The past couple of nights I’ve stayed up way too late puzzling over the best ways to calculate the organic composition of capital — and, as a necessary extension, untangling the relationship between the organic composition (OCC) and its two ‘components’, the technical composition of capital (TCC) and the value composition of capital (VCC). This […]
Read More Note on the Organic Composition of CapitalLast week, I created a twitter for the purposes of scrapping our fave zone of cyberspace for mentions of industrial policy—follow Lil’ Industrial Policy Guy!—partly for the novelty of it, but also for keeping up with the ongoing conversations around the topic. It’s certainly been more active than I initially anticipated, and one of the […]
Read More Industrial Policy Round-Up #1This morning I came across this fragment by Engels this morning, penned in 1887 as the introduction to a pamphlet by Sigismund Ludwig Borkheim (a veteran of the revolutions of 1848 and member of the International Workingmen’s Association) titled “In Memory of the German Arch-Patriots of 1806-1807″. Engels in this period was flirting with the theories […]
Read More Foreshadows of a Great WarA few weeks back I wrote a post on the uncanny similarities between postmodernism—as a kind of all-encompassing and generalized cultural condition that has persisted since (roughly) the early 1970s—and ‘decadence’, the elusive ensemble of expressions, traits and (sub)cultural norms that rolled across Europe in the so-called fin-de-siecle era. On the surface, what brings the two […]
Read More Catastrophic Marxism in the Age of DecadenceAn interesting convergence of two sets of writings on populism and technocracy drifted across the tl yesterday: the latest issue of American Affairs, dedicated to the ongoing evaporation of laissez-faire’s hegemonic status in American thought, and a paper on the politics of Italy’s Five Star Movement (5MS) and Spain’s Podemos as being “techno-populist” in orientation. The […]
Read More Technocracy and PopulismKoselleck’s essay “Does History Accelerate?”—to be found in the recently-published collection of his late works, Sediments of Time—is full of brilliant historical notes on the “annihilation of space by time”, highlighting the importance of revolutions in transportation and communication in producing these socially-palpable effects. Hat tip to MF Doomer for drawing my attention to this paper! […]
Read More Annihilation of SpaceI’ve promised a lengthy post on the so-called ‘transformation problem’, and it will come—eventually. There’s a lot to compile, because I think that the history of the transformation problem debate is as interesting as the theoretical content of each turn of the debate, and it seems to me that examining its various snaking pathways goes […]
Read More Engels and his Eternal Law of ValueOn the tl, Moct chimes in on my post about capitalist space-times: https://twitter.com/Moctezuma_III/status/1193667057864368128 It’s an interesting point that says something about the distinct social and cultural patterning that typifies capitalist development. I would absolutely agree with Moct here in that the frozen desert of temporal spatialization is the defining characteristic of our current epoch. We can see […]
Read More Decadence & (Po)MoLast night I came across this interview with Moishe Postone via Ross Wolfe’s Charnel House blog. I’m a bit surprised that I hadn’t seen it before—it’s definitely an example of Postone at his best, and (like many of his other interviews and shorter articles) brings into relief the positive political dimensions that are often missed if […]
Read More Spatialization of Time/Temporalization of SpaceThis dismal eyesore, courtesy of ultra-lib ‘grassroots’ organization Mad Dog PAC, went up near my house recently. It’s one of three new billboards appearing around the state as part of the new anti-Mitch blitz. Unseating the self-described “Grim Reaper” of all policies progressive or vaguely left-ish, the Democrats have finally realized, is what needs to […]
Read More Meanwhile, in Kentucky
Reciprocal Contradiction 