There’s a new wind blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to [...]
Posts under ‘Social Theory’
Global Corporate Networks
Image at right: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue. The fact of highly concentrated global capitalist networks — as well as the related question of a transnational capitalist class — will be familiar ones [...]
What do we recognize a revolution?
Wu Ming is a novelist collective, a pseudonym for a group of Italian novelists who have written several novels, some of which (Manituana, Altai, and 54) have been translated into English. Rather than a sociological or analytic approach (‘what are the necessary features of a revolution?’) these two members of Wu Ming take a rather [...]
Doesn’t the class struggle affect economic developments?
We’ve posted a number of essays on this site relating to analyses of the current crisis, the trans-nationalization of capital (etc.), their effects on social structures and the conditions of the people, and the implications of all of this for politics and class struggle. But don’t implications run both ways? Nat W. has been an [...]
No new deal!
I’ve started to think that there are some analogies between Negri and Zizek: a similar prolificality of work, and what I’ve begun to see as a similar playfulness (although Negri suffers in this comparison, Zizek being both more prolific and funnier). Be that as it may, this little piece begins playfully enough, but leads into [...]
The crisis of the capitalist state and the crisis of the left
What are the parameters of the situation we face today? How serious? What sort of period are we in today: what time is it? What are our political needs? These are the sorts of questions — important and urgent — posed (although not in these words) by the following. Consider the ruling class responses in [...]
Pulling the Monster Down
The following consists of several excerpts from an interview with William K. Carroll, whose work we’ve featured previously on this site. Carroll’s research focus is on the contemporary capitalist political economy and transformative social movements. The author of a number of books, his Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class is due out in December. These [...]
What is the distinction between war and peace?
One of the legacies of the past decade — the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the “war on terror,” the attacks on civil liberties, and now the financial crisis and deepest recession of the post-WW2 era — has been a resuscitation of something like “golden age” thinking: the idea that there was a time before [...]
Eddy Laing: Why Historical Materialism Matters
Why historical materialism matters By Eddy Laing At the core of Marxism is the methodology of historical materialism (HM), which “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.” 1 As developed by Marx and Engels, the dialectical materialist conception [...]
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