generally backs the strong over the weak; justice is largely a weapon of violence and domination, while culture, science, the arts and religion are harnessed to the task of preserving the status quo. The institution of the state has “bound new fetters on the poor and given new powers to the rich”. For the benefit of a few ambitious men, he comments, “the human race has been subjected to labour, servitude and misery”.
Reading Marx’s Capital Vol II – Class 1, Introduction
This is the first class of a free semester-long open course consisting of a close reading of the text of Marx’s Capital Volume II (plus parts of Volume III) in 12 video lectures by Professor David Harvey. David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Anthropology and Geography PhD programs. This course was taught at Union Theological Seminary in Spring 2011, and was attended by graduate students and activists from across New York City.
Subsequent videos will be available every one to two weeks. Initially the videos will be available only on YouTube. Additional file formats and podcasts will be available soon.
The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are valid for the Penguin Classics editions of Capital Volumes II and III.
Thanks to the over 300 small donors who made this project possible.
“Karl Marx had it right. At some point Capitalism may destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That’s what has happened. We thought that markets worked; they’re not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process.”
Posted Sunday 14th August 2011
One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you’re likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialectitians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn’t simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.
[W]hat Marx seeks out in Capital is a conceptual apparatus, a deep structure, that explains the way in which motion is actually instantiated within a capitalist mode of production. Consequently, many of his concepts are formulated around relations rather than stand-alone principles; they are about transformative activity.
(via dontbcruel)
(via fuckyeahneo-marxism)
From David Ruccio’s Blog:
Marx, crisis, and the “slaughtering of capital”
“Brad DeLong doesn’t get Marx’s argument that one of the preconditions for capitalist recovery is the “slaughtering of capital.” It’s a precondition but, of course, not a guarantee. The idea is that, in the midst of a crisis (whatever its causes), some capitalists go bankrupt, the pace of business slackens, and underutilized capacity rises. As a result, the value of constant capital declines. That permits the capitalists who survive to buy up existing capital assets at less than their previous value, thus permitting both the concentration and centralization of capital and, perhaps, new investment leading to capitalist recovery. That’s the basic story of the role the slaughtering of capital plays in Marx’s argument about crisis and recovery.
It has nothing to do with solving the housing overhang. The decline in the value of housing assets may play a role in capitalist recovery, for example, if landlords buy up cheap housing stock (and thus put money back into the pockets of homeowners and banks) and/or if a fall in the price of housing leads to a decline in the value of labor power (thus making the hiring of workers more profitable). But it does not represent the slaughtering of capital Marx was referring to. DeLong’s model of two variables—currently produced goods and services and financial assets, in which an excess demand for one means a deficient demand for the other—can’t capture that dynamic. And it never will.”
One of my favourite books. A tool kit for the mind.
Anti-Oedipus (1972) is a book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second volume of which is A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Anti-Oedipus analyses the relationship of desire to reality and to capitalist society in particular; it addresses questions of human psychology, economics, society, and history. The book is divided into four sections. The first outlines Deleuze and Guattari’s “materialist psychiatry” and its modelling of the unconscious in its relationship with society and its productive processes; in this section they introduce their concept of “desiring-production” (which inter-relates “desiring machines” and a “body without organs”). The second section offers a critique of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis that focuses on its theory of the Oedipus complex. The third section re-writes Karl Marx’s materialist account of the history of society’s modes of production as a development through “primitive,” “despotic,” and “capitalist” societies and details their different organisations of production, “inscription” (which corresponds to Marx’s “distribution” and “exchange”), and consumption. In the final section, the authors develop a critical practice that they call “schizoanalysis.”
The book draws on and criticises the ideas of a vast range of thinkers; as well as Marx and Freud, these include Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Reich, Laing, Cooper, Jung, Klein, Oury, Jaspers, Hjelmslev, Peirce, Bateson, Clastres, Lévi-Strauss, Klossowski, Lyotard, Monod, Mumford, Turner, Wittfogel, Fourier, Kant, and Spinoza. Deleuze and Guattari also draw on a wide range of creative writers and artists during the course of their argument; these include Artaud, Beckett, Büchner, Butler, Kafka, Kerouac, Kleist, Lawrence, Miller, Proust, Schreber, and Turner. Foremost among its influences, however, stands Nietzsche—Anti-Oedipus may be considered a kind of sequel to The Antichrist.
Some of Guattari’s diary entries, correspondence with Deleuze, and notes on the development of the book were published posthumously as The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2004).
“When home ownership became endemic, two things happened. First, the banks, highly monopolistic institutions with a profound lack of understanding of money, as they recently demonstrated, commoditised and monetised the most basic human need for shelter: our homes. But then those of us who managed to buy a home and hold on to it finally had a stake in the capitalist system. This was economically novel. It had never happened before.
The Domesday Book of 1873 records the beginning of private home ownership in the UK - in effect, the beginning of popular participation in the capitalist market system. No economist, not even Karl Marx, who was still alive when the second Domesday was published, foresaw the transformation that this would bring about. Marx thought that capitalism would always be confined to a minority, and that the majority would be a rent-paying proletariat. A superficial look at the second Domesday would have confirmed this. That is how it was then, but it’s not how it is now. The transformation is fundamental to both capitalism and democracy.
Private home ownership destroys the notion of rent as a significant element of the overall economic equation. The estate agent Savills recently demonstrated what this means. The national debt, which we are supposed to lie awake at night worrying about, is roughly £1trn. The total value of the privately owned national housing stock is over £3trn. The ratio of debt to equity in the housing stock is about 1:4. In other words, for every £1 of mortgage debt, there is £3 of free asset value.”
- http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2011/03/million-acres-land-ownership
I’m not sure [Frederic] Jameson would say that he is more imaginative than [Steve] Jobs. One of the best aspects of Jameson - and Zizek for that matter - is that he has never given up on what for me is the crucial Marxist idea that an authentic anti-capitalism must develop out of capitalism at its most modern and modernizing. There are some rousing passages in both First As Tragedy, Then As Farce and Valences Of The Dialectic which reiterate this commitment. And Jameson’s essay on “Wal-Mart as Utopia” (also in Valences) is a tremendous attempt to think in this way, against the moralizing and agragrian tendencies in certain stripes of anti-capitalism. Anti-capitalism has to struggle over modernization, not reject it.
The problem with any attempt to posit an anti-capitalism opposed to IPhones and IPods is not only that it invites accusations of inconsistency - here we all are, fermenting anti-capitalist discontent on the internet - but that it surrenders the inorganic - and therefore also libido - to capitalism. For me, the crucial discovery of modernist theory and art is that libido is inorganic: as everyone from Freud through to Eistenstein and Burroughs have recognised, libido montages, it cuts and pastes, it’s no respecter of organic wholeness.
