Cannabis Communism: The Politics of Consciousness
Anders Maybeck2021
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
Acid communism. Psychedelic socialism. The freak Left. What do these terms mean? The Youth International Party, with a red star and a marijuana leaf on its flag, formed in 1967, a youth-oriented countercultural revolutionary party, who ran a pig, Pigasus the Immortal as its presidential candidate, and the campaign of Hunter S. Thompson for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado in 1970, on the “Freak Power” ticket, whose logo for Gonzo journalism and his Sheriff campaign was the “Gonzo fist” which interestingly has 6-fingers and is holding a peyote button; these examples better embody than any others the fusion of revolutionary libertarian socialist politics with the counterculture of the 1960s. Mark Fisher, forefather of the “Acid Communism” project, committed suicide in 2017. In ‘Capitalist Realism’ he included a discussion of mental health in terms of the dominating hegemony of capitalism, his personal mental health struggles, and the effects of capitalism on individuality. He argued that the revitalization of democratic socialism and libertarian communism as alternatives to contemporary neoliberal capitalism had to move beyond the politics of anti-capitalism to a politics of post-capitalism that would recognize that the destruction of the organized left was predicated on the failure of this movement to come to terms with the cultural divergence of 1960s counterculture from the political mainstream. Furthermore, he warned of the transition from anti-statism to anti-politics in postmodernity. His argument, however, was that even in the midst of a total economic and ecological catastrophe, that the very functioning of the neoliberal ideology as hegemonic negates the forms of class struggle that challenge capitalist realism. In ‘Capitalist Realism’, the second chapter is called “What if you held a protest and everyone came?”. He goes on to argue that neoliberalism since the 1960s has maintained its system of dominance but in our contemporary era of technological acceleration, it has changed form: into a “more desperate, even faux-melancholic edge”. His main thesis is that the “strategy” of neoliberalism is not to condemn anti-capitalist protest, but instead present the idea that there is no viable alternative to capitalism - i.e. capitalist realism. The 1960s was defined by the emergence of the New Left, the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, environmentalism, the anti-nuclear movement, second-wave feminism, the gay rights movement; as well as the rise of middle class drug culture, beats, mods, hippies, and of course psychedelia. The focus of this analysis, based on the basic idea of Mark Fisher’s posthumous introduction to his unfinished ‘Acid Communism’, we see through the lens of Derrida’s concept of hauntology (e.g. the idolization of Ché Guevara during Occupy Wall Street) of the “slow cancelation of the future”, and the persistence of cultural elements that return like a ghost from the past, and Fisher’s unpublished book attempted to advance a solution to the earlier outline of ‘Capitalist Realism’ through the excavation of Marxism and 1960s culture to return to the cultural revolution of the 60s in the vein of the reality of hauntology such that we see both Derrida’s original idea of the atemporal historicity of Marxism to haunt Western culture, such as how Marx’s critique of political economy can be viewed as an objective science that is always applicable in discourse to criticize capitalism as a monolith of political economy that seems to always only get more advanced as history progresses; so how can we speak of progress? Marx’s historical materialism is the very essence of progress; we cannot concede to the fashionable concept of “accelerationism” because Marx himself thought that the capitalism of the 19th century was almost at its point of implosion; we have heard this same refrain all throughout history, so though accelerationism is here rejected, Derrida’s hauntology is relevant in the sense that Walter Benjamin conceptualized revolution as the awakening of the dead of past revolutions; will the ghost of the 1960s return?
