In The Sublime Perversion of Capital Gavin Walker examines the Japanese debate about capitalism between the 1920s and 1950s, using it as a "prehistory" to consider current discussions of uneven development and contemporary topics in Marxist theory and historiography. Walker locates the debate's culmination in the work of Uno Kōzō, whose investigations into the development of capitalism and the commodification of labor power are essential for rethinking the national question in Marxist theory. Walker's analysis of Uno and the Japanese debate strips Marxist historiography of its Eurocentric focus, showing how Marxist thought was globalized from the start. In analyzing the little-heralded tradition of Japanese Marxist theory alongside Marx himself, Walker not only offers new insights into the transition to capitalism, the rise of globalization, and the relation between capital and the formation of the nation-state; he provides new ways to break Marxist theory's impasse with postcolonial studies and critical theory.

Kojin Karatani's Transcritique introduces a startlingly new dimension to Immanuel Kant's transcendental critique by using Kant to read Karl Marx and Marx to read Kant. In a direct challenge to standard academic approaches to both thinkers, Karatani's transcritical readings discover the ethical roots of socialism in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a Kantian critique of money in Marx's Capital. Karatani reads Kant as a philosopher who sought to wrest metaphysics from the discredited realm of theoretical dogma in order to restore it to its proper place in the sphere of ethics and praxis. With this as his own critical model, he then presents a reading of Marx that attempts to liberate Marxism from longstanding Marxist and socialist presuppositions in order to locate a solid theoretical basis for a positive activism capable of gradually superseding the trinity of Capital-Nation-State.

This book probes the interconnections of time and ecology in order to spark our imagination and inspire us to re-think the planetary, ecology, and otherwise. It presents debates that interrogate and elucidate the anxieties of the known and the unknown of this world and the planetary beyond, sifting through temporal accounts of the Anthropocene, human beings, and climate change. The chapters in this edited volume spur conversations with different thought systems and their underlying assumptions about the composition of structures of time and contingent temporalities. The authors engage rising temperatures in the oceans and air, the consequences, intended and unintended, of investments in various forms of "development", and the potential catastrophe unfolding in real time. Recent temporal strategies such as mitigation and adaptation to the "climate crisis" are challenged as they further compound and commodify the inquiry, the understanding and responses to environmental degradations, extractions, and displacements. Anti-colonial and decolonial debates about the structures of time, the planetary, and ecology are crucial contributions of this volume. Further, privileging the vantage points of the colonized and enslaved, the authors of this volume challenge dominant universal, cyclical, and retrospective structures of time and the planetary. Through research, poetry, art, and popular cultural analyses, the authors attend to the ways that the struggles of the "submerged," indigenous and black communities for climate justice become coded as a global warming crisis. This volume grapples with how racial climate struggles and unrest become mobilized both as a source of paralysis and as an opportunity for further expropriation and expansion of data accumulation markets for settler planetary projects all in the name of global warming. Ultimately, the authors in this volume argue that conventional attempts at exploiting the planetary all depend upon ideas of conquest and the mastery and control of ecologies, global governance, and individual behaviors. In this sense, fears about the unknown future of our planet miss what is at stake in the structures of time, the question of creation and invention. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Globalizations.

Locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism Seb Franklin sets out a media theory of racial capitalism to examine digitality’s racial-capitalist foundations. The Digitally Disposed shows how the promises of boundless connection, flexibility, and prosperity that are often associated with digital technologies are grounded in racialized histories of dispossession and exploitation. Reading archival and published material from the cybernetic sciences alongside nineteenth-century accounts of intellectual labor, twentieth-century sociometric experiments, and a range of literary and visual works, The Digitally Disposed locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism. Franklin makes the groundbreaking argument that capital’s apparently spontaneous synthesis of so-called free individuals into productive circuits represents an “informatics of value.” On the one hand, understanding value as an informatic relation helps to explain why capital was able to graft so seamlessly with digitality at a moment in which it required more granular and distributed control over labor—the moment that is often glossed as the age of logistics. On the other hand, because the informatics of value sort populations into positions of higher and lower capacity, value, and status, understanding their relationship to digitality requires that we see the digital as racialized and gendered in pervasive ways. Ultimately, The Digitally Disposed questions the universalizing assumptions that are maintained, remade, and intensified by today’s dominant digital technologies. Vital and far-reaching, The Digitally Disposed reshapes such fundamental concepts as cybernetics, informatics, and digitality.

