Slavoj Žižek: Living in the End Times (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · apartheid, biotechnology, capitalism, communism, ecology, financial crisis, genetics, intellectual property, philosophy, political economy
There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Slavok Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.
After passing through this zero-point, we can begin to perceive the crisis as a chance for a new beginning. Or, as Mao Zedong put it, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” Slavoj Zizek shows the cultural and political forms of these stages of ideological avoidance and political protest, from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Concluding with a compelling argument for the return of a Marxian critique of political economy, Zizek also divines the wellsprings of a potentially communist culture—from literary utopias like Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes.
Publisher Verso, 2010
ISBN 184467598X, 9781844675982
Length 416 pages
PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-4-15)
Comment (0)Dmytri Kleiner: The Telekommunist Manifesto (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, commons, copyright, cultural production, intellectual property, labour, manifesto, p2p, political economy, venture communism
“In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a key contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of cultural production and economic distribution.
Proposing ‘venture communism’ as a new model for workers’ self-organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels’ seminal Manifesto of the Communist Party into the age of the internet. As a peer-to-peer model, venture communism allocates capital that is critically needed to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of free culture and free networks.
In developing the concept of venture communism, Kleiner provides a critique of copyright regimes, and current liberal views of free software and free culture which seek to trap culture within capitalism. Kleiner proposes copyfarleft, and provides a usable model of a Peer Production License.
Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential of the internet for a truly free society, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a political-conceptual call to arms in the fight against capitalism.”
The Telekommunist Manifesto is composed of texts that have been extended and reworked by Dmytri Kleiner, from texts by Joanne Richardson, Brian Wyrick and Dmytri Kleiner, 2004–2008.
Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, October 2010
Network Notebooks series, 3
Peer Production License. Commercial use encouraged for Independent and Collective/Commons-based users.
ISBN 9789081602129
PDF, PDF (updated on 2022-11-12)
Comment (0)Brett Christophers: Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · geography, mass media, political economy, television
Envisioning Media Power develops an original geographical perspective on the nature and exercise of power in the international television economy. It uses theories of political economy as the basis for a comparative empirical examination of the UK and New Zealand television markets, while closely considering these markets’ respective relationships with the US market and its globally-influential media corporations. In fleshing out this geographical perspective, the book critically addresses the power to produce, reproduce, and extract profit from territorialized media markets. To understand such powers, the book examines processes of creation and dissemination of industry knowledge, structures of industry governance, and the locational characteristics of television’s operational economy.
Through its rigorous and creative combination of conceptual insights with empirical substance, Envisioning Media Power both illuminates the fabric of television’s international space economy, and ultimately offers a unique theoretic argument – suggesting that power, knowledge and geography are inseparable not only from one another, but from the process of accumulation of media capital.
G – Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series
Publisher Lexington Books, 2009
ISBN 0739123440, 9780739123447
Length 467 pages