Remaining in his lofty (but admittedly indispensable) realm of abstraction, seemingly oblivious to the concrete history of the “real movement that abolishes existing conditions” as the force which drives the evolution of its inverted form, capital, Postone only gets it half right
In the past forty years, it has become easier to draw a sharp line between Ricardo’s and Marx’s theory of value. and between Ricardo’s economics and Marx’s critique of political economy.
It was 1971. We were in our early 20’s and we were mad.
The Western invention of the idea of race in the 17th century, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, was not merely a degradation of the peoples of color to whom it was applied. Such a degradation had to be preceded, and accompanied, by a comparable degradation of the view of man within Western culture itself.
Communism is neither a doctrine sprung from the head of a world reformer, nor a political organization; it is, as Marx said in the Manifesto, “the real movement unfolding before our eyes”.
It is not often recognized that, prior to the 17th and 18th centuries, the period which Western history calls the Enlightenment, the concept of race did not exist.
However unpalatable it may be to do so in the contemporary climate, where the Enlightenment project is everywhere under attack by Nietzscheans, “cultural studies” ideologues, Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, Foucaultians, Afrocentrists and (most) ecologists, it is necessary to discuss the limits of the Enlightenment in order to defend it, and to go beyond it.
Sections of French and, more recently, American academic discourse in the “human sciences” have been dominated for decades by a terminology originating not in Heidegger but first of all in the writings of Nazis.
We know all too well a world in which the linear application of micro-rationality is quite compatible with macro-barbarism.
The question of the status of universality, whether attacked by its opponents as “white male”, or “Eurocentric”, or a “master discourse”, is today at the center of the current ideological debate
An effort to show the very real historical and political conjuncture in which Nietzsche became Nietzsche, a context all but forgotten and dismissed as trivial in most of the contemporary discussion.
The translation of Ernst Bloch’s major work Principle of Hope into English constitutes an event in its own right in the consolidation of a serious Marxist current in the English speaking world.
Aims to question the currently existing lines between “culture” and “nature,” and to posit a possible unitary theory encompassing both.