Benjamin Noys: Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (2014)

“We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, Malign Velocities tracks this ‘accelerationism‘ as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism – the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the ‘cyberpunk phuturism’ of the ’90s and ’00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism – suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.”

Publisher Zero Books, 2014
ISBN 1782793003, 9781782793007
130 pages

Publisher

EPUB, EPUB (updated on 2019-6-9)

J. P. Nettl: Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. 1 (1966)

The first of 2 volumes of the leading biography of the Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist. Covers the period until 1911.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 1966
450 pages
via Hyeonwoo Kim

Review (Hannah Arendt, The New York Review of Books, 1966)
Review (Robert H. McNeal, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 1966)

PDF (17 MB, no OCR)
For a chronology of her life see the exhibition brochure produced by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (DE, EN, FR, TR, ES, VN).

Margaret A. Rose: Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts (1984)

“This book offers an original and challenging study of Marx’s contact with the visual arts, aesthetic theories, and art policies in nineteenth-century Europe. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory in looking at Marx’s views from an art-historical rather than from a literary perspective, and in placing those views in the context of the art practices, theories, and policies of Marx’s own time. Dr Rose begins her work by discussing Marx’s planned treatise on Romantic art of 1842 against the background of the philosophical debates, cultural policies, and art practices of the 1840s, and looks in particular at the patronage given to the group of German artists known as the ‘Nazarenes’ in those years, who are discussed in relation to both the English Pre-Raphaelites, popular in the London known to Marx, and to the Russian Social Realists of the 1860s. The author goes on to consider claims of twentieth-century Marxist art theories and practices to have represented Marx’s own views on art. The book the conflicting claims made on Marx’s views by the Soviet avant-garde Constructivists of the 1920s and of the Socialist Realists who followed them are considered, and are related back to the aesthetic theories and practices discussed in the earlier chapters.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1984
ISBN 0521369797, 9780521369794
216 pages
via Charles, in the Unlimited Edition

Reviews and commentaries: Genet-Delacroix Marie-Claude (Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 1986, FR), Harold E. Maha (History of European Ideas, 1987), Eugene Hirschfeld (2010).

Publisher

PDF (25 MB, no OCR)
See also the entry on Marxist aesthetics on Monoskop wiki.