"Money and Crisis:

Marx as Correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune, 1856–57"

Sergio Bologna

[Editorial Note: This article was written in 1973. It was a key article in developing the theoretical base of the newly emerging politics of working-class autonomy. This translation, presented here in five parts, was made by Ed Emery and John Merrington for an anticipated volume to be published by Red Notes: Selected Writings of Sergio Bologna. For further details, write to Red Notes, BP15, 2a St Paul's Road, London N1 UK]

At the beginning of 1855, in a series of articles in the Neuer Oder Zeitung (11, 12, 20 and 25 January and in successive articles in the following months) Marx confronted the problem of cyclical crises and questions related to the British banking reforms of 1844. Already there were signs of the coming world recession of 1856–58 and it was urgent to set about analysing its causes.

Marx's unpublished notes on Geldwesen, Kreditwesen, Krisen ("Essence of Money, Credit and Crisis") also date from the same period — November 1854 to January 1855. The relation between the money form and general crisis must thus have been clear to him before the direct experience of the crisis of 1857. Even so, it seems historically legitimate to locate in this experience a decisive turning point in Marx, relating the early stages of his project for Capital to the need for building the base for an international revolutionary working-class party. It seems likely that this convergence of his theoretical and practical work would not have been so solidly achieved had it not been for the close scrutiny and stage-by-stage observation that he devoted to the monetary crisis of 1857. I have taken this as my starting point for a reading of the articles which Marx was writing about the crisis, articles which appeared in the New York Daily Tribune between June 1856 and December 1858.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

War and Peace in the Global Economy

New York City, Dec. 28-30, 2005

The Society for Social and Political Philosophy (SSPP):

Historical, Continental, and Feminist Perspectives

Call for Papers For the Society's Meetings To Be Held in Conjunction With the American Philosophical Association (APA) in 2005


The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

1) WAR: the rhetorics and realities of war, including: wars on poverty, drugs, terror, etc., current conflicts (Sudan, Iraq, Congo, etc.), pre-emptive war, the justifying of war, civilians and war, depleted uranium munitions, the selling of war, war and empire, “war by other means”, proxy wars, resources wars, war and nationalism, war and genocide.


  2) PEACE: the politics and culture of peace, including: human rights, peace movements, perpetual peace, stateless peoples, minority rights, internal conflicts, the UN, the international criminal court, resource distribution, truth and reconciliation committees.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2005 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2005). The meeting will be scheduled for December 28-30, 2005 in New York City. Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY. Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to papers@sspp.us. For information on the society, and to become a member, please consult our web page at www.sspp.us. For other questions or information, please email us at information@sspp.us.

An anonymous coward writes:

Work/Leisure in the Global Economy

The Society for Social and Political Philosophy (SSPP):

Historical, Continental, and Feminist Perspectives

Call for Papers For the Society's Meetings To Be Held in Conjunction With the SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) in 2005

The SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to:

1) WORK: in all of its aspects: economic, political, ontological, and cultural. Topics might include: paid and unpaid work, mental and manual labor, “immaterial” and “affective” labor, work and gender, work and race, work and domesticity, the ethics of work and productivity, labor movements, “global supply chains,” child labor, sex workers and international sex trafficking, alienation, living wage movements, worker rights in the developing world, the WTO, bi-lateral trade agreements, etc.

2) LEISURE: in its various aspects and associated realities, including: consumer culture, conspicuous consumption, the tourist industry – types of tourism (eco-, sex-, resort-), entertainment, cultural capital, class and leisure, gender and leisure, race and leisure, leisure in the non-west, the history of leisure, leisure time, philosophy as a leisure activity.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2005 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2005). The meeting will be scheduled for late October/early November 2005, at a place yet to be determined. Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY. Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to papers@sspp.us.

For information on the society, and to become a member, please consult our web page at http://www.sspp.us. For other questions or information, please email us at information@sspp.us.

s0metim3s writes:

"Critique of Formal Democracy and Representation"

Alessandro Pandolfi

War is what allows the populist sovereign to realise the identification between poeple and sovereignty. War is the use by sovereignty of communication, what I call poverty: the fact of not having the option to subtract oneself form a mechanism where the will of all is immediately the will of the sovereign.

Sovereignty and multitude break this Janus but insist on the same points, and constitute the real. Our teachers told us that this relation is an absolute dualism, between command and the multitude the same tensions arise. Both from the side of command and of multitude we have exited representation (for all the reasons we know already). But why has the multitude exited from representation? There are reasons to believe the multitude is a non representative subject.

First, the multitude must be kept in political passivity and in productive activism, active in production and consumption. It is the most active subject ever conceived in the history materialist production. Second, the latitude of the multitude is unlimited. There is no political codified status to it. The political is all in production, as Virno says, and this makes political representation intolerable. Thirdly, disobedience has no relation to representaiton because it contests the fundamental law of sovereignty: the princile of political obligation. Fourthly exodus, we try and build new grammars, so how can we go to parliament and dislocate the issues of a political argument? It can only mean not accepting the very parliamentary representaiton itself. Fifthly the relation between norm and life: in the multitude the norm is no longer transcendent but rather it is life norm, the path life gives itself as it goes along. So how is this representable?

