Activity

Given these likely futures, what might the effects be for art, for poetry? One of the arguments of this book is that since 1960 poetry in particular and art and literature more broadly have derived their force from a massive demographic and occupational transformation, as workers moved away from go…

The reality principle is transformed into an excessive “performance principle” that orients humans toward continual self-denial in accord with the exigencies of capitalist accumulation

On the one hand, these developments might seem to imply a slowing down of historical “progress,” measured in terms of technical development. But this slowing down finds itself matched by a speeding up. As it becomes difficult to extract increased profits from investment in labor-saving technology, …

The standard presentation of the rising organic composition of capital assumes that its central effect is a falling rate of profit, since the rate of new value extraction also falls. The arguments around this point are complicated, highly technical, and might lead us to miss the major point here. R…

Some of Marx’s most compelling passages on the nature of the machine develop from this conception. For Marx, the machine is one of the essential forms of capital. Fixed capital, in the form of the self-propulsive machine or automaton, represents the objectification of subjective will. In the factor…