The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation - Michael Perelman

 

The originators of classical political economy—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others—created a discourse that explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this?

Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land.

This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.

The Electronic Revolution - William S. Burroughs (1970)

The book is divided into two parts. 

Part one, entitled "The Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden" invokes Alfred Korzybski’s views characterising man as "the time binding machine" due to his ability to write. Burroughs sees the significance of a written word as a distinguishing feature of human beings which enables them to transform and convey information to future generations. He proposes the theory of "the unrecognised virus" present in the language, suggesting that, "the word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host." 

Part two, "Electronic Revolution" concerns the power of alphabetic non-pictorial languages to control people. It draws attention to the subversive influence of the word virus on humans and dangerous possibilities of using human voice as a weapon. Recording words on tape recorders and employing the Cut-up technique can easily lead to the false news broadcasts or garbled political speeches causing confusion and psychic control over individuals. [Wikipedia]

Morning Star: surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism, utopia - Michael Löwy

An expanded edition of revered theorist Michael Löwy's Morning Star: Marxism and Surrealism (previously published in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek), this masterwork collects the author's essays on the ways in which surrealism intersected with a variety of revolutionary political approaches, ranging from utopian ideals to Marxism and situationism. Taking its title from André Breton's essay "Arcane 17," which casts the star as the searing firebrand of rebellion, Löwy's provocative work spans many perspectives. These include surrealist artists who were deeply interested in Marxism and anarchism (Breton among them), as well as Marxists who were deeply interested in surrealism (Walter Benjamin in particular).Probing the dialectics of innovation, diversity, continuity, and unity throughout surrealism's international presence, Morning Star also incorporates analyses of Claude Cahun, Guy Debord, Pierre Naville, José Carlos Mariátegui and others, accompanied by numerous reproductions of surrealist art. An extraordinarily rich collection, Morning Star promises to ignite new dialogues regarding the very nature of dissent.

 

Philosophy of the Encounter. Later Writings, 1978-87 - Louis Althusser

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troubling period, this fourth and final volume of political and philosophical writings reveals Althusser wrestling in a creative and unorthodox fashion with a whole series of theoretical problems to produce some of his very finest work. In his profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, Althusser developed a "philosophy of the encounter," which he links to a hidden and subterranean tradition in the history of Western thought.

Debt: the first 5000 years - David Graeber

Graeber lays out the historical development of the idea of debt, starting from the first recorded debt systems that existed in the Sumer civilization around 3500 BC. In this early form of borrowing and lending, farmers would often become so mired in debt that their children would be forced into debt peonage, though they were periodically released by kings who canceled all debts and granted them amnesty under what later came to be known, in ancient Israel, as the Law of Jubilee. Throughout antiquity, the author identifies many different systems of credit and later monetary exchange, drawing from historical and also ethnographical records evidence for his argument that the traditional explanation for the origins of monetary economies from primitive bartering system, as laid out by Adam Smith, doesn't find empirical support. One feature first observed in this period, though - that of popular indebtedness leading to unrest, insurrections and revolts - will accompany the narrative of the whole book as it deals with the origins of the state, money, interest, taxation and slavery.

The author supports that originally credit systems developed as means of account much before the advent of coinage around 600 BC, and can still be seen operating in non-monetary economies. The idea of barter, on the other hand, seems only to apply for limited exchanges between different societies that held no frequent contact and often were in a context of ritualized warfare, rendering its conceptualization among economists as a myth. As an alternative explanation for the creation of economic life, the author suggests that it originally related to social currencies, closely related to non-market quotidian interactions among a community and based on the "everyday communism" that is based on mutual expectations and responsibilities among individuals. This type of economy is, then, contrasted with the moral foundations of exchange, based on formal equality and reciprocity (but not necessarily leading to market relations) and hierarchy, based on clear inequalities that tend to crystallize in customs and castes.

With the advent of the great Axial Age civilizations, the nexus between coinage and the calculability of economic values was concomitant with the disrupt of what Graeber calls "human economies," as found among the Iroquois, Celts, Inuit, Tiv, Nuer and the Malagasy people of Madagascar among other groups which, according to Graeber, held a radically different conception of debt and social relations, based on the radical incalculability of human life and the constant creation and recreation of social bonds through gifts, marriages and general sociability. The author postulates the growth of a "military-coinage-slave complex" around this time, through which mercenary armies looted cities and human beings were cut from their social context to work as slaves in Greece, Rome and elsewhere in the Eurasian continent. The extreme violence of the period marked by the rise of great empires in China, India and the Mediterranean was, in this way, connected with the advent of large scale slavery and the use of coins to pay soldiers, together with the obligation enforced by the State for its subjects to pay its taxes in currency. This was also the same time that the great religions spread out and the general questions of philosophical enquiry emerged on world history - many of those directly related, as in Plato's Republic, with the nature of debt and its relation to ethics.

When the great empires in Rome and India collapsed, the resulting creation of a checkerboard of small kingdoms and republics saw the gradual decline in standing armies and cities, as well as the settlement of the lower classes through various hierarchical caste systems, the retreat of gold and silver to the temples and the abolition of slavery. Although hard currency was no longer used in everyday life, its use as a unit of account and credit continued in medieval Europe, against popular claims among economists that the Middle Ages somehow saw the economy "revert to barter". In fact, it was during the Middle Ages that more sophisticated financial institutions like promissory notes and paper money (in China, where the empire managed to survive the collapse observed elsewhere), letters of credit and cheques (in the Islamic world) developed and spread. According to Graeber, it was the Islamic "western" tradition of free market and commerce outside of governmental intervention that inspired the original formulation of Adam Smith, whose writing seems to repeat ipsis litteris the words of Persian scholars like Al-Tusi and Al-Ghazali.

It took the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade and the massive amounts of gold and silver extracted from the Americas - most of which ended up in the far East, specially China - to see the reemergence of the bullion economy and large scale military violence. All of which, according to Graeber, directly inter-wined with the earlier expansion of the Italian mercantile city-states as centers of finance that defied the church ban on usury and led to the age of the great capitalist empires that endured and prospered for the next 500 years. As the new continent opened new possibilities for gain, it also created a new area for adventurous militarism backed by debts that required the economic exploitation of the Amerindian and, later, West African populations. As it did, cities again flourished in the European continent and capitalism advanced to encompass larger areas of the globe when European trade companies and military outposts disrupted local markets and pushed for colonial monopolies.

This age would have come to an end with the abandonment of the gold standard by the U.S. government in 1971 and a return to credit money, opening up uncertainties and possibilities yet unclear as the dollar stands as the world currency largely based in its capacity to multiply itself through debts and deficits as long as the United States maintains its status as the world only military power and client states are eager to pay seignorage for its government bonds. By comparing the evolution of debt in our times to other historical eras and different societies, the author suggests that modern debt crises are not the inevitable product of history and may be changed.

 

 

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.