On Bernard Stiegler’s Marx-ish Work
Nice guy as Bernard was, a little self absorbed should never be held against anyone who had to grow up in France, no? But many loved him, and…
Tag: capitalism
Gavin Smith: Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour
Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations]…
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Book Review)
by Ellie Plumb In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Seth M. Holmes seeks to uncover the synergistic effects that citizenship, race, ethnicity, and…
Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea (Book Review)
by Connie Scott “Fish simply appear in supermarkets” (p.209), writes Penny McCall Howard. Most consumers have little or no awareness of where their fish comes from, or of…
Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part…
Time, History, Politics, Art, Revolt – not being crushed to bits. This is a MUST SEE – of all things going on in the Integrated hyperventalated Spectacle this year, why, its Tom Buyard, a rare treat that will be worth doing the prep reading for and tuning in ready to roll.
Seriously do not miss this. Some call him Mr Modest, to others he is The Tattooist (with a nod to Raymond Redington’s Black List) but Tom Bunyards’s Spectacle/S.I.…
Coconuts
Sir Fancis Drake – whose lucre profits helped Queen Elizabeth get out of debt and invest in the Levant and then the East India Company, from which in…
Cleaver: concluding thoughts
Cleaver leaves with a final bit about education in his conclusion that also seems sensible (if still US-o-centric) : ‘We have many potential allies among our schoolmates or…
Predator journals target ISSH2021 – be warned.
So, a process warning to those not used to getting chatty friendly emails from parasite journals that will charge you to publish. The ISSH2021 conference gets hit by…
Opium and Political Economy in Bengal
On why I think Marx’s writing style is misrepresented by the all-too-dour and serious commentators on Capital – you know, the famous ones published by big presses or…
For those about to be assessed, Harry Cleaver helps cut throught he must…
To those doing assignments, be it single or collective projects, here’s a reminder to resist the stress and do it for your own reasons. This is another condensed…
Rafael Wainer: COVID-19: Complicity, complacency, and connections
Image 1: Social distancing signs. Photo by ©Acabashi CC-BY-SA 4.0 To understand the massive world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a sociology of complicity. Since the different…
Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies
a book from 2004 – people didn’t get the title that much, but Derrida, Bataille (the best bit is on Bataille – reclaimed for the left). From books4you.…
Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his…
Aurora Donzelli on her book, Method of Desire
interview by Setrag Manoukian https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/methods-of-desire-language-morality-and-affect-in-neoliberal-indonesia/ Setrag Manoukian: It is reductive to assign a narrow t…
Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgos Poulimenakos: The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%
In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the climate change argument makes…
Digital Psychedelia: Hidden Experience and the Challenge of Paranoia by Tehseen Noorani
Introduction Over the past 15 years, several groups of researchers have sought to use clinical trials to reintroduce psychedelics to mainstream society, reporting impressive efficacy from trials a…
Jaime A Alves: F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility. The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing…
#BookReview: Terraformed
Terraformed by Joy White aims at making sense and contextualising the vulnerability and inequality experienced by the Afrodiasporic population of the UK. The author describes her effort as…
Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past…
A Sandbox for a Specific Type of Narcissist – Clubhouse, the Allure of Live Audio and Dangerous Rabbit Holes
A nasal voice is rambling on in a long monologue about how to best pitch a startup on Clubhouse when I log on sometime in March. It is…
Entrepreneurship and Technologies
Everyone is an entrepreneur – a new ethos is sweeping through our economic world. While the promises of ‘being your own boss’ and ‘deciding about your working hours’…
Colonial Hyperbole, with gaps
There are some crimes that are longer-term than others… As I am finding from spending part of the morning exploring archival images, such as this one. A ‘British…
Class – and critique – in Bad Marxism, poking fun.
I was looking something up and stumbled upon a quote of me that I did not recognise – that class ‘does not make much sense’. I am pretty…