Gillian Roses's Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory
August 6, 2024.
“Marxist Modernism presents for the first time Gillian Rose’s 1979 lectures on the Frankfurt School, art, and politics.”
mood:
“The defeat of our fathers is revisited upon us as the limits of our world. Yes, structure is human, it is the monumentalisation of congealed sweat, sweat squeezed from old exploitation and represented as nature, the world we inhabit, the objective ground.”
1/2
Towards a marxist theory of ‘polycrisis’:
“This ‘wicked trinity’ leads to a compounding of the tensions at the heart of the capitalist state, resulting in the latter’s increasing inability to perform its role in capitalist society while sustaining its liberal form.”
“Class struggle unfolds in the rift between two impossibilities: the impossibility of affirming the proletariat without affirming capital and the impossibility of negating capital without negating the proletariat.”
Ray B. on Théorie Communiste:
Alfred Sohn-Rethel on the Weimar Hyperinflation:
‘The whole world fell apart, the ground opened beneath your feet. All the expressionist art of that time, that was a proper eschatology, because the world actually came to an end.’
Ray Brassier on Marx, Marcuse & utopia:
“Communism is not just another religious utopia but the utopia of a human life without the need for religion, whether of the afterlife or of everyday life. This is the utopian dimension of Marx’s thinking which Marcuse, perhaps” 1/4
On Bertolt Brecht’s Collages:
“Brecht’s anti-fascist photo-collages bring to mind Dada & surrealism. [...] The operation of cutting, rearranging, & gluing newspaper clippings retrieves truth by deforming reality.”
George Grosz, Kapital und Militär wünschen sich: „Ein gesegnetes Neues Jahr!“, Die Pleite no. 6, 1920.
[Capital and Military wishing each other: “A blessed New Year!”]
Gillian Rose's Lectures // The Sussex tapes
* * *
“Tapes of Gillian’s lectures have been floating around the internet since at least the early 2010s. [...]
The first, introductory lecture is entitled “The Frankfurt School”.”
Excellent interview with E. Minassian on the situation in Israel/Palestine:
“It’s not a war, but rather the management of a surplus proletariat by the military means of total war, by a democratic, civilized state belonging to the central bloc of capitalist accumulation.”
“Whenever the critique of culture complains of materialism, it furthers the belief that the sin lies in peoples’ desire for consumer goods, and not in the organization of the whole which withholds these goods from them: satiety rather than hunger.”
– Adorno
To help build momentum and generate preorders for Vol. 3, we are now intermittently publishing essays from Vol. 2:
For a Dialectical Concept of Culture by Marcel Stoetzler
OPEN MARXISM
Critical Theory as Militant Enlightenment
Christos Memos
Dec 12 2024
“This book examines the Open Marxist tradition & how it develops the work of the early Frankfurt School [...] It charts the development of the different strands of OM:”
via
@anarchisation
“The whole is the truth and the whole is false. Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of "on the one hand and on the other," but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.”
— ‘Social Amnesia’, 1975.
PDF:
“[...] The structure of the world was built by the dead, they were paid in wages, and when the wages were spent and they were dead in the ground, what they had made continued to exist, these cities, roads and factories are their calcified bones.”
2/2
“Before the war, [...] pizza was only found in a few southern Italian cities, where it was made and eaten in the streets by the lower classes. His research suggests that the first fully fledged restaurant exclusively serving pizza opened not in Italy but in New York in 1911.”
@LegoRacers2
@NeeedlesEye
There’s a Marxist scholar in Italy whose entire career has been demonstrating the artificiality of Italian culinary traditions and he’s like the most hated man in Italy
“Antonio Negri passed away today. As a sort of tribute, here's our collection of articles (mostly critical) on autonomia.” — Aufheben
From Operaismo to Autonomist Marxism
The arcane of reproductive production
Keep on Smiling-questions on immaterial labour
“The uprooting of Palestinian communities all over the West Bank is not a project of the settlers, the bad ones, the good ones, or the other ones. It is a state project.”
An interview with Hagai El-Ad from
@btselem
:
“Notwithstanding all the problems, however, the fact remains that the Communist Party of Palestine was the only interwar organization in the country in which Jews and Arabs worked together politically.”
— Mario Kessler
“Not all wheels have to keep turning in a democracy based on workers’ councils: the demand itself implies a fear of the unemployed, who will disappear along with capitalist exploitation.”
— T. W. Adorno, ‘Theses on Need’, 1942.
“[Even] during the commodities boom, simultaneous deindustrialization and deagrarianization—occurring in the context of massive population growth—produced a plethora of unoccupied laborers, concentrated in massive slum-cities like Karachi, Lima, Jakarta.”
Inflation as the ‘privileged weapon against the refusal of work’.
Sergio Bologna (1974) quoted by
@SteveWright1958
, in “Revolution from Above? Money & Class-Composition in italian Operaismo”.
PDF:
“There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry anymore.” — Adorno.
“St. Paul’s injunction that ‘he who does not work does not eat’ thus outlived material scarcity in the food supply.” — J. Clegg &
@roblucas
, Three Agricultural Revolutions
Michael Roberts:
“In the past ten years the collective Kibbutzim have rapidly disappeared to be replaced by high-end suburban housing. Land values have skyrocketed with real estate speculation. There has been continual erosion in” 1/3
“[The] long depression ended with World War II, not with a new economic upswing. It took the war to bring about full employment without capitalist accumulation. Capital was not only destroyed in terms of values, it was also destroyed physically.” – P. M.
RIP Wu Ming 3 (1964-2023) --
“In the second half of the 1990s Luca was, among other things, Luther Blissett, whose name was Legion. At that time we wrote the novel that would change our lives.”
Inflation theory ftw:
• Paul Mattick (Sr.), Economics, Politics and The Age of Inflation (1977).
• Understanding Inflation: Paul Mattick (Jr.) with Friends of the Classless Society (Feb. 2024 // FIELD NOTES).
“Inflation can, of course, be abolished by reversing monetary and credit policies not so, however, the shortage of profits, which accelerates price inflation. Any restriction on the expansion of money and credit is reflected in a further decline in economic activity...”
“it bows down before the ineluctability of what is. But like Marx, Marcuse insisted that utopia is nothing if it is not realizable.” 4/4
— Ray Brassier, ‘Utopian Possibility’, introduction to Herbert Marcuse, ‘Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis Politics & Utopia’, 2022.
“more than anyone, fleshed out philosophically. Uniquely among critical theorists, Marcuse sought to show how the emancipation of the human proclaimed by Marx was not just social but ultimately existential in scope. Human liberation is the transcendence of transcendence;” 2/4
"God, punish England! Not for nationalist reasons but because this nation invented football. Football is a counterrevolutionary invention."
- Rote Jugend, the paper of the KAPD's youth wing.
“the overcoming of the superhuman — not the divinization of the human but the overcoming of the divinization required to compensate for human abjection. The worldly-wise “realism” that assures us such overcoming is impossible remains fundamentally religious in nature:” 3/4
En librairie le 3 mai.
“En 1950, dans l’isolement de son exil américain, Karl Korsch envisage pour un temps de revenir théoriquement sur le sens du projet communiste. Il en ressort une cinquantaine de pages dactylographiées sous le titre de Buch der Abschaffungen.”
“This year in China there have already been at least 130 factory strikes, more than triple the number in the whole of 2022, according to data compiled by the
@chinalabour
[...] The scale of those demonstrations, and the fact that they came as the country” 1/2
“The new powers of computing and communication developed in the 21th c. do not render the central planning of the 20th c. newly feasible. They merely make it possible to see as properly political problems that were once thought to be entirely technical.”
“The essential feature of the state is its class character; its autonomy is the surface form of appearance of its role in the class struggle.” — Simon Clarke, 'The State Debate', Macmillan, London, 1991.
“We need to know what capitalism is, but not in order to wonder at it and enumerate its sublimities. The concept of value is nothing, for communists, if not a cross-hairs that flashes red when we need to smash something.” — Jasper Bernes, The Test of Communism.
@outsidadgitator
@sorenmau
strikes again! 🚩
“What do we want communism to look like? Søren Mau discusses communist modes of production, Left utopian ideas, the transcendental power of capitalism, and his book, Mute Compulsion.”
via
@VersoBooks
Value in Motion // Beverley Best &
@abenanav
“What is this thing we call “value”? [...] where do more abstract commodities derive their value - whether it be a share in a corporation, or a piece of land, or an hour’s work? What is this measure”
// from
@IliasAlami
,
@JackCopley6
&
@moraitisalexis
:
The ‘wicked trinity’ of late capitalism: Governing in an era of stagnation, surplus humanity, and environmental breakdown
“The tension between solidaristic socialism and settler-colonialism, which Sabbagh-Khoury captures brilliantly throughout the book, was a constant since the foundation of the first Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz in 1926 and only grew bigger in the following decades.” 1/2
“But money under capitalism is not a benign accounting tool. Money is the form that human sociality must assume in a system of private production and mass dispossession.” –
@JackCopley6
1/x
🇰🇪
#Kenya
: Protester filmed smoking a tear gas canister during ongoing protests against proposed tax hikes. Kenyan President William Ruto has stated that he will not be signing the proposed financial bill after clashes erupted nationwide, which have now led to the deaths of at
new translation //
@artifices_
for
@endnotesjournal
🚩🏴
“What we are seeing is a struggle between capitalist fractions seeking to find a place in the sun in a new regime of accumulation, and part of the rural middle class resisting its definitive proletarianisation.”
🔴 good summary of the anti-cop uprising in Marseille & its repression:
“Two days after police killed Nahel Merzouk, the poorest big city in France exploded with anger. By Sunday, a crackdown had smothered the protests—& made residents even more fearful.”
“The task is clear enough: no one must go hungry anymore. But that will require establishing a material human community on the ruins of capital.”
via
@Cominsitu
"China's move into a "mixed economy" has created a wealth inequality crisis to rival any nation's; wildcat workers' strikes have become increasingly common, though they are not often reported in the news."