In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Common Notions)
Language: English
Pages: 300
ISBN: 1604863358
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Although information technology, immaterial production, financialization, and globalization have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that transcends its violent origins, this collection of essays by autonomist Marxist George Caffentzis argues that instead of being in a period of major social and economic novelty, the course of the last decades has been a return to the vehement conflicts present at the advent of capitalism. Emphasizing class struggles that have proliferated across the social body of global capitalism, Caffentzis shows how these struggles are so central to the dynamic of the system that even the most sophisticated machines cannot liberate capitalism from class struggle and the need for labor. The writings draw upon a careful rereading of Marx’s thought in order to elucidate political concerns of the day and document the peculiar way in which capital perpetuates violence and proliferates misery on a world scale.
Reducción y combate del animal humano
labor-power is the crucial object for study of capitalist production. Just as thermodynamics gives us the measure to compare all sorts of human energy expenditure so, too, a Turing machine analysis allows us to see the quantitative basis of skill. It makes precise the “different proportions in which different sorts or labour are reduced to unskilled labor as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by
capitalist control did not reside in mass territorial war but in molecular, capillary and diffuse infections needing precise yet extensive application. Could a Nike really “solve” the “problem of El Salvador”? The publicist for the “new strategic thinking” had been unquestionably James Fallows (and his book, National Defense, published in the first Reagan year), who not only laid out the main arguments of the approach but nicely captured the tone of a former Vietnam war resister who had come
decisions”), on the other side, they claimed to be able to cut a deal with the Russians that would safeguard them and their real estate from the only conceivable threat to their total existence: nuclear war. They promised a saner, more reasonable, polyvalent world. No more titanic struggles between the forces of Good against the “focus of evil” fought with MXs and lasers, just a few trade wars and border disputes, a limited dose of social democracy in selected areas of the Third World and some
“outside”—similar to the way that record and film industry bosses deal with their “artists.” This is especially true of cognitive labor, the embodiment of “living knowledge.” Instead of the factory, the production of contemporary cognitive capitalism has as its model the putting-out system where the merchant provides the wages, inputs, and at times the machines and receives the product in return. In fact, there is a deep relationship between an increasing workers’ autonomy in the production
understand this Marxist paradox one must examine Helmholtz’s claims like “Perpetual motion [machines] produce work” and “work is money” more carefully from Marx’s perspective. Machines enter into the value-production process, according to Marx’s theory of machines, as constant instead of variable capital. Their value is preserved and transferred during the production process to the resultant commodity by the labor expended in the process. This labor has a twofold character, however, for it is