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Thursday, 14 May 2009 |
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Debkumar Mitra
Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health, Monthly Review Press, New York/Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2009, Price: Rs 395
At the beginning of the last century, despite the advent of Darwin, practice of science became a tool of exploitation in the capitalist world. The very idea of science as an enterprise in search of the ‘ultimate, unadulterated truth’ gave it an Ur human status and capitalism recognised its power in the early days of Industrial Revolution in England. Science through its mirror technology attained the status of the saviour of human race and powered its way through the entire gamut of liberal education and got institutionalised as an academy of truth. This was too juicy an offer for capitalism in its nascent stage to ignore. And without effective resistance or little intervention it became one of the most powerful sources of exploitation. Everyone was still doing science but its fruits were enjoyed by Manchester cotton barons.  Be first to comment this article |  Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 16 May 2009 )
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Thursday, 07 May 2009 |
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Shankar Gopalakrishnan
Amid political fractures, a global economic crisis and rising social tensions, this term of the United Progressive Alliance government is coming to an end. To many, there has been little to distinguish this period in Indian history, and indeed if anything it is marked by a lack of change. Yet the UPA period has been one of tensions and contradictions, a period that threw up in sharp relief some of the developing tendencies of the Indian polity. In the few days left before we deal with the results of the elections, it may be time to consider these tendencies. The hypothesis that emerges is both hopeful and disturbing: India's ruling class appears to be heading towards an intensifying hegemonic crisis.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 07 May 2009 )
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Friday, 01 May 2009 |
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Saswat Pattanayak
Relevance of this day never was greater than it is today - as a celebration of collective human progress, as a reminder of historic labour struggles, as an occasion to reaffirm class allegiance with the working poor, and the majority strugglers.
Not an allegiance to exploitative ruling class demarcations of geographical boundaries drawn and redrawn through manipulative gestures of status-quo diplomacy. Not an allegiance to standards of academic, material, knowledge society thus distinguished and rewarded by the handful corporate czars to effectively facilitate their spheres of influence. Not an allegiance to normative philosophies of spiritual and religious practices aimed at bringing calm and internal peace through aggrandizing state of ignorance, indifference and ineptitude.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 01 May 2009 )
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Friday, 10 April 2009 |
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Spyros Lapatsioras, Leonidas Maroudas, Panayotis G. Michaelides, John Milios and D. P. Sotiropoulos In the third chapter of Capital, Marx observed: "As long as the social character of labour appears as the money existence of the commodity and hence as a thing outside actual production, monetary crises, independent of real crises or as an intensification of them, are unavoidable. It is evident on the other hand that, as long as a bank’s credit is not undermined, it can alleviate the panic in such cases by increasing its credit money, whereas it increases this panic by contracting credit" (Marx 1991: 649). As we know, financial crises are sometimes the prelude to, and sometimes the result of, a crisis of over-accumulation of capital. Sometimes, again, the financial crisis manifests itself independently of the broader economic conjuncture, that is to say does not have any significant effect on the level of profitability and the level of employment of the "factors of production" in the other sectors of the economy above and beyond the financial sphere or some specific parts of it.(1) This, for example, is what happened in the case of the international financial crisis of 1987, when there was a collapse of share prices in the international stock exchanges, providing the international press with the opportunity to speak of a "return to 1929 and the Great Depression". But it is also what happened in most of the more than 124 crises in the banking system that were recorded between 1970 and 2007. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 10 April 2009 )
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Sunday, 29 March 2009 |
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Werner Bonefeld
I 'All emancipation is the restoration of the human world and of human relationships to Man himself' (Marx).
