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)

Roman Rosdolsky: The Making of Marx’s Capital (1968–) [IT, SR-CR, EN, ES, PT-BR]

Rosdolsky’s Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ is a major work of interpretation and criticism, written over fifteen years by one of the foremost representatives of the European marxist tradition. Rosdolsky investigates the relationship between various versions of Capital and explains the reasons for Marx’s sucessive reworkings; he provides a textual exegesis of Marx’s Grundrisse, now widely available, and reveals its methodological riches. He presents a critique of later work in the marxist tradition on the basis of Marx’s fundamental distinction between ‘capital in general’ and ‘capital in conrete reality.’

First published in German as Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen ‘Kapital’, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfut am Main, 1968

English edition
Translated by Pete Burgess
Publisher Pluto Press, London, 1977
581 pages

Review (Makoto Itoh, Science & Society, 1979)
Wikipedia (DE)

Genesi e struttura del “Capitale” di Marx (Italian, trans. Bruno Maffi, 1971, no OCR, 21 MB, via)
Prilog povijesti nastajanja Marxova “Kapitala”, sv. 1, sv. 2 (Serbo-Croatian, trans. Ivan Prpić [1] and Hotimir Burger [2], 1975)
The Making of Marx’s Capital (English, trans. Pete Burgess, 1977, 10 MB)
Génesis y estructura de El Capital de Marx (Spanish, trans. Léon Mames, 2nd ed., 1978/2004, no OCR, 11 MB)
Genese e estrutura de O capital de Karl Marx (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. César Benjamin, 2001, no OCR, 20 MB)

Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (1970–) [DE, EN, ES, PT]

In this book, the economist and philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel attempts to “establish the relationship between the capitalist commodity form and the origin of the distinction between manual and intellectual labor. His theory of knowledge is constructed after an elaborate consideration and criticism of two schools of thought. On the one hand, he criticizes the effort of bourgeois science to assert the independent nature of science and to formulate ahistorical laws of the development of knowledge in terms of non-empirical, metaphysical characteristics of Reason. On the other hand, he also challenges orthodox Marxist theories of ideology in which knowledge is viewed as mechanistically derived from activity in the economic base.” (from a review by Gilda Zwerman, Theory and Society, 1982)

German edition
First published by Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1970
Revised and expanded edition published by VCH, Weinheim, 1989
ISBN 352717690X
226 pages
via discofiasko

English edition
Publisher Macmillan, 1978
ISBN 0333230450
216 pages
via jlw

Commentary: Alberto Toscano (2005), N Pepperell (2007), David Black (2009), David Black (2013), Joseph Belbruno (2012), Ross Wolfe (2014).

New English edition in preparation

Geistige und körperliche Arbeit (German, revised ed., 1970/1989)
Intellectual and Manual Labour (English, 1978, 7 MB, OCR’d version added on 2014-5-4 via Marcell Mars)
Trabajo intelectual y trabajo manual (Spanish, 1979)
Trabalho espiritual e corporal (Portuguese, trans. Cesare Giuseppe Galvan, HTML, undated, unpaginated)