This article explores the financialisation of the world’s most important commodity, oil. It argues that much of the literature on the financialisation of commodities tends to adopt a dualistic approach to financial markets and physical producers, where financial and non-financial activities are assumed to be externally-related and counterposed to one another. The article locates the roots of this analytical separation in a mistaken acceptance of the fetish character of interest-bearing capital (IBC) – a view that the exchange of (...) loanable sums of capital represents a relationship between money-capitalists rather than a relationship to the moment of production. Against such dichotomous readings, the article argues that the financialisation of oil needs to be understood as part of the reworking of ownership and control across the oil commodity circuit, expressed through the combined centralisation and concentration of capital over the money, productive and commercial moments. This argument is demonstrated through an original empirical investigation of the US oil industry, including 20 years of weekly trading data on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and a detailed study of more than 160 oil and energy-related firms in the US. By mapping the structural weight and connections between different capitalist actors involved in accumulation across the oil sector, we gain a better understanding of the ultimate dynamics (and beneficiaries) of the carbon economy. (shrink)

By most accounts Deleuze's engagement with Marx begins with the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia he co-authored with Félix Guattari. However, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition alludes to a connection between Deleuze's critique of common sense and Marx's theory of fetishism, suggesting a connection between the critique of the image of thought and the critique of capital. By tracing this connection from its emergence in the early texts on noology, or the image of thought, to the development in the (...) critique of state thought in A Thousand Plateaus, it can be argued that what initially appears as an entirely infra-philosophical problem, concerned with the presuppositions of philosophy, is not only a political problem as well, but ultimately bears on the very nature of the conjunction between thought and politics, making possible a re-examination of what is meant by revolutionary thought. It is a transition from noology to noopolitics. In the end it can be argued that revolutionary thought is no longer an eschatology, attempting to discern the signs of the future revolution in the present, but a thought oriented towards everything that exceeds the fetish of society, towards the virtual relations and micropolitical transformations that constitute society but exceed its representation. (shrink)

Building on Pietz’s speculation about the construction of a “history of the fetish’ that might be related to, yet stand apart from the fetish as a historical construct, this paper asks if there might be novel yet unmarked contemporary fetish-formations. Taking the later chapters of Pietz’s volume, which focuses on capital and techno-political infrastructures, this essay suggests that non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs,” might be thought of as failed fetishes, objects that work to occlude the material infrastructure (...) that supports blockchain, yet do not cohere because due to contemporary technology, they lack the sensuous materiality required by Pietz’s phenomenologically-shaped understanding of Marxism. Regardless of the correctness of this speculative claim about NFTs, this discussion suggests that Pietz’s original, groundbreaking argument on the fetish still has relevance to, and a great deal of creative promise for, analysis in the current day. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between revolution and corruption in Jean Genet’s accounts of the Palestinian movement in his final work, Prisoner of Love. For Genet, corruption does not simply expose the actions of a revolutionary subject as an empty impersonation, performed for the actual ends of acquiring personal power and fortune. Rather, it exposes the ‘pretension’ inherent in the revolution it undermines as well as in the accumulation of value. For Genet, the misappropriation of money by the Palestinian leadership (...) makes manifest the imaginary character of both devotion to a revolutionary cause and greed for the commodity-fetish. Corruption, in other words, betrays revolution as well as the ‘imaginary wealth and power’ which the ‘game of revolution’ attempts to destroy. (shrink)

This article discusses how the way in which post-Enlightenment humans tend to relate to material objects is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism. The difficulties that conventional academic disciplines have in grasping the societal and political aspect of ‘technology’ stem from the predominant Cartesian paradigm that distinguishes the domain of material objects from that of social relations of exchange. This Cartesian paradigm has constrained the Marxian analysis of capital accumulation from extending the concept of fetishism to the domain of (...) technology. Both Marxian and mainstream thought represent technological objects as empowered by their intrinsic properties, which derive from human ingenuity and tend to progress over time. To transcend this paradigm will be possible only through the kind of post-Cartesian perspective on material artefacts that has been championed by Bruno Latour. However, Latour’s own neglect of technological systems as social strategies of exploitation reflects his lack of concern with global inequalities. (shrink)

