Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of (...) self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import. (shrink)

This essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and emerging evangelical US Christianity I call “journeys to the margins”: trips centered on learning from marginalized persons for the traveler’s ethical formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with one case study, “Come and See Tours” to Israel/palestine, I interrogate how the commodified form of these trips shape possibilities for ethical subjectivation. First, I demonstrate ways in which journeys to the margins market ethical transformation to American Christian (...) consumers in the form of packaged moral narratives. Second, I focus on the paradoxical nature of journeys to the margins as simultaneously packaged commodities and ethical encounters. Finally, I use reformulations of freedom emerging from the anthropology of ethics to argue that possibilities for ethical subjectivation occur in moments when tour ideals come into tension with lived realities. (shrink)

In recent years, the free market position has been gaining strength. In this book, Radin provides a nuanced response to its sweeping generalization.

: This essay examines the increasing commodification of the body with respect to tissues, gametes, and embryos. Such commodification contributes to a diminishing sense of human personhood on an individual level, even as it erodes commitments to human flourishing at the societal level. After the case for social harm resulting from the increasing commodification of the body is made, the question becomes whether that harm is best remedied by following any of three approaches by which government traditionally seeks to promote (...) the flourishing of its citizens. The author concludes that it is not, and that what is needed is a pragmatic and somewhat casuistic approach to the regulation of contested commodities--that which legal scholar Margaret Jane Radin calls "incomplete commodification.". (shrink)

To this day, many theorists regard the commodity theory and the credit theory as the two main rival accounts of the nature of money. Yet cryptocurrency has revolutionized the institution of money in ways that most commodity and credit theorists could hardly have anticipated. Given that cryptocurrency is a new form of money, the question arises whether the commodity and credit theories can adequately account for it. I argue that they cannot. I first offer an interpretation of (...) the commodity and credit theories according to which these theories uphold differing claims about the origin of money, the ontology of money, and the function of money. I then argue that thus understood, neither theory can accommodate cryptocurrency. Finally, I develop a novel hybrid hylomorphic account of money which draws on aspects of both the commodity and credit theories, and I argue that this hybrid account can accommodate cryptocurrency. (shrink)

We revisit the Marxist debate on the commodity form. By following the thought of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to understand the commodity form through the Kantian categories a priori. Sohn-Rethel explores the proposition that there can be no cognition independent of its historical and social conditions and puts forward the daring conclusion of an ontological unity between knowledge and commodity exchange. We suggest that Sohn-Rethel’s thought finds new relevance nowadays, under the prevalence of a (...) cognitive capitalism. We discuss the reformulation of relations of production and consumption under cognitive capitalism and show how knowledge-led immaterial and affective labour adds a higher value to the commodities into which it is embodied. Above all, the commodity form in cognitive capitalism becomes biopolitical. (shrink)

In ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, Lukács analyses the commodity-structure as ‘the universal category’ that frames society as a whole. Taking seriously the aspiration to follow Marx in going ‘to the root of the matter’, Lukács examines the ways and extent to which the commodity structure extends into and remoulds society, focusing on living individuals, their needs and relations to things as use values. We propose a reading drawing on the idea of concern-in-indifference, which addresses the (...) complexity of the practice of owning that underpins Lukács’s analysis. We argue that attention to this complexity enables us to shine a light on the commodity structure’s capacity to conceal, directing us away from Lukács’s focus to an appreciation of the significance of the universal category’s power to deny a future ethical substantiality of togetherness while giving rise to singular beings for whom this substantiality remains an orienting vision. (shrink)

This article explores the financialisation of the world’s most important commodity, oil. It argues that much of the literature on the financialisation of commodities tends to adopt a dualistic approach to financial markets and physical producers, where financial and non-financial activities are assumed to be externally-related and counterposed to one another. The article locates the roots of this analytical separation in a mistaken acceptance of the fetish character of interest-bearing capital (IBC) – a view that the exchange of loanable (...) sums of capital represents a relationship between money-capitalists rather than a relationship to the moment of production. Against such dichotomous readings, the article argues that the financialisation of oil needs to be understood as part of the reworking of ownership and control across the oil commodity circuit, expressed through the combined centralisation and concentration of capital over the money, productive and commercial moments. This argument is demonstrated through an original empirical investigation of the US oil industry, including 20 years of weekly trading data on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and a detailed study of more than 160 oil and energy-related firms in the US. By mapping the structural weight and connections between different capitalist actors involved in accumulation across the oil sector, we gain a better understanding of the ultimate dynamics (and beneficiaries) of the carbon economy. (shrink)