Related papers
Neoanarchism and the New Spirit of Capitalism: From Alterglobalization to Occupy Wall Street
From Alterglobalization to Occupy Wall Street: Neoanarchism and the New Spirit of Capitalism The Research Group on Post-Growth Societies, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena Tuesday, September 29th This talk will present an overview of my doctoral research, which examines how political transformations within left social movements have helped to construct a “new spirit of capitalism” that addresses widespread demand for an ethical lifeworld, simultaneously innovating and modernizing while neutralizing critique. Ideas and practices pioneered by oppositional movements have become mainstream political discourse and consumer habitus; modern capitalism increasingly speaks the same language of its critics: sustainability, fairness, authenticity, freedom. Looking at the cases of the alterglobalization and Occupy Wall Street movements in the United States, I analyze the emergence of their distinctive neoanarchist political orientation and explore its latent affinities with neoliberalism to argue that recuperation – the process of incorporating contentious movements and discourse into power – constitutes an important but overlooked factor in movement decline as well as establishing political legitimacy. The talk will examine the political logic which animated the shift from New Left Marxism to neoanarchism, offer a critique of the neoanarchist theorists like David Graeber and Simon Critchley based on its resonance with neoliberal concepts, and theorize recuperation as a factor in social movement decline and in the modernization of capitalism’s normative order. Whereas the anti-corporate politics of the alterglobalization movement of the late 90s and early 2000s was reborn as ethical consumption, I suggest that in a post-crisis era, the anti-statist communitarian politics of movements like Occupy Wall Street have also been absorbed into neoliberal policy and discourse. I argue that the orientation of direct action self-provisioning by non-state actors, increasingly attractive to left and right actors alike, offers a glimpse of a potentially new spirit of capitalism well-tailored to a post-crisis era of “post” or “zombie” neoliberalism. Both theoretical and empirical, the project the project explores how ostensibly oppositional social movements also constitute important resources for political stabilization in contemporary societies.
The Breakdown of Capitalist Realism
In this intervention, I reflect on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism as a work better known for its title, as a phrase or slogan, than for the substance of the book. While indicative of the success of Fisher’s diagnosis, one borne out through the experience of capitalist crisis and austerity, I want to turn to the problem of the alternative and the future that was a constant concern of Fisher’s writing. In particular, probing the “realism” in “capitalist realism,” I want to consider Fisher’s interest in the breakdown of capitalist realism. This “breakdown” is indicated negatively by psychic suffering and collapse, but also positively by the cultural forms of the weird and eerie as markers of a consciousness beyond “capitalist realism,” the mapping of capitalist crisis, and the futures that might positively emerge through breakdown. At stake in the substance of Fisher’s work, I suggest, lies a class phenomenology concerned with not only grasping the suffering inflicted by capitalist culture, but also the possibilities of a breakdown of realism that would imagine a future oriented to a new collective experience beyond the existing limits of psychic and social formations.
From Alterglobalization to Occupy Wall Street: Neoanarchism and the New Spirit of Capitalism
City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2013
Neoanarchist politics have become increasingly hegemonic on the North American left. Tracing its emergence during the Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999 to its recent incarnation in the Occupy Wall Street movement, this article argues that neoanarchism’s attempts to “change the world without taking power” pose serious theoretical and practical problems for emancipatory politics today. The text also examines recuperation as a factor in social movement decline, arguing that the incorporation of social movement themes is constructing a “new spirit of capitalism” that both addresses widespread demand for a more ethical world while simultaneously insulating itself from critique – a process facilitated by significant ideological resonance between neoanarchism and neoliberalism.
Anticapitalism and culture: Radical theory and popular politics
Continuum, 2010
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. organisers, Alan Finlayson and Jim Martin, for inviting me. Some other elements of it were aired at the Democracy Beyond Democracy: Democratic Struggle in a Post-Democratic Age symposium in Vienna, and I'd like to thank Rupert Weinzierl for inviting me to that, as well as my co-participants, Oliver Marchart (who was later also encouraging about a fi rst draft of the fi rst two chapters of this book), Simon Tormey, Chantal Mouffe, and Miguel Abensour. I was supposed to write it up into an article for the excellent Social Movement Studies; it was in the process of doing so that it took something like its current shape, so I'd like to thank one of the journal's founding editors, Tim Jordan, for his encouragement and then his forbearance when the article never appeared. I have also realised at the very late stage of proofreading the book that all references to Tim's Activism! have somehow been edited out-an embarrassing oversight on my part given the high value I accord to that work. My colleagues and students at the University of East London are a never-ending source of inspiration and support. Ta for that. Finally, I'd like to thank my Dad, for teaching me that there is nothing so practical as a good theory, and my Mum, for similarly helping me to see from a very early age just how much politics matters. The book is a loving present for Jo Littler. Without her love and support it would have been very diffi cult. Without her inspiration, it could not have happened at all. 2 • Introduction Despite the intellectual richness of this moment, by the 1990s most of the organised Left-from the socialist and communist movements to the New Social Movements-had ceased to be viable as coherent, consistent projects for social transformation. The defeat of communism, the dispersal