“No, what I’ve said in a sense suggests that they’re not, in that you can be a good leftist and thinker of the anti-capitalist movement without being particularly indebted to Marxism. I wouldn’t lean too heavily on the need for Marx to be right, though it’s true I suppose that Marxism has been the mainstream anti-capitalist critique within the left. What strikes me is the dramatic way the situation has changed since, say, the turn of the Millennium. At the turn of the Millennium, history was supposedly over. Capitalism was in a peculiarly confident and arrogant phase. And then, from the fall of the World Trade Centre onwards, there has been the so-called War against Terror, the enormous capitalist crisis, the Arab Spring, societies like Greece teetering on the brink of radical change, a majority of American youth saying they prefer socialism to capitalism. Nobody could have predicted that ten years ago. So I think that what’s brought Marxism or at least socialism back on the agenda is of course the capitalist crisis. It’s not because people have suddenly started reading Marx or a new generation of leftists has spontaneously emerged. It’s that crisis always makes a system visible, it always makes its limits visible, and systems don’t normally like that, and therefore people are able to cast a new critical eye on them.”
—

Terry Eagleton responding to the question, “Do you think at this point in history “Marxism”, “communism”, “socialism”, “leftism” are basically interchangeable? Would you insist on sharp distinctions?”

Barker, Alexander and Niven, Alex. “An Interview with Terry Eagleton.” The Oxonian Review. 4 June 2012. Web. 4 June 2012. [source] h/t: ayjay)

I’m very fond of the final three sentences.

Jun. 4 2012
Via oxonianreview.org
#terry eagleton #marx #marxism #socialism #capitalism
97 notes
thenoobyorker: The album cover to Lil B’s, Berkeley, California based rapper, new album titled I’m Gay (I’m Happy). The first pane states Slavery, the second panes states Mental Slavery while the third pane majestically proclaims Mental Freedom. As many of you are aware, the album deals with the psychological conditions of the middle pane while evoking inescapable past struggles as he yearns for true freedom, a freedom encompassed by the phrase mental freedom. Therefore one is unsurprised to learn that Lil B consistently evokes slavery and other somber moments in black history throughout the album as he critiques the many forms of slavery that impede the progress today towards a complete mental freedom. And the rap game/ It’s the slave trade/ No time for meditation/ Turning into robots/ The Devil is money/ It’s not even human/ The people die for a piece of paper/ It’s so stupid -from the song “Unchain Me” [link to song] Mental slavery/ Niggas be hanging off of trees in the woods, like the hood/ It’s more than Martin Luther King, fighting for a dream/ Watch me go against everything you believe/ They desrespect you tryna spark a dream/ Everybody knows it’s easy to fail but it’s harder to think… -from “Trapped in a Prison” [link to song] Lil B should consider reading Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. Edited for length purposes but this is Lil B.

thenoobyorker:

The album cover to Lil B’s, Berkeley, California based rapper, new album titled I’m Gay (I’m Happy).

The first pane states Slavery, the second panes states Mental Slavery while the third pane majestically proclaims Mental Freedom. As many of you are aware, the album deals with the psychological conditions of the middle pane while evoking inescapable past struggles as he yearns for true freedom, a freedom encompassed by the phrase mental freedom. Therefore one is unsurprised to learn that Lil B consistently evokes slavery and other somber moments in black history throughout the album as he critiques the many forms of slavery that impede the progress today towards a complete mental freedom.

And the rap game/ It’s the slave trade/ No time for meditation/ Turning into robots/ The Devil is money/ It’s not even human/ The people die for a piece of paper/ It’s so stupid

-from the song “Unchain Me” [link to song]

Mental slavery/ Niggas be hanging off of trees in the woods, like the hood/ It’s more than Martin Luther King, fighting for a dream/ Watch me go against everything you believe/ They desrespect you tryna spark a dream/ Everybody knows it’s easy to fail but it’s harder to think…

-from “Trapped in a Prison” [link to song]

Lil B should consider reading Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society.

Edited for length purposes but this is Lil B.

