The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault - Richard Marsden

 

The synthesis of Marx and Foucault has traditionally been seen within the social sciences as deeply problematic. The author overturns this received wisdom by subjecting both thinkers to an original re-reading through the lens of the philosophy of critical realism.

The result is an illuminating synthesis between Marx's social relations of production and Foucault's disciplinary power from which the author constructs a model of the material causes of our capacity to act. The laws of motion of a society and its microphysics are shown to be complementary parts of a theory of capital, society's genetic code. The Nature of Capital overturns traditional interpretations of Marx, presents an accessible and comprehensive account of the development of his model of capital and demonstrates its ability to explain modern societies.

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State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization - John Gledhill, Barbara Bender, Mogens Trolle Larsen

The traditional Eurocentric view of state formation and the rise of civilization is vigorously challeged in this unusually broad-ranging, up-to-date and innovative book. Using research from archaeology, ethnology, and anthropology, the authors examine the dynamics of political centralization, the nature of social inequalities, state formation, the nature of bureaucracy and the role of literacy in a variety of historical and geographical contexts. They examine the developments and resistences encountered in state formation and the mechanisms which produce cumulative development on a world-historical scale.

United by a common committment to dialogue and to the idea that archaeology cannot exist in isolation from other social and historical sciences, this volume will be essential to all those working on issues of social inequality.

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The A to Z of Utopianism - James M. Morris & Andrea L. Kross

 

This reference contains more than 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on utopian thought and experimentation that span the centuries from ancient times to the present. The text not only covers utopian communities worldwide, but also its ideas from the well known such as those expounded in Thomas More's Utopia and the ideas of philosophers and reformers from ancient times, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and from notable 20th-century figures. Included are the descriptions of utopian experiments attempted in the United Sates, like those of the Shakers, Oneida, Robert Owen, and the Fourierists, and elsewhere throughout the world from Europe to Australia, Latin America, and the Far East. Major utopian literary works and their literary counterparts and dystopian novels are also profiled because these have fueled the fires of time-honored arguments about the feasibility of creating a perfect society.From the early theoreticians and thinkers who proposed republican, democratic, and authoritarian innovations; to those who sought equality of classes, races, and genders; to those who insisted on hierarchy under a supreme leader, or god; and to those who had more practical economic, social, and ethical plans, this reference enables the reader to explore the Western mind's desire to improve the world and the lives of the people within it as utopianism has persisted over the centuries.

The Debt Resistors' Operations Manual - Strike Debt / Occupy Wall Street

"This manual shows us the ways in which we are all made to pay for basic social survival—for the rest of our lives. This is the traditional idea of a “debtor”—a person who borrowed money and owes a sum of money to a bank or government agency. This is fairly straightforward and most people are beginning to understand this: mafia capitalism means that governments make cuts and the people have to go into debt to survive. The burden of sustaining “life” gets shifted from the state to the individual and household. Most households are drowning in various forms of debt; it is a way of controlling us—making us weak, afraid and financially unstable.

Our whole system runs on debt and credit—our households, our cities, our countries and all those who slip between the cracks. From municipal bonds that we never agreed to, to the low-income or unemployed worker forced to take payday loans after being excluded from “mainstream” credit, the whole word has become indebted. This is how the 1% maintains its wealth and power.

Anyone fighting the 1% is a debt resistor. We are all debtors now."

Against Civilization Readings and Reflexion, John Zerzan

Compendio de artículos de distintos autores en los que se trata el tema de la crítica a la civilización, editor y compilación por John Zerzan.
Descarga aquí.

Althusser: The Detour of Theory - Gregory Elliot

 

First published in 1987, Althusser, The Detour of Theory was widely received as the fullest account of its subject to date. Drawing on a wide range of hitherto untranslated material, it examined the political and intellectual contexts of Althusser's `return to Marx' in the mid-1960s; analysed the novel character of the Marxism developed in his major works; charted their author's subsequent evolution, from his self-criticism to the proclamation of a `crisis of Marxism'; and concluded with a balance-sheet of Althusser's contribution to historical materialism.

Storming heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism - Steve Wright

Storming Heaven is the first comprehensive survey of Italian autonomist theory, from its origins in the anti-stalinist and workerist left of the 1950s to its heyday twenty years later. Autonomist marxism was a political tendency which privileged themes--self-organisation, construction of identity, grassroots politics, subjects in struggle--which in many ways can be seen as the precursor of today's debates around direct action protest. Emphasising the dynamic nature of class struggle as the distinguishing feature of autonomist thought, Wright explores how its understanding of class politics developed alongside emerging social movements. Offering a critical and historical exploration of the tendency's emergence in postwar Italy, Storming Heaven moves beyond the crisis of traditional analytical frameworks on the left, and assesses the strengths and limitations of autonomist marxism as first developed by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna and others.