27.06.2010 
English
07.10.2009
The “return of the state” as crisis administrator
Deutsche Version – Versione Italiana
Norbert Trenkle
Parts of the left are attributing the current global economic crisis to political causes. Neoliberalism, so the argument goes, with its total deregulation of markets and particularly the radical increases in freedom accorded to the financial markets, has failed. Now, they claim, we are approaching an era of regulation and control by the state, and our task is to influence the forms it will take. The central demand is for the rolling-back of the influence of finance capital and a strengthening of the real economy, which in turn should itself be reformed both ecologically and socially. Whether or not this will succeed is treated primarily as a question of the balance of social power and of political mobilisation.
However, this analysis overlooks the fundamental character of the global crisis. Weiterlesen »
24.03.2009
Tremors on the Global Market
Deutsche Version – Versión española
On the underlying causes of the current financial crisis.
Norbert Trenkle (May 2008) Weiterlesen »
18.01.2009
Gross Social Happiness
Deutsche Version
Maria Wölflingseder
The new magic formula against poverty, unemployment and all other grievous dislocations is: “Invest in Social Capital. Enjoy immediate profit, the personal surplus value of voluntary activity. You, dear entrepreneur, create social and ecological surplus value.” Sociology has discovered “social capital” as a wonder cure. Weiterlesen »
14.11.2008
Crash Course
Deutsche Version — Version française — Versión española — Nederlandse versie — Versione italiana — българска версия
Why the collapsing of the financial bubble is not the fault of “greedy bankers” and why there can be no going back to a social welfare capitalism
A new version of the “stab in the back” legend of the 1920s and ‘30s is making the rounds: “our” economy has supposedly fallen victim to the limitless greed of a handful of bankers and speculators. Gorged on the cheap money of the U.S. Federal Reserve and backed up by irresponsible politicians, these greedy bankers have–so the legend goes–brought the world to the edge of the abyss, while honest people are made to play the fools.
Nothing could be more contrary to fact Weiterlesen »
23.10.2008
Emancipation under Conditions that the Left Didn’t Want
Generalized Resource Shortages as a Historical Crisis of the Social Formation of Capitalism
www.stateofnature.org
Andreas Exner, Christian Lauk & Konstantin Kulterer
“If there is a lack of appropriate analysis of environmental processes and societal relations to nature because they don’t fit into the wishful thinking of ‘eternal capitalism,’ dangerous ways of ideologically processing the crisis can gain momentum.”
Rising prices for food are increasing hunger, a global recession is waiting in the wings, and at the same time, energy is getting more and more expensive. Within only a few years, the terrain has changed dramatically for left movements. Nonetheless, many people are still holding on to well-known formulas. Unfortunately, they don’t fit the new circumstances.
31.12.2007
Weaken All the Fronts!
Alternative Transpositon. All Partisanship in the Clash of Cultures Should Be Refused
This article published in: Freitag 13, 3/30/2007
The wildest threatening scenarios are often nothing but hallucinated analogies. Whoever accepts everything as a supposedly lesser evil will justify evil and monstrosities.
Franz Schandl
The 20th century was the bloodiest century in the history of humanity. The 21st century could break this record. The arsenals are full or can be full at any time. We live in times of insecurity of the worldwide political system. That is realistic though it may sound cynical. As everybody knows, growth in all areas is a principle of capital accumulation. A black scenario is unfolding today in the Middle East where suffering and brutality constantly increase.
31.12.2007
Lecture on The Capital, Ch. 1 – 5
Held at the Congrès Marx International , Paris, Oct. 2007, with Moishe Postone
31.12.2006
The Idiom of Crisis
On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno
new version June 2006
Neil Larsen, University of California, Davis
I.
“The whole is the untrue.”1 This phrase, one of the signatures of Adorno’s most unmistakable work, Minima Moralia, points to an irony that perhaps not even its author could have discerned. Notwithstanding the truth of its bitter rebuke to the Hegelian dialectic as apology for capitalist modernity, as a philosophical dictum in its own right it would itself have to be judged false, fatal to any aspiration to dialectical thought. To that much, of course, Adorno testifies, both in practice–for neither Minima Moralia nor any other of his works reflect any doubt that critical theory, as part of its own conceptual movement, must strive for the totalization of its object– but also in theory: one need look no further than to Minima Moralia itself than to have this confirmed: “Dialectical thought opposes reification in the…sense that it refuses to affirm individual things in their isolation and separateness: it designates isolation as precisely a product of the universal.”2 A refusal to isolate means a commitment to totalize, albeit a non-Hegelian one. The alternative would be to succumb to the reified consciousness of the object in its sheer immediacy. The “whole” may be the “untrue,” but that does not make the part the truth. Both become false, at least from the immediate standpoint of “wrong life” reflected, consciously and without apology, by Minima Moralia.
31.12.2005
Critical Theory of Capitalism Today
Türk versiyon – Ελληνική εκδοχή
Interview with Moishe Postone by Salih Selcuk
Pubished in YARIM, Istanbul, Feb. 2005
1. You reformulate the basic categories of Marx’s critique of political economy. According to you: where does Marxism reveal to be nowadays unsufficient, when it comes to explain capitalist society?
2. “Labor” seems to be the basic category that constitutes capitalist life, as you by the way claim it. Can one formulate today an intelligent critique of capitalism without criticizing labor?