Antonio Negri – A Revolt that Never Ends

Fascinating documentary of Antonio Negri, other parts are listed on the side panel on youtube. It is English subtitles

“Gender and Democracy in the Neoliberal Agenda: Feminist Politics, Past and Present”: Silvia Federici

6th Subversive festival
13/05/2013, 21:00h, cinema Europa
Silvia Federici ”Gender and democracy in the Neo-liberal agenda: feminist politics past and present

Moderator: Ankica Čakardić

As feminism has been institutionalized and subsumed to the neo-liberal agenda in the name of democratization, a feminist critique of liberal democracy is more urgent than ever. Federici discusses the role this grand illusion has played in feminist politics and contrasts it with the contribution feminist movements have made to democracy intended as self-government and egalitarian division of the commonwealth.

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Bonefeld on Primitive Accumulation.

Good talk from Wener Bonefeld on Primitive Accumulation and Class

reificationofpersonsandpersonificationofthings

Here’s a video of Bonefeld’s talk at Delavsko-punkerska univerza on ‘Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Accumulation:’

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Merleau-Ponty – The World of Perception and the World of Science

I am currently writing an essay on Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Eye and Mind’ so I figured I’d post this short but rather brilliant video where he discusses Perception and Science. The Youtube channel this is taken from contains numerous videos on Philosophy and is well worth looking at.

The Frankfurt School – Radio 4

The Frankfurt School – Radio 4

Melvyn Bragg and guests Raymond Geuss, Esther Leslie and Jonathan Rée discuss the Frankfurt School.

This group of influential left-wing German thinkers set out, in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, to investigate why their country had not had a revolution, despite the apparently revolutionary conditions that spread through Germany in the wake of the 1918 Armistice.

To find out why the German workers had not flocked to the Red Flag, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and others came together around an Institute set up at Frankfurt University and began to focus their critical attention not on the economy, but on culture, asking how it affected people’s political outlook and activities.

But then, with the rise of the Nazis, they found themselves fleeing to 1940s California. There, their disenchantment with American popular culture combined with their experiences of the turmoil of the interwar years to produce their distinctive, pessimistic worldview.

With the defeat of Nazism, they returned to Germany to try to make sense of the route their native country had taken into darkness.

In the 1960s, the Frankfurt School’s argument – that most of culture helps to keep its audience compliant with capitalism – had an explosive impact. Arguably, it remains influential today.

“A Marx for the Left Today”: Interview with Marcello Musto by Vesa Oittinen and Andrey Maidansky

Vesa Oittinen is professor at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland, and author of many books. Among these are: Spinozistische Dialektik (Peter Lang, 1994); Der Akt als Fundament des Bewusstseins? (Peter Lang 1996); Marx ja Venäjä (ed., Aleksanteri Papers, 2006); and Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) ja Marxin uudelleen löytäminen (ed. with Juha Koivisto, Vastapaino 2010).

Andrey Maidansky is professor of philosophy at the Institute of Economics and Management in Taganrog, Russia. He has published several studies on Spinoza, Marxism and philosophy of science and contributes regulary to the main Russian philosophical journal Voprosy Filosofii. They interviewed Marcello Musto about the significance of newly published works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Musto teaches at the Department of Political Science of York University (Toronto, Canada). He has carried out researches on the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe and is the editor and a contributing author of: Sulle tracce di un fantasma. L’opera di…

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New Heinrich Article on Crisis.

reificationofpersonsandpersonificationofthings

This Month’s issue of the Monthly Review has a new article by Michael Heinrich on Marx’s crisis theory:

In Marx’s work, no final presentation of his theory of crisis can be found. Instead, there are various approaches to explain crises. In the twentieth century, the starting point for Marxist debates on crisis theory was the third volume of Capital, the manuscript of which was written in 1864–1865. Later, attention was directed towards the theoretical considerations on crisis in the Theories of Surplus-Value, written in the period between 1861 and 1863. Finally, the Grundrisse of 1857–1858 also came into view, which today plays a central role in the understanding of Marx’s crisis theory for numerous authors. Thus, starting with Capital, the debate gradually shifted its attention to earlier texts. With the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), all of the economic texts written by Marx between the late…

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Talking History

Fascinating little gem I found on Youtube, E.P. Thompson and C.L.R. James discussing history.

The page translates to English once you follow the link.

Inessa Armand, la primera dirigente del Departamento de la Mujer en la Revolución Rusa de 1917, hizo la siguiente observación: “Si la liberación de la mujer es impensable sin el comunismo, el comunismo es también impensable sin la liberación de la mujer”. Esta afirmación es un perfecto resumen de la relación entre la lucha por el socialismo y la lucha por la liberación de la mujer: no es posible una sin la otra.

La tradición marxista asume, desde sus orígenes, con los escritos de Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels, la lucha por la liberación de la mujer. Ya desde el “Manifiesto Comunista”, Marx y Engels argumentaron como la clase dominante oprime a las mujeres, relegándolas a “ciudadanas de segunda clase” en la sociedad y dentro de la familia: “el burgués ve en su mujer un mero instrumento de producción…, no sospecha siquiera que el verdadero objetivo que perseguimos [los comunistas]…

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Jairus Banaji – 2012 Deutscher Memorial Lecture

Jairus Banaji ‘Seasons of self-delusion: opium, capitalism and the financial markets’
Great talk given at the 2012 Historical Materialism conference by Marxist academic Jairus Banaji.
Part two is listed at the side panel on the video page.