Black Lives Matter in Hegelian-Marxian Critical Social Theory

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1duPOafBaUCUCyzG2LGvqOjB7rpjAYUhY/view?usp=sharing 

Article on Karel Kosík and Herbert Marcuse in new issue of Prague-based journal Contradictions

June 27 2020
See description and table of contents of Prague-based journal Contradictions, including my article on "Karel Kosík’s Critique of Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic in Hegel and Marx"

This is a significantly expanded version of a talk I presented at the 2014 conference on Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete, held at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. 

http://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/current-issue

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Pandemic, the State-Capitalist Response, Marx's value theory

Seemingly unprecedented NYT editorial on economic crisis and COVID-19 (Coronavirus pandemic): "How to Avoid Complete Economic Destruction"

https://nyti.ms/2U8gIRe


Clearly the bipartisan rush to send U.S. workers money is not any sort of altruism. Instead, while unable in these circumstances to create new vaue, living labor must be sustained to labor as before, as in capitalist production, according to Marx: "While the laborer, by virtue of his labor being of a specialized kind that has a special object (durch die zwecmässige Form der Arbeit), preserves and transfers to the product the value of the means of production, he at the same time, by the mere act of working, creates each instant an additional or new value. (Marx, 1867/1909, 231 [1867/1990, 314–315], quoted by Marcuse, 1941/1999, 308). Marcuse (in Reason and Revolution) emphasizes that the performance of concrete labor, “labor power in action”, preserves value in adding new value. In this pandemic the most devasting propsect (for capitalism) is not the loss of material wealth because people can't work, but the lack of the "gratuitous" service of workers in while creating new value at the same time preserve the value of the existing means of production.