Blog post

Audio: Capitalism: Concept and Idea. 150 Years of Marx’s Capital: The Philosophy and Politics of Capital Today.

Recordings of presentations by by Antonio Negri, Cinzia Arruzza, Jason W. Moore, Peter Osborne, Tithi Bhattacharya, Gayatri Spivak, and others.

Verso Books 6 November 2017

Audio: Capitalism: Concept and Idea. 150 Years of Marx’s Capital: The Philosophy and Politics of Capital Today.

In October, the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London, in conjunction with the Department of Philosophy, University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis, hosted Capitalism: Concept & Idea 150 Years of Marx’s Capital: The philosophy and politics of capital today

As a counterpoint to the retreat of the concept of communism from history to 'idea', this conference will mark the 150th anniversary of the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by asking the question of the meanings of 'capital' and 'capitalism' today as at once (explanatory structural-historical) concepts and (political) ideas.

In particular: What is the current standing of the different philosophical interpretations of Marx's Capital? What light do they thrown on capitalism today? How have historical developments since Marx's day changed the concept of capitalism? Has 'neo-liberal' capitalism rendered the concept of crisis redundant, for example? Is capitalism governable? Or is capital itself now the main form of governmentality? What is the precise character of Capital as a text - in terms of theory and in terms of literature? What does it mean to be 'against capitalism' today?

In eight sessions, the conference included presentations by Éric Alliez (CRMEP, Kingston University/University of Paris 8), Cinzia Arruzza (New School for Social Research, NY), Leigh Claire La Berge (CUNY), Tithi Bhattacharya (Purdue University), Werner Bonefeld (University of York), Boris Buden (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar), Michael Heinrich (Prokla, Berlin), Anselm Jappe (Academy of Fine Arts, Sassari), John Kraniasukas (Birkbeck, University of London), Elena Louisa Lange (University of Zurich), Maurizio Lazzarato (Paris), Jason W. Moore (Binghamton University, NY),  Antonio Negri (Paris), Peter Osborne (CRMEP, Kingston University), Judith Revel (University of Paris 10), Gayatri C. Spivak (Columbia University, NY), Keston Sutherland (University of Sussex). Their abstracts can be read here

Full recordings of all the presentations are now available from Backdoor Broadcasting

[book-strip index="1" style="display"]

Reading Capital
Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosophe...
A Companion to Marx's Capital
“My aim is to get you to read a book by Karl Marx called Capital, Volume 1, and to read it on Marx’s own terms…”The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression has generated a surge of inte...
Paperback
A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 2
The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression shows no sign of ending, and Marx's work remains key to any attempt to understand the ebb and flow of capitalist economies. For nearly fort...
Paperback
Philosophy and Revolution

Philosophy and Revolution

In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions. He ...
A World to Win

A World to Win

Karl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite...
Hardback
Eleanor Marx
Eleanor Marx is one of the most tragically overlooked feminist intellectuals in history, usually overshadowed by her father, Karl Marx. But not only did she edit, translate, transcribe and collabor...
The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx
In this republication of the 1971 original, Ernest Mandel traces the development of Marx's economic ideas from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts to the completion of the Grundrisse. In a ser...
The Politics of Time
If Aristotle sought to understand time through change, might we not reverse the procedure and seek to understand change through time? Once we do this, argues Peter Osborne, it soon becomes clear th...
Anywhere or Not at All
Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA).Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of disco...
The Postconceptual Condition
If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, “it is the function of artistic form…to make historical content into a philosophical truth” then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that trut...
Capitalism in the Web of Life
Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a ...

Filed under: history, marxism, philosophy, political-economy