Marxist Reading Group

We (English graduate students at the University of Southern Mississippi + other cool people) meet monthly to discuss selections from Marx's _Capital_. Contact [email protected] for dates and location

[dailymarx]

The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

Karl Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844 (via dailymarx)

[mal-educadx]

[eeeeevilhag]

Neither land nor women are territories of conquest

[hburgmarxists]

David Harvey's open course on Capital. This lecture covers chapters 7-9--the reading for meeting 5. 

[hburgmarxists]

Adorno had no blind reverence for past culture and made no attempt to disdain the present by cloaking himself in its authority.

Susan Buck-Morris, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute 

[omgcatrevolution]

Charlie Chaplin, The Circus (1928).

"When we discover that making this 3000-meter long film involved shooting 125,000 meters, we get an idea of the immense and devoted labor concealed behind Chaplin’s masterpieces. It also gives us a sense of the kind of financial capital needed by this man, as much as by a Nansen or Amundsen, in order to fit out his voyages of discovery to the poles of cinematic art. One has to share Soupault’s anxiety that the dangerous financial pressures placed on Chaplin by his second wife, together with the competitive war waged against him by American trusts, are paralyzing his productivity. Chaplin is supposed to be planning films about Napoleon and Christ. Should we not worry that such projects are but giant screens behind which the great artist is hiding his weariness?”

— Walter Benjamin, “Chaplin in Retrospect”

[scowlofminerva-blog]

The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that the society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'  (via aidsnegligee)

[blushisthecourt]

The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing left behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace we gain possession of the thing; in the aura it takes possession of us.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [M16a,4] in the section called The Flaneur. (via blushisthecourt)

[critical-theory]

BuzzFeed Founder Responds to His Marxist Roots, "Lol"

[hburgmarxists]

Here’s a story of encouragement for budding cultural critics: if you sell out, you can make millions of dollars by re-purposing your academic work for capitalist consumption. At least, that’s what BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has done. Back in April, 2013, we discovered that Peretti published an article in college that critiqued cultural capitalism and the MTV generation by citing the work of Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson and queer theory. “Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume,” Peretti wrote, “and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities. The internet is one of many late capitalist phenomena that allow for more flexible, rapid, and profitable mechanisms of identity formation.” The piece, entitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” later notes that the “rapid fire succession of signifiers” erodes a sense of temporal continuity, before going on to argue that advertisement

[levantine-viper-deactivated2014]

— Karl Marx’s replies to questions given to him by his daughters Jenny and Laura in 1865

His answers in Latin to your maxim and your motto translate as:

Nothing human is alien to me. (Maxim)

Everything must be doubted. (Motto)

[reallyrealhappiness-deactivated]

"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend."

Marx & Engels (Communist Manifesto)

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

I don't understand why Communists hate private property. If I own a blanket that only covers one at a time, why is it wrong for me to keep it for myself?

This is a common misconception about communism, and one deliberately promoted by capitalist ideology.

Communism is not about taking away an individual’s personal property like blankets. It is about socializing the means of production and distribution for the good of society.

Through socialized labor, the workers of the world collectively create society’s wealth. The benefits should be shared by all, rather than hoarded as profits by a small class of capitalist bosses.

This would resolve the problem (to follow your example) of some people having blankets, others having more blankets than they need, while others have none.

[t0kwxmzckcrlkfbfu4o9-deactivate]

Marxism distinguishes between labour, the physical act of working, and labour power, the ability to work. It is labour power, not labour, that is commoditised under capitalism. Labour power is a unique commodity because its use value, labour, is the production of other use values.

[hburgmarxists]

"Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction…Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction."

Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

[hburgmarxists]

Read if you dig Psycho-Marxist theory. 

[hburgmarxists]

"Money, like every other commodity, cannot express the magnitude of its value except relatively in other commodities."

Karl Marx, Capital

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Weekend of Discussion: MARXISM – The Science behind the Struggle

Saturday and Sunday – Aug. 23-24, 2014

5920 Second Ave., Detroit, MI 48202

Join us to hear panelists report on • imperialist war drive • global austerity • the continuing assault on workers and oppressed • oppression of women • immigrant rights • racism • LGBTQ struggles • Africa • Iraq, Syria; the Middle East and Palestine • the growing system-created humanitarian crises • just some of the issues, discussions and fightback strategies.

Register by calling [phone]

Housing available

Lunch And Dinner Served on Saturday Only

The anti-people, anti-worker agenda of the bosses and bankers is devastating to the working class. Job loss, increasing unemployment, racism and war, are the day to day fare for our class here at home and around the globe as global austerity, imperialist wars of intervention and occupation, and burgeoning refugee crisis are occurring cross the globe. In the belly of the beast, income disparity, homelessness, poverty and hunger are increasing as the insatiable hunt for greater and greater profits drives the capitalist monster.

The situation facing over 700,000 Detroiters, its public workers and pensioners, who in addition to having their pensions robbed from them, are facing an ever greater humanitarian crisis as a massive water shut-off program has been ordered by the EM dicta- tor for tens of thousands of homes.

These are just a few of the issues forcing an economic iceberg upon our class. Find out why and how we fight against the ills of capital- ism. The time has come for a system change. So join us and not only see what the bosses and bankers are about, but what our class, the workers and oppressed can and are doing about it. The fight back continues. Hope to see you there.

[hburgmarxists]

"Burroughs anticipates Fredric Jameson’s claim that an information society is the purest form of capitalism. When bodies are constituted as information, they can not be only sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to market pressures. Junk instantiates the dynamics of informatics and makes clear the relation of junk-as-information in late capitalism. Junk is the “ideal product” because the “junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. The junkie’s body is a harbinger of the postmodern mutant, for it demonstrates how presence yields to assembly and disassembly patterns created by the flow of junk-as-information through points of amplification and resistance." (42)

Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago, 1999.