In the present work, we propose to explore the passage from critique to commodity fetishism and, in general, of capital in Karl Marx to the critique of the fetishism of power in Enrique Dussel. Marx's category of fetishism and its use in the political field has been suggested by the Latin American philosopher for the negative critique moment of his Politics of Liberation, however, it has not been explicitly developed in his passage from the economic field to the political (...) field. We think that its explicit thematic treatment is important since it seems to us the central category in the critique of politics and the possible alternatives towards a new order. The text is presented in three parts: The first part reviews the historical necessity of the State form and its inevitable possibility of fetishization. In the second one, it recovers the category People and their Will-of-life as anti-fetishist fundament of the political power. And, in the third, we made the exposition of the logical passage from the economic field to the political field, that is, from the fetishism of capital to the fetishism of power between Marx and Dussel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.2 (2001) 3-8 [Access article in PDF] The Two Secrets of the Fetish Jean-Luc Nancy "Commodity fetishism": Marx's formula has been imprinted on the largest and most resistant of cultural memories. It has become almost anonymous, or rather synonymous with Marx's very name, as is the case with certain coined terms(cogito, categorical imperative...). This privilege could only be due to a very particular virtue. Such a virtue (...) is that which not only consists in characterizing, in the strict sense of the word (to typify a property or an essence), but even in characterizing in such a way that the character (the stamp, the seal) is somehow inscribed on the thing itself and can no longer be detached from it, or at least without some loss in the substance of the thing.In Kantian terms: the intuition presented under the word "fetishism" is printed or traced indelibly onto the concept of "commodity," giving rise to a schema "commodity," from which a new image, and thus a new idea, ensues. Not just the commodity as the fetish—as if this were one of its traits or one approach among others—but rather the essence of the commodity revealed as fetish, so that the fetish character would remain once the approach was shifted or the "secret" of its "mystical character" was revealed. (As we know, these are all Marx's own terms.)As is also known, the secret consists in that the commodity value (or exchange value) of the object (or product), which seems to be its intrinsic or immanent property (parallel in this way to its use value, which is extrinsic and completely relative to its utilization in a given sociotechnical context) only covers, masks or represses the origin of its pure or absolute value—this last value being nothing other than the living human labor of the producer, which the act of production incorporates into the product. But the commodity value deflects this incorporated creative life toward equivalence within an exchange, where the producer (the worker) finds himself surreptitiously stripped of the part of the value that the mercantile calculation does not exchange for the maintenance of its labor force, but rather sets to the account of capital. * * * Here we are not concerned with addressing the problems associated with the evaluation or the appreciation of living work as it is related to the intensification or the very creation of value ("the surplus-value"), nor with respect to the extortion suffered by the creator of value (the valuable and value-making man, the living man as maker, as giver of prices in an absolute fashion) to the benefit of the one who accumulates value in the form of general equivalence, creating mercantile prices through a common currency. Currency is the fetish, where fetishism is fixed: belief in the value of the market price itself. The critique of political economy—that is, the critique of the economy as politics—reveals the inanity of this belief, and if this critique cannot measure the hidden and mysticized or mystified value in monetary terms, the principle of this critique remains [End Page 3] no less, but even more so, the incommensurability of the value creator and the marketed product.Alienation is not measurable. It is at the same time the principle of the critique and its impasse from the moment that we would like to, and indeed that we should, oppose one measure to another: the critical measure of the fetish against the mercantile measure through the fetish.In contrast, what we would like to sketch out here would have the following hypothesis as a point of departure: does not the strength of Marx's formula derive from a power other than that of the only critique thus broached? Is there not another energy, and another enigma, slipped into the first, adding itself to the revelation of the secret, even exceeding this revelation and perhaps in this fashion displacing just a bit the secret itself (precisely because it is not measurable)?This other power would derive from "fetishism" itself. That is to say... (shrink)

