Self-management of misery or the miseries of self-management - Terra Cremada
A critical look at co-ops, worker-owned and collective businesses, ethical banking, the entrepreneurial spirit, competition, and “independent” contract work and the limitations of the concept and practice of self-management in the context of the totalitarian logic of capitalist society.
The resistance to capitalism - Emilio Lopez Arango
This is the translation of the first chapter of an essay in an out of print text by Emilio Lopez Arango, one of the premier theorists of the FORA up through the 20s when he was assassinated. This has never been translated as far as is known.
Imagining non-work - Kathi Weeks
Kathi Weeks discusses how even our concepts of leisure are defined in relation to work, and how we might escape work's domination of life.
The middle class, the partocracy and fascism - Miguel Amorós
A discussion of “partocracy”, defined as “a modern type of developmentalist oligarchy” characterized by the abrogation of popular sovereignty by a political class largely based on the declining and insecure middle classes, which acts on behalf of the needs of economic expansion but is based on an extensive network of patronage relations, establishing a regime in which “fear is used as an instrument of government” to impose “a policy of resignation”, together with an analysis of how this regime differs (e.g., decentralized vs. centralized corruption) from fascism, despite certain similarities.
Growth and anti-growth - Miguel Amorós
A discussion of the intellectual forebears of the anti-growth movement, including Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Ivan Illich, Donella Meadows, Fritz Schumacher and even Rosa Luxemburg, narrating the history of the ideas they represented until their ultimate recuperation and distortion by the contemporary anti-growth movement, led by “an enlightened lumpenbourgeoisie” that prefers “the established order to popular unrest”, and which, dispensing with the more visionary features of the ideas it appropriated, instead proposes technocratic reforms and the continuation of capitalism, thus revealing this movement to be a “renewable illusion” and “an auxiliary weapon of domination”.
The trauma of curtailing economic growth - Miguel Amorós
A critique of the anti-growth movement, which the author depicts as a reformist movement promoted by middle class elements threatened by economic marginalization, who want to “put capitalism on a diet” rather than abolish it, and seek to return to the good old days of the Keynesian and statist social market economy, only this time based on the imputed imperatives of an ecological state of emergency, in order to breathe new life into the declining fortunes of their doomed class which, however, because of its incoherence as a hodgepodge of competing interests, only does the work of the ruling class by fostering a sense of fear in the population and diverting dissent into innocuous channels.
An investigation of this supposedly victorious capitalism - Claude Bitot
In Part 1 of this book originally published in France in 1995, Claude Bitot addresses capitalism’s imminent contradictions from the perspective of Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit and in the context of the role of automation, rising productivity and relocations since the crisis of the 1970s, and concludes that capitalism has entered a stage of permanent crisis he defines as “the end of its cycle”; in Part 2, he discusses some of the ideological and social consequences of this crisis that signal the definitive decline of the republican and secular values that characterized the rise of the nation state in the springtime and maturity of capitalism.
The alternative to capitalism - Adam Buick and John Crump
E-book by Adam Buick and John Crump on capitalism and its revolutionary alternative.
The Culture of Capitalism (Pinhole 1): No Place
Submitted by Cindy Milstein on Mar 1 2013 03:50
This is the first in what I hope becomes a series under the heading "The Culture of Capitalism." For the original post and many other pieces of writing, see my Outside the Circle blog at cbmilstein.wordpress.com.
Credit unto Death - Anselm Jappe
Anselm Jappe reflects on the significance of the ongoing crisis of commodity production and the reactions of mainstream commentators, the representatives of the “anti-neoliberal” left, and ordinary people, the role of credit in prolonging the system’s death throes, and the pitfalls of blaming scapegoats for what is actually a systemic collapse, and the “fundamental crisis” of the “value-form”, caused by the immanent contradictions that lie at the heart of the system of commodity production, which we should not save but destroy as quickly as possible in order to make the “leap into the unknown” of “a more human society”, or else endure worse barbarism to come.
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