Download or read book On Necrocapitalism written by M. I. Asma and published by Kersplebedeb. This book was released on 2021-08-20 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A virus is haunting the globe, one of pandemic proportions, whose threat has necessitated unprecedented measures to forestall death and violence worse than the present crisis. But the cruelty, violence, and depredations that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic aren't merely detritus in the wake of its spread; they characterize the necrocapitalism of this conjuncture." - from the Prologue As the pandemic transitioned from science fiction to reality in early 2020, a number of writers and thinkers in the imperialist metropoles declared the impossibility of writing in the face of a future that is foreclosed. And yet, due to the nightmare that capitalism has been since its beginning, numerous writers and thinkers from the margins have always written in the face of such foreclosure. Meanwhile, other contemporary thinkers sought to conceptualize the unfolding pandemic according to conceptions of bio/necropolitics, forgetting the foundation upon which these conceptions have always existed. The M.I. Asma writing group came together to stake out a different terrain, thinking through the pandemic as events unfolded while also always working to think beyond the capitalist imaginary. Writing between April 2020 and May 2021, the authors set out to produce a serial theoretical-philosophical project focused on class struggle in the midst of the COVID--19 pandemic. The authors approached the pandemic as an occasion to think capitalism according to what it always has been, what the pandemic reveals about its current ideological deployment, and how we can think about a communist alternative in the face of exterminism. This book collects, with some revisions and with a new epilogue, the entries from the On Necrocapitalism blog, where M.I. Asma's interventions first appeared. M.I. Asma is the collective designation for six authors from Canada and the United States, representing a variety of revolutionary anticapitalist theoretical persuasions: J. Moufawad-Paul, Devin Zane Shaw, Mateo Andante, Johannah May Black, Alyson Escalante, and D. W. Fairlane.
Download or read book Dead Labor written by James Tyner and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking consideration of death from capitalism, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century From a 2013 Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed fifteen people and injured 252 to a 2017 chemical disaster in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, we are confronted all too often with industrial accidents that reflect the underlying attitude of corporations toward the lives of laborers and others who live and work in their companies’ shadows. Dead Labor takes seriously the myriad ways in which bodies are commodified and profits derived from premature death. In doing so it provides a unique perspective on our understanding how life and death drive the twenty-first-century global economy. James Tyner tracks a history from the 1600s through which premature death and mortality became something calculable, predictable, manageable, and even profitable. Drawing on a range of examples, including the criminalization of migrant labor, medical tourism, life insurance, and health care, he explores how today we can no longer presume that all bodies undergo the same processes of life, death, fertility, and mortality. He goes on to develop the concept of shared mortality among vulnerable populations and examines forms of capital exploitation that have emerged around death and the reproduction of labor. Positioned at the intersection of two fields—the political economy of labor and the philosophy of mortality—Dead Labor builds on Marx’s notion that death (and truncated life) is a constant factor in the processes of labor. Considering premature death also as a biopolitical and bioeconomic concept, Tyner shows how racialized and gendered bodies are exposed to it in unbalanced ways within capitalism, and how bodies are then commodified, made surplus and redundant, and even disassembled in order to accumulate capital.
Download or read book Necroculture written by Charles Thorpe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author draws on Karl Marx’s writings on alienation and Erich Fromm’s conception of necrophilia in order to understand these aspects of contemporary culture as expressions of the domination of the living by the dead under capitalism. Necroculture is the ideological reflection and material manifestation of this basic feature of capitalism: the rule of dead capital over living labor. The author argues that necroculture represents the subsumption of the world by vampire capital.
Download or read book Resisting Racial Capitalism written by Ida Danewid and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does freedom mean without, and despite, the state? Ida Danewid argues that state power is central to racial capitalism's violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence: policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism that stretches from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi. Thinking with a rich set of scholars, organisers, and otherworldy dreamers, Danewid theorises these modes of refusal as a utopian worldmaking project which seeks not just better ways of being governed, but an end to governance in its entirety. In a time where the state remains hegemonic across the Left–Right political spectrum, Resisting Racial Capitalism calls on us to dream bolder and better in order to (un)build the world anew.
Download or read book Necropower in North America written by Ariadna Estévez and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-25 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses and theorizes Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the politics of death, in the specific context of North America. It works to characterize and analyze the particularities and relational differences of American and Canadian necropowers vis-à-vis their devices, subjectivities, necroempowered subjects, and production of spaces of death in their geographical and symbolic borderlands with the Third World: the US-Mexico border, indigenous lands, migrant and Black-American neighborhoods, and resource rich geographies. North American necropowers not only profit from death, but also conduct disposable populations to death throughout the region. The volume proposes a postcolonial perspective that characterizes the political power of North America as a necropower—or the sovereign power to make die. Each chapter therefore theorizes and analyzes the specificities of necropower, examining different necropolitics that range from asylum and migration restrictions to the economic exploitation and abandonment of deprived populations and policing of ethnic minorities, in particular Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples, and African American communities.