Commodity fetishism and the fetish of capital as an effect of western civilisation. Marx was aware that economic categories do not live an autonomous conceptual life, that they presuppose, in particular, the material and practical relations which humanity, as an organic living species, establishes with non-human nature. Such relations are to be examined in terms of their development in various historical and geographical milieus. The aim of the article is to highlight the importance of such variable conditioning. To (...) do so, it addresses the categories of fetishism and value, looking at the quantitative orientation of the production of material goods which has developed in western-type civilisation over the last 5,000 years. (shrink)

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion (...) that constitutes the ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other. (shrink)

The beginning of Marx’s Capital has references to Hegel’s Logic of Being. From the individual commodity considered in isolation, Marx derives the value form as the germ cell of capitalist society. Marx’s materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic posits the value form as a spectral objectivity that constitutes the real abstraction specific to capitalism. As the most abstract expression of capital, it rules unconsciously the totality of social praxis as an absolute fetish. Value arises from a double (...) mystification: the reification of capitalist social relations of production in an objective abstract form, and its representation in concrete objects, as commodities and money in circulation. Value, as the real abstraction of capitalist social relations of production, is the disjunctive synthesis between the despotic command of capital in production and the reciprocity of exchange in circulation. In the final chapter on primitive accumulation, Marx identifies its historical genesis in the dispossession of the commons, which, by separating the subjective from the objective conditions of production, gives rise to the capital-wage labour relation. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the literature on Marx’s systematic-dialectical method through a critical reading and discussion of the significance and presentational ‘architecture’ of the section on commodity fetishism in the dialectical sequence of form-determinations inCapital. In order to undertake this task, the paper firstly explores the content and expositional structure of the first three sections of Chapter 1 ofCapital. This sets the stage for a methodologically-minded close examination of Marx’s presentation of the fetish character of the commodity, (...) which shows that there is a precise systematic sequence which gives unity to the flow of his argument within the section on ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’. The conclusion is that only through a proper grasp of the dialectical method can the full systematic significance and implications of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism be uncovered. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 23-48.

Friedrich Engels’s “History of the Rifle” was among the longest and most detailed studies of technological development that either he or Marx produced. Yet the piece has been almost entirely forgotten. I recover Engels’s essay as a model for the historiography of technology and for the study of the politics of the technical object today, demonstrating its continuity with the larger critical project he was engaged in with Marx in these years. In a famous footnote to Capital, Marx suggested (...) that the method appropriate to a “critical history of technology” in society should be developed by analogy to Darwin’s revolutionary history of organic life. I show that Engels’s study of the rifle works out such a method in practice, recasting technological development as a nondeterministic interplay between the successive mutations of the artifact and the pressures of its social environment. Moreover, Engels’s technological materialism has a socially engaged and emancipatory end, for it is here directed against a particularly pernicious form of the commodity fetish: the fetishism of weapons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics, Education, the Critical Autonomous Self, and the Culture IndustryMarianna Papastephanou (bio)IntroductionE Lucevan le Stelle disconnected both from Tosca and Puccini becomes incidental music and brings strong recollections of the detergent advertisement it once coated. Last Year in Marienbad has caused some of the deepest yawn relief to many hopefuls for the title of the sophisticated who wished to cash out the film's cultural and social capital. A (...) painting by a well-known artist in the living room of a middle-upper-class residence often matches the colors of the carpet, and a piece of African art in the corner testifies to the hosts' cosmopolitan respect for otherness and the proper dose of hybridity in their selfhood. The young of the family are said to search for freedom from the puritan lifestyle in Ecstasis. Or, they rebel against the oppressive order of the system through idolizing music bands of an unconventional style and, as a matter of fact, of "unconventional" wealth accumulated precisely through the systemic exploitation of their idolization. The whole family, including the discontented young, will unite in the enjoyment of a new movie in which, just as in hundreds before it, police detectives can solve cases only after their suspension from duty and foreigners prefer to converse in perfect English when they are alone. What all members of the family are sure of by the end of the day, some of them through the prism of heavy drinking and others in the sober appreciation of the latest reality show, is that they exercised once again their free will in all instances. For they oriented their desires, treated as natural and self-posited, to objects they initially lacked but "autonomously" and "critically" found and selected from a rich and all-encompassing marketplace of culture. [End Page 75]How are art, its education, and its educational ideals of autonomy and critique related to this particular cultural reality that I have highlighted? Pseudo-individualism, escapism, Ersatzbefriedigung, fetishization, reification, and educationalization are some of the terms Adorno employed to approach the reality of artistic production and reception in capitalist times while preserving the distance that art offers for critiquing reality.1 In contrast with the above-sketched reality, in Adorno's ultimate aesthetic vision through art the self is not supposed to "forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image."2 Adorno attacks the drive toward a "totally administered" society—that of late capitalism—which "reduces every aspect of present-day life to the dead level of conformist popular 'taste' as dictated by a wholesale culture industry given over to the purposes of mass indoctrination."3 Fundamentally, the culture industry hinders the formation of autonomous, critical, and independent individuals.4I shall argue that such a theoretical framework gives us additional insight through which to combat what has already been perceived in pedagogical discourse as educational inability to cultivate reflective and critical subjectivities. Instead of autonomy, education nurtures narcissism. and instead of critique, it promotes appeasement5 —all the more so when education succumbs to the culture industry or fails to encourage students' critical stance to its imperatives.My position here is that by reclaiming their own valuable connection to reflective artistic experience and reception, aesthetic theory and art education can contribute to a reconceptualization of autonomy and critique and, perhaps more importantly, to a reorientation of educational practice.6 Adorno's aesthetics is exceptionally relevant to this aim because his work exemplifies in a unique way the necessary awareness of the antinomic qualities of autonomy and critique, their ineluctable dependence on society and culture, and their secret culpability in domination. Moreover, Adorno's cultural criticism comprises an unsurpassable diagnosis of those social pathologies that leads away from critical and reflective subjectivity and offers conceptual means for setting a critical eye on some current impoverished practices of teaching art. Above all, Adorno's aesthetic theory displays a remarkable topicality regarding contemporary positions on purely artistic concerns and contentions. Thus, the current neglect of his work in aesthetic educational theory7 must be dealt with since accommodation of such aesthetics within art educational discourse will serve significantly the latter's... (shrink)