Amidst expanding interest in local food and agriculture, food banks and allied organizations across the United States have increasingly engaged in diverse gleaning, gardening, and farming activities. Some of these programs reinforce food banks’ traditional role in distributing surplus commodities, and most extend food banks’ reliance on middle class volunteers and charitable donations. But some gleaning and especially gardening and farming programs seek to build poor people’s and communities’ capacity to meet more of their own food needs, signaling new roles (...) for some food banks in promoting community food security and food justice. This article reports the results of a national survey and in-depth case studies of the ways in which food banks are engaging in and with local agriculture and how this influences food banks’ roles in community and regional food systems. The patterns it reveals reflect broader tensions in debates about hunger relief and food security. (shrink)

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of (...) health and well-being, suffering, and death. In _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_ explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article draws on a five-year, multi-sited transnational research project on the global traffic in human organs, tissues, and body parts from the living as well as from the dead as a misrecognized form of human sacrifice. Capitalist expansion and the spread of advanced medical and surgical techniques and developments in biotechnology have incited new tastes and traffic in the skin, bones, blood, organs, tissues, marrow and reproductive and genetic marginalized other. Examples drawn from recent ethnographic research in Israel, the (...) Palestinian Authority and Turkey serve to cast light on the dark side of organs harvesting and transplantation. The article focuses on the dangers of the `fetishized kidney' for both sellers and buyers, for whom this new commodity has become an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort. The bodily sacrifice is disguised as a donation, rendered invisible by its anonymity, and hidden under the medical rhetoric of `life saving' and `gift giving'. It suggests that the ultimate fetish as recognized long ago by Ivan Illich is the idea of `life' as object of manipulation. (shrink)

This paper explores the claims made by various authors that the fair-trade network provides an initial basis for a challenge to the commodification of goods under global capitalism. Proponents of fair trade generally advance two essential arguments in this regard. First, they claim that fair trade reveals the social and environmental conditions under which goods are produced and brings producers and consumers together through 'ethical consumerism', which challenges the commodification of goods into items with an independent life of their own. (...) Second, they argue that fair trade affirms non-economic values of co-operation and solidarity which challenge the capitalist imperatives of competition, accumulation, and profit-maximisation. Drawing from cases in the fair-trade coffee sector, these assertions are critically examined and it is argued that, while fair trade can provide a symbolic challenge to commodity fetishism, in the end this challenge is strictly limited by the power of global market imperatives and the network's market-driven approach. (shrink)

Criticism and sarcasm are interspersed with description and analysis throughout Marx's work. Most of the criticism is aimed at one or another side of a single target: what Marx sees as capitalism's pretensions of freedom, equality, and prosperity in the face of exploitation and recurrent crises. But the remarks on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital seem to be directed at a different target. Here Marx tells us that a commodity is ‘a queer thing, abounding in (...) metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ But instead of going on to reveal the nature of commodites-the task that occupies him for the preceding 30 and subsequent 700 pages-Marx takes the opportunity to explore their ‘mystical’ character. The passage repays careful consideration. It is one of the few places in his mature writings in which Marx returns to the tone of his youthful works. It is also the passage in which commentators have claimed to find grounds for attributing a doctrine of ‘false consciousness’ to Marx. (shrink)

