Most know something of Garrett Hardin’s in/famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Fewer have read that essay carefully. In many ways, it and Hardin’s subsequent work are the basis of arguments that there are ‘genuine concerns’ about migration. Continue reading
Tag: marx
Identitarianism
Adorno coined the term ‘identitarianism’ in Negative Dialectics (1966), prompted by critique of Kantian and Hegelian philosophies. Continue reading
Mapping precariousness
The first part of a chapter, titled “Encoding the Law the Household and the Standardisation Of Uncertainty,” for an edited volume on mapping precariousness. Continue reading
The commons
The first paragraph of a chapter I wrote on “The Commons,” for a forthcoming edited volume on gender and nature. Continue reading
Contractual Performance, Labor & the Art of Life
An extract from a 2014 conference paper, most of which has been rewritten into draft chapters for Infrastructures of Uncommon Forms. But reminded of it, posted here, for Kesha. (Scroll down for the video performance.) Continue reading
Waged work, service work and ‘socially necessary labour’
The wage contract is not identical or commensurate in the sense that the labour it ‘represents’ is or can be identical to the exchange it governs. Continue reading
Walter Benjamin’s “The Author As Producer”
There have been many arguments made about the politics of authorship. Yet few of those situated it as long ago as Walter Benjamin did, not only in relation to labor, but in terms of the changing economic patterns and technologies that served to redefine both authorship and labor and, for that matter, any distinctions between them. This, in brief, is Benjamin’s singular contribution to a discussion about authorship. Continue reading
The Law of Value, Capitalist Spirits and Financialized Bonds
[This is the abstract to the second and forthcoming essay in the series on financial bonds.
Commodification
‘Commodification’ is often used as a short-hand way of defining what capitalism does, but all too often it’s used as a synonym for transaction or exchange. Yet buying and selling are not specific to capitalism and, more importantly, there are consequences in organising a critique of, or opposition to capitalism on the grounds that ‘markets’ are bad.
Footnotes
By way of settling an odd bet, here are some footnotes from an old essay on financial crisis, national debt and disciplinary practice in the 1930s (pdf): Continue reading
The Gift of Surplus Labour
[Excerpted from Contract & Contagion, pp.163-64]
The conservative critique of capitalism is preoccupied […] with taking capitalism to task for setting up crises of its own realisation, as in the expansion of debts that cannot – or will not – be repaid. It is concerned not with the question of moving beyond the interrelated dynamics of expansion and crisis, but of restoring the very foundations of capitalism in the retrieval of the conditions of gratuitous labour. Continue reading
Cognitive Labor, Buried Treasure, and Fictive Capital
In 1843, the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper published the winning entry in its writing competition, awarding Edgar Allan Poe the sum of $100 for his short story “The Gold-Bug.” Continue reading
