NY News and Letters invites you to join a series of classes on:

"Alternatives to Capitalism" Classes

Sundays in Spring, 2004, New York City

39 West 14th Street, Rm. 205 (Ring bell #3, Identity House), Manhattan

Free admission; free and open discussion. Most readings can be purchased from us. Call (212) 663-3631 for more information, or e-mail nandl@ igc.org and ask about
New York classes. You can visit our website at www.newsandletters.org. Classes continue every other Sunday.

Class 2: Value, Exchange Value, and Freely Associated Labor? — April 4
Speaker: Andrew Kliman, 7:00-9:15 p.m. (Daylight Savings Time)

"Socialism" is often posed in terms of whether "capital should be individual or common." Marx's rejection to this way of posing the issue is discussed in The Poverty of Philosophy and "Critique of the Gotha Program." Marx's view that, "It is totally impossible to reconstitute a society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it," permeates his 1875 "Critique," which is taken up in Dunayevskaya's "A New Revision of Marxian Economics."

"A Universal History of Contingency:

Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism"

Jason Read, Borderlands

 

It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference (you know, that much heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures, the one that we are told we 'need so badly' in our age of dispersion and specialization where 'hope' is lacking). One must not look for a 'philosophy' amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel. —Michel Foucault (1983)

Retrospective

1. One of the difficult characteristics of the writing of Gilles Deleuze, alone and in collaboration with Félix Guattari, is, in Deleuze's terms, its extremely "untimely" nature. Philosophical and theoretical positions that have generally been abandoned or rendered untenable by the passage of time are advocated by Deleuze and Guattari only to be subsequently twisted so as to be rendered unrecognizable. There are multiple specific examples of this: the turn to vitalism, to naturalism, or to pre-critical philosophical positions, but more generally it is possible to say that Deleuze and Guattari write as if the general breakdown of the lofty aspirations of philosophy, the critique of metaphysics and of the systematizing pretensions of philosophy, had not happened. Or do they? Even as Deleuze and Guattari seem to produce a metaphysics and even a cosmology that encompasses everything from the geological history of the earth to the contemporary technological and political transformations of capital they do so with such a perverse humor that it is impossible to assume what is at stake in such writing. Is this simply the worst sort of totalizing metaphysical philosophizing, or is it all just some sort of joke? Or is something altogether different happening — another practice of philosophy, that is neither a return of the grand systematic aspirations of philosophy nor the dismantling of it?

Full article continues here.

"Reversion of History"

Jean Baudrillard

Somewhere in the course of the eighties of the twentieth century, history took a turn in another direction. Once it passed its apogee in time, once it reached the peak of the curve in its evolution, its solstice of history, a sliding back of events set in, an unfolding of inverted meaning. As in the case of cosmic space, historical space-time would also have a curvature. By way of the same chaotic effect in time as in space, things go faster and faster as they approach their culmination, just like the flow of water speeds up mysteriously as it approaches the waterfall.

"Radical Thought"

Jean Baudrillard

The novel is a work of art not so much because of its inevitable resemblance with life but because of the insuperable differences that distinguish it from life. — Stevenson

And so is thought! Thought is not so much prized for its inevitable convergences with truth as it is for the insuperable divergences that separate the two.

It is not true that in order to live one has to believe in one's own existence. There is no necessity to that. No matter what, our consciousness is never the echo of our own reality, of an existence set in "real time." But rather it is its echo in "delayed time," the screen of the dispersion of the subject and of its identity — only in our sleep, our unconscious, and our death are we identical to ourselves. Consciousness, which is totally different from belief, is more spontaneously the result of a challenge to reality, the result of accepting objective illusion rather than objective reality. This challenge is more vital to our survival and to that of the human species than the belief in reality and in existence, which always refers to spiritual consolations pertaining to another world. Our world is such as it is, but that does not make it more real in any respect. "The most powerful instinct of man is to be in conflict with truth, and with the real."

"Zizek is not a Radical?"

Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey

In the world of radical theory, Slavoj Zizek has
attained the status of intellectual superstar. Terry
Eagleton claims Zizek "provides the best intellectual
high since Anti-Oedipus", and with good reason. (1)
Zizek's work is passionate, exciting, funny,
frustrating, all-consuming, interdisciplinary and
paradigm-shaking. Further, he endorses immediately
"political" positions and claims that seem
uncompromisingly "radical" when compared to rivals
such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Judith
Butler. He relentlessly unmasks those he sees as
closet liberals in his enduring war on the terrorism
of political moderation, from "radical democracy" to
multiculturalism, denouncing all attempts to improve
liberal capitalism from within its own horizon. (2)

Moreover, Zizek's radicalism seems refreshingly
original and relevant whilst daring to confront the
existing socio-symbolic system. But is this
appearance of a radical break with a flawed present
sustainable?

Francisco Trindade writes:

"On the Confederation, or the Proudhonian Federal Structure"

Proudhon ignores completely the characteristics of the political model that permits [estender] the State of right to the relations between the nations. For more on this, and on the technical responsability for the totality of the site, please visit:

http://www.franciscotrindade.com

"The Limits of Networking"

A Reply to Lovink and Schneider's "Notes on the State of Networking"

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker

The question we aim to explore here is: what is the principle of political
organization or control that stitches a network together? Writers like
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have helped answer this question in the
socio-political sphere using the concept of "Empire." Like a network,
Empire is not reducible to any single state power, nor does it follow an
architecture of pyramidal hierarchy. Empire is fluid, flexible, dynamic,
and far-reaching. In that sense, the concept of Empire helps us greatly to
begin thinking about political organization in networks. But like Lovink
and Schneider, we are concerned that no one has yet adequately answered
this question for the technological sphere of bits and atoms.

ringfingers writes:

"Political Notes: Anti-Streaming Activism"


Arthur Kroker

In the same way that the early hegemony of the
capitalist bourgeoisie called into existence its
necessary objective political antithesis - the
industrial proletariat - so too, the swift emergence
of the virtual class from the ruins of the industrial
economy marks the beginning of a new cycle of
political economy. Lacking a definitive name but not a
definite historical presence, this "anti-virtual"
class takes to the streets and to the net in
spontaneous forms of struggle that quickly resemble a
Paris Commune rebelling against the digital mode of
production.

Momentum Journal writes MOMENTUM
ANNOUNCING A NEW JOURNAL OF RADICAL POLITICS


          In the years since the WTO demonstrations in Seattle, there has been renewed interest in radical politics. A movement has emerged that is seriously engaging with questions about our understanding of how the world operates, the kind of world we’d like to see, and what strategies we might use in our struggles. Yet there are very few spaces, aside from cyberspace, in which these discussions can take place in a focused and ongoing manner. We feel this void prevents our movements from actually moving, from thinking and reflecting on the words and deeds that animate our political work. This is why we have decided to generate Momentum.

         

For those who would like to see and hear a recent talk on the "Dance of the Dialectic" that
Bertell Ollman gave at the Rethinking Marxism conference last fall in Amherst, Massachusetts, check out Cultural Logic at this URL:

Ollman