The value of this text requires some comment. There is of course the intrinsic worth of Horkheimer’s essay, and its relevance to one of the monuments of Western Marxism. What draws this text into the space of nonsite.org’s concerns is the intersection of union organization—what Horkheimer critically elaborates here under a general theory of “rackets”—and Marxism. To say unions and Marxism share a tense

In her classic treatments of the subject, Hannah Arendt made two general remarks on the relationship between revolutions and violence. Writing in the early 1960s, she commented that, like war, revolution was indelibly marked with the occurrence of violence to such an extent that the two phenomena tended to mutate into one another. By the end of the decade, however, Arendt’s essay

Jeżeli realizm rozumiemy jako metodę estetyczną, za pomocą której radzimy sobie z rzeczywistością, i jeśli warunkiem skuteczności takiego postępowania wyjaśniającego jest jego zakorzenienie w określonej postawie wobec świata, to zanim rozważymy kwestię stylu, musimy postawić pytanie o postawę realistyczną. Pytanie to zadać dziś trudno i bywa ono z miejsca wyśmiewane, lecz nie powinno nas to powstrzymać przed jego postawieniem. Ponieważ to, co prawdziwe, nie zawsze jest

In creating a small-scale version of capitalism within the classroom, the simulation I describe below offers a ‘demonstration’ of several ideas at the heart of Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism – in particular, the appropriation of surplus value, but also the alienation of wage labour, the fetishism of commodities and the immanent critique of liberal ideology. ‘Playdough Capitalism’ is an adventure

For more than a generation now, class theory has been deeply influenced by what is known as the “cultural turn.” Although the specific claims attached to it tend to vary across the disciplines, its practitioners share a set of baseline intuitions. Chief among these is the view that social practice cannot be understood outside of the ideological and cultural frames that actors carry

Among critical and progressive academics today, the influence of postcolonial theory is unmistakable. Though born in the narrow confines of literature departments in the wake of Asian and African decolonization, its intellectual apparatus has increasingly become associated with more directly political commitments. Postcolonial theory today is viewed as an indispensable framework for understanding how power works in modern social formations and, in particular, how the West

Many in favor of the legalization of prostitution refer to it as “sex work” and employ concepts such as “consent,” “agency,” “sexual freedom,” “the right to work,” and even “human rights” in the course of making their defense.[1] Consider some of the common claims defenders of legalization advance: sex work is work just like any other form of work, only the social shame and

In his wonderful short text ‘Notes of a Publicist’—written in February 1922 when the Bolsheviks, after winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak

Radical feminism is most associated with the “second-wave” or women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite this, radical ideas about actualizing women’s liberation, (or at least bringing about full equality to men) through socio-economic revolution have existed in theory and practice since the dawn of Marxism in 1848 and especially

What is tolerance today? The most popular TV show of the fall of 2000 in France, with a viewer rating two times higher than that of the notorious Big Brother reality soap, is C'est mon choix (It's my choice) on France 3, a talk-show whose guest is each time an ordinary (or, exceptionally, well-known) person who made a peculiar choice that determined his or

Od dłuższego już czasu słyszymy w polityce o prawach człowieka, możemy wręcz powiedzieć, że polityka i jej różnorodne „podmioty” zostały ponownie przywołane do praw człowieka, ich uniwersalnych wartości i bezwarunkowej konieczności. Prawa człowieka stały się na powrót absolutem politycznego dyskursu.

Jednak niewiele albo praktycznie nic nie słyszy się o polityce praw człowieka, brakuje jakiegokolwiek namysłu nad jej stanem, formami i trudnościami [2] .

In order to consider the social realities of capital's posthuman empire, however, I believe it is necessary to start outside of it, in what Marx and Engels call the "real ground of history…the material production of life itself" (The German Ideology 164). What I mean by this is that in contrast to Giorgio Agamben's posthumanist declaration in What is an Apparatus? that "what is to be

At the end of the day, the benefits we gain in freedom to pursue our own leisure will only change in degree and not in kind. We will still be limited to what we can afford, and what we can afford may not change as much as we think it would. Our lives would still revolve around the prices and availability to us of

Work is the greatest affront and the greatest humiliation that humanity has committed against itself. This social system, capitalism is based on work; it has created a class of men who must work – and a class of men who do not work. Workers are compelled to work, otherwise they will die of hunger. ‘Whoever does not work shan’t eat’ profess the owners, who pretend furthermore that calculating and protecting

It has become commonplace to lament the current beleaguered and disoriented condition of the Left. Stuart Hall is among the few who have tried to diagnose the sources and dynamics of this condition. From the earliest days of the rise of the Thatcher-Reagan-Gingrich Right in Europe and North America, Hall insisted that the “crisis of the Left” in the late twentieth century was due neither to

This special issue of Anthropology & Materialism is dedicated to the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. On the one hand, the pieces collected here explore Benjamin’s relation to a range of canonical figures, whose work significantly influenced his own thinking (Kant, Fichte, Marx, Cohen, Husserl, Freud etc.); on the other hand, they put his philosophy into relation with a range of more recent thinkers (Saussure, Blanchot, Lacan,

(PRE-)CONDITIONS OF COMMUNISM

In his projection of the communist society succeeding capitalism Marx, it should be pointed out, drew on the writings of his immediate predecessors – such as Saint Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen – all of whom envisaged a post-capitalist society without exploitation of human by human. However, these pre-Marxian socialists advanced their ideas of the future

The overwhelming focus of research into the phenomenon of globalization has been on the patterns of objective relations. Major works have been written on aspects of objective globalization from the consequences of containerization for global trade to the redefijining efffects of the global intersection of biotechnology and genomic sequencing of DNA (see Levison 2006; Thacker 2005). Digital devices like