Bernard Stiegler: For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010)

“The catastrophic economic, social and political crisis of our time calls for a new and original critique of political economy – a rethinking of Marx’s project in the very different conditions of twenty-first century capitalism.

Stiegler argues that today the proletarian must be reconceptualized as the economic agent whose knowledge and memory are confiscated by machines. This new sense of the term ‘proletarian’ is best understood by reference to Plato’s critique of exteriorized memory. By bringing together Plato and Marx, Stiegler can show how a generalized proletarianization now encompasses not only the muscular system, as Marx saw it, but also the nervous system of the so-called creative workers in the information industries. The proletarians of the former are deprived of their practical know-how, whereas the latter are shorn of their theoretical practice, and both suffer from a confiscation of the very possibility of a genuine art of living.

But the mechanisms at work in this new and accentuated form of proletarianization are the very mechanisms that may spur a reversal of the process. Such a reversal would imply a crucial distinction between one’s life work, originating in otium (leisure devoted to the techniques of the self), and the job, consisting in a negotium (the negotiation and calculation, increasingly restricted to short-term expectations), leading to the necessity of a new conception of economic value.

This short text offers an excellent introduction to Stiegler’s work while at the same time representing a political call to arms in the face of a deepening economic and social crisis.”

Publisher Polity, 2010
ISBN 0745648045, 9780745648040
100 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-8-7)

Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality (1973–) [EN, DE]

“Ivan Illich has aroused worldwide attention as a formidable critic of some of society’s most cherished institutions – organized religion, the medical profession, compulsory education for all.

In Tools for Conviviality he carries further his profound questioning of modern industrial society by showing how mass-production technologies are turning people into the accessories of bureaucracies and machines.

Tools for Conviviality was published only two years after Deschooling Society. In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. Illich proposed that we should ‘invert the present deep structure of tools’ in order to ‘give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.'”

Publisher Harper & Row, New York, 1973
World Perspective series
SBN 060121386
xxv+110 pages

Reviews: Michael G. Michaelson (New York Times Book Review, 1973), John L. Elias (CrossCurrents, 1974), John Touhey (World Affairs, 1974), Romesh Diwan (Economic & Political Weekly, 1975), Galye Avant (American Political Science Review, 1975).

Tools for Conviviality (English, 1973, 4 MB, added on 2019-10-1; HTML)
Tools for Conviviality (English, 1975, 2 MB, updated on 2019-10-1)
Selbstbegrenzung. Eine politische Kritik der Technik (German, trans. Ylva Eriksson-Kuchenbuch, 1975/1998, added on 2019-10-1)

The Red Specter. Journal of Agitation and Enlightenment 1 (2010) [English/Spanish]

Published on the occassion of exhibition Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, May – August 2010, curated by The Red Specter (Through its Commissariat of Public Enlightenment: Mariana Botey, Helena Chávez Mac Gregor and Cuauhtémoc Medina).

Editors of issue 1: Ekaterina Álvarez Romero and Cuauhtémoc Medina
English translations: Christopher Fraga, Lorna Scott Fox
Spanish translations: Manuel Hernández, Jaime Soler Frost

PDF, HTML, Issuu (English)
PDF, HTML, Issuu (Spanish)