Conclusion: The Fatal Abstractions of Capitalist Rule

This chapter concludes that digital society requires significant restructuring if it is to facilitate greater democratization. But unless it is achieved via a path where workers' democracy is entrenched, then whatever social provisions and degree of democracy happens to be attained through concessions, it will always be susceptible to erosion as capitalists reassert themselves at a later date. In many different registers, widespread digital communication is revolutionary. Within four decades the Internet expanded from niche military, government and scientific institutions to being integral to all parts of social life. In providing access to many goods and facilitating the creation of others, it has become a public good in and of itself. This fact has often been construed as a key episode within a triumphant narrative found in the cheerleading technology press as well as large circulation newspapers about the potency for greater communication to yield opportunities for commerce and emancipation. In one way or another, digital utopians have argued that the Internet is, or can be, a great leveller. But the promise of egalitarian liberation is far from materializing. Instead, power has radically concentrated with the ruling class, those that own the means of production. This development should be foremost in any analysis of contemporary social life. Accordingly, the key question should be how does the development, acquisition and deployment of technology reshape the balance of power between governors and the governed.

Racialized capitalism: An account of its contested origins and consolidation

Undergirded by the perspective of historical materialism in dialogue with black Marxism and Marxist feminism, this article constructs an account demonstrating the significance of racism to the making of modernity. The analytic returns of unthinking Eurocentric sociologies in favour of a more unified historical social scientific approach include the unmasking of the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles and racism, particularly how capitalist rule advanced through a process of differentiation and hierarchical re-ordering of the global proletariat. From the 17th-century colonization of Virginia to Victorian Britain and beyond, racism formed an indispensable weapon in the armoury of the state elites, used to contain the class struggles waged by subaltern populations with a view to making the system safe for capital accumulation. Additionally, situating an account of racism within the unfolding story of historical capitalism as against the postcolonial tendency to locate it within the civilizational encounter between the West and the Rest helps make transparent the plurality of racisms, including the racialization of parts of the European proletariat. This explanation of the structuring force of racism and the differentiated ways in which the proletariat has been incorporated into capitalist relations of domination has important implications for emancipatory politics. A race-blind politics risks leaving untouched the injustices produced by historic and contemporaneous racisms. Instead, an alternative approach is proposed, one that invites movements to wilfully entangle demands for economic justice with anti-racism and thereby embrace and demystify the differences inscribed into the collective body of the proletariat by capitalism.

The Multiplicities Within Capitalist Rule and the Articulation of Struggles

This contribution is part of a debate between Michael Hardt/Toni Negri and David Harvey on the occasion of Marx’s bicentenary (May 5, 2018). The discussion focuses on the question of what capitalism looks like today and how it can best be challenged. In this article, Hardt and Negri respond to David Harvey’s article “Universal Alienation”.

Od odrzucenia ironii ku jej afirmacji. Dorota Masłowska w poszukiwaniu „my” [From rejection to praise of irony. Dorota Masłowska in her search of “we”]

