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6 Creative survival as subversion I Solidarities and creative tactics against ‘conditions of death’1 n the DRC, the exercise and consolidation of state authority does not necessarily imply social transformation or a real commitment of the state to impose itself but, rather, the management of state absences and state presences through a plurality of authorities. Still, the patterns of coercion and extraction that have followed from the 20 years of conflict, with the different state-making and peacebuilding processes, determine the conditions for the
The starting-point for the book is its chapter on methodology. Found here are not only critiques of conventional Soviet Marxism-Leninism and post-modernism, but also a new rethinking of the classic dialectic. For the most part, however, the book focuses on revealing the new quality now assumed by commodities, money, and capital within the global economy. The market has become not only global, but a totalitarian force that is not a ‘socially neutral mechanism of coordination’. It is now a product of the hegemony of corporate capital, featuring the growth of new types of commodity: information, simulacra, and so forth. The book demonstrates the new qualities acquired by value, use value, price, and commodity fetishism within this new market, while exploring the contradictions of non-limited resources (such as knowledge) and the commodity form of their existence.
Money is now a virtual product of fictitious financial capital, possessing a new nature, contradictions, and functions. This analysis of the new nature of money helps to reveal the essence of so-called financialisation.
Capital has become the result of a complex system of exploitation. In the twenty-first-century context this exploitation includes the ‘classic’ extraction of surplus value from industrial workers combined with internal corporate redistribution of income by ‘insiders’; international exploitation; and the exploitation of creative labour through the expropriation of intellectual rent.
Capital of the twenty-first century as a dialectical negation of the previous evolution of capitalism: relations of exploitation Before reviewing the most modern forms of exploitation involving the subordination of creative activity to capital, we should stress that modern capitalism is a complex system involving all the basic ‘layers’ of interaction between labour and capital, in their modern spatial reality, that characterise the historical evolution of the capitalist mode of production. 1
creative labour; the expansion of unalienated social relations in the field of joint creative activity (free working associations of scholars, of teachers, and of activists in social networks); new phenomenon of wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams 2007 ); and copyleft and other important components of economic life in the epoch of the rise of post-industrial society (the epoch of the scientific-technical revolution). No less interesting is the question of how to assess the socio-economic, humanitarian-economic, and environmental-economic effectiveness of self
place the process of transformation through which the ‘realm of necessity’ becomes the ‘realm of freedom’. The latter is, according to Marx's well-known definition, ‘in essence beyond material production’. This allows us to systematise the changes in the system of social productive forces that result in the material and technical determination of the production relations of ‘late capitalism’. We see the basis of these transformations in the development of the creative content of labour. Thanks to it, the determining resources of progress become cultural phenomena that
derivatives of social, cultural and economic structures, the autonomy of migration lens reveals migration to be a constituent creative force which fuels social, cultural and economic transformations. Migration can be understood as a force which evades the policing practices of subjectivity. Migration can also be understood as a force that not only evades, but that reshapes what it means to be a citizen or migrant subject. To think about the pervasiveness and constitutive force of migration in today
the case is not a common European foreign policy per se but rather the more narrowly conceived CFSP, meaning that the communautarian aspects of foreign policy are omitted. The following section aims at exploring possibilities of theorising the CFSP ‘the constructivist way’. First, I describe how the balance between deductive and inductive theorising is quite asymmetrical. Then I use nine rules for creative theorising
their individuality, that is, in their empirical life, work and relationships. In defending Jewish emancipation against the restoration of the Jewish question, Marx re-affirmed the subjective right of Jews to be citizens, to be Jews, and to deal creatively, singularly, in their own way, with their Jewish origins. Real humanism is a revolt against the tyranny of provenance. The humanist Marx we are endeavouring to uncover is doubtless not the only Marx we could
, and with that, implicitly endorses (or at least does not substantively refute) Hegel's narrative of world history that leaves Africa and Africans as prehistory. Turning inwards there is nothing to be found worthy of preservation. A surreptitious reader might ask this: so with what creative matter (not generic instrumental energy) would it be possible to cultivate a new
their members appeared to have become accustomed to low levels of commitment and activity. The dominant imperative for the RCP was the need to promote an independent anti-capitalist outlook. It was intended thereby to give voice and effect to the interests of the working class and humanity as a whole. The party was the organisational expression of this understanding, its mode of intervention in the social reality it aspired to transform. It sought to develop and sustain a creative balance between activities around issues of exploitation, on the one hand, and issues of