"the genius of Marx consisted precisely in the fact that, filled with disgust, he tackled exactly that which he found disgusting: the economy" -- Adorno
My contribution to reflecting on the 100th anniversary of the Frankfurt school uses Samuel Moyn and William Schuerman’s incisive critiques of the lack of political economy in contemporary Habermasian critical theory as a jumping-off point. 🧵
The description of Capital in the Princeton translation is blowing my mind, especially when you compare it to the description of Capital in the Fowkes translation.
We regret to announce that this event is canceled. We will not speak at the New School while student protesters are being arrested. We will announce an alternative date and location in due course.
This is coming out in a month
Please let me know if you would be interested in reviewing it or if you would like to join the Critical Theory and Critique of Society street team.
What are good articles or books on socialist approaches to the environment beyond the big name ecomarx dudes (Bellamy Foster, Moore, Malm, Saito, Huber)?
Very sorry to hear about Simon Clarke passing. His work has been extraordinarily important to me. I almost told him this when I saw him at the last HM conference I attended but I was too shy and figured there would be another occasion that was less awkward. Sadly there wasn't.
Excited to announce that Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy can now be preordered in paperback for the more reasonable price of $35.95
Someone should write a book about Anglophone Marxist debates of the 70s. Because I don't think many people realize they are the jumping-off points for the debates of today and at the same time there is a lot of great stuff from that era that's overlooked
I unexpectedly have 2 new chapters out today:
"Totality" in Beverly Skeggs, Sara R Farris et al (ed.) The SAGE Handbook of Marxism
"Law and the State in Frankfurt School Critical Theory" in Paul O'Connell and Umut Ozsu (ed) Research Handbook on Law and Marxism.
Do you want to spend the holiday season hearing me and a few of my fellow contributors take part in an online panel on the new edited collection on Marxism and the Capitalist State? Well, you are in luck!
Much respect to Adorno for starting of his Introduction to Sociology course with a detailed overview of how bad career prospects are for sociology majors.
Mark my words: Making it legal to fire tenured professors for "moral turpitude" in a state where its most powerful politicians decry the "woke left", "critical race theory" and "cultural marxism" in just these terms is setting up a very ominous legal precedent.
Courtesy of the co-editor Tommaso Redolfi Riva*, the cover, the backcover, and the table of contents of Marx’s Key Concepts,
@Elgar_Economics
*the one who actually made this book possible.
The ebook version of this is now out:
Spread the word!
Please let me know if you would like to review it
Please ask your libraries to order it if you can
Do let me know if you would like a copy of any of my contributions
I've spent 20 years studying orientalism, powerlessness, and social catastrophe, and the unspeakable horror that is going on right now is fucking me up. Can't think of a time I felt more hopeless or powerless.
Honored, excited, and a little nervous to be workshopping material from my current book project. Do pop along -- in person or via zoom -- if you are willing and able.
Join the Political Theory Workshop
@GC_PoliSci
this Friday for
@chrisokane_nyc
presentation of a chapter of his upcoming book on "The Critique of Political Economy as Critical Theory of Social Domination"
Who will write the magisterial review essay on Mau's Mute Compulsion, Bonefeld's A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion, and Best's The Automatic Fetish?
New Bev Best article just dropped: "I offer a ... way of reading Marx’s theory of value, as a theory that illuminates how capital comes to mediate gendered and racialized subjugation, sustaining it through its dissimulation."
Almost sounds like capitalists are 'personifications of economic categories' and treat each other as 'hostile brothers', now if there was only a thinker who had explained this.
Marxism is essentially also just a high-status conspiracy theory. Business people are, in my experience, almost comically apolitical. They only care about their own business.
The idea that they all work together, as a class, to prop up capitalism, is... not plausible.
I am an editor of the Critical Theory and Critique of Society book series with Bloomsbury Academic Press.
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Get in touch if you are interested in publishing with the series.
Sad to see Oskar Negt's passing. he is sadly overlooked in the English-speaking world. Only some of his work with Kluge has been translated and very little of his own work. For those who are interested in an overview, I suggest the work of Richard Langston.
I was hired to help turn my institution into an R1. Yesterday I presented my research at a University in Berlin and it was cited by an academic in Australia. But the topics I work on are on the verge of being outlawed here and elsewhere.
Pleased to announce my article "Critical Theory and the Critique of Capitalism: An Immanent Critique of Nancy Fraser's “Systematic” “Crisis-Critique” of Capitalism as an “Institutionalized Social Order" is now up on the
@SciSocJournal
website:
Why would it be useful to read a collection of articles on 'post-fordism and social form' when the debates are now about whether we are in neo-feudalism or post-neoliberalism?
Here is the video of yesterday's panel. Instead of a discussion of the Handbook, we presented three papers on Critical Theory. Werner focuses on the question what is social reality?, Amy on anti-social reproduction, I talk about permanent catastrophe.
I know I come from a 4 generation Quaker family, but I just can't wrap my head around opposition to a ceasefire, let alone firing people for supporting one.
A thread on what I consider new and important work on Dialectic of Enlightenment that goes against its predominant reception as a one-dimensional transhistorical theory of instrumental reason that broke with Marx.
Much of my academic training is in intellectual history.
So to understand the ideas about group identity that have become powerful so quickly, I did a TON of reading.
Here's the true story of the origins of "woke"—and how it explains many themes of today's left.
A loooong 🧵.
Said was actually how I got into Adorno. I wrote my MA thesis on Said's idea of humanism. I got into Said and Saidian humanism because of the War on Terror.
20 years since we lost the great Edward Said. A brilliant scholar who played a critical part in bringing the invisible Arab voice to the forefront.
📽: Edward Said discussing the ideas of Frantz Fanon with Eqbal Ahmad in 'The Idea of Empire'.
"Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to pull the emergency brake."
Well Braunstein's Adorno's Critique of Political Economy should hopefully do away with the idea that Adorno got his idea of real abstraction from Sohn Rethel
Biden offering a deal on immigration so far-right Republicans see it as a ‘historic opportunity’ they wouldn’t get under Trump: “If Trump’s president, Democrats will be expecting a pathway to citizenship for that.”
People are working on critical theory + political economy, and critical theory and the critique of political economy, but I think that we are just not accepted as "Frankfurt School Critical Theory" for several reasons I get into in the book I am writing on this topic.
Yes--I have a piece coming out in
@JConstellations
saying the same. "Unfortunately, critical theory today is now chiefly the purview of cultural and literary theorists, historians of ideas, philosophers, and political and social theorists."
Re-reading Schmidt's Concept of Nature in Marx. I realize Bellamy Foster and Smith dump on him but it seems like a lot of what he focuses on is missed in the narrower conceptions of nature in Marxist thought these days?
Proofing an article I initially submitted in 2016. It then went through two substantive revisions in response to excellent feedback and was accepted last March. its been a long ride but it did help me develop my ideas, so I am excited and nervous about its publication:
What does Value-Form Theory mean these days? is it like the idea that capital is subject entirely detached from class antagonism and associated with the work of Heinrich?