Activity

[...] The justifications offered for contemporary transformations in employment practices – from longer work hours (‘it allows stores to open on Sundays’) to competition-enhancing deregulation (‘it lowers prices’) – always contrive to catch agents by ‘the joyful affects’ of consumption, appealing o…

[...] As can be expected, agents – both collective and individual – caught up in relations of dependence and placed in situations where they are obliged to defend vital interests – economic survival for enterprises, keeping their jobs for employees – are driven to externalise the bulk of the effort…

[...] to use a ballistic metaphor, one needs a launcher to ‘launch’ a business. One needs an initial amount (of energy/start-up capital) in order to be propelled past the critical threshold – the capitalist equivalent of escape velocity. From this follows a fundamental inequality with respect to th…

[...] If we understand by ‘finance’ the full set of mechanisms that allow agents to (temporarily) spend more than they earn, it is the ability to access money in the non-wage form of finance that identifies the potential capitalist. The fundamental difference is that money as wages is accessed in t…

[...] 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.