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Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici.
I know basically all I do is quote this book lately, but it’s with good reason. It’s astonishing; powerfully written, passionately argued, and remarkably researched. Most of all, it’s incredibly important when it comes to understanding the struggles of our own time; one in which capitalism, having entered a severe moment of crisis with the collapse of global finance, is attempting to reassert itself by imposing a strict social division of labour upon human communities. This division of labour demands radical modes of expropriation, exclusion, and devaluation capable of disciplining the production of value and surplus. Hence the renewed invectives and wars against racial and cultural others, the violent attacks on women’s bodies by patriarchal institutions, the renewed extension of servitude through the economic instruments of debt and austerity (and that smarmy, slimy, pathetic moral injunction to ‘live within your means’).
So important. So relevant.
(via mirrortheories)
The austerity-stricken university is combustible, and knowledge is incandescent.
David Horowitz: I have to go to universities with bodyguards because of the fascist left in this country.
Julian Assange: I have assassination threats all over.
Slavoj Žižek: I’m the only guy in this room who was physically assaulted by right-wingers to be a communist and by communists to be a traitor to nationalists.This is the greatest sitcom that will never be.
(via dropouthangoutspaceout)
Can we?
(via azurestatic)
To extend the life span of neoliberalism, it needs ideological justification. Facebook explicitly wants to be that. It sustains a subject that is not inauthentic and opportunistic in its perpetual networking but liberated to be and do more. Quantify yourself, increase that quantity.
“Facebook in the Age of Facebook,” by Rob Horning | Read More.
- The Problem With (Sex) Work, Jacobin Magazing
- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
(via rethinksocialism)
It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
Alexis Madrigal’s article for the Atlantic about how many tracking companies are following us on the Web as we browse is extremely informative and raises a host of questions worth considering with regard to the practice (e.g. How many of these tracking companies are there? Does it make a difference if only machines have this information on me? Why does it seem creepy? Should creepy be appearing in academic studies as a term of art?). The most important of these, I think, derives from a claim he makes toward the end:
I am all too aware of how difficult it is for media businesses to survive in this new environment. Sure, we could all throw up paywalls and try to make a lot more money from a lot fewer readers. But that would destroy what makes the web the unique resource in human history that it is. I want to keep the Internet healthy, which really does mean keeping money flowing from advertising.
The assumption here seems to be that in order for information to circulate, it needs to be sponsored. The “health” of the internet — the vitality of its ecosystem, the level of activity of users — is contingent on how many people can make a living from using it, and the only viable way to make a living from the information trade is by making it all ultimately into marketing data. The health of the internet, then, depends on the degree to which we can turn thought into marketing through the process of circulating it. “A panoply of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes unmonetized,” Madrigal notes, but he seems at pains to defend that as an important prerequisite rather than a sign that another avenue of communication has been thoroughly subsumed by capital.
(read more)
