The Original Sin of Accumulation: Trying to Say Something Original About Ursprüngliche Akkumulation

Red May Seattle

A bit of context: last weekend I was asked to participate in Red May Seattle, contributing to both its Marx-a-thon, a day long reading group on Capital and the Grundrisse, as well as discussing neoliberalism, science fiction, and the current struggles. What follows here is neither the text of what I presented on primitive accumulation, nor a kind of follow up self critique; it is an attempt to jot down some thoughts that were generated in collective discussion and reflection before they dissipate. It is red in practice and in theory, or, at the very least red in theoretical practice. What follows owes a great deal to all of those present at Red May. Names are withheld because I may have completely misunderstood what they were saying. 

Yet Another Effort, Spinozists, If You Would Become Marxists: Marxist Spinozism Against Enlightenment Spinozism

Me at PAF talking about Spinoza and Transindividuality 

(I am running out of Spinoza/Marx graphics)

In a recently published piece in Jacobin (which is a response to this piece in Viewpoint) we see the following statement:

"Precisely because of what we affirm in Spinoza, we view his French reception in the twentieth century skeptically. Thinkers such as Deleuze and Althusser largely reject Spinoza’s rationalism, monism, and determinism, reducing his substance to a swirl of anarchic forces, whether in Deleuze’s nomads or in Althusser’s aleatory materialism. These readings perform a kind of “substance abuse,” replacing Spinoza’s objective metaphysics with a Nietzschean play of forces.

But a different tradition of Marxist Spinozism doesn’t fall into this trap. Starting with Joseph Dietzgen and Georgi Plekhanov and proceeding with the Soviet Spinozists, A. M. Deborin and Evald Ilyenkov, these writers treat Spinoza as a dialectical thinker avant la lettre. They participate in the tradition of the left-Hegelians Heine, Feuerbach, and Hess, who hailed Spinoza as the real godfather of German Idealism. As such, they did not reject Spinoza’s humanism for a Heideggerian inspired antihumanism. Instead, they sought to affirm human power and dignity through an understanding of the material world."

Dialectic of the Donald: Or, Not Trump Again

The Owl of Minerva might fly at dusk, but her eagle works the day shift 

Let us begin with negation. You did not want to read this, you even told yourself that you were done, no more Trump think pieces, tweets, or articles. After all there are more important things to think about, and thinking about Trump, thinking about politics in age of Trump, seems almost to be a contradiction, like trying to think one's very inability to think. I get that, dear reader, I did not want to write this either, but I did--drawn in and repelled. Trump is not just the car wreck that you feel compelled to gaze upon. Trump is like slowing to watch a car crash and then going home to read a dozen articles on the dangers of drunken driving and digital distraction on today's highways, knowing all the while that all the articles in the world won't change the world.