In this paper Marx’s concept of fetishism is used in order to analyze contemporary representations of technology in the science-fiction genre (concretely Terminator, The Jetsons and Dune will be used as examples) and discuss their correspondence to two major ideological perceptions of technology (the luddite and the productivist) and to one of the best attempts to grasp technology in a non-fetishized form (Marx’s analysis in Capital).

In this essay, Enrique Dussel provides a textual “rereading” of Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism according to his scattered but significantcomments on religion as they extend throughout the whole of his work. In Part I, “The Place of the Subject of Religion in the Whole Work of Marx,” Dussel demonstrates Marx’s differentiation between a critique of the essence of religion and its manifestations, arguing that there is a space in Marx for a anti-fetishized liberatory religion. In Part II, “Toward a (...) Theory of Fetishism in General,” he provides a methodological account of such a religion, as well as a panorama of the content of this essence of religion. These accounts provide the basis for more clearly identifying both religious fetishism and the fetishist character of capital. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 2 Heft: 2 Seiten: 314-343.

This article examines the relationship between Marx’s Capital, Georg Lukács and Critical Theory through the prism of value-form theory. Marx’s theorisation of value understands commodities as expressions of the historical form of social relations defined by capital. Products of human labour become values in capitalist production, defined by the abstract quality of undifferentiated quantities of labour-power, exchangeable through the universal character of the market. The social form of this process, Marx identifies as processing a fetish quality, where (...) humans take on the thing-like character of commodities. The impact of this theorisation on Critical Theory has been considerable, beginning with Lukács’ concept of reification. In Part I, I examine the challenge to Lukács’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital made by Gillian Rose. She draws attention to a misidentification of reification in Marx, suggesting a strong conceptual distinction between commodity-fetishism and reification. In their conceptual flattening, Rose contends that Lukács and Critical Theory generalised Marx’s value-form theory, losing its speculative character. I argue that despite Rose’s suggestion remaining unfulfilled, she helps illuminate important tensions between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory. This comparison allows in Part II for the beginning level of a speculative approach to Marx’s Capital to be advanced. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has further intensified a crisis in the functions and the perception of the state. It has also revealed underlying contradictions in both mainstream and radical ideologies of the state. A desire for the state as guarantor of public welfare vies with fear of the state’s hypertrophic capacities for surveillance and control. Following a brief exploration of the intimate modern connection between plagues and the state, the article tries to map some of the ways in which the state (...) has been at stake in political and theoretical commentaries on the pandemic. Is an epidemiological politics from below, beyond the plague state, possible? Can recent emergency measures be seen as incomplete or inverted anticipations of a communist use of the state of exception? Or is the primacy of the political we are currently experiencing a mere fetish, indissociable from the rule of capital? (shrink)

