Das Kapital at 150: Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and the Global Crisis Today

http://events.hofstra.edu/index.php?eID=20374

Including Russell Rockwell:

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

 Abstract

I investigate the immanent critique of Herbert Marcuse’s interpretations of the relationship of Marx’s Capital and the Grundrisse found, though for the most part implicit, in Time, Labor, and Social Domination, by Moishe Postone, the U.S.-based Critical Theorist.  Marcuse, a key founding member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, included a brilliant, though limited, interpretation of Marx’s Capital in his 1941 work Reason and Revolution. I find that, 1) Marcuse’s analysis of Capital, historically prior to widespread automated production, skipped the section on “relative surplus value”, thereby focusing on the “reduction” of concrete labor to abstract labor, while overlooking the “interaction” of the two dimensions, which Postone develops extensively in terms of the intensifying contradictions of labor and temporality; and, 2) when Marcuse returns to Marx’s value theory in 1964 (a new stage of automated production), he posits a contradiction between the Grundrisse and Capital, precisely on the basis of his not having incorporated “relative surplus value” in his original (1941) analysis. During the 1950s crisis of the bipolar post-World War II period Marcuse repeatedly argued that the Grunrdrisse supplemented Capital; in One-Dimensional Man, written during the1960s automation crisis, he fundamentally reinterpreted the two texts of Marx’s mature critical theory: The Grundrisse and Capital contained opposing theories, Marcuse argued, so that in the Grundrisse Marx theorized, but later “repressed” in Capital, the idea that with technological production the “law of value” might be overcome, even within capitalism.

Publication of the Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements

Includes Russell Rockwell and Kevin B. Anderson, "The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse Correspondence: Crystallization of Two Marxist Traditions"

http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2382_reg.html

Today's Automation and Marx's Capital--"Machinery and Large-Scale Industry"

http://nyti.ms/2iaa3nE

"The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the [worker]…The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery. The whole system of capitalist production is based on the fact that the workers sell their labour-power as a commodity. Division of labour specialises this labour-power, by reducing it to skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workperson's labour-power vanishes; the worker becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value. It is impressed upon the work- people, as a great consolation, first, that their sufferings are only temporary ("a temporary inconvenience")…[but] since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields of production, its temporary effect is really permanent…
Marx, Capital, Volume I: “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”

President Elect Trump, Labor Secretary nominee, on workers, automation, women--and K Marx

On the 75th Anniversary of Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution

Karl Marx's Grundrisse and "Artificial Intelligence" (AI)

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...”