Category: Marxism
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To see nothing
The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities.’ In capitalist society, the sense-perception of seeing is engendered by the commodity-form. Relations between human beings appear as relations between things, and relations between things appear as relations between human beings. The logic of value possesses…
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Crimes That Do Not Count
Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime. Georges Bataille. L’anus Solaire (1927). For the bourgeoisie, capital’s human mask, endowed with flesh, voice,…
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The State after History
Workers ought not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an…
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Fragments on Invariance
Notes on the invariance of Marxist doctrine and method, as elaborated in the tradition of the Communist Left Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.…
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Bonifacio the Totem
Reflections against heroic idolatry “The social revolution […] cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution […] must…
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The Catechesis of Semifeudalism
Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations. It should not astonish us, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic relations in which these prima facie…
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Against Positivist Marxism
As Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance. Karl Marx, ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’ (1839). 1. Oxford Languages defines “Science” as “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical…