Needless Necessity: Sameness and Dynamic in Capitalist Society (original) (raw)

Inner Voice of Capitalism: “Everything is Temporary for the Sake of My Existence

Economics & Sociology, 2012

The main purpose of this study 1 is to explain the parallelism of transformation in labour market and social transformation with the concept of "temporariness" which is frequently used both in society and in economy. The central argument it is put forward in this article is that in this stage of capitalism, every technical policy change in economy brings transformation of social structure and reshapes interpersonal relations and system of values. Consequently, the contemporary global economy which is significantly based on temporariness not only forces individuals and society as a whole to adapt to fundamental economic changes, but gives also rise to a considerable number of social and psychological troubles.

Social Reproduction as a Paradigm of the Common. Reproduction Antagonism, Production Crisis

Óscar García Agustín, Christian Ydesen (eds), Post-Crisis Perspectives: The Common and its Powers, Petr Lang Edition, Frankfurt an Mein, 2013, pp. 83-98, 2013

In contemporary capitalism, the traditional sphere of ‘reproduction’ has merged with ‘production’ as the activities of ordinary life which were separate in the Fordist system have become central to the creative creation of value. Feminists have long noted that capitalism depended on the unpaid and unacknowledged work of the housewife. This chapter argues that we are all now the housewives of ‘relational-cognitive bio-capitalism’ as our bodies, emotions and relationships potentially become commodities. Is there any alternative to this all-encompassing appropriation? The solution is not to reinstate boundaries between productive and reproductive labour but to embrace the new biopolitics to create an alternative form of society based on our own values, not those of capitalism.

The contradictions of class and the praxis of becoming

2010

At this ferociously ambivalent juncture in world history, with the flames of finance neoliberalism scourging the ideologists of capital that have found themselves strapped to the smoldering stake of global investment, it has never been more urgent to approach the question of social class from a Marxist perspective. This book does just that, arising from the ashes of capital's disgrace.

Work, Bodies, and the Emerging Politics of Alienation - PhD thesis

Labour in the “post-industrial” society alienates bodies’ political capacities; the embodied character of alienation renders the labour process and the sphere of reproduction as critical spaces for anticapitalist politics. The labour process of these emergent forms of labour is a political space in which bodies’ potential for praxis directly collides with the domination of value. The capacities and potentialities of bodies to engage in praxis – the properties of bodies with which humans express their Being as political Being – has become the social form of the domination of labour by capital. The social-fixing of indeterminate labour-power links and decouples the inner relations between power, consumption, reproduction, value, and subjectivity that constitute the emerging politics of alienation. My jumping-off points to these relations are concepts that purportedly describe “new” and “hegemonic” forms of labour in the post-industrial economy: ‘aesthetic labour’, ‘emotional labour’ and the triadic conception of ‘affective/immaterial/biopolitical labour’. I resolve the one-sidedness of these abstractions – their contending characterisations of the labour process, its relations, and their representations of the politics of emergent forms of labour – with an empirically-informed dialectical reconfiguration of the concept of body work. The factors of alienated body work are reciprocally related across productive and reproductive spheres and therein they bind articulations of capitalist politics together with the production of political subjectivities. This form of the organisation of labour creates a contradictory inner connection between the politics of production and modes of reproduction. This deepening connection between spheres of production and reproduction results in the potential for a capitalistic transformation of the body, foreclosing on the subversive potential of indeterminate labour-power, and simultaneously brings embodied political capacities into direct confrontation with the logic of value at the very centre of production.

Living Amidst the Catastrophes of “the Living Contradiction”

Crossings: A Journal of English Studies

Two hundred years after Marx’s birth, we find ourselves living amid thecatastrophes of what Marx terms “the living contradiction.” I argue here thatMarx’s immanent critique of capitalist society’s “economic law of motion”remains the indispensable basis for any coherent understanding of capital todayand, hence, of any revolutionary project to bring about capital’s demise andsupersession. This essay develops a careful reading of a discrete section fromGrundrisse where we find key elements of Marx’s critique in concentrated form. Ifocus on the way that Marx consistently frames capital as contradiction – a set ofbarriers or limits that capital posits, presses past, and in superseding, posits againat a higher level of contradiction – culminating in Marx’s formulation of capitalas “the living contradiction.” In conversation with contemporary value-formtheory I consider what makes this contradiction living; in particular I considerthe intertwined phenomena of class decomposition and surplu...

Constructive resistance to the dominant capitalist temporality

Constructive resistance to the dominant capitalist temporality, 2019

"The logics of capitalist temporality dominate western society today. Drawing on Barbara Adam’s work, we explore two important dimensions of this dominant temporality. Standardised and abstract clock time involves a detachment from seasons and the life-world, closely related to the commodification of time exemplified by expressions like ”time is money”. Many initiatives attempt to challenge the dominance of capitalist temporality, amongst which we present: (1) worker cooperatives that organize work and its temporality as alternatives to capitalism; and (2) timebanks where people exchange services with each other based on time rather than money. We investigate how these illustrative examples differ from the dominant capitalist temporality, and in what ways they depend on the same logic that they resist. The analysis shows that the initiatives divert from the dominant temporality in important aspects, but also reproduce it in other ways. Thereby, this article contributes to theorizing resistance in connection to time and temporality, and gives insights in the potential and elusiveness of constructive resistance to dominant temporality." Sørensen, M. och Wiksell, K. (2019) ”Constructive resistance to the dominant capitalist temporality”, Sociologisk Forskning, 56(3-4), s. 253-274. https://sociologiskforskning.se/sf/article/view/18802 Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-licens https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en Sociologisk Forskning, årgång 56, nr 3-4, sid 253-274. © Författaren och Sveriges Sociologförbund, ISSN 0038-0342, 2002-066X (elektronisk).