With the increasing scale of e-commerce, the complexity of image content makes commodity image classification face great challenges. Image feature extraction often determines the quality of the final classification results. At present, the image feature extraction part mainly includes the underlying visual feature and the intermediate semantic feature. The intermediate semantics of the image acts as a bridge between the underlying features and the advanced semantics of the image, which can make up for the semantic gap to a certain (...) extent and has strong robustness. As a typical intermediate semantic representation method, the bag-of-visual-words model has received extensive attention in image classification. However, the traditional BoVW model loses the location information of local features, and its local feature descriptors mainly focus on the texture shape information of local regions but lack the expression of color information. Therefore, in this paper, the improved bag-of-visual-words model is presented, which contains three aspects of improvement: multiscale local region extraction; local feature description by speeded up robust features and color vector angle histogram ; and diagonal concentric rectangular pattern. Experimental results show that the three aspects of improvement to the BoVW model are complementary, while compared with the traditional BoVW and the BoVW adopting SURF + SPM, the classification accuracy of the improved BoVW is increased by 3.60% and 2.33%, respectively. (shrink)

There have been several criticisms of Object-Oriented Ontology from the political Left. Perhaps the most frequent one has been that OOO’s aspiration to speak of objects apart from all their relations runs afoul of Marx’s critique of “commodity fetishism.” The main purpose of this article is to show that even a cursory reading of the sections on commodity in Marx’s Capital does not support such an accusation. For Marx, the sphere of entities that are not commodities is actually (...) quite wide, including all the beings of nature not subject to exchange, as well as bartered goods, and tithes and rents paid in kind to feudal lords. In short, the theory of commodity fetishism is a theory of v a l u e, not an anti-realist theory of b e i n g, and thus does not touch on OOO at all. In closing, I make some brief comments on Marx’s relation to Kantian formalism and to Heidegger’s famous account of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. (shrink)

A review of economic thought since the sixteenth century reveals two streams of economic discourse, dirigisme and laissez-faire. Starting with the mercantilists, dirigiste approaches to economics embrace the real-world complexity of commodities that often differ greatly in attributes that are growth- and rent- augmenting. Most importantly, this means that free trade is likely to be polarising: it concentrates growth- and rent-augmenting commodities in countries that already enjoy a head start in these commodities. Advanced countries, therefore, support laissez-faire, while lagging countries (...) tend to support dirigisme. In order to rationalise their laissez-faire stance, advanced countries began developing a new economic discourse that strips commodities of their complexity. The foundations for this ideological reconstruction of economics were first laid by Adam Smith; this process eventually reached its climax with the neoclassical economists who stripped commodities down to one attribute: their capital intensity. In opposition to this laissez-faire economics, other writers, supportive of the interests of lagging countries, brought complexity back into their economic discourse; they argued that lagging countries had a fighting chance of catching up to advanced economies only by indigenising a growing array of growth- and rent-augmenting commodities. (shrink)

Commodities have become an important component of many investors' portfolios and the focus of much political controversy over the past decade. This book utilizes structural models to provide a better understanding of how commodities' prices behave and what drives them. It exploits differences across commodities and examines a variety of predictions of the models to identify where they work and where they fail. The findings of the analysis are useful to scholars, traders and policy makers who want to better understand (...) often puzzling - and extreme - movements in the prices of commodities from aluminium to oil to soybeans to zinc. (shrink)

Human subjects in the developing world historically have been, and continue to be, treated like expendable commodities in clinical research. This paper will explore some of the factors that make those in the third world prime targets for exploitation. It will also challenge a deeply-entrenched view that has permitted this unethical conduct to persist—namely, the belief that the standard of medical care should vary depending upon where a research subject lives. The paper will also discuss the Food and Drug Administration’s (...) 2008 decision to disavow the Declaration of Helsinki, to the further detriment of research subjects in developing countries. Finally, the paper will suggest a possible solution to help address this ethical crisis. (shrink)

Many festivals use animals in the name of continuing traditions and religious acts of historical and cultural relevance, as well as for tourist entertainment; however, the welfare of these animals has been overlooked in favor of maintaining cultural identity or making economic profits. The criticism of animal-based festivals has been growing along with the increased public awareness of animal rights. However, this change in public perception has not yet been translated into actual government policies in Korea. This study addresses the (...) unethical practices and challenges regarding animal welfare at festivals from the perspective of visitors to understand the public perception of the need for institutional and regulatory interventions to improve the treatment of animals at festivals. An online survey (N = 1000) is conducted to examine the public perception of animals and animal welfare at festivals and how strongly online survey participants support organizer- and state-level actions to protect the welfare of festival animals. Logistic regression analyses identify gender, pet ownership, pro-animal attitude, visiting experience, sensitivity to criticism regarding animal issues, and perception of animal welfare at festivals as significant predictors of online survey participants’ support for actions ensuring the welfare of animals used in festivals. Our findings also suggest that people sympathize with the need to enhance animal welfare but have low levels of sensitivity to the maltreatment of animals at festivals, indicating the existence of cognitive dissonance. Establishing guidelines and regulations for improving animal welfare can help festivals use animals in a more sustainable way and make visitors rethink and re-establish human–animal relationships. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present possible consequences caused by the development of commodity market financialization understood by the influence of financial investor’s speculation. Also the task of elaboration is to outline the existence of financial factors in the price creation process of commodities. The existing impact of financialization on the volatility of commodity prices significantly modifies the market. The results of the research and analyzes carried out indicate a similarity in the behavior of the markets (...) of commodities. The situation results from the redistribution of the risk of financial investors who having a few goods in the investment portfolio, next to large transaction volumes affect the unification of price trends. Price shaping factors are being transformed. The decrease importance of supply or consumption in the context of the commodities market changes its form. The growing influence of investors who create numerous speculations transforms the market. Trade in futures contracts affects the level of commodities prices. (shrink)

The struggle for domination clearly persists in The Homecoming as it does in almost all of Pinter’s works. Because of the vague atmosphere, enigmatic characters, and dark, tragicomic dialogue and action, a single decisive meaning for the play cannot be identified. Many character analyses have been carried out on the play, frequently focusing on Ruth and her decision at the end. Moreover, critics have sought to read the play in the light of psychoanalysis, centering on the characters’ past and complexes. (...) By adding a sociopolitical dimension to purely realistic or symbolic readings, this article attempts to analyze the relationships of domination and servitude between characters at the micro-level of the family structure through Marx’s notions of fetishism in relations between individuals, and commodity fetishism as expounded by Slavoj Žižek. With the help of Žižek’s ideas on ideology, a new layer of sociopolitical signification to the relationships held between characters is added, particularly that between Ruth and the men, which is seen as a parallel to the macro-level fetishized relationships in pre-capitalist societies and commodity fetishism in a capitalist one. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of Adorno’s ideas concerning jazz from his own perspective. I approach the topic from a dialectical standpoint, accounting for the historical development of jazz in the African-American context while trying to understand why Adorno found nothing of the genre redeemable; he scorned jazz as an unoriginal product of the culture industry. Drawing on the work of Eric Hobsbawm and Fumi Okiji on jazz, history, and Adorno, I try to demonstrate the internal contradiction of Adorno’s dislike (...) of jazz and appraisal of Beethoven. Although Adorno’s critical tools of the culture industry, deconcentration, and his usage of Lukács’s idea of reification are indispensable, Adorno should have consistently applied the subtle distinction between two intrinsically tied but nevertheless separate entities: an artwork and the mode of production in which it is developed. (shrink)

This paper addresses problems related to transferring market concepts to non-market domains. More specifically it is about fallacies following from the use of the commodity concept in environmental valuation studies. First of all, the standard practice tends to misconstrue the ethical aspects related to environmental choices by forcing them into becoming ordinary trade-off problems. Second, the commodity perspective ignores important technical interdependencies within the environment and the relational character of environmental goods. These are all properties that have made (...) many such goods escape the commoditisation pressure of markets in the first place. Further, it is shown that these interdependencies are the source of some of the ethical dilemmas observed. Finally, inherent characteristics of the environment tend to make the concept of the margin, so indispensable to economic calculus, either difficult or irrelevant to define. The commodity 'fiction' twists the perception of the environment from systems preservation to items use or transformation. This is a problem of increased importance as we approach potential systems perturbations. (shrink)

In the transition from the feudal-corporate order to industrial capitalism, German and British producers adopted contrasting definitions of the workers' conveyance of labor as an abstract, quantifiable substance. These definitions of labor as a commodity structured techniques of manufacture and discipline in the early factory systems of Germany and Britain. The contrasting understandings of labor also shaped the dynamics of capital investment and workers' understandings of exploitation in each country before the First World War. Recast as an analysis of (...) the cultural assumptions of capitalist practice, Marx's theory of labor values offers powerful, empirically demonstrable predictions. (shrink)

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion (...) that constitutes the ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has focused on the tensions, contradictions, and limits of place-based branding through labels of origin, place-named agricultural products, and geographical indications. Existing literature demonstrates that even well-intentioned efforts to use place-based branding to protect the livelihoods and cultural and ecological practices of small producers are often undermined by transnational firms, states, and local elites who attempt to capture the benefits of these marketing strategies. Yet, little attention has been given to the implications of place-based branding for competition among (...) geographically dispersed agricultural producers. While place-based branding can be used for emancipatory ends, it can also be used strategically by agricultural producers to expand their market share at the expense of others. To explore these dynamics, I trace an alternative history of place-based branding that begins not in the potentially emancipatory politics of protecting terroir but rather in the tensions and contradictions characterizing the rise and decline of the US food regime. Drawing on a cross-time comparison of branding strategies within the global cotton trade, I make two key arguments. First, I argue that US producers and the US state forged the use of different types of branding strategies in response to the distinct tensions and contradictions characterized by the rise and decline of the US food regime. Second, these distinct branding strategies organized competition among geographically dispersed cotton producers in different ways. (shrink)

Storage and Commodity Markets is primarily a work of economic theory, concerned with how the capability to store a surplus affects the prices and production of commodities. Its focus on the behaviour, over time, of aggregate stockpiles provides insights into such questions as how much a country should store out of its current supply of food considering the uncertainty in future harvests. Related topics covered include whether storage or international trade is a more effective buffer and whether stockpiles are (...) more useful in raw or processed form. Several chapters are devoted to analysing such government programmes as price bands, buffer stocks, and strategic reserves. This material is in the domain of applied welfare analysis with public finance. Because the theory presented is sufficiently general, it should be of interest to macroeconomists studying aggregate inventories or savings and to those in operations research studying inventory and pricing policies of large firms. (shrink)

This article critiques conspicuous displays of morality within public discourse, recently framed as ‘moral grandstanding’, from the perspective of an intersubjective Critical Realist theory of ethics. Drawing on Honneth’s recognition theory as the basis of a ‘qualified explanatory critique’, I argue that these practices are not mere aberrations within moral discourse, but a necessary consequence of the neoliberal imperative to turn all aspects of the self into market assets. Neoliberal commodity fetishism also and especially involves the commodification of moral (...) character as a means of economic competition, as exemplified in recent discussions of ‘ethical capital’. This objectification categorically precludes intersubjectivity as the basis of ethical life, and produces a cognitive structure resembling narcissistic pathology, characterized by the pervasive objectification of self and other. Critical Realists should therefore reject moral grandstanding not only for its detrimental effects on public discourse, but because in subordinating morality to the market, it is fundamentally anti-ethical. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of the effect of exchange on subjectivity. Two modes of exchange are discussed: commodity-exchange and gift-exchange. Following Marx, Simmel, Lukács, and Bewes, commodity exchange is argued to be detrimental to subjectivity insofar as it leads to abstract, mediated social relationships, and reifies the subject. Debates around the notion and application of reification are investigated. The anthropological insight of Mauss on gift-exchange is introduced and used to challenge elements of the thesis of reification and (...) process of on-going commodification. Gift-exchange is argued to perpetuate concrete, immediate social relations. Critical attention is drawn to the gift as critique of the commodity. My interrogation suggests that there is a problem because the gift is often over-idealized in much gift discourse and figures as a binary opposite to the commodity. This is especially the case with one of the leading contemporary theorists on the gift, Jacques Godbout. Themes that support the notion of the gift, such as family and community bonds, reciprocity, and ‘face to face’ relations, are often taken for granted as being fully enabling. On the other hand commodity exchange is perceived as being exclusively disabling. The article begins to challenge this thinking. (shrink)

