At the extreme, signs and significations which are nothing more than significations will lose all meaning. At the extreme looms the shadow of what we will call ‘the great pleonasm’: the unmediated passing into the unmediated and the everyday recorded just as it is is everyday—the event grasped, pulverized and transmitted as rapidly as light […]
Read More Frenetic StandstillIts been a little over a week since the first industrial policy round-up, and new news in this go-round has come at a much slower pace—with the notable exception, of course, being the unexpected turns in the recent UK election, which has brought with it some surprising turns and uncertainties, particular where economic questions are […]
Read More Industrial Policy Round-Up #2The 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 CapitalA 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 DecadenceLast 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 SpaceThe Good Doctor The second area in which we find Marx raising questions around geometrical growth occurs in the course of his analysis of interest-bearing capital. Just as the discussions of geometrical growth with respect to mechanization appeared in primarily in the Grundrisse and the three volumes of Capital (namely, the first and third volumes), […]
Read More Marx on Geometric Change (2. Interest-Bearing Capital)While… productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. —Engels, preface to the 1886 English edition of Capital Vol. 1 Change and Progress Theories of ‘accelerating change’ are mostly commonly associated with a particular strain of techno-utopian thought, concentrated primarily on the libertarian—and perhaps at this point, postlibertarian—side […]
Read More Marx on Geometric Change (1. The Rate of Profit)
Reciprocal Contradiction 