Vladimir Mayakovsky: My Discovery of America (1926/2005) [Russian/English]

Touring the United States in 1925, the Russian Futurist poet and propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky observed at first hand what he considered to be the model for Soviet technological development. Writing in his typical declamatory style, he found much to celebrate in the modernised, industrialised America of the 1920s – creativity and advancement, a ‘primitive futurism’. But he also decried the social injustices of uncaring capitalism, losing no opportunity to propound his own political beliefs.

Presented here in full for the first time in the English language, My Discovery of America forms a series of humorous sketches, thoughts, jottings and poems, the significance of which resounds from the early twentieth century through to our own times.

First published as Мое открытие Америки in Russian in 1926
With an introduction and translated by Neil Cornwell
Foreword by Colum McCann
Publisher Hesperus Press, 2005
Modern Voices series
ISBN 1843914085, 9781843914082
138 pages

publisher
google books

View online (HTML) [Russian]
PDF (PDF) [English]

David Harvey: The Enigma of Capital And the Crises of Capitalism (2010)

For over forty years, David Harvey has been one of the world’s most trenchant and critical analysts of capitalist development. In The Enigma of Capital, he delivers an impassioned account of how unchecked neoliberalism produced the system-wide crisis that now engulfs the world.

Beginning in the 1970s, profitability pressures led the capitalist class in advanced countries to shift away from investment in industrial production at home toward the higher returns that financial products promised. Accompanying this was a shift towards privatization, an absolute decline in the bargaining power of labor, and the dispersion of production throughout the developing world. The decades-long and ongoing decline in wages that accompanied this turn produced a dilemma: how can goods–especially real estate–sell at the same rate as before if workers are making less in relative terms? The answer was a huge expansion of credit that fueled the explosive growth of both the financial industry and the real estate market. When one key market collapsed–real estate–the other one did as well, and social devastation resulted.

Harvey places today’s crisis in the broadest possible context: the historical development of global capitalism itself from the industrial era onward. Moving deftly between this history and the unfolding of the current crisis, he concentrates on how such crises both devastate workers and create openings for challenging the system’s legitimacy. The battle now will be between the still-powerful forces that want to reconstitute the system of yesterday and those that want to replace it with one that prizes social justice and economic equality.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN 0199758719, 9780199758715
296 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (PDF)
PDF (EPUB)
PDF (MOBI)

Ray Brassier: Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter (2001)

“The thesis tries to define and explain the rudiments of a ‘non-philosophical’ or ‘non-decisional’ theory of materialism on the basis of a theoretical framework provided by the ‘non-philosophy’ of François Laruelle. Neither anti-philosophical nor anti-materialist in character, non-materialism tries to construct a rigorously transcendental theory of matter by using certain instances of philosophical materialism as its source material.

The materialist decision to identify the real with matter is seen to retain a structural isomorphy with the phenomenological decision to identify the real with the phenomenon. Both decisions are shown to operate on the basis of a methodological idealism:- materialism on account of its confusion of matter and concept; phenomenology by virtue of its confusion of phenomenon and logos. By dissolving the respectively ‘materiological’ and ‘phenomenological’ amphibolies which are the result of the failure to effect a rigorously transcendental separation between matter and concept on the one hand, and between phenomenon and logos on the other, non-materialist theory proposes to mobilise the non-hybrid or non-decisional concepts of a ‘matter-without-concept’ and of a ‘phenomenon-without-logos’ in order to effect a unified but non-unitary theory of phenomenology and materialism. The result is a materialisation of thinking that operates according to matter’s foreclosure to decision. That is to say, a transcendental theory of the phenomenon, licensing limitless phenomenological plasticity, unconstrained by the apparatus of eidetic intuition or any horizon of apophantic disclosure;- but one which is simultaneously a transcendental theory of matter, uncontaminated by the bounds of empirical perception and free of all phenomenological circumscription.” (Synopsis)

Doctoral Thesis
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, April 2001
241 pages

discussion (Levi R. Bryant)

PDF