… work in progress in social theory and cultural sociology

Faced with what counts as “Marxist philosopher” (BBC on Zizek) I questioned whether a Marxist philosopher is something to be. Well – I eat my words. Listen to Heinrich Blücher – the Marxist Socrates on Hannah Arendt’s side     ...

Slavoj Zizek on Newsnight – doubly mislabelled. He’s a jacobinist demagogue in search for “an authentic leader” – not one who tells people what to do but one who expresses what they really really want and tells them to do that. Very much what, at the time, a lot of people (and they themselves) thought ...

In my previous post on Basis/Überbau I casually mention Gramsci’s totalitarian tendencies. This needs some further explanation, especially since I will use some aspects of his reconceptionalisation (as struttura/superstrutture) when arguing for the retention of this much maligned metaphor. Gramsci tries to solve the old problem of dualism of base/superstructure (which he rejects as an ...

I agree with Roy Greenslade in his Guardian blog that it is wrong to dismiss anything that is brought to you by the Daily Mail on the basis that, in the 1930s, they supported not only the British Union of Fascists but also their foreign master, Adolf Hitler. The main reason being that the paper turned ...

One of the most effective critiques of base/superstructure determinism is that by Cornelius Castoriadis in his “provisional” reckoning with Marxism. One of his more striking points is that if the determining base is itself driven by the progress of the productive forces – i.e. technology, both material and organisational – then it relies on an ...

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 ...

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: ...