1. