April 6-7 Hofstra University Conference, Capital @ 150

MARX'S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY  AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS TODAY
Hofstra University, April 6-7 2017

Including Friday, April 7
1:30-2:55 p.m.            CONCURRENT SESSIONS

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Session 16:      READING CAPITAL AND CRISIS TODAY

Guthart Cultural Center Theater, Axinn Library, South Campus

Session Chair:  Johanna Shih, Hofstra University

Presenters:    Christian Lotz, Michigan State University

"What is the Object of Capital, and Why is it a Critique"

Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University, NJ

"Reading Capital Today"

Bertell Ollman, New York University

"Marx's 'Main Aim' in Writing Capital, Vol. 1, was…"

Russell Rockwell 

"Capital to Grundrisse: The Dual Crisis—in Critical Social Theory and in Society"

Full Draft Final Program:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hKUqPHaIcTXK-K8u_siHnXtv-IjtMz3jZeB3bVoOmOA/edit?usp=sharing

Follow up to Critical Theory and the New Right-Wing Populism

Andrew Wilson also, racism

Like · Reply · 1 · September 14 at 2:22pm

Alastair Hemmens I agree with the general sentiment. But concrete labour is still abstract labour. You can't find new and better forms of work or decouple use value from value as this author suggests.

Like · Reply · 1 · September 14 at 2:45pm

Russell Rockwell In a society that has overcome capitalism, there is neither concrete nor abstract labor.
Postone, quoting Marx in an early section of the Grundrisse, writes:
People must be able to step outside of the direct labor process in which they had previously labored as parts, and control it from above. The control…must be available not only to society as a whole, but to all of its members. A necessary material condition for the full development of all the individuals is that “labor in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased.”
In a section of the Grundrisse, which discusses his notion of surplus labor time and surplus labor, Marx develops the context for the end of the kind of labor that could be done by a machine, which Postone argues is “the necessary material condition for the full development of all the individuals”. Marx discusses the historical developments of the specifically capitalist mode of production, which shape the immense potential of the social conditions arising from it. Of the several conditions Marx mentions, perhaps the most important is creation of “the material elements for the development of rich individuality which is all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labor no longer appears as labor, but as the full development of activity itself...”

Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man at 50, All-Day Conference, Columbia University, Sept. 29, 2014

Includes Russell Rockwell, "Marx's Mature Critical Theory, Marcuse, and Post-Marcuse"

Abstract

Marx’s mature critical theory, Marcuse, and post-Marcuse

Critical Theory, at least in the work of Herbert Marcuse, has always interpreted contemporary society by analyzing the internal relationship between the actual and the possible. This has meant determining the social resources that are present or are in development, which point the way toward freedom in a post-capitalist society. Recent works by economists, such as Race Against the Machine, and The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee, point to a new stage of digital and robotic technologies, which echoes as today’s reality or near-reality much of what Herbert Marcuse sketched as a distant but determinate possibility in the “Prospects of Containment” section of One-Dimensional Man. Moishe Postone, perhaps the most important theorist among the current generation of Critical Theorists, recognized Marcuse’s theoretical achievements, which included systematic analyses of the principal categories of what Postone has termed “Marx’s mature critical theory”. Hence Marcuse repeatedly interpreted and subjected to careful analysis in the context of contemporary developments not only Capital, but works unpublished in Marx’s lifetime, i.e. Grundrisse and Critique of the Gotha Programme. Yet, Postone, in revisiting that all-important relationship of the actual and the possible, critiques Marcuse’s social theory of one-dimensionality by developing Marx’s concept of an “intrinsic contradiction”: on the one hand, direct labor as the sole source of value (the specifically capitalist form of wealth), and on the other, the logic in capitalism for replacing direct labor through automation, in today’s terms, with digital technology and robots.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1EMkTi7WgJIRDZxRUs1QXlPLUE/edit?usp=sharing