of the women's movement and the hegemony of neoliberalism all consolidated a situation in which there simply were no such radical movements for cultural studies to maintain such dialogues with. This has not prevented cultural studies from growing, proliferating and extending its project and its reach. Nor has it prevented the best work in the fi eld from continuing to offer incisive analyses of contemporary culture in its many aspects. But it does mean that cultural studies has not had the benefi t of that dynamic dialogue with radical political movements that was the source of some of its energy in the past. The second chapter therefore suggests that a dialogue between cultural studies and the anti-capitalist movement might be a good thing. Chapter 3 outlines and refl ects upon the emergence of this movement, which is sometimes called anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation or global-justice or altermondialiste. Since the early 1990s a range of projects and institutions have arisen around the world which try to challenge the global dominance of liberal capitalism, and which are informed by a set of libertarian and egalitarian values very similar to those which typifi ed the New Left. This anti-capitalism is different from the traditional labour and socialist movements in ways which were to some extent prefi gured and called for by the ideas of the New Left, and by the ideas of philosophers and theorists associated with the anti-essentialist turn. The chapter therefore argues that this movement can be said to be radical democratic in its aspirations, provided that we clear up some common confusions as to what the term radical democracy means. On the other hand, this movement is informed by, at best, some woefully simplistic ideas about culture and political strategy. It is precisely this poverty of thought which the best cultural studies work of the past has often tried to remedy in radical movements. As such, Chapter 3 contends that it is worth thinking through some issues about culture and political strategy from a position informed by the legacy of cultural studies and the concerns of anti-capitalism. Chapter 4 considers a range of different ways of conceptualising the relationship between capitalism and culture, and it considers reasons as to why one might or might not want to take up a political or analytical position which is explicitly anti-capitalist. Although it rejects a classically Marxist anti-capitalism, it fi nds good reasons for taking up a position which sees capitalism in general-and neoliberalism in particular-as inimical to any democratic culture, and worth opposing on those terms. It concludes, however, that the anti-capitalism of the movement of movements might have to be mobilised under names less abstract than anti-capitalism if it is to prove politically effective in concrete contexts. Chapter 5 tries to think about what would be involved in developing such a position, by comparing the theoretical ideas of a number of philosophers who have written in a spirit close to that of both New Left cultural studies and of the anti-capitalist 8 • Introduction organised groups. Indeed, some might say that, along with the other defi nitions offered above, cultural studies simply is the result of a radical expansion of the concept of politics within the humanities and social sciences. This expanded conception regards politics as involving all those processes whereby power relationships are implemented, maintained, challenged, or altered in any sphere of activity whatsoever. Given that important traditions in philosophy and social science-which have both infl uenced cultural studies and been infl uenced by it-regard power relationships as infusing all aspects of human existence, and in some cases all aspects of all existence whatsoever (Nietzsche 1968: 297-300; 332-47), it seems like it might be possible to describe almost any situation in so-called political terms. This, in fact, is one of the great sources of anxiety within recent debates over the nature and practice of cultural studies: if everything is political, then does that mean that nothing is specifi cally political, as some commentators seem to fear (Eagleton 2000)? Is there any difference between offering a political analysis of a situation and a non-political one? This, once again, is a highly controversial area to which several whole books could be devoted without exhausting the range of possible positions. However, it is also a debate within which this book will have to take a tentative position before it can proceed any further. For the sake of argument, then, I am going to propose a distinction between two levels of political engagement: the political and the micropolitical. With the phrase micropolitical, I am referring to that level of interaction at which all relationships (even those between non-human entities such as animals, plants or even, arguably, sub-atomic particles) might be described as political insofar as they can involve relative stabilisations, alterations, augmentations, diminutions or transfers of power. At the level of human culture, for example, even such a localised and historically insignifi cant incident as a university deciding not to offer a degree course in modern French might be understood as the outcome of micropolitical processes involving confl icts, disagreements and decisions over the allocation of resources, or the relative prestige attributed to different disciplines within the university, and so forth. In the next two chapters, I am going to use the term politics, on the other hand, in the more widely understood sense of the general fi eld of public contestation between identifi able and opposing sets of ideas about how social relationships should be ordered. Politics in this sense is the sphere in which social movements, political parties, large-scale ideologies and powerful institutions (such as governments and corporations) struggle to determine the outcomes of the big questions about what kind of societies we want to live in. In this sense, the struggle to keep open our university French department would only be political to the extent that it located itself in a wider context of struggles against public service cuts, 'dumbing down', xenophobia, or something beyond the immediate career concerns of its staff. I could use the term macropolitics for this level of engagement instead, and it might be more accurate, but it would sound clumsier and take up more space. Now, the relationship between these two levels is clearly unstable and at times conceptually problematic.
