The relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis has been frequently debated; nonetheless, one rarely comes upon a thoroughgoing, in-depth treatment of this connection. The Capitalist Unconscious is therefore a belated but welcome inquiry into the points of intersection between the two, a project whose contours could be traced back to the works of Marx and Freud. It is in the work of Lacan, however, that this correlation between Marxism and Psychoanalysis becomes visible. This article explores Samo Tomšič’s analysis of the logical, (...) epistemological, and political continuity of Marx’s critique of political economy and Freud’s theory of libidinal economy, meanwhile appraising the possible emancipatory potential of this project. (shrink)

This article analyzes neoliberal articulations of the economic crisis in Greece, as they appear at the Ekathimerini daily. Neoliberalism is primarily understood as the ideology organizing the political strategies of late capitalist production. The analysis focuses on the ways the capitalist crisis is presented in the context of Greece, as well as the ways that socio-political opposition to neoliberal reforms are addressed. Ekathimerini reproduces the hegemonic explanations of the crisis that view the crisis as a national and moral problem rather (...) than a global and systemic one. The analysis draws concepts from both discourse theory and critical theory. Discourse theory analyzes the neoliberal discourse organizing the political interventions for the reproduction of capitalism in the crisis-context, while political economy critiques the materiality of the capitalist process, which itself is based on discourses and political interventions. The article concludes that Ekathimerini's crisis-coverage contributes to the form of social engineering organized by neoliberal policies in Greece, in order to produce the political and social norms for a post-crisis configuration of capitalism. (shrink)

The theory of social-property relations, or political Marxism, has argued that in contradistinction with pre-capitalist forms of exploitation, capitalism is characterised by the separation of the economic and the political, which makes surplus appropriation under this system uniquely driven by economic coercion. In spite of political Marxism’s various strengths, this article argues that the paradigm puts forward an ahistorical and sanitised conception of capitalism typical of bourgeois economics, which is an outcome of its formal-abstractionist approach to the concept of the (...) mode of production and the separation between theory and history that it operates. A more satisfactory solution to political Marxism’s inability to make sense of past and present forms of coercion and violence under capitalism can be found in Jairus Banaji’s emphasis on Marx’s historical – rather than formal – conception of the mode of production. (shrink)

Advocates of biomimicry encourage a new industrial paradigm that ostensibly leaves behind the crude violence of Francis Bacon, the domination of nature-as-machine, and a history of toxic production processes that have given rise to a present and coming climate crisis. As part of a broader trend towards the conceptualization and development of a ‘bioeconomy’, we argue here that biomimicry produces ‘nature’ in new ways. At face value, these new approaches to valuing nature may seem less violent and exploitative. Yet, new (...) natures can and are tortured in new ways. We argue that biomimicry produces ‘nature’ through well-worn logics of resource enclosure and privatization, focusing upon two fundamental shifts in how nonhuman life is figured and put to work: the production of nature as intellectual property ; the production of nature as an active subject. (shrink)

In Robinson in Ruins, the third of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy of fictionalised documentaries concerning the wanderings and speculations of an unseen protagonist, the narrator informs us that Robinson had been reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which ‘locates the origin of twentieth century catastrophe in the development of market society in England’. Polanyi identifies how the self-regulating market is not a naturally emergent social form, but was the product of the active interventions of the state. For Robinson (and for Keiller) (...) the contradictions between displacement and dwelling generated by laissez-faire can be revealed and challenged by an exploration of the relationships between landscape, space and politics. The melancholy tone of this trilogy can also be sensed in one of Henri Lefebvre’s final essays, in which he laments the dissolution of the utopian promise of the urban that he once dramatised through his thesis of the ‘urban revolution’. This article explores the themes that drive Keiller’s approach in the Robinson trilogy and draws out the associations in these works to Lefebvre’s writings on the politics of space, Polanyi’s critique of laissez-faire capitalism, and Walter Benjamin’s response to the historical catastrophe we understand as ‘progress’. I will argue that Keiller’s engagement with the idea of catastrophe, through spatial, social and historical registers, is an attempt to link the material ruins of our present with utopian imaginings of alternative forms of sociality—beyond the conceptual limits of capitalist realism and the catastrophic futures of neoliberal space. (shrink)

This article examines the political economy of French imperialism from a critical Marxist perspective. It demonstrates how France has maintained a major role on the international scene, especially militarily, despite experiencing a relative decline in world economic power since the 1990s. In this regard, three features have marked the French imperial project: (1) the core role of state institutions and corporate elites in making French capitalism, and the protracted closeness of the state-capital nexus; (2) the strength of militarism in economic, (...) political, and social realms; and (3) the consolidation of rentier interests not only in the corporate power bloc, but also at a political level. Over the past century, these three dynamics have underpinned and reinforced a particular project of empire in France – one that bears relevance to current debates on globalisation and the ‘new imperialism’. By examining these issues, this paper seeks to further develop the Marxist theory of international political economy. (shrink)

Peter Linebaugh’sStop, Thief!aims to ‘join the alarm against neoliberalism’ by invoking the bloody history of enclosure. The essays collected in this book range in their focus from Karl Marx’s intellectual formation, to the history of the Luddites, to the privatisation of Mexicanejidos. Linebaugh’s idiosyncratic style, resisting abstraction and high theory, inscribes the nuances of the class struggle into the context of the commons. It effectively makes the case for a renewed focus on enclosure today.