The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles is a collection of accessible, loosely connected essays by influential Marxist geographer David Harvey. Based on episodes of Harvey’s podcast of the same name, the book tackles topics related to the contemporary and historical crises of global capitalism. In nineteen brief, topical chapters, Harvey appropriates and reimagines Marxian categories and anti-capitalist frameworks of various kinds in order to report on the changing shape of global capitalism considered as a historically distinct social formation, the internal logics and contradictions which govern capital’s movements in the world, and the obstacles to be overcome by socialist politics.
Keyword: capital
License to Extract: How Louisiana’s Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast is Sinking It
This article explores the deployment of Louisiana’s highly touted $50 billion, fifty-year Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast, which is often characterized as saving Louisiana’s Working Coast of disappearing marshlands that are home to several major industry sectors, along with migratory flyways, seafood estuaries, and two million residents. As a concept, the Working Coast attempts to signify the importance of Louisiana’s coastal zone to the nation’s economy in order to justify expensive restoration projects. By complicating the euphemism and the extractive logic it signifies, I hope to show that the state’s current approach to slow the disappearance of its coastline in fact rationalizes the very practices sinking it. The Working Coast reifies the state’s fragile marshlands through metrics that can only be realized through continued extraction.
Target Markets and Logistical Management
This paper demonstrates how target marketing provides valuable point-of-sale and point-of-interaction insights, and argues that the labor theory of value is untenable for understanding the conditions of leisure-time surveillance and data aggregation. It then provides a close reading of an Amazon affiliated fulfillment center exposé in order to examine precisely how the information produced during leisure-time surveillance intensifies the exploitation of fulfillment center labor. Target marketing is part of a larger apparatus that aggregates data for the purposes of assigning risk, differentiating prices, and managing supply chains and labor costs.
Review of Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction by Ivan Ascher (MIT Press)
As Ivan Ascher shows in his book “Portfolio Society,” since the mid-twentieth century capitalism’s developed world has found itself increasingly dependent on a system of money in itself as determinant of value—a system of credit and debt, of perceived risks and predictions.
Informatic Labor in the Age of Computational Capital
Jonathan Beller expands conversations about the role of the digital and the digital humanities through attention to the mechanisms by which the digital image is instrumental in neoliberal capitalist accumulation and colonialism. Beller argues that the digital image itself exploits the attentive labor of those who see it, organizes profitable patterns of spectatorship, and links communication directly to financial speculation. Through scrutiny of examples that attempt to disrupt the profitable, algorithmically-capitalized flow of data and attention through the interface of the screen, Beller’s article makes a pointed critique of the ways that fascism manifests in and might be combated via digital economies.
Culture Industries: Critical Interventions
This thread presents a different agenda for studying culture and the culture industries in particular, one that is grounded in a distinctly cultural studies materialist reflexivity. Cultural studies is probably best understood as the politically committed, theoretically grounded, and radically self-reflexive and historical-materialist analysis of cultural processes and practices, where the commitment to imagine a humane, socialist society has always been a guiding assumption in the field from its early formations in post-war Britain.