Catalogues by Colin Mooers
Windsor Art Gallery, 2003
Over the past few years, David Mabb has produced paintings based on the work of designer, poet, a... more Over the past few years, David Mabb has produced paintings based on the work of designer, poet, and essayist William Morris (1834-96). A committed socialist, Morris believed that new manufacturing technologies alienated people from nature and from one another, and that industrialization removed workers from the creatiive aspects of craftsmanship. In this exhibition, six Morris wallpaper designs and nine paint colours provide the background for Mabb's paintings and videos. He examines Morris's designs and ideas relative to narious utopian visions of the future. The title of the exhibition suggests Morris's desire to transform industrial societies into a paradise.
Catalogue texts from A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers, including A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers by James Patten, Introductory Notes on A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers by David Mabb and Dialectics at a Standstill: The art of David Mabb by Colin P Mooers.
Papers by Colin Mooers
This article explores several issues related to the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. How we... more This article explores several issues related to the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. How well do contemporary theories of revolution explain these events? What did and did not happen? What theoretical framework makes the best sense of these events? The 1989 revolutions are notable for a number of reasons. Although they were centred in urban areas they were characterized by relatively low levels of popular mobilization. Most importantly, key sections of the old ruling classes welcomed the shift toward the market. Despite differences in the tempo and character of events in different countries, bureaucratic reformers and oppositional intellectuals shared many of the same political and econ-omic views. Neither group saw popular mobilization and alternative forms of institution-building as desirable or necessary. Attempts to theorize the 1989 revolutions have been insufficiently critical of notions of ’civil society’, ’modernity’, and the supposedly ’post-materialist’ values curren...
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2018
The New Imperialists: Ideologies of EmpireIntroduction: The New Watchdogs, Colin MooersChapter On... more The New Imperialists: Ideologies of EmpireIntroduction: The New Watchdogs, Colin MooersChapter One-Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy As Ideology of Empire.Chapter Two-Aziz Al-Azmeh, After The Fact: Reading Tocqueville in Baghdad.Chapter Three-Tariq Ali, Tortured Civilizations: Islam and the West.Chapter Four-Shahrzad Mojab, Gender, Political Islam and Imperialism.Chapter Five-David McNally, Imperial Narcissim: Michael Igatieff's Apologies for Empire.Chapter Six-Colin Mooers, Nostalgia for Empire: Revising Imperial History for American Power.Chapter Seven-Thom Workman, When Might is 'Right': Ancient Lamentations, Straussian Ministrations and American Dispensations.Chapter Eight-Adam Hanieh, Defending the Economics of the New Imperialism: Deepak Lal and the Capitalist World Market.Chapter Nine- Tanner Mirrlees, American 'Soft Power' Or A New Cultural Imperialism?Chapter Ten- Paul Cammack, UN Imperialism: Unleashing Entrepreneurship in the Developing World.
This defence of the concept of bourgeois revolution reasserts the importance of basic historical ... more This defence of the concept of bourgeois revolution reasserts the importance of basic historical materialist precepts to an understanding of the rise of European capitalism. In a wide-ranging analysis of British, French and German history - from feudalism to the system of rival capitalist states that was consolidated in the second half of the nineteenth century - Colin Mooers challenges both Marxist and non-Marxist revisionist interpretations of European history. He argues for an alternative conception of capitalist transition and bourgeois revolution which distinguishes between the conscious aims of social classes and the consequences of their actions for the long-term development of capitalism. Situating the continental revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the wider context of capitalism's 'combined and uneven development', the author shows how late-developing capitalist states like France and Germany were able to surpass British capitalism towards...
the Public Sphere, was that it sought to provide an historically grounded account of the public s... more the Public Sphere, was that it sought to provide an historically grounded account of the public sphere in relation to the rise of liberal capitalist societies. Habermas’s analysis drew attention to the existence of a ‘fourth sphere ’ alongside the family, economy, the state. The concept of the public sphere has retained its currency in contemporary debates surrounding citizenship and identity. Indeed, the explosion of myriad new forms of ‘publicity, ’ has forced a redefinition of “the spatial, territorial, and geopolitical parameters of the public sphere (Hansen 1993:183).” The classical bourgeois public sphere, as Nancy Fraser has argued, was essentially masculine; it implicitly assumed the bourgeois male as the ‘universal class’. Its presupposition, in other words, was the exclusion of women, the working class, and any others who did not correspond to this masculinist ideal. But, while many have criticized its exclusions and silences, few have traced the abstract generality of the...
Imperial Subjects : Citizenship in an age of crisis and empire
Introduction 1. Birth of the Liberal Subject 2. Imperialism Today 3. States of Insecurity 4. Stat... more Introduction 1. Birth of the Liberal Subject 2. Imperialism Today 3. States of Insecurity 4. States of Security 5. Contesting Empire: Against Commodity Citizenship
Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes
Midway through News From Nowhere, William Morris's visionary novel of an imaginary future sociali... more Midway through News From Nowhere, William Morris's visionary novel of an imaginary future socialist society, the time-travelling explorer Guest interrogates his host, Hammond, about his memories of how things were made in the bad old days of capitalism. Guest wonders: surely if things were produced for the world market, they must have been made very well? "Quality!" Hammond crustily replies, "how could they possibly attend to such trifles as the quality of the wares they sold? […] It was a current jest of the time that the wares were made to sell and not to use; a jest which you, as coming from another planet, may understand but which our folk could not" (Morris 1890, 95-96). Now, by contrast,
Studies in Political Economy, 2001
What right does any country have over another's policies and internal affairs, and are they ... more What right does any country have over another's policies and internal affairs, and are they right to use military power to change them? This book contains a collection of articles which examine whether unilateral political and military interjection can be justified. It is for those ...
points out, in precapitalist societies it would have made no sense to describe the labours of pea... more points out, in precapitalist societies it would have made no sense to describe the labours of peasant producers as that of a "professional" peasantry. For more on the relationship of capitalism, money, and abstract concepts of rights and citizenship see, Mooers 2001. 2 I do not have in mind here the issue of 'visible minorities'. However, as I hope to show, the abstractness of this notion in official government parlance in countries like Canada, which seems to have invented the term, has much to do with its disconnection from the way in which such identities are actually lived in class societies (Bannerji 2000). 2 things (Marx 1978: 165) ." Human relations in general assume an abstract form; concrete relations between individuals become subsumed under abstract-universal notions. 1 This paper explores the salience of this structural logic of abstraction for an understanding of the contemporary public sphere. The abstracting logic of the commodity form, I argue, involves a singular dialectic of embodiment and disembodiment in which certain types of bodies become socially visible while others remain largely invisible. 2 Visibility and invisibility is ultimately determined by where one stands in the chain of social relations linking the sphere of production and the public sphere. In the bourgeois public sphere, those who do not conform to the 'unmarked identity' of the bourgeois male enter the public sphere at the cost of shedding their concrete, embodied, identities. Full embodiment remains a privilege only for the 'unmarked' bourgeois male. In contrast, within the productive sphere, labouring bodies, in all their gendered and racialized concreteness, are radically present, while the body of the capitalist disappears from view. In the latter, 'Capital,' not any particular corporeal capitalist, becomes the embodiment of an abstract valorization process.
Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 2009
This paper charts the internal mediations between the duality of human labour under capitalism, t... more This paper charts the internal mediations between the duality of human labour under capitalism, the way in which capitalism embodies its ‘others’ through ideologies of race and gender, and the fetishistic forms of ‘difference’ expressed in liberal notions of multicultural citizenship. Such an immanent critique helps to explain one of the central paradoxes of ‘diversity’: how in the very process of recognizing ethnic and cultural differences, multiculturalism also occludes and distorts capitalism’s concrete social relations. The fetishistic ideology of multicultural citizenship should be understood as a ‘compromise formation’ which both distorts social relations and gestures toward an emancipatory potential beyond itself.
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Catalogues by Colin Mooers
Catalogue texts from A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers, including A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers by James Patten, Introductory Notes on A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers by David Mabb and Dialectics at a Standstill: The art of David Mabb by Colin P Mooers.
Papers by Colin Mooers
Catalogue texts from A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers, including A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers by James Patten, Introductory Notes on A Factory as it Might be or The Hall of Flowers by David Mabb and Dialectics at a Standstill: The art of David Mabb by Colin P Mooers.