What if Virilio’s compelling rendering of integral accidents – as chain reactions” of “incidents and disasters” – is turned inside out, into the heart of capitalism’s much vaunted capacity for “innovation”? Integral accidents issue from capitalism’s specific integration of power, profit and […]
There is little doubt that, in the last hundred years or so, progress has been made in lifting more people out of extreme poverty (World Bank 2020). Yet, considerable economic inequalities both within and between nations persists and, as recent
Capitalism, Money and Inequality in the World
The general law of overpollution synthesizes these insights, highlighting three moments. It specifies the relational asymmetry between surplus value and surplus pollu-tion, the latter reckoned as forms of toxification “surplus to” the geobiological capacities to metabolize –and neutralize – wastes
Waste in the Limits to Capital: How Capitalism Lays Waste to the Web of Life, and Why It Can’t Stop
I started reading Félix Guattari in 1974. I was in a barracks in southern Italy, when military service was compulsory for young men of sound mind and body, but serving the country soon irritated me, and I was looking for
The following article is an interview with Shirin Kamangar by Warren Montag and Joseph Serrano and was published first here on November 28, 2022. 1. You have argued that the recent revolt in Iran, while initially focused on the mandatory hijab, was preceded by
Crisis and Revolt in Iran Today
The Ukraine War reflects and reinforces the exhaustion of Cheap Natures. Earlier Thirty Years Wars (1618-48, 1792-1815, 1914-45) were entwined with successive developmental crises of Cheap Nature that could be resolved through new imperialisms, new rounds of commodification and appropriation.
Imperialism, With and Without Cheap Nature: Climate Crises, World Wars & the Ecology of Liberation
The crisis we are witnessing in the wake of the pandemic and the depression that may follow is not the result of an accounting imbalance. It is the outcome of a physical and nervous collapse of society. read here
The End of Abstraction? The Triumph of
Abstraction? A Prospective Dilemma
We’ve all become mere data points in the consumption cycle, our dividual lives of labor running the course of commodity production and exchange as informational agents and products in a knowledge economy. Sipping at the brothel of capital, neither prostitute
Lost in the Maze: Futurity and the Inhuman Economy
Iman Ganji and Jose Rosales . On September 13, Zhina (Mahsa) Amini,1 a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, was arrested and detained by the Iranian “morality police”2 while visiting Tehran with her family from Saqqez (in Iran’s Kurdistan Province). Her charge: allegedly violating the law
Tomorrow Was Shahrivar 1401: Notes on the Iranian Uprisings
Environmentalists often argue that if we accounted for the ‘true’ costs of the fossil-fuel business, the industry would go bankrupt. While I understand this sentiment, I think the idea of ‘true’ costs is dubious. Costs exist not because they are
How to Make the Oil Industry Go Bust
No civilization has been more Promethean than capitalism in its aspirations. Named after the Greek Titan who gave fire to humankind, Prometheanism is understood as a kind of environmental—but not (necessarily) environmentalist—strategy for the domination and management of something usually
Power, Profit & Prometheanism, Part I
Every paragraph of Can Global Capitalism Endure? sizzles with insights. Here is William I. Robinson at his best: empirically sensitive, theoretically original, politically committed. Global Capitalism, in this groundbreaking formulation, is no amalgamation: “global” plus “capitalism.” It identifies, rather, an
Global Capitalism in the Great Implosion. From Planetary Superexploitation to Planetary Socialism?