'Class' is not an affirmative category but a critical concept. The critique of class society finds the positive only in the classless society, in communism. Communism means 'communis' – the commune or association of the direct producers, where each contributes according to her abilities, and where each receives according to her needs. This, then, is the society of the free and equal – a commune of communist individuals who exercise their own social power directly.(1) Instead of counter-posing 'society' as an abstraction to the individual, the communist individuals recognise and organise 'society' as their own social product.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 29 March 2009 )
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Saturday, 28 March 2009 |
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Dave Hill
This article calls for transformative activism by education and other cultural workers - teachers, lecturers, journalists - in order to develop an economically just economy, polity and society. It sets out key characteristics of neo-liberal global capitalism (and, importantly, its accompanying neoconservatism) and its major effects on society and education. It highlights the obscene and widening economic, social and educational inequalities both within states and, globally, between states; the detheorisation of education and the regulating of critical thought and activists through the ideological and repressive state apparatuses; and the limitation and regulation of democracy and democratic accountability at national and local educational levels.Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 28 March 2009 )
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Wednesday, 25 March 2009 |
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The Knowledge Industry in/of Education
Deb Kelsh and Dave Hill
The Marxist concept of class is necessary in order to combat neo-liberal and neoconservative initiatives that work systematically to reduce education to an adjunct serving the interests of the capitalist class in extracting ever more profit for itself. The Marxist concept of class, because it connects inequitable social relations and explains them as both connected and rooted in the social relations of production, enables class consciousness and the knowledges necessary to replace capitalism with socialism. The Marxist concept of class, however, has been emptied of its explanatory power by theorists in the field of education as elsewhere who have converted it into a term that simply describes, and cannot explain the root causes of, strata of the population and the inequities among them. This essay critiques sample theorists in the field of education who have participated in the conversion of the Marxist concept of class to a descriptive term by culturalizing it - pluralizing it and cutting its connection to the social relations of exploitation that are central to capitalism. Such knowledge workers serve the interests of the capitalist class. The essay argues for the necessity of the Marxist concept of class, as well as of class consciousness, in combating and transforming capitalism into socialism. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 29 March 2009 )
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Saturday, 21 March 2009 |
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Faith Agostinone-Wilson We enter 2008 on the knife’s edge of economic crisis. Foreclosures are a common sight, with entire streets featuring homes for sale. Home equity is the lowest it has been since 1945 and the nation’s savings rate is zero. Household debt levels mirror the national debt, with many people putting doctors’ visits and college tuition on multiple credit cards, maxed to their limits. Food costs are rising at the fastest rates of inflation in fifteen years, far outpacing the amount that food stamps allotments. Charity-based food pantry levels are low—arguably the real measure of economic health. Oil finally reached $100.00 a barrel, impacting transportation and the food supply, built on the corporate agri-business model that relies on long-distance shipping versus local farming. Jobs cuts are at a five year high, yet the profits of large companies keep rising, the triumph of the Bush tax cuts. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 28 March 2009 )
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Friday, 20 March 2009 |
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David Hursh Over the last several decades, neoliberalism has been presented as a necessary and inevitable outcome of globalization and, therefore, has shaped social, economic, and educational policies. However, neoliberalism or free market capitalism neither achieves the economic and social benefits claimed for it nor functions as a self-regulating system. Instead, neoliberalism, as the current global recession makes abundantly clear, has devastated global economies and wrecked havoc on the environment. Therefore, I will argue the following:
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 28 March 2009 )
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Friday, 13 March 2009 |
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Pothik Ghosh
A talk on March 6, 2009 at the Department of English, Hindu College (Delhi University), organised by Benjamin-Lukacs Circle (a joint initiative of Correspondence and Radical Notes).
I To talk about Kafka is to talk of the law and its exception by other means. Exception is created within and by the law to make the latter possible. Like bare life is produced by the law to protect high life on whose behalf it speaks. So, exception is included by excluding. And through its inclusion into law, by it being named as bare life by that law, it is excluded from it. Exception not only proves the law, it is also constituted by it. Clearly, the search by the exception for emancipation from the law, even as it maintains its ontology as ‘exception’, is impossible. Since this exception constitutes the law, its existence reinforces the law and will thus not permit liberation for its ontic position from the law, which can only happen through their mutual abolition. It only (pseudo-)liberates the holders of the exception position at one moment, only by pushing them on to the ontic position of the apparent subject of the law. Josef K’s constant failure in The Trial to figure out his crime though his absurd encounters within the domain of the law shows how crimes are constituted by law in order for it to make and sustain itself.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 13 March 2009 )
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