Parallel Lines: Is there anything left in Marx for us?
November 21st, 2009
Yes, we are sure there is. There is an unknown Marx who saw that capital is an inhuman monster, an automaton that makes everybody a slave to its need for endless self-expansion.
This is a different Marx from the sociologist of class and the advocate of industrial triumphalism. Everyone knows this second Marx, but almost no-one has recognised the first one. An exception to this failing is Moishe Postone whose book Time, Labour and Social Domination is the first thoroughgoing attempt to come to grips with this side of Marx, and more to the point, to look at the modern world from this standpoint.
The coming series of political interventions by Principia Dialectica will consist of discussions of parallel themes in the works of Karl Marx and Moishe Postone.
An absolutely unmissable opportunity for all those who are sick and tired both of the depredations declining capital, and of the banal and timeworn platitudes of party and class.
Friday December 4th 2009 at 8pm, at the Lucas Arms, 245a, Grays Inn Road, WC1X 8QZ
Nearest tube: King’s Cross, buses: 17, 45, 214
Illustration: The Secret of Hegel by Franklin Rosemont, (1968)
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:30 pm
No more historical revisionism from Principia Dialectica! Equal time for Postone’s forerunners now! Honor the real innovators!
See here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Marx-Lekt%C3%BCre
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:19 pm
If anyone would like a copy of the Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, (BRILL 2008) namechecked in the wiki link above, please send us a line at principia dialectica. We have just had the central heating plumbed in so don’t need fuel for the fire anymore
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 pm
The Bidet Leninist-Stalinist-Situationist-Verso stew:
“The subversive stimulus it continues to have among new generations, ensuring communication between the Marxist tradition and contemporary currents challenging consumption and production, from situationism to the critique of
work, everyday life, culture and ecology. It is a precious heritage, nothing of which must be lost.” (p375 New Interpretations of Capital)
A thin gruel.
November 24th, 2009 at 1:28 am
Yeah, go back to reading Robert Kurz in second-hand translations.
When Backhaus and Reichelt were first publishing their work in the in 1970s, after having studied under Adorno, Robert Kurz was a Maoist and a member of the MLPD.
November 27th, 2009 at 12:24 am
hmm…hiding behind a pseudonym forever…must make it easy to disguise and hide any mistakes from your past. But then, maybe you didn’t make any mistakes as a hotheaded young kid yourself, eh, white-knickers?
November 27th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Maybe you could stay on topic and actually try to develop an argument as to why Robert Kurz is more worth reading than the people who formulated the same ideas decades before, but frankly I’m not holding my breath. Doing so would be tantamount to admitting that ideas you think are “cutting edge” are actually much older. Then you wouldn’t be able to play the distinction card as readily.