From rejection to praise of irony. Dorota Masłowska in her search of “we”The adventures of Dorota Masłowska, experienced between her novels Snow White and Russian Red and Honey, I Killed Our Cats, show a world where capitalism is the only way of organising reality. At the same time, it is a power affecting all types of relations: among people and between people and the world. The motif connecting Masłowska’s novels is the pursuit – through one’s writing – of liberation from the tools of the capitalist rule recorded and reinforced in the language. Attempts at comprehending this rule, undertaken always as an element of a writer’s ethos, are an extremely interesting path from destruction to praising conservatism and from combat for yourself (as defined by Hallward) – as an expression of a specific configuration of reality – to the singularity of a writer’s absolute. Taking this path requires a change to the use of two literary categories: grotesque and irony which remain Masłowska’s trademarks. At the same time, in her subsequent books grotesque and irony bring a new angle to her polyphonic writing. The author analyses the evolution of Masłowska’s writing making a (critical) use of the tools of postcolonial theory. She refers to the notions of “singular” and “specific” as used by Peter Hallward in his Absolutely Postcolonial. Writing between Singular and the Specific (2001). In his dissertation, Hallward presents two trends; a description thereof allows him for “the global and contemporary discrimination of fundamental approaches to our general conceptions of agency and context, self and other, politics and particularity.” Snochowska-Gonzalez refers Hallward’s categories to the subject of interest of the postcolonial theory (like freshly located and de-territorialisation, national determination and freedom from it). She develops the method of applying analytical tools presented in her article “Od melancholii do rozpaczy. O prozie Andrzeja Stasiuka” published in Studia Litteraria et Historica, no. 2 (2013).Od odrzucenia ironii ku jej afirmacji. Dorota Masłowska w poszukiwaniu „my” Przygody Doroty Masłowskiej, przeżywane na drodze od Wojny polsko-ruskiej pod flagą biało-czerwoną do Kochanie, zabiłam nasze koty, pokazują świat, w którym kapitalizm jest jedynym dostępnym sposobem organizowania rzeczywistości, a jednocześnie siłą, która nadaje kształt wszelkim relacjom – między ludźmi nawzajem i między ludźmi i światem. Nić łącząca powieści Masłowskiej to dążenie do wyzwolenia się – przez własną praktykę pisarską – od zapisanych i umocnionych w języku narzędzi kapitalistycznego panowania. Próby odnalezienia się wobec tego panowania, podejmowane zawsze jako element pisarskiego etosu, są niezwykle ciekawą drogą od burzycielstwa do pochwały konserwatyzmu i od walki o siebie samą, rozumianej po Hallwardowsku jako wyraz konkretnej konfiguracji rzeczywistości, do osobliwości pisarskiego absolutu. Przebycie tej drogi wymaga zmiany w użyciu dwóch kategorii literackich: groteski i ironii, które wciąż pozostają znakiem rozpoznawczym warsztatu Masłowskiej, a jednocześnie nadają – w kolejnych jej książkach – inny ton jej polifonicznemu pisarstwu.Autorka analizuje przemiany, jakim podlega pisarstwo Masłowskiej, przy (krytycznym) użyciu narzędzi teorii postkolonialnej. Wykorzystywane w tekście terminy „osobliwy” i „konkretny” (singular i specific) odwołują się do rozprawy Petera Hallwarda Absolutely Postcolonial. Writing between Singular and the Specific (2001). Hallward przedstawia w niej dwie tendencje, których opisanie pozwala mu na „całościowe i współczesne rozróżnienie zasadniczych ujęć ogólnych koncepcji sprawstwa i kontekstu, koncepcji ‘ja’ i ‘innego’, polityki i partykularności”. Snochowska-Gonzalez proponuje odniesienie kategorii Hallwarda do tematyki poruszanej przez teorię postkolonialną (takich jak zlokalizowanie i deterytorializacja, narodowe zdeterminowanie i wolność od niego). Autorka rozwija w tekście metodę zastosowania narzędzi analitycznych, przedstawioną w artykule Od melancholii do rozpaczy. O prozie Andrzeja Stasiuka, opublikowanym w piśmie „Studia Litteraria et Historica”, nr 2 (2013).

Accumulation by Dispossession: A Marxist History of the Formation of the English Premier League

The decade of the 1980s witnessed massive changes in the internal structure and functioning of English football.1 Several rules, instituted during the infancy of the professional game to limit profit-making, were overturned with remarkable rapidity within the space of a few years, culminating in the formation of the English Premier League (EPL) in 1992. In this paper, I engage with two questions. One, why and how was the century-old structure of English football so rapidly transformed and what were the consequences? Two, what sort of Marxian theoretical framework can we use to understand the historical trajectory of English football? With respect to the former, I follow David Harvey’s analysis of neoliberal strategies used to restore upper-class dominance to argue that the formation of the EPL can be interpreted as another instance of accumulation by dispossession, one among myriad attempts to solve the profitability crisis of the 1970s by creating an avenue for financial speculation in football clubs. Together with the deregulation of television, it converted football from a domain formerly regarded as “off-limits to the calculus of profitability” into a “business proper.” In terms of a theoretical framework, I propose that it is useful to think of football as serving global capitalism in a dual manner: as an avenue for accumulation (the accumulation function) and as a tool for legitimizing capitalist rule by producing alienated consciousness in society (the legitimation function).