Recording Surface

Some rough notes on Rawi Abdelal’s Capital Rules: Abdelal attempts to turn much of the standard history of neoliberal finance on its head. (more…)

The postwar expansion of the welfare state and of social guarantees — including access to higher education — can no more be ascribed to the era’s high level of taxation than it can to the state’s unilateral beneficence. (more…)

From We Want Everything, a blog of the occupation of the University of California–Santa Cruz: (more…)

Amid this extended — and pointless, I’d say — discussion of whether capitalism has an “outside,” Badiou avers the following: “So we must go from politics to economics and never from economics to politics.” Which is odd, because Organisation Politique’s motto is: “those who work and live here belong here.” In other words, what makes migrants, sans papiers, politically a part of France is their economic function: going from economics to politics. Communist Badiou, however, insists on moving from politics to economics. Rather than see this is a contradiction, though, I’d say it reveals something else: Badiou sees the nation as the foundational political unit, replacing the state and parties. So migrants must first translate their economic subjectivity into a political one, and a distance from the state can be achieved and communism approached by this established national subjectivity.

From David Graeber’s “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years“: (more…)

For anyone interested, I have finally finished this thing. If you want a copy, leave a comment or send me an email [ersatzdog at gmail.com] and I’ll send it along. Maybe now I will start posting here with more regularity. Maybe. (more…)

A slab of draft words from the thing I’m working on. Comments welcome/encouraged. This needs to be cut, as it’s too long, is supposed to be only a transitional section, and is kinda boring. But the last is Harvey’s fault, not mine. Heh. (more…)

In many ways, The Wire’s Omar Little is a reprise of an old type of movie hero, one from the 1940s, especially noir and detective movies of that era — the silver-tounged and deceptively intelligent characters usually played by actors like Bogart and Mitchum. (more…)

While I’ve been working through most of Faulkner’s novels — the latest was Light in August, which lacks the formal inventiveness of his most famous books but, especially in its exposition of race in the interwar South, is as good as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying — I’ve also been reading some of the Faulkner criticism published in the last decade. Surprisingly, to me at least, the work is generally pretty vibrant. (more…)

It is a well-known fact that the worst victims of the recent exacerbation of the international division of labor are women. They are the true surplus army of labor in the current conjuncture. (more…)