Activity

Karatani sees the stages of the world market system in terms of the key world commodity of each. Thus for mercantilism it is textiles, for liberalism it is light industry, for finance capitalism it is heavy industry, for state monopoly capitalism it is durable consumer goods, and for multinational …

The “Fragment” distinguishes fixed and circulating capital, where fixed capital is embodied in a particular use value (machines) and circulating capital realizes its value in exchange (money). Like natural resources such as water and air, the general level of technology is something capital gets “f…

Borrowing from the energetic worldview, capital becomes an entropic system:

Capitalism is like a poorly designed steam engine that must be run at top speed, despite the fact that this speed contributes to a greater overall loss of heat. This increased overall heat can be neither transformed in…

No kind of knowledge production, whether of science or culture or even philosophy, is exogenous to the commodity form any more. But neither is it as simple as saying that “invention becomes a business” (61). Rather, it became a new kind of business, which changed all the others. There is no eternal…

This is a point that needs insisting on in the tech-phobic world that is so much of the humanities and social sciences. There politics is the magic answer to all our problems. But not this actual politics whose dismal rituals we see all around us. Some other politics, a virtual politics that is a p…