Barbarism of Labour
And labor is everywhere, at all times. When oppression is absolute, there is no more leisure, no more “free time. Sleep is supervised. The meaning of work is then the destruction of work at and through work. But if, as …
capital
Global finance as capital rule. The “creative” role of the ECB
Spyros LapatsiorasUniversity of Crete, spirosla@gmail.comJohn MiliosNational Technical University of Athens, john.milios@gmail.com1. The prevailing heterodox approaches to neoliberalism and financializationA crucial aspect of many heterodox approaches to modern capitalism, finacializationand crisis is the idea that the domination of neoliberalism and of …
Global finance as capital rule. The “creative” role of the ECB
Afghanistan & the American Imperial Project
On August 16, 2021 President Biden addressed the nation to explain why the US military is pulling out of Afghanistan. To a lesser extent, he also tried to explain why the Afghan government and its 300,000 military forces imploded over …
Determination-in-the-last-instance in the economy
In one of the few passages of Laruelle on economics it says: “We distinguish exchangeability or translation as encompassed within a general element which is necessarily philosophical in kind or convertibility which regulates this exchange, from unilateral translation or translation …
The distinction between financial and real capital
With money, one can potentially trade all objects, products and relations of an economy as commodities, as purchasable objects, while conversely commodities are produced exclusively in order to turn them into money. Because of this ubiquitous function of money alone, …
Capitalism with Derivatives. A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class
Capitalism with Derivatives. A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class, by D. Bryan and M. Rafferty, New York: Palgrave-MacMillan 2006. $ 85; pp. viii, 236 The book is a vitally interesting and innovative approach to finance, focusing on …
Capitalism with Derivatives. A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class
Pharmaceuticals: Beating the Hell Out of the Average
Judging by the yardsticks that matterthe most, though–namely,the companies’relative profi tand relative capitalization–pharmaceuticals are doing just fine. In fact, based on these yardsticks, they remain the most powerful corporate sector of all. read here
Who’s Afraid of Work?(Unemployment and the “end of labour”)
The subject of this paper is this rather peculiar ideological use of the phenomenon of automation asserting the imminent end of labour. In sections 2and 3 we will approach the history and the content of these conceptions. In the following …
The Ritual of Capitalization
There’s something mysterious about finance. The symbols are arcane. The math is complex. The practitioners are impressively educated. And the stakes are high. All of this gives finance the veneer of higher truth — as if quants are uncovering a …
Value Form and Abstract Labour in Marx. A critical review of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of “real abstraction”
University of Chicago, May 14, 2021. Marx defines the social homogenisation of individual production processes by introducing the term abstract labour. Labour has a dual nature – on the one hand it is concrete labour (labour which produces a concrete …
Questions to the economists about COVID and the crisis
… One has to be precise. The frontline creators of the massive infusion of credit are the banks, led of course by the Central Banks. This of course draws on the major source of national credit, the government and state …
Critique of the concept of abstract labor
The attempt of Marxist economists to finally get hold of the concept of abstract labor (in relation to that of concrete labor) was, of course, preceded by Marx’s critique of classical national economics, whose adepts got caught in an extraordinary …