Gregory SHOLETTE: Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism
Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement, 2018
'The War Against Marxism: Reification and Revolution' by Tony McKenna reviewed by Fouad Mami -Marx & Philosophy Society
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2021
Anti-Capitalist Resistance in the Liberalist Context
2016
In this article I link the "social ethos" of contemporary anti-capitalism (with a focus on the Occupy movement) to a history of liberalist radicalism in the Western world. I challenge the leftist perspectives of Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek to argue that there is a genuinely progressive, radical undercurrent to liberalist culture, with movements such as the Occupy movement unconsciously drawing on, and being a product of, this culture. I trace the strands of a radical liberalist culture back to some of the tenets in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and John Locke, postulating the development of an egalitarian individualism through Western history. However, rather than celebrate or champion the liberal tradition, I propose a fundamental contradiction at the heart of liberalist culture, and consider how neoliberalism draws on and brings out the well-noted possessive tendencies of liberal individualism. I argue that liberalism is not synonymous with capitalism, even if it is compatible with it and often supports its development. I argue that the contemporary form of neoliberal capitalism does not represent the fulfilment of liberal ideology per se, but the fulfilment of one (arguably perverse) strand of liberal culture that prioritizes the struggle for individual power over the struggle for individual freedom.
Ideology and Utopia: Philosophy Under Conditions of Neoliberalism
Enthusiasm for Derrida's work and persona was sourced in both their resonance with the affective-ideological atmosphere of ascending neoliberalism and their emphatic embodiment of neoliberal ideality, i.e., their exceptional instantiation of the neoliberal good life. What for many was only partially, if at all, realized, and tinged with disappointment, frustration, anxiety, and suffering, was consummately achieved in Derrida's writings. In close connection to ordinary experience, but also at a great distance from it, experiences of insuperable conflict and uncertainty, collapse, and ruin were, in Derrida, converted into intriguing new beginnings. His capitalizing on de-construction was undaunted, ideal. As all prior progressive ideals -both revolutionary and liberal -and good life fantasies collapsed or eroded, we identified with Derrida's enthusiasm, reverberated with it, and soon enough found ourselves in a feedback loop of mutually enhancing enthusiasm. Then, as the allure of neoliberalism's promise became tarnished by experiences of its developing actuality, as we increasingly felt left behind by or very incompletely included in that promise but not yet definitively divested by it, Derrida came to stand for peak of neoliberalism which we had not yet attained, but might yet. Enthusiasm for Derrida became, more explicitly, enthusiasm for an ideal. Finally, when the break between neoliberal conditions and neoliberal ideology became unavoidably apparent, Derrida could no longer function as a prop for fantasies of the neoliberal good life. His enthusiasm could no longer speak to us, the frayed and depressed denizens of late stage neoliberalism. It is for this reason that the memory of Derrida is fast fading. What enflamed and sustained interest in Derrida were social and political conditions that have now collapsed. What this collapse reveals is what, precisely, was intolerable in our past, as well as the contours of the present.
The Poverty of Radical Theory Today: From the False Promises of Marxism to the Mirage of the Cultural Turn
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2001
More than twenty years ago, EP Thompson cautioned academic radicals 3 on the dangers of using social theory to paint overly-complete, too tightly-structured images of the society we live in. He charged that such theory, and especially the academic Marxism then in vogue in Britain and the United States, 4 underestimated the openness and variety of historical processes and hence the possibilities for 1 A "mirage" is something which is chimerical, fascinating, often beautiful, and possibly quite pertinent or useful, but which nonetheless leads us astray. separating our analysis of what is from what we want to be. 9 This search for comprehensive solutions to many ills --in the case of radical political economy, combating capitalism --is what we may call a utopian impulse. Although marxism has largely gone out of fashion, the utopian impulse has moved to post-modernism (and to a lesser extent, post-colonialism) on the theory side, and multi-culturalism and "cultural politics" in political practice.