Governments around the world face the challenge of espousing principles of fairness but practicing inequity in their administration. Issues of equity and justice are fundamental concerns of government, and thus to public administrators, who constantly struggle to evaluate a country’s social climate and ensure equity in governance. Such evaluation is unlikely to occur in a serious way, however, if government actors are fundamentally too uncomfortable to directly engage the topic. The result, this book argues, is a context of 'nervousness,' which unless squarely acknowledged and addressed, can become debilitating and thwart progress toward achieving social equity. This volume explores and expands our understanding of the concept of nervousness in the administration of government services around the world, demonstrating the ways in which such an emotional and physical reaction can debilitate government actions that are needed to promote social equity and justice. Each of the chapters in this edited volume focuses on a single country and examines a specific nervous area of government, highlighting important historical and political considerations, as well as specific evidence of promising progress. It considers the complexity of nervous areas of governments around the world, while identifying encouraging approaches and initiatives. Global Equity in Administration is required reading for all practicing and aspiring public servants concerned with fair and equitable provision of public services around the world.

A major Marxist thinker and critic in 1930s Japan, Tosaka Jun was among the world’s most incisive—yet underrecognized—theorists of capitalism, fascism, and ideology during the years before World War II. The Japanese Ideology is his masterpiece, first published in 1935, as Japan and the world plummeted into an age of reaction. Tosaka offers a ruthless philosophical critique of contemporary ideology that exposes liberalism’s deep complicity with fascism. The Japanese Ideology provides a materialist analysis of the reactionary ideology then overtaking Japan, with profound significance for anywhere fascism has taken root. Modeled after Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, it critiques idealism as the common ground for liberalism and fascism, against which only historical materialism can suffice. Tosaka demonstrates how liberal and fascist ideas at once justified and concealed Japan’s colonization of East Asia, and he investigates the many traces of fascism in Japanese thought and society. The Japanese Ideology makes an important intervention in Marxist theory by criticizing reliance on the East/West binary and the notion of the “Asiatic mode of production.” Robert Stolz’s translation introduces Anglophone readers to a classic of twentieth-century Marxist thought by an unsung peer of Gramsci and Benjamin with striking relevance today.

Since the 1970s, sociocultural analysis in Latin American studies has been marked by a turn away from problems of political economy. Accumulation and Subjectivity challenges this turn while reconceptualizing the relationship between political economy and the life of the subject. The fourteen essays in this volume show that, in order to understand the dynamics governing the extraction of wealth under contemporary capitalism, we also need to consider the collective subjects implied in this operation at an institutional, juridical, moral, and psychic level. More than merely setting the scene for social and political struggle, Accumulation and Subjectivity reveals Latin America to be a cauldron for thought for a critique of political economy and radical political change beyond its borders. Combining reflections on political philosophy, intellectual history, narrative, law, and film from the colonial period to the present, it provides a new conceptual vocabulary rooted in the material specificity of the region and, for this very reason, potentially translatable to other historical contexts. This collection will be of interest to scholars of Marxism, Latin American literary and cultural studies, and the intellectual history of the left.

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Marxism both within and without the academy. Marxian frameworks, concepts and categories continue to be narratively relevant to the features and events of contemporary capitalism. Most crucially, an attention to shifting cultural conditions has lead contemporary researchers to re-confront some classical and essential Marxist concepts, as well as elaborating new critical frameworks for the analysis of capitalism today. The SAGE Handbook of Marxism showcases this cutting-edge of today’s Marxism. It advances the debate with essays that rigorously map and renew the concepts that have provided the groundwork and main currents for Marxist theory, and showcases interventions that set the agenda for Marxist research in the 21st century. A rigorous and challenging collection of scholarship, this book contains a stunning range of contributions from contemporary academics, writers and theorists from around the world and across disciplines, invaluable to scholars and graduate students alike. Part 1: Reworking the critique of political economy Part 2: Forms of domination, subjects of struggle Part 3: Political perspectives Part 4: Philosophical dimensions Part 5: Land and existence Part 6: Domains Part 7: Inquiries and debates

Value without Fetish presents the first in-depth English-language study of the influential Japanese economist Uno Kōzō‘s (1897-1977) theory of ‘pure capitalism’ in the light of the method and object of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. A close analysis of the theories of value, production and reproduction, and crisis in Uno’s central texts from the 1930s to the 1970s reveals his departure from Marx’s central insights about the fetish character of the capitalist mode of production – a departure that Lange shows can be traced back to the failed epistemology of value developed in Uno’s earliest writings. By disavowing the complex relation between value and fetish that structures Marx’s critique, Uno adopts the paradigms of neoclassical theories to present an apology rather than a critique of capitalism.

Crisis and Criticism is a series of interventions from 2009 to 2021 engaging with the literary, cultural and political responses to the capitalist crisis of 2007–8. Challenging the tendency to treat crisis as natural and beyond human control, this book interrogates our cultural understanding of crisis and suggests the necessity of ruthless criticism of the existing world. While responses to crisis have retreated from the critical, choosing to inhabit apocalyptic fantasies instead, only a critical understanding of the causes of crisis within capitalism itself can promise their eventual overcoming.