[...] Spinoza proposes an altogether different mechanism of alienation: the real chains are those of our affects and desires. There is no such thing as voluntary servitude. There is only passionate servitude. That, however, is universal.
[...] It is the social structures, in the case of employment, those of the capitalist relations of production, that configure desires and predetermine the strategies for attaining them. Within the structures of radical material heteronomy, the desire for persevering biologically-materially is narro…
[...] currency the name of a certain social relation, and money the name of the desire to which this relation gives birth.
Michel Aglietta and André Orléan made the decisive contribution of refuting the substantial (intrinsic value) and the functional (convenient means of exchange) approaches to…
[...] money, as the almost exclusive mediation of material strategies, ‘the digest of everything’, became the object of meta-desire – the obligatory gateway through which all other (market) desires must pass.
[...] Marx and Polanyi among others have amply shown how the conditions for proletarianisation emerged, notably through the enclosure of the commons. In the wake of that act of the most complete, organised immiseration, people were left with only one option, the sale of their undifferentiated labou…