In The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Enrique Dussel provides a groundbreaking combination of Marxology, theology, and ethical theory. Dussel shows that Marx unveils the theology of capitalism in his critique of commodity fetishization. Capitalism constitutes an idolatry of the commodity that undergirds the capitalist expropriation of labor. Dussel examines Marx's early writings on religion and fetishism and proceeds through what Dussel refers to as the four major drafts of Capital, ultimately situating Marx's philosophical, economic, ethical, and historical insights in (...) relation to the theological problems of his time. Dussel notes a shift in Marx's underlying theological schema from a political critique of the state to an economic critique of the commodity fetish as the Devil, or anti-God, of modernity. Marx's thought, impact, and influence cannot be fully understood without Dussel's historic reinterpretation of the theological origins and implications of Marx's critiques of political economy and politics. (shrink)

In June 2016, Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani social media star, was murdered. Her death sparked both public outrage and a policy debate around ‘honour killing’, digital rights and sex-positive sexuality across Pakistan and its diasporas. Qandeel challenged what constitutes a proper Pakistani woman, an authentic Baloch and a respectable digital citizen. As a national sex symbol, she failed at the gendered workings of respectable heterosexuality, and during her short lifetime she optimised this failure and public fetish as a (...) technologically mediated social currency (clicks, hashtags, comments, likes, reposts) to build a transnational celebrity brand. I centre Qandeel Baloch’s life and afterlives to think through the economic entanglements of honour, racialised ethnicity, coloniality, sexual violence and social media at the intersections of globalised anti-Blackness and honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. Within these complex registers of coloniality, Qandeel’s life and brutal murder necessitate a rethinking of categories of racialised ethnicity (Baloch), sexual labour (racial capital) and social media (digitality) as vectors of value for capitalism and nationalism. By centring Qandeel, I define honour as a form of racialised property relations. This rereading of honour, as an economic metric of heteropatriarchy, shifts my lens of honour killing from a crime of culture to a crime of property. Women’s honour functions as a necrocapitalist technology that constructs female and feminine bodies as the debris of heterosexual empire through racialised, gendered and sexualised property relations. These relations and registers of honour get further complicated by social media currency and discussions around digital rights, privacy and freedom of expression. Honour is, therefore, the economic management of sexual morality produced through race, religion and imperialism. (shrink)

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification. The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally rooted in (...) science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another's being, to another's claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself. The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman's place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity's domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book. Stephanie Polsky is an interdisciplinary writer and academic working in the areas of Media Studies and Visual Culture. Her work explores the confluence of power around race and gender as technologies of governance. She has lectured widely in media and cultural studies, critical theory, and visual culture at a number of prestigious institutions including Goldsmiths University, Regent's University London, University of Greenwich, and Winchester School of Art. Most recently she has worked at California College of the Arts in Critical Studies and Diversity Studies. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Media Studies from the University of Sussex. Her books include The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin's Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2009). (shrink)

In this essay, Enrique Dussel provides a textual “rereading” of Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism according to his scattered but significant comments on religion as they extend throughout the whole of his work. In Part I, “The Place of the Subject of Religion in the Whole Work of Marx,” Dussel demonstrates Marx’s differentiation between a critique of the essence of religion and its manifestations, arguing that there is a space in Marx for a anti-fetishized liberatory religion. In Part II, “Toward (...) a Theory of Fetishism in General,” he provides a methodological account of such a religion, as well as a panorama of the content of this essence of religion. These accounts provide the basis for more clearly identifying both religious fetishism and the fetishist character of capital. (shrink)

