Papers by Dimitris Papafotiou
Range and size increment of industrial applications regarding Circulating Fluidized Bed (CFB) tec... more Range and size increment of industrial applications regarding Circulating Fluidized Bed (CFB) technology raise numerous design and operating problems. Further insight into the governing and complex multiphase flow physics regarding CFB operation can be provided by CFD analysis. However, it has been proven during the recent years that multi-scale phenomena occurring in CFB reactors cannot be accurately reproduced by conventional models. Such models are unable to accurately predict the momentum exchange between the co-existing phases (gas and inert material) when calculating the drag coefficient. The main reason is that gas-solid two-phase flow features spatiotemporal multi-scale structures, named clusters, as the heterogeneous flow field is developing. Aiming to evaluate the particles tendency to aggregate in clusters and describe the effects of this complicated mechanism on the main characteristics of the induced multiphase flow field, the advanced Energy Minimization Multi-Scale (EMMS) analysis is applied. The EMMS scheme comprises of a set of equalities, constraints and a minimization energy equation, solved for a number of volume fraction's and slip velocity's values, using the optimization software General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS).
The aim of this presentation is to present the dialogue between the positions of Charles Bettelhe... more The aim of this presentation is to present the dialogue between the positions of Charles Bettelheim and Robert Linhart regarding socialist transition and in particular the New Economic Policy. Our approach will not attempt to judge the accuracy of their assessment in the regards to actual developments and class relations of the Soviet social formation. What we want to do is to attempt to see this dialogue as part of the relation of western Marxism to this question. Therefore we attempt to see their respective theoretical positions.
Value-form theory presents also a way to think about questions of revolutionary strategy and soci... more Value-form theory presents also a way to think about questions of revolutionary strategy and socialist transition. This is based in our reading of value form theory which suggests that the emergence of a social form whose reproduction entails the reproduction of particular capitalist social relations and relations of production, was the result of an entire series of singular and molecular social practices, struggles and conflicts, economic but also political and ideological. In this sense, it is impossible to put an end to the value form by decree and the plan in a certain way reproduces elements of the value form, including fetishistic results. Instead, what is needed is an entire period of experimentation with new forms of organization of production and distribution, but also of new political forms and new forms of collective intellectuality in a constant struggle against the reproduction of capitalist social relations and forms, and in constant antagonistic contradictions with the capitalist mode of production. Only by this extensive and expansive form of social experimentation and transformation and struggle it is possible to see the emergence of radically novel social relations and configurations that would be in a position to be reproduced as social forms..
Ζήτω οι μπολσεβίκοι, Κάτω οι κομμουνιστές!, 2017
Τετράδια Μαρξισμού, τεύχος 3, Άνοιξη 2017
Περιοδικό Θέσεις - Τεύχος 131, περίοδος: Απρίλιος - Ιούνιος 2015
Περιοδικό Θέσεις - Τεύχος 127, περίοδος: Απρίλιος - Ιούνιος 2014
Beginning with his suggestion in 1969 that one should begin reading Marx’s Capital Volume 1 from ... more Beginning with his suggestion in 1969 that one should begin reading Marx’s Capital Volume 1 from the Part II, leaving aside Part I, Louis Althusser in the 1970s moved to a more critical approach regarding what he considered the idealist residues in Marx’s theorization of value. He even praised Pierro Sraffa’s demonstrations of Marx’s mistakes regarding the transformation problem. On the one hand, he stresses the problems he attributes to a Hegelian conception of science that need to start from the most abstract notion and gradually, by means of conceptual transformation reach concrete reality. For Althusser, this conception of science along with the idealist / anthropological overtones of Marx’s theory of fetishism can account for the idealist elements that continue to be effective within the Marx’s mature work. Althusser insists that there is also another theoretical strategy in Capital that stresses the importance of the concrete history of class struggles, the many singular battles and confrontations, the everyday violence of exploitation that is at the heart of capital. This coincides with Althusser’s elaboration of materialism of the encounter that stressed the importance of singularities. Consequently and partly in contrast to Althusser’s texts in Reading Capital, Althusser seems critical of any potential theory of the value-form as articulated in Capital. Although there is indeed a certain ‘missed encounter’ between Althusser and value form theory, the aim of this paper is to argue that it is exactly be means of Althusser’s attempt to renew historical materialism as a materialism of the encounter along with his attempt to offer a relational theorization of social structures and forms as lasting encounters, that we can rethink in a non Hegelian way the theory of the value-form and the many important contributions to it beginning with I.I. Rubin’s seminal work.
50 years after its original publication Reading Capital remains one of the most important contrib... more 50 years after its original publication Reading Capital remains one of the most important contributions to Marxist debates. One of its most interesting aspects is exactly the fact that it is a reading of Marx’s Capital and of Marx’s theory of the value-form, that in a certain way preceded the major debates of theory of value and the value-form from the 1970s onwards. However, relatively little attention has been paid to this aspect, since the main tendency has been to treat Reading Capital as a more general epistemological and / or philosophical statement and as the expression of ‘High Althusserianism’. In contrast to this tendency, we would like to insist on the importance of Reading Capital as in intervention and contribution to the debates on Marx’s theory of value and the value form by means of a comparative reading of Rancière’s contribution to Reading Capital and I.I. Rubin’s conceptualization of the value-form, attempting to show that in Reading Capital there is much more to be found than simply ‘structuralism’.
Uploads
Papers by Dimitris Papafotiou