[The rest of the translation, by Arianna Bove, is here: Generations Online ]

Quirk writes
Venture Communism

Venture Communism is a revolutionary investment strategy, a form of workers struggle designed to enclose labour into an anarcho-syndicalist economy which, in the endgame, literally buys the world from the Capitalists.

-=The Bluffer's Guide to the Political Economy=-

Wealth and Poverty describe the extremes of entitlement to the productivity of the economy, if your share is large, you are wealthy, if your share is small, you are poor.

All productive capacity of the economy is the result of the application of the three factors of production: Land, Labour and Capital.

Quirk writes:

"Venture Communism"

Dmytri Kleiner

Venture Communism is a revolutionary investment strategy, a form of workers struggle designed to enclose labour into an anarcho-syndicalist economy which, in the endgame, literally buys the world from the Capitalists.

The Bluffer's Guide to the Political Economy

Wealth and Poverty describe the extremes of entitlement to the productivity of the economy, if your share is large, you are wealthy, if your share is small, you are poor.

All productive capacity of the economy is the result of the application of the three factors of production: Land, Labour and Capital.

"Theses of Resistance"

Daniel Bensaïd, Viento Sur

We are faced with a double responsibility: the transmission of a tradition
threatened by conformism, and the exploration of the uncertain contours of
the future.

In the course of the last decade (since the disintegration of the Soviet
Union and German unification), something came to an end. But what? Was it
the “Short 20th Century” of which Eric Hobsbawm and other historians speak,
beginning with World War I and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Or is it the short period that followed World War II, marked by the twin
superpowers of the Cold War, and characterized in the imperialist centres by
sustained capital accumulation and “Fordist” regulation?

Or again, is it the great cycle in the history of capitalism and the
workers’ movement, opened by the capitalist development of the 1880s,
subsequent colonial expansion and the blossoming of the modern labour
movement, symbolized by the formation of the Second International?

hpwombat writes:

"Why We Desire Destruction and Not Socialism"
Heretic and High Priest Wombat, KSC

What is Socialism?

The movements for socialism cannot exist without capitalism and their logic is that of civilization. Critiques of the totality cannot develop within the framework of these movements, only certain things are of value to be critiqued and these movements always have an alternative. If they are not utopian, which to some socialists is desirable, but not necessary, then they are progressive. Reduce pollutants but don't question the logic of work and the technology that drives it. We must put socialism to the question and its ultimate strategy for complete domination, rather than for the end of it.

First there is state socialism, a name we give to the movements and their strategies for achieving progress through state power. All of socialism is justified by some method or appeal to democracy and so participating in a democratic process, such as the election of representatives is just a move towards expanding democracy. According to many socialists, if the majority were given democracy, they would choose progressive policies and may even choose socialism over capitalism, should such a thing ever come to the ballot. Some state socialists are wary of democracy as it stands for one reason or another and opts instead to lead, as a vanguard, the movements for socialism towards their ascension over the state through undemocratic means, but not because they reject democracy but rather they fight for the future of democracy.

Local, Islamic and Global
The Petroleum Commons
George Caffentzis, Counterpunch

1. All land and natural resources (including mineral resources) within the Ijaw territory belong to Ijaw communities and are the basis of our survival.

2. We cease to recognize all undemocratic decrees that rob our
peoples' communities of the right to ownership and control of our lives and resources, which were enacted without our participation and dissent. These include the Land Use Decree and The Petroleum Decree. — The Kaiama Declaration (December 1998)

Introduction: Oil and Water

The struggles over the ownership of the two most important political liquids of this era, petroleum and water, have had different fates. Though water has been proclaimed to be either private, state or common property throughout history, the novel feature of this neo-liberal period has been the move by corporations to totally privatize it. The powerful struggles waged against the corporate privatization of water from Cochabamba (Bolivia) to Soweto (South Africa) have focused world attention on the question: Who owns water? The consequent efforts to keep water as a common property on a local and global level are now among the most important initiatives of the anti-globalization movement.


Petroleum, on the other hand, has in the last hundred and fifty years been considered exclusively as either private or state property. Thus, the pages of the history books on the petroleum industry have been filled with "magnates" like John D. Rockefeller or government "leaders" like Saddam Hussain and Winston Churchill. Similarly, the "struggle over oil" has been largely seen as a struggle between oil companies and governments, since its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century.

Saroj Giri writes:

"Against ‘Reality’
The Maoists in South Asia"

Saroj Giri

In his essay "After the Orgy", Jean Baudrillard, the French post-modernist philosopher, talks about the coming into circulation of revolutionary forces and ideas and their subsequent castration into another marketable social configuration or politically correct idea. So lots of once-revolutionary ideas have today become part of daily parlance, completely punctured of not just their original force but also their meaning. Rather, the perverse recycling of these ideas into the melting pot of liberal discourse has gone on to provide it with an undeserved moral strength and legitimacy. Thus today, with everything from feminism and gay rights to post colonial discourse having gone on to serve the liberal multicultural consensus of global capital, we see that we are living in a hegemonic world order where any attempt to go beyond and concretely envision another world is dismissed by invoking the spectre of 'totalitarianism': that any project for radical transformation of society will almost invariably lead us to totalitarianism.