Apr. 12 2012
Via thenoobyorker
#mental-slavery #capitalism #exploitation #lil b #marxism #music
24 notes
“If “freedom” can be said to exist in Foucault, it is tied to his conception of life as alterity and biopolitics as inseparable from the productive, “natural” dimension of human existence as the element in which power has to function. So famously, he said power becomes the “power to make live and let die,” but there is a limit here. There is something radically other about life that exceeds the grasp of power. This is because technologies of government/security control the milieu of a population but are unable to completely penetrate its biological processes. Therefore these technologies only function in a regulatory way. The political tendency towards systemization (i.e., “resistance”) is based on the presupposition of the impotence of power. The residual power of life is disclosed not as merely power over life but as power of life. There is an Inherent unpredictability here that serves as the limit that governmental power cannot overcome, but it is also, ironically, the source for power (basically the idea of exponential increase). Life remains resistance to biopolitical calculations then, but it is not because of a willing agent-subject. It is tied rather, to life as force of chance and to the capability for error. Foucault’s challenge to biopolitics was to conceived of a politics of disorganization that affirms life without finality, ends, or goals. Here’s where Deleuze’s conception of life as “ontology of force” becomes a helpful corollary. Anyway, you can see the radically different conception of life/the subject/politics here that only a very deliberate misreading could mistake for “liberalism” or “anarchy.”
—

Rhizombie on Bio Fooko 

To be fair, communities of thinkers create journals and they have to fill the pages of these journals with something. I guess.

For the record, I want a government job where I am allowed unprecedented access to “penetrate” biological processes. 

Mar. 9 2012
#foucault #power #biopolitics #anarchism #liberalism #libertarianism #marxism
69 notes
“Let’s give the President credit where credit is due. Obama is a very sophisticated Marxist philosopher, combining the highly advanced social manipulation tactics of Alinsky with careful, long developed insights in how to craft a modern, neo-Marxist message to sell to a majority of modern America. This is what we heard in last night’s State of the Union.”
—

Peter Ferrara, “Gingrich Frames the Debate”  h/t: interruptions

Holy fuck, what did I miss last night? For those that did watch, was the SOTU reminiscent of the speeches made by Antonio Gramsci or was it more of a Perry Anderson neo-Marxist message? 

(via in-unitatespiritussanctiregnat)

Jan. 25 2012
Via interruptions
#politics #Marxism #Alinsky #Gingrich #Obama
45 notes
“Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.”
— What? George Will in The Washington Post. Okay.
Dec. 3 2011
#newt gingrich #marx #marxism
32 notes
Karl Marx may have died 128 years ago but he’s just as fly as ever, The classical economists long ago foresaw that an economy defined by constant expansion would one day give way to what John Stuart Mill called the ‘stationary state’. The idea has gained a new currency in Marxist writing of recent years, and in its contemporary version tends to locate the limits to growth in the depletion of natural resources or in the exhaustion of productivity as the share of manufacturing in the world economy shrinks and that of services expands. Of course, peak oil or soil exhaustion might easily coincide with faltering productivity. Harvey doesn’t spell out why growth must have a stop, and the outlines of an ecologically stable and politically democratic future socialism remain as blurry in his later work as they do almost everywhere else. At the moment Marxism seems better prepared to interpret the world than to change it. But the first achievement is at least due wider recognition, which with the next crisis, or subsequent spasm of the present one, it may begin to receive. The quote comes via Marx Versus Capitalism Versus You over at Naked Capitalism, but it originally appears in the article How Much Is Too Much? from the London Review of Books. The Naked Capitalism article is quite a bit wrong but so are most people when it comes to Marx, right Brad DeLong?

Karl Marx may have died 128 years ago but he’s just as fly as ever,

The classical economists long ago foresaw that an economy defined by constant expansion would one day give way to what John Stuart Mill called the ‘stationary state’. The idea has gained a new currency in Marxist writing of recent years, and in its contemporary version tends to locate the limits to growth in the depletion of natural resources or in the exhaustion of productivity as the share of manufacturing in the world economy shrinks and that of services expands. Of course, peak oil or soil exhaustion might easily coincide with faltering productivity. Harvey doesn’t spell out why growth must have a stop, and the outlines of an ecologically stable and politically democratic future socialism remain as blurry in his later work as they do almost everywhere else. At the moment Marxism seems better prepared to interpret the world than to change it. But the first achievement is at least due wider recognition, which with the next crisis, or subsequent spasm of the present one, it may begin to receive.

The quote comes via Marx Versus Capitalism Versus You over at Naked Capitalism, but it originally appears in the article How Much Is Too Much? from the London Review of Books.

The Naked Capitalism article is quite a bit wrong but so are most people when it comes to Marx, right Brad DeLong?

Oct. 24 2011
#karl marx #david harvey #marxism #crisis #economics
25 notes