Straipsnyje bandoma atsakyti į klausimą, kaip Gilles’o Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari geismo samprata atsispindi jų politinėje filosofijoje. Tyrinėjama geismo mašinų ir jų gamybos koncepcija, jų santykis su sociumo struktūra ir kapitalo logika. Savo veikaluose šie du autoriai teigia, kad geismo mašinos kuria materialią revoliucinę energiją, kuri nuolat konfrontuoja tiek su sociumo normomis, tiek su kapitalistine priespauda. Tačiau, pasak jų, tokią energiją sociumas mėgina represuoti, paversti revoliucinį geismą fašistiniu „tvirtos rankos“ geismu, o kapitalas fetišizuoja, suprekina ir pritaiko savo tikslams. Šiame tekste, (...) remiantis tiek Deleuze’o ir Guattari, tiek jų sekėjų tekstais, daroma prielaida, kad geismo mašinos sociumo represijoms ir kapitalistiniam suprekinimui gali priešintis pasirinkdamos atstumtųjų terpėje gimstančias kūrybingas ir radikalias mažosios politikos strategijas. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: geismas, geismo mašinos, sociumas, reakcija, kapitalas, suprekinimas, revoliucija, mažoji politika. Desire and Liberation in Political Philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari Kasparas Pocius Summary The article analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and desiring-machines, their origins and workings in the organized structure of socius and in the capitalist regime as well as the revolutionary strategies and milieus that these desiring-machines engender. Contemporary social critique often distorts the notion of desire while linking it exclusively with capital that forces people to consume identities and commodities. Meanwhile, in the conception of Deleuze and Guattari desire is a material revolutionary energy which constantly aims to confront the norms of both socius and capitalist repressions. Unfortunately, this energy is continually under the threat of being appropriated and inactivated by socius, and it also undergoes the risk of being fetishized and commodified by capital, which makes desire serve its aims of seeking profit and extracting surplus value. Desiring-machines attempt to break through to the other side of socius and capital, the former of which is decoded and deterritorialized, whereas the latter is too limited to deal with desire as an absolute limit of socius. Capital is unable to commodify potential revolutionary energy or to absorb it in another way. However, in the structure of socius active and creative desire may be reversed into reactionary fascist desire of hierarchy, exploitation, humiliation, slavery and death. The molar order of socius is distinguished by a clear structure and hierarchy where individuals have fixed identities. However, capital tries to demolish those structures and deterritorialize socius by following the desiring-machines. The discipline, laws and norms are substituted by the flexible axiomatic of capitalism, which can adjust itself to the demands of desire or regenerate to the former repressive forms of command. Such milieu gives rise to a single monolithic molar class. Therefore, today the conflict lies not between the capitalist class and the working class but between the class and those who are outside the class – minor people, creating minor politics in molecular milieu. There is a paradox in the conception of minor politics by Deleuze and Guattari. Although this kind of politics originates in the space that is oppressed by socius and capital, however such space can become highly active, creative and radical. Desire as a material basis for creativity becomes a powerful revolutionary potential. Minor politics is based not on identification or representation of somebody’s interests, but on permanent creativity. This politics emerges within the milieu of mutual communication and intellect as well as uncommodified affectivity and sexuality and it embodies revolutionary desire in everyday practices of self-valorization. Keywords: desire, desiring-machines, socius, reaction, capital, commodification, revolution, minor politics. (shrink)

Financial derivatives have been singled out as the major villain in the latest crisis, particularly through speculative trading by banks. Yet little attention has been paid to the fundamental rôle that derivatives play in modern capitalism. Even less has there been a focus on how the boom in derivatives-trading was prompted by the crisis of profitability and capital-accumulation. This article shows that while derivatives were one means by which speculation took off, the momentum behind this was driven by low (...) profitability. That was why banks turned their mortgage-loans into derivative-driven securities, why pension-funds placed bets on commodity-futures and why countries such as Greece used derivatives to hide the real state of their finances. Derivatives helped determine the form and magnitude of the crisis, but were not its underlying cause. Proposed reforms of the derivatives-market ignore the fundamental determinants of the financial crisis, assuming it to be a failure of regulation. (shrink)

Brandon Absher demonstrates that the neoliberalization of higher education has led to a paradigm shift in contemporary philosophy in the United States. Neoliberal philosophy aims to produce human capital and profitable knowledge.

