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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.
abstract to the concrete – that is, as the dialectical reflection of the natural aspects of the real historical development of the objectively existing system of relations of a particular mode of production. The outstanding Soviet Marxist Evald Ilyenkov developed this understanding of the method of Capital in an extremely sophisticated form. Unlike many Soviet creative Marxists of the mid-twentieth century, Ilyenkov became known outside Russia thanks to the translation of some of his works into English (Ilyenkov 1982 ), and to the activity of
positive aspects of the Chinese model, often tending to idealise it. V.S. Semenov is, arguably, the most radical writer in this group. Two groups of philosophers, extremely heterogeneous but on the whole very close to Marxism, deserve special mention. The first consists of students of the great Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov including Vladimir Lazutkin, Gennady Lobastov, Sergey Mareev, Elena Mareeva, and Andrey Sorokin, while Lev Naumenko is a distinctive figure whose views are closer to those of the post-Soviet school of critical Marxism. Finally
dialectical opposite – the ideal, historically understood as the domain of human ‘spiritual’ culture, and in the case of the Armenian avant-garde, of art as an autonomous sphere of activity? To provide a theoretical grounding for this concept, the notion of the ideal is treated not through Hegel and Marx directly, but instead through a fascinating and overlooked debate in Soviet philosophy – between Evald Ilyenkov and Mikhail Lifshitz in the late 1970s and the first part of the 1980s.43 The choice of these particular authors is justified by the fact that they have provided
paint or canvas used – that determines the relationship between everyday life (or reality understood as the empirical field of experience) and the ideal of autonomous art. By drawing from the philosophical debate between Soviet philosophers Evald Ilyenkov and Mikhail Lifshitz, I approach the ideal of autonomous art as a realm of human universality constituted through a material historical process. In this, art becomes an instance of universality. This book traces the transformations and development of autonomous art in Armenia: from the late Soviet unofficial artists
analyses and to their consistent nature. Essentially, the concept of castration is inseparable in this analysis from that of dissipation’ (Derrida 1981 : 35, 41, 84, 86). 4 We should note that in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s a world-ranking school of critical Marxist dialecticians took shape, represented by such figures as Evald Ilyenkov, Victor Vazyulin, Genrih Batishchev, and others
‘inorganic body of man’ and which Evald Ilyenkov refers to as ‘thought in its Otherness’ (‘das Idee in der Form des Anderssein’), the artist triumphs over a temporality where the prehistory and post-history of humankind rejoin in a natural-artificial dystopia. Sweet Repression of Ideology of 2000, performed during the exhibition Collapse of Illusions, extends the theatricality of Kareyan’s aesthetic lan- The reign of the ‘painterly real’ and the politics of crisis David Kareyan, Sweet Repression of Ideology, performance, 2000 guage of this period to encompass the