Download or read book Capital Is Dead written by McKenzie Wark and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's not capitalism, it's not neoliberalism - what if it's something worse? In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Necropolitics written by Natasha Lushetich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection comprises contributions from leading artist-theorists in the fields of necropolitics and tactical media, and from increasingly influential scholars of biomediality and urban performativity
Download or read book Narcocapitalism written by Laurent de Sutter and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-16 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do the invention of anaesthetics in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Nazis' use of cocaine, and the development of Prozac have in common? The answer is that they're all products of the same logic that defines our contemporary era: 'the age of anaesthesia'. Laurent de Sutter shows how large aspects of our lives are now characterised by the management of our emotions through drugs, ranging from the everyday use of sleeping pills to hard narcotics. Chemistry has become so much a part of us that we can’t even see how much it has changed us. In this era, being a subject doesn't simply mean being subjected to powers that decide our lives: it means that our very emotions have been outsourced to chemical stimulation. Yet we don't understand why the drugs that we take are unable to free us from fatigue and depression, and from the absence of desire that now characterizes our psychopolitical condition. We have forgotten what it means to be excited because our only excitement has become drug-induced. We have to abandon the narcotic stimulation that we’ve come to rely on and find a way back to the collective excitement that is narcocapitalism’s greatest fear.
Download or read book Reconstruction written by Alaya Dawn Johnson and published by Small Beer Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reconstruction Award-winning writer and musician Johnson digs into the lives of those trodden underfoot by the powers that be: from the lives of vampires and those caught in their circle in Hawai’i to a taxonomy of anger put together by Union soldiers in the American Civil War, these stories will grab you and not let you go.
Download or read book Decay written by Ghassan Hage and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-23 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment. Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
Download or read book A New Earth written by George P Tsakraklides and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Earth population: 1.8 billion. In a world already ravaged by climate change, society has become a dystopia of deep fake algorithms, vertical farms and digital totalitarianism. Among the very few remaining free thinkers, a retired extinction ecologist, a marine molecular biologist and a transgender woman accidentally discover a genetic locus that goes back to the origin of life on the planet. Will their discovery help them understand the biggest extinction event that Earth has ever faced? "This is impressing me like no author I've read since Kim Stanley Robinson. Bravo"
Download or read book Beyond Capitalist Realism written by Samuel Alexander and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Capitalist realism' implies that, ever since the fall of Soviet communism in 1989, capitalism has been the only realistic system of production and distribution. Everything else is generally dismissed as 'utopianism' or just naïve dreaming. This perspective points to a worrying failure of imagination, suggesting that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But here is the paradox of capitalist realism: just as the dominant cultural imagination has contracted into a single vision of what is possible, the existing system shows itself to be in the process of self-destructing, serving neither people nor planet. Whether by design or disaster, the future will be post-capitalist. In his fourth book of collected essays, degrowth scholar and activist Samuel Alexander seeks to transcend capitalist realism. He shows that viable and desirable alternatives are being lived into existence today by diverse but connected social movements. Calling for a 'degrowth' transition of planned economic contraction, Alexander examines and develops this emerging paradigm from various political, energetic, and aesthetic perspectives. Readers will come away seeing plausible pathways to prosperity, sustainability, and resilience that do not rely on the capitalist growth model of progress.
Download or read book Violence Rewired written by Richard Whittington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an alternative picture of the causes of human violence, showing strategies for change through concerted societal action.
Download or read book Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies written by Cassander L. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies brings into conversation two fields—Early Modern Studies and Black Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. This disconnect is the product of current scholarly assumptions about a lack of archival evidence that limits what we can say about those of African descent before modernity. This volume posits that the limitations are not in the archives, but in the methods we have constructed for locating and examining those archives. The essays that make up this volume offer new critical approaches to black African agency and the conceptualization of blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, material and visual cultures, and performance culture. Ultimately, this critical anthology revises current understandings about racial discourse and the cultural contributions of black Africans in early modernity and in the present across the globe.
Download or read book Prison Profiteers written by Tara Herivel and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Prison Profiteers, co-editors Tara Herivel and Paul Wright "follow the money to an astonishing constellation of prison administrators and politicians working in collusion with private parties to maximize profits" (Publishers Weekly). From investment banks, guard unions, and the makers of Taser stun guns to health care providers, telephone companies, and the U.S. military (which relies heavily on prison labor), this network of perversely motivated interests has turned the imprisonment of one out of every 135 Americans into a lucrative business. Called "an essential read for anyone who wants to understand what's gone wrong with criminal justice in the United States" by ACLU National Prison Project director Elizabeth Alexander, this incisive and deftly researched volume shows how billions of tax dollars designated for the public good end up lining the pockets of those private enterprises dedicated to keeping prisons packed. "An important analysis of a troubling social trend" (Booklist) that is sure to inform and outrage any concerned citizen, Prison Profiteers reframes the conversation by exposing those who stand to profit from the imprisonment of millions of Americans.
Download or read book Freedom and Nature in Schelling s Philosophy of Art written by Devin Zane Shaw and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding Schelling's philosophical development from his early works in 1795-1796 through his theological turn in 1809-1810. Schelling's philosophy of art is the 'keystone' of the system; it unifies his idea of freedom and his philosophy of nature. Schelling's idea of freedom is developed through a critique of the formalism of Kant's and Fichte's practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw's careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom.
Download or read book My Cocaine Museum written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-12-19 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years. Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine. This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.