Examining how new forms of currencies diffuse is important to uncover their impact on the organization of communities, and thus motivates our study of community currencies. Community currencies provide a medium of exchange by using alternative banknotes or electronic money, which circulates only within particular communities, allowing members to trade goods, increase social cohesion, and achieve collective goals. In this study, we examine how community currencies help facilitate social commons by serving as a setting for building community relationships and a (...) catalyst for other social activities beyond market relations. We analyze cases of community banks that provide microfinance and issue community currencies in Brazil. We find that microfinance entrepreneurs who involve a greater diversity of stakeholders from public, private, and nonprofit sectors in decision making even prior to startup, while also facilitating the formation of supportive social capital from diverse cross-sector stakeholders, increase opportunities for developing new community currencies. By exploring the implications of entrepreneurial actions that promote inclusive participation of diverse stakeholders for accomplishing collective goals, our findings are relevant for other activities that create a common pool of resources while also developing the vitality of the community, including initiatives that use cryptocurrencies and other emerging forms of currencies for building social commons. (shrink)

The concept of natural capital denotes a rich variety of natural processes, such as ecosystems, that produce economically valuable goods and services. The Anthropocene signals a diminished state of nature, however, with some scholars claiming that no part of the Earth’s surface remains untouched. What are ecological economists to make of natural capital during the Anthropocene? Is natural capital still a coherent concept? What is the conceptual relationship between nature and natural capital? This article wrestles with (...) John Stuart Mill’s two concepts of nature and argues that during the Anthropocene, natural capital should be understood as denoting economically valuable processes that are not absolutely—but relatively—detached from intentional human agency. (shrink)

Much current work in the social sciences seeks to understand the effects of trust and social capital on economic and political outcomes. However, the sources of trust remain unclear. In this article, the authors articulate a basic theory of the relationship between institutions and trust. The authors apply this theory to industrial districts, geographically concentrated areas of small firm production, which involve extensive cooperation in the production process. Changes in power relations affect patterns of production;the authors suggest that they (...) also have knock-on consequences for trust and cooperation among actors. (shrink)

A materialist approach to the fictions of Charles Dickens based on a reading-in of the historical background, creative application of Walter Benjamin's methodology, as well as a re-reading the philological core of the minor works.

Black and Gilson have argued that “venture capital can flourish especially – and perhaps only – if the venture capitalist can exit from a successful portfolio company through an initial public offering, which requires an active stock market.” But nothing in the Black and Gilson analysis requires that the exit option be a domestic capital market. In this article, I use the phenomenon of Israeli hi-tech companies going public on the Nasdaq as a case study to explore the (...) connection between a venture capital industry and domestic capital markets in a world of global capital and product markets. (shrink)

We show unintended consequences of quota regulations to get women on boards. Board members may have different characteristics, and even among women, there are variations. We assume that the characteristics of the board members have an influence on their contributions to boards, to businesses as well as to society. In this paper, we argue that different types of societal pressure to get women on boards have an influence on the social capital characteristics of the women getting multiple board memberships. (...) The paper is drawing on institutional theory and social capital theory, and we distinguish between mimetic, normative, and coercive types of pressure. Through a cluster analysis of 58 Italian “golden skirts”, we show that different types of societal pressure may lead to differences in social capital characteristics. The study has implications for the ongoing international debate about women and diversity on boards, and we propose developing a pressure theory for getting women on boards. (shrink)