Shock and Alla: Capitalist cures for socialist perversities at the end of the twentieth century
Capitalist cures for socialist perversities at the end of the twentieth century THIS ARTICLE PANS out from the special time and place of Russia in the early 1990s, a society deep in the throes of epistemic transition, in order to disentangle a less local phenomenon described by transnational queer theorists as the insidious linking of perverse modernity and the perverse body in certain instantiations of globalized thinking. 1 In the pages that follow, I pursue one such instantiation, mapping out the itineraries of modernity's normalizing metaphors as they make their way across the world, from the West to the (abnormal) rest, and as they remake the world in the wake of their wanderings. I ask not only how these lines of thought and their expressive repertoires link up "unhealthy" political economies with "unhealthy" economies of desire along the way, but also how the conflations they effect on the figurative level of language register on the real surfaces of the body -especially, I press, when the body in question attempts the reverse voyage, by boldly going against the flows of late-capitalism. Indeed, when dealing with the perverts of modernity, I wonder, how extreme must the treatment administered to a body politic, marked as pathological from the late-capitalist lambda nordica 4/2012
A Postmodern Marxism
Whilst the need for social and political transformation in the modern world is clear, it isn’t clear just who or what the structural agency for this change will be. It still can be the working class, for the reasons Marx gave. But the mechanisms upon which marxist class politics rest seem to have failed. Some would question the relevance of Marx to the project of emancipation, consigning marxism to the past in the search for a revival of radical politics.Marxism is still geared to the political economy of an industrial capitalist past. For postmodernists, marxism fails to either recognize the new technologies of regulation and, tied to the past, proceeds to advance political programmes that only further processes of bureaucratisation and homogenisation. The 'evident truths' of Marxism as a political movement are considered to have been 'seriously challenged by an avalanche of historical mutations which have riven the ground on which those truths were constituted'. This study looks at the relation between marxism postmodernism with the specific intention of outlining the contours of a 'postmodern marxism', playing up the extent to which the end of Marx's emancipatory project is itself a POSTmodernity rather than an anti-modernity. Particularly important is the role of social identity and pluralisation within an overarching framework. Thus the attempt is made to address the crisis of marxism as opportunity as well as defeat. Whilst some thought that the collapse of the old soviet marxism would mean the end of marxism as such, the view taken here is that the result has been the flourishing of a new Marxism, the foundations of which have been laid by many hitherto ignored and marginalised thinkers in the past.
On Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism
2015
My intervention this afternoon will attempt to summarize some of the main ideas put forward in We Make Our Own History – a book that it took my good friend and comrade Laurence Cox and myself well over a decade to write. We Make Our own History is intended, above all, to explore the relationship between Marxist theory and social movements, and in particular how this relationship works in the specific historical period that we are calling the twilight of neoliberalism. Or – put slightly differently – I’ll be talking about how we can reclaim Marxism as a theory that can serve activist purposes and knowledge interests in a context where neoliberalism appears to be undergoing a moment of organic crisis.
The Unbearable Slowness of Change: Protest Politics and the Erotics of Resistance (The Philosophical Salon - Los Angeles Review of Books)
In the past decades there has been a proliferation of protest movements that interpellate a global demos, which has been wronged by the neoliberal beast. Street politics seem to have transformed the way power, agency and resistance are being perceived and performed. By inserting new actors into the political stage, these counterpublic spheres are displacing the Habermasian idea of public sphere thereby reshaping the terms of the state-civil society relation. However, the question remains: How effective are these fantasies of radical change through “Facebook revolutions” and “Twitter insurgencies” in fundamentally transforming social, political and economic relations in the era of postcolonial late capitalism? Do current protests unwittingly reproduce processes of subalternization of marginal subjects and collectivities that have a tenuous relation to the state as well as the (international) civil society and counterpublic spheres? The continued reproduction of subalternity complicates easy notions of transnational alliances, raising troubling questions about the possibilities of post-imperial politics in the era of neoliberal globalization.
