Marxism

Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In this book, Geoff Pfeifer offers an in-depth look at their respective views. Using Louis Althusser’s materialism as a starting point—which, as Pfeifer shows, was built partially as a response to the Marxism of the Parti Communiste Français and partially in dialogue with other philosophical movements and intellectual currents of its times—the book looks at the differing ways in which both Badiou’s and Žižek’s work attempt to respond to issues that arise within the Althusserian edifice. Pfeifer argues here that, ultimately, Žižek’s materialism succeeds in responding to these issues in ways that Badiou’s does not. In building this argument, Pfeifer engages not only with the work of Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek and their intellectual backgrounds, but also with much of the contemporary scholarship surrounding these thinkers. As such, Pfeifer’s book is an important addition to the ongoing debates within contemporary critical theory.

"This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people
produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested
in the relationship between the production of value “at work”
and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions
that enable its deployment."

The purpose of this article is to introduce elements of the capitalist society economic reproduction to the discussion around the current dynamics of health accumulation. It identifies the direction and significance of capital accumulation in the health area as well as the characteristics of the economic environment where the competition currently takes place. The hypothetic hypertrophy of the financial sphere is seen as a means for structuring the capitalist economy since the late twentieth century. The former delimitations between industrial production and service delivery are blurred and weakened; the competition process shows new features and the contradictions - internally between the different elements of the health industry and externally with other sectors - are changing. This article aggregates elements for a contemporary analysis of the "medical-industrial complex" on the basis of a theoretical-historical-conceptual approach. We identify changes in the capital dynamics of this complex at international and national level and stress the increasing role of the health services as a forefront of capital accumulation. The new approach is based on the economic thinking of Marx in addition to the current discussions about the theory of financial capital accumulation and the new productive configurations of the large corporations.

"There exists a real dearth of literature available to Anglophones dealing with philosophical connections between transhumanism and Marxism. This is surprising, given the existence of works on just this relation in the other major European languages and the fact that 47% of people surveyed in the 2007 Interests and Beliefs Survey of the Members of the World Transhumanist Association identified as “left,” though not strictly Marxist (Hughes 2008). Rather than seeking to explain this dearth here, I aim to contribute to its being filled in by identifying three fundamental areas of similarity between transhumanism and Marxism. These three areas are: the importance of material conditions and particularly, technological advancement, for revolution, conceptions of human nature, and conceptions of nature in general. While it is true that both Marxism and (especially) transhumanism are broad fields that encompass diverse positions, even working with somewhat generalized characterizations of the two reveals interesting parallels and dissimilarities fruitful for future work.
This comparison also shows that both transhumanism and Marxism can learn important lessons from one another that are complimentary to their respective projects. I suggest that Marxists can learn from transhumanists two lessons: that some “natural” forces may become reified forces and the extent to which the productive apparatus is now relevant to revolution. Transhumanists, on the other hand, can learn from Marxist theory the essentially social nature of the human being and the ramifications this has for the transformation of the human condition as well as forms of social organization compatible with transhumanist aims. Transhumanists can also benefit from considering the relevance of Marx’s theory of alienation to goals of technological advancement.
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"¿Es el concepto de contrarrevolución el opuesto simétrico del de revolución, tal como podría sugerirlo la antonimia?

Si bien la literatura sobre el concepto de revolución en la reflexión marxista es vasta, y no parece en condiciones de saldar el debate, es posible intentar una aproximación indirecta: rastrear el concepto de contrarrevolución, para observar cuál es su relación de sentido respecto de su presunto concepto originario, el de revolución.

"Revolución y contrarrevolución en Alemania", reunión de los artículos publicados en el New York Daily Tribune entre 1851 y 1852, resulta un material apropiado para este ensayo, en la medida en que se trata de esa zona de materiales que, dentro de la obra de Marx, tematiza hechos histórico-políticos, en este caso los sucesos de la Alemania revolucionaria de 1848."

The Anthropocene and species-being: I want to immediately confess that there is something awkward about holding these two terms together. It would seem they share little conceptual ground. The former, relatively newly minted in earth system science, designates the advent of a geological era of the human species’ own making. The latter, from the annals of Marxist theory, describes humanity’s capacity to take its own “life-activity” as its object, and thus, the historical possibilities of its own self-development. Nevertheless, in this paper I follow a hunch that this is a productive coupling. For it seems to me that it offers a new line for thinking through the relations between this novel geological era, in which the human species is now a force altering the trajectory of planetary life, and the historically specific social formation, capitalism, that has ushered in this epoch, and with it, this augmented species capacity. As a means to develop this contention I wish to explore the tensions and implications of the two contrasting formulations of the human that respectively inform these two notions: that is, as a biological species with geological agency; and as a species-being, with the capacity to consciously direct its own species’ life activity.