This paper applies Israel Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship and the Austrian theory of capital to the theory of the firm. In particular, it explores why some firms are better able to react to exogenous change than others, especially when that change is negative. The argument is that firms that have structures of physical and human capital that are more “flexible” are better able to adapt to exogenous change. In this context, flexibility is understood in terms of Lachmann’s notions (...) of the substituability and complementarity of capital. Flexible capital structures are ones in which elements can be more easily substituted for. Such flexibility carries a trade-off in terms of lost productivity from using less specific capital, but it is argued that this trade-off might be worthwhile in an environment of heightened structural uncertainty.Cet article applique la théorie entrepreneuriale d’Israel Kirzner et la théorie Autrichienne du capital à la théorie de la firme. Plus particulièrement, il explore pourquoi certaines entreprises sont plus à même de réagir face à des changements exogènes que d’autres, spécialement quand ces changements sont négatifs. L’argument est que les firmes qui possèdent des structures de capital physique et humain plus “flexibles” sont plus aptes à s’adapter à des changements exogènes. Dans ce contexte, la flexibilité est comprise au sens lachmanien de substituabilité et de complémentarité du capital. Les structures de capital flexibles sont celles dans lesquelles la substitution entre les composantes est plus aisée. Une telle flexibilité entraîne un compromis en termes de perte de productivité découlant d’un usage de capitaux moins spécifiques, mais il est suggéré que ce compromis en vaut la peine dans un environnement encore plus structurellement incertain. (shrink)

Vous cherchez un point commun entre Les Simpson et le Tea Party, Angelina Jolie et Alan Greenspan, Mad Men et Dirty Dancing, le fondateur de Wikipedia et l'administration Reagan, ou encore Vladimir Poutine, Queer as Folk et Donald Trump? Il y en a un : Ayn Rand. Quasiment inconnue en France, Ayn Rand est pourtant considérée aux Etats-Unis comme l'auteur du livre "le plus influent après la Bible". Romancière, philosophe et chantre de l'ultra-libéralisme, Ayn Rand a offert une mythologie au (...) capitalisme, celle de l'entrepreneur comme surhomme et de l'égoïsme comme vertu ultime. Stéphane Legrand combine les ressorts de l'essai et du récit pour analyser sa pensée et ses romans les plus marquants, qui font d'elle une pièce essentielle à la compréhension du monde contemporain. Il brosse le portrait captivant de cette émigrée russe "bigger-than-life", qu'on a pu qualifier d'"ultime drogue de passage vers une vie de droite", et dont le destin n'a rien à envier à ses fictions les plus rocambolesques. (shrink)

Scant attention has been paid to the notion of property in Hannah Arendt’s thought, and this paper aims to address this gap. For Arendt, property is the realm of privacy, located in the house. She argues that the modern age represented its loss with the expropriation of the peasant classes after the Reformation. As a result, wealth started to be accumulated and became productive through the labor of the new propertyless classes. This new way of dealing with property needed a (...) new notion of property for the laborers. Locke’s understanding gave the laborers the hope of being property-owners through their labor and simultaneously justified the unending accumulation of money; nevertheless, property in its true meaning was never recovered. Arendt believes that recovering property under conditions of equality is an essential consideration, and this egalitarian vision of property only can be achieved if law protects prop- erty as well as set limits on the accumulation of wealth. (shrink)

The theory of the conatus is a major presupposition of Spinozist philosophy. The principles and concepts involved therein are well known to specialists and interpreters of Spinoza’s philosophy, but unndoubtedly are much less well known or used by economists and sociologists. In his book La politique du capital, Frédéric Lordon, an economist, uses the principles of Spinoza’s theory of the conatus to interpret a financial event and attempt to derive from it the analytic criteria which are necessary to understand (...) it. Which financial event is this? The conflict that opposed the BNP to the Société Générale and Paribas, from January to August 1999. What does this series of events imply for French capitalism ? What are the laws and principle governing the financial struggle for the control of banks I Why does he speak, regarding such events, of a « politics of capital » ? As he tries to answer these questions, Lordon shows that the relations between the « subjects,) of capital are not founded on a « pure economic nature » but rather, more profoundly, on a dynamics of power making use of relations that are « mediated by mercantile exchange ». The politics of capital then turns out to be, in essence, a matter of « sovereignty », that is, a necessity of persevering in its being in the midst of the confrontation with the power of another. What is at stake in this conflict is nothing other than the « life » or better, the « survival » of capital. (shrink)