Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A very good summary

Guendelsberger lays out in awful detail how a pathological desire for maximum profit over almost all regard for workers has trapped people like rats in circumstances where companies would rather install painkiller vending machines than alter their meat-grinder operations. Low-wage work in America

Very good! The temporal paradox is that, although Marx comes after Spinoza, it is Spinoza who can now help us fill the gaps in Marx.” The gaps concern a problem Marx poses, but never completely resolves: Why, and how, do workers return to work each day? If labor power drives the entire capitalist economy, then what is it that motivates individuals to continue to sell their labor power? Lordon believes the answer can be found in Spinoza’s theory of desire, of the conatus that constitutes an individual’s striving, and the affects that define it. In Lordon’s approach to the Spinoza/Marx relation there are echoes of Spinoza’s fundamental political question, “Why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” coupled with Marx’s basic critique of the alienation of capitalism. It is a question of knowing why people will continue to work for a system that exploits them, appropriating their productive powers while granting them less and less control. On labour and human bo...

There were real differences between neoliberals and conservatives on the family. Although they converged around the idea of family responsibility, there were different motivations and different inflections to this convergence. Social conservatives saw the family and its moral order as foundational to any social and economic order. Even when they became converts to the free market, as was the case with Irving Kristol, they saw the family as the necessary foundation on which market freedom needed to rest. They were also more often than not invested in a particular vision of the family – patriarchal, heteronormative, monogamous. Ideas about responsible fatherhood and the need to reinstate the place of men within the family come from this conservative tradition. Neoliberals had a more minimalist understanding of family responsibility. For them, family responsibility meant that the family or the couple should be the primary source of economic security and in this way function as a subst...

Because of depression Mark Fisher took his life last year. A friend of mine sought counselling. She told me they had never asked her about work and her working conditions. I have recently heard that a colleague of mine is away because of stress. Personally, I narrowly escaped depression 18 months ago. Here is the context: "The ‘rigidity’ of the Fordist production line gave way to a new ‘flexibility’, a word that will send chills of recognition down the spine of every worker today. This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and outsourced. Like Sennett, Marazzi recognizes that the new conditions both required and emerged from an increased cybernetization of the working environment. The Fordist factory was crudely divided into blue and white collar work, with the different types of labor physically delimited by the structure of the building it...

The New Spirit of Capitalism