The qin 琴, a seven-stringed plucked musical instrument, occupies a unique status in Chinese cultural history. By the time it was established as the musical embodiment of classical tradition and literati culture in the Song dynasty, it had become an exchangeable commodity. While literary writings composed before the Song rarely focused on its monetary value, the unprecedentedly vibrant commercial world recast the qin, hitherto an aristocratic or scholarly pursuit, as a commodity that affected the life of the literati. (...) This article examines how the literati worked through the conflicting values brought by the commodification of the qin to create and reinterpret its new meaning as an object with both cultural and monetary value. The commercial mechanism that the literati took part in also brought about changing characterizations in the connoisseurship of the qin. The astute perception of sound was no longer the sole criterion for appraisal, which now included familiarity with the qin’s physicality and knowledge of its craftsmanship. Behind the ostensible monopoly of the literati discourse on the qin, there was an economic and social network in which different groups participated—groups that together defined the cultural and commercial values of the qin. (shrink)

Buttle's reply to my objections to buying kidneys is helpful but unconvincing in two respects. Doing something freely leaves quite open the possibility that one is thereby making a commodity of a person; and the effects of institutionalising such a practice is itself a matter for concern. And while his emphasis on 'power' is important, the concept is hardly less problematic than 'commodification'.

This paper makes the case for conceptualizing news as a contested commodity. It offers an unprecedented application of commodification theory to the problem of the sustainability of a free press in a democracy. When the news media are expected to be purveyors of the public interest while pursuing profits for their corporate owners, the result often is a clash of capitalist and journalistic imperatives. The amoral values of the market system conflict with the moral agency of a free press, (...) and the two are inherently incompatible. This study presents a synthesis of otherwise divergent theoretical perspectives to examine the free press-free market paradox from a new vista. The author concludes regulatory reforms are needed to insulate the press from the predatory expansion of a free market system that permeates every aspect of social life, including the production of news. “American mainstream media have become the watchdog and guardian of the corporate bottom line instead of the vanguard of democracy and the public interest…. Driven by profit maximization … Instead of protecting against abuses of government power by keeping the public adequately informed, they have become complicit in destabilizing and undermining American democracy.” —Elliot D. Cohen (2005a, p. 17). (shrink)

Marx's work in the first chapters of Capital is sometimes taken to be ?metaphysical?, since his remarks do not lend themselves to ?scientific? testing against quantitative data. I argue that Marx aimed to re?present the economic theory of his day in order to reveal the characteristic presuppositions of capitalist society, and ? in the first instance ? to rid the theory of logical confusions. Though his distinctions are ingenious and his arguments consistent, the enterprise fails in certain respects, because he (...) relies on Ricardian propositions about value and labour, and because his use of certain methods and distinctions of nineteenth?century logic is no longer convincing. Hence he reaches conclusions about the meaning of value, and the nature of commodities and labour, that are wrong in principle. These conclusions were the logical basis for his most sweeping predictions about capitalist society. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 9, Page 1302-1328, November 2022. Robinson Crusoe is a mythic character who lives not only in the popular imaginary but through the history of political and social thought. Defoe’s protagonist lives marooned on his island, isolated and apart from society. The narrative is a perfect naturalisation of the ‘bourgeois’ world, dependent on an ontology of the self-sufficient individual. This article analyses this lineage in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Later, (...) Hegel used the novel to illustrate his dialectic of mastery/servitude. Challenging the atomism of the state of nature, Hegel’s theory of recognition gives an account of positive freedom, where the individual is formed in and through social interdependence. This sociality is continued by Marx, who satirises Defoe's novel in his value-form critique of political economy. The value-form provides insight into Robinson's island labour and Marx's difference with Locke's labour theory of value. For Marx, the myth of ‘natural man’ hides the domination of capitalist development and Robinson Crusoe reflects the internalisation of the abstract rationality of commodity society. However, Marx's immanent critique of the novel points to a radical idea of social life and freedom. (shrink)