Sublime

The challenge was how to ensure that capitalism served the people. Some supposed answers came from Europe and Russia. One was state ownership of monopolies and the largest enterprises—socialism, as it was called. A more radical one was found in communism—common ownership of all “means of production,” in Karl Marx’s words. A third was to turn large

After the First World War, the newly established Weimar Republic was impoverished by inflation and economic crises and considered itself abused by the punitive provisions included in the postwar Treaty of Versailles. Under Hitler after 1933, Germany sought to impose its totalitarianism on all of Europe. In short, throughout the first half of the tw

What, then, can we expect in the near term? Absent a secure hegemony, we face an unstable interregnum and the continuation of the political crisis. In this situation, the words of Gramsci ring true: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Managers of newly privatized businesses who have received a certain number of shares may borrow from banks (or from friends) to buy up the remaining shares from the workers (sometimes coercively, by threatening layoffs for example). Since a large number of bank loans are non-performing, the new owners either run the companies into the ground (asset

is that to a large extent the United States had to carry out its foreign interventions through the medium of mercenary states. There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states. Israel is the major one, but it also includes Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, the states that are involved in the World Anti-Communist League and the various military gro

Il n’en reste pas moins que l’attitude de Burke s’enracine profondément dans la philosophie de l’histoire de la tradition libérale qui, à partir de Montesquieu, a tendance à repérer les débuts de l’histoire de la liberté et du libre gouvernement représentatif chez les anciens Germains. Chez eux, comme Grotius nous l’a appris, l’institution de l’esc

Third, and most important, Hardt and Negri maintain that with immaterial production all the dichotomies that characterized labor in the industrial era—productive/unproductive, production/reproduction, labor/leisure, waged/unwaged—vanish, so that labor ceases to be a source of differentiation and unequal power relations.8 In the place of the former