Spectres of Class: Marxism, Deconstruction and the Politics of Affiliation
Journal for Cultural Research, 2006
The paper is concerned with the reaction of the left to the publication of Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (SM). My argument is that this reaction has, in general, been unwilling to engage with the ethico-political significance of Derrida's thought, and that it has concentrated largely on reiterating certain protocols which ought to govern the inheritance of Marx's political provocations. I have taken three particularly vociferous critics of SM as exemplary of this attempt to designate the proper conditions of affiliation to Marxism: Aijaz Ahmad, Alex Callinicos and Tom Lewis. I argue that each of these thinkers has ignored the concept of the question which informs Derrida's attempt to remain faithful to "a certain spirit" of Marxism, and that consequently they have failed to take seriously his attempts to transform conventional notions of class solidarity. In the final section I will examine Fredric Jameson's attempt to restage the encounter between Marxism and deconstruction, and to reconfigure the idea of class in the light of Derrida's remarks on logic of revolutionary condensation and historical necessity. My aim is to show that the apparent homology between Derrida and Jameson is ruptured by the latter's insistence upon the "allegorical" configuration of class solidarities, and the former's commitment to the de-affiliating questions (of hospitality) that arise from global organization of capitalism. I will always wonder if the idea of Marxism-the self-identity of Marxist discourse or system or even a science of philosophy-is not incompatible with the event-Marx. (Derrida 1993
Long Shadows of the New Left: From Students for a Democratic Society to Occupy Wall Street
Revisiting the Sixties: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on America's Longest Decade, 2013
This text examines the political legacy of the New Left on the alterglobalization movement and Occupy Wall Street in the United States. It argues that the U.S. New Left’s transformation from participatory democracy to Maoist sectarianism constituted a trauma deeply inscribed on the formation of subsequent social movements in the United States, especially its direct chronological successors in the New Social Movements of the 1980s and 1990s. This synthetic movement milieu was characterized by commitments to feminism, antiracism, and ecology coupled to a critique of economic reductionism, an aversion to ideological sectarianism instantiated in a turn to culture and single issue campaigns, and a preference for prefigurative political forms which embodied a consistency of means and ends. This political constellation would become definitional for the alterglobalization movement that emerged on the streets of Seattle in 1999, and, after a period of movement abeyance, would re-emerge later in Occupy Wall Street alongside new populist themes. By charting the development of groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Abalone/Clamshell Alliances, Direct Action Network, this paper explores how the New Left’s discourse of “the personal is the political” evolved into the neo-anarchism that became hegemonic within the alterglobalization movement and later OWS. It also contends that the same challenges and limitations that demobilized the early New Left, New Social Movements, and the alterglobalization movement persist in Occupy Wall Street. Exploring the continuities and ruptures between these movements, I argue that the “prefigurative politics” now hegemonic within the North American left, by overcorrecting for the failures of 20th Century Marxism, poses formidable theoretical and practical problems for social movements today.
The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism: The Liberal Spirit and the Making of Western Radicalism
2017
Does contemporary anti-capitalism tend towards, as Slavoj Žižek believes, nihilism, or does it tend towards, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri believe, true egalitarian freedom? Within The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism, Fletcher presents an answer that manages to tend towards both simultaneously. In entering into contemporary debates on radicalism, this innovative volume proposes a revised conception of Hardt and Negri’s philosophy of emancipatory desire. Indeed, Fletcher reassesses Hardt and Negri’s history of Western radicalism and challenges their notion of an alter-modernity break from bourgeois modernity. In addition to this, this title proposes the idea of Western anti-capitalism as a spirit within a spirit, exploring how anti-capitalist movements in the West pose a genuine challenge to the capitalist order while remaining dependent on liberalist assumptions about the emancipatory individual. Inspired by post-structuralism and rejecting both revolutionary transcendence and notions of an underlying desiring purity, The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism offers new insight into how liberal capitalist society persistently produces its own forms of resistance against itself. This book will appeal to graduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Cultural Studies, History, and Philosophy.
The posters of May '68 and their significance for a contemporary critique of capitalism
Estudios de Filosofía, 62, 175-188, 2020
This essay explores the original political significance of the posters of May '68 as a critique of capitalism, as well as extending this approach to a critique of contemporary capitalism in 2020. The slogans of '68 are deceptively simple and we look to the importance of the political ideas expressed aesthetically as having immediate impact in the late 1960s, but also the underlying Situationist philosophy which influenced them. We also explore the contemporary significance of Situationist theory, especially in the context of the renewal of Marxist thought in the 21 st century. This renewed Leftist critique of capitalism emerges as articulated through newer social and political movements of the current times, particularly through the political philosophy of Slavoj Žižek and his auto-critique of the former Yugoslavia.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.