It is often noted that Marx was a great admirer of Darwin, but it has been rarely explored what he actually took from him into his own theory, let alone put to productive use by his followers. There are exceptions, though. Mark Warren (1987: 258) shows that Marx thought of technological progress as well as ...
„Es ist mit den Geschäften wie mit dem Tanze; Personen, die gleichen Schritt halten, müssen sich unentbehrlich werden; ein wechselseitiges Wohlwollen muß notwendig daraus entstehen…“ [It is with business as it is with dance; persons who are in step with each other, will inevitably become indispensible for each other. A mutual benevolence will arise with ...
random association: Marxism: ‘While individual consumption consumes use-values as the means of subsistence of the living individual, productive consumption consumes as “the means whereby labour, the labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act”. In order to maintain the products of past labour in their objective existence as use-values, it is necessary for them ...
It has become a common exercise in sociology introductory classes to show students a lineup of the classics (normally Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim) and ask them what these three have in common. Answer: they are all bearded middle-class white males. This is, of course, a valid reminder of one of sociology’s core messages: ...
Karl Marx 1844: Ich, wenn ich Beruf zum Studieren, aber kein Geld dazu habe, habe keinen Beruf zum Studieren, d.h. keinen wirksamen, keinen wahren Beruf. Dagegen ich, wenn ich wirklich keinen Beruf zum Studieren habe, aber den Willen und das Geld, habe einen wirksamen Beruf dazu. (Marx 1971: 300) If I have the vocation for study but ...
Starting to evaluate what, if anything, is to be gained from an application of the Weber theses on the Protestant ethic and ‘the spirit of capitalism’ – it turns out that it is impossible to engage with them without a also undertaking a reevaluation of the theorem they have formulated against: the Marxian/Marxist base-superstructure (Basis ...
One of the starting points of my interest in the possible linkages between Sufism and commercial culture was Sultan Veled’s couplet on how the soul becomes ‘a city, a market, a shop‘. Sufism is a thoroughly urban, cosmopolitan phenomenon – The notion that Sufism is a mere expression of rural “folk” Islam is a myth, ...
update 19th may 2013 slightly improved version now published in ephemera http://www.academia.edu/1303458/towards_a_consumerist_critique_of_capitalism_and_a_socialist_defence_of_consumer_culture Introduction To suggest a ‘consumerist critique of capitalism’ sounds quite oxymoronic – and even more so a ‘socialist defence of consumer culture’. Consumerism is widely seen as the cultural expression of developed capitalism and Marxist analyses from the 1970s onwards have tried to ...
I’ve always found the ease with which some who would count themselves towards the radical left take to Schmitt’s “critique of democracy” or Heidegger’s “critique of technology”. Johannes Thumfart highlights a very worrying example in die tageszeitung – English version at signandsight. Thumfart sums up the anonymous (and at least in France and Germany celebrated) ...
David A Borman’s 2009 paper on ‘Labour, Exchange and Recognition’ gave me a bit of a shock as, at first, it looked like making the same points as my 2010 paper on ‘Reciprocity, Recognition and Labor Value’ … and thus robbing me of any claim to originality. For example when specifying the recognition function of commodity exchange: ...