Bret Benjamin takes up the 1974 UN Declaration for a New International Economic Order in an effort to reconsider “the 1970s as a decade of transition in which the sharpening developmental aspirations of G77 nations in the global south come into conflict with structural transformations in the accumulation of capital.” Reading the NIEO as the “last gasp” of the Bandung era, Benjamin argues that the “developmentalist demands of the Bandung era run aground on the contemporaneous systemic crisis of capital.”.

Siguiendo especialmente la lectura categorial de Moishe Postone, me propongo reconstruir los elementos de una teoría crítica de la modernidad en el pensamiento de Marx. Esta teoría prescinde de toda filosofía de la historia universal, asentándose en cambio en la comprensión históricamente situada del nexo social en el capitalismo. A la vez, el énfasis categorial en las mutaciones nexo social amplía los alcances de la teoría marxiana hacia una visión comprehensiva de la dinámica de la sociedad moderna, incluyendo las transformaciones (...) en la subjetividad. El capital produce una mutación dual en las formas del nexo social, en virtud de la cual pluraliza y multilateraliza radicalmente los patrones de interacción humana, pero a la vez los homogeneiza bajo las constricciones sistemáticas de la reproducción del valor. El pensamiento de Marx, que excede ampliamente a una teoría de la lucha de clases, ilumina estas contradicciones en el nexo social moderno. (shrink)

Stephen Shapiro and Neil Lazarus interrogate the importance of linguistic theory and translation to Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism and situate these concepts within ongoing debates about the world-literary system. Ultimately, they argue that the translatability of literary or political texts is, or should be, “a matter not of intellectual work, no matter how progressive, but of practical politics.”.

Myka Tucker-Abramson reviews The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction by Alison Shonkwiler.

ABSTRACTFeminist theory and critical realism should consolidate their collaboration since they have much in common. Nevertheless, feminist standpoint theory and critical realist ontology remain at odds, as extended debates have shown. I argue that this is because of the importance that feminism places on difference – which brings up the problem of relationality in a material way – and thus makes it hard to integrate into traditional critical realism. Dialectical critical realism contributes greatly to an understanding of relationality but lacks (...) difference’s historicity. This claim is elaborated through a discussion of intersectionality in feminism and feminist new materialism. The discussion shows that the mainstream understanding of both approaches has grave deficiencies and profits from critical realist metatheory. Notwithstanding, CR can learn from the motives and ways that difference is deployed in both strands. (shrink)

Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly emphasises the role of value-producing labour in biotechnologically reproductive processes, while also arguing that Marx’s use of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘value’ is inadequate to the critical scrutiny of these processes. Focusing especially on the reformulation of the value-labour relation in recent work in this area by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, this paper both critiques this reformulation and questions the explanatory efficacy of the category ‘labour’ in this context. Emphasising (...) the contemporary global expansion of capital relative to value-producing labour – specifically, the expansion of fictitious capital and debt on the one hand, and of global surplus populations on the other – it argues that this reformulation misrepresents the mediated capacities of capital as the immediate capacities of labour. This reformulation, moreover, is indicative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation of labour, tendencies exemplified by autonomist Marxism. (shrink)