virtual capital & political economy

Have you ever played that game where everyone tries to keep a balloon in the air as long as possible?

Lots of people are discussing the lack of a political agenda in neoliberalism’s policies based on this post by Doug Henwood: Crooked Timber (I, II), Will Wilkinson, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, The American Scene, Jacobin (I, II), Arin Dube, Brad Delong, JW Mason/Pitkin with good comments (I, II), Corey Robin, Elias IsQuith at LoEG, and I’m sure a ton more.

Most of the posts examine the lack of a unified theory of politics in neoliberalism’s current policy focus. I want to focus on a critique of neoliberalism’s higher-level policy agenda from a liberal point of view. I’m not much of a politics thinker, so I’ll leave it to others to tease out the…

One of the most attractive, problematic, and astonishing features of Badiou’s ontology is his strictly extensional understanding of sets or multiplicities. A set is not defined by its members sharing a common predicate or quality, nor by the relations among members of the set. Rather, a set is defined strictly by its extension or the members that belong to that set. From the standpoint of 20th Century French and German Continental philosophy, this thesis cannot but be a heresy, for the predominant trend in Continental thought has been a relational conception of entities. Whether we are speaking of language as a diacritical set of negative oppositions as defended by the structuralists and the post-structuralists, or Heidegger’s being-in-the-world where entities, the ready-to-hand, are defined by the relational networks to which they belong, the predominant trend has been to treat beings as bundles of relations such that the entity is nothing apart…

By ann summers

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who watches the watchers) Juvenal

Recently, a US rancher with unfortunate racist and fascist tendencies came to the attention of US media with unfortunate consequences but an interesting discourse path. I won’t repeat those issues here except to note that the concerns on which this dispute hinged were issues of common-pool resources. Those are publicly owned assets used by that rancher under a contractual agreement to pay for those property rights to the tune of $1 million.

In this case the rancher refused on anachronistic ideological grounds to pay those fees with the contradictory premise that his citizenship beliefs were historically special and autonomously sovereign and therefore exempt from the obligations to his original contract. The Rancher was first lionized by conservative media as a hero resisting an “overreaching” oppressive federal state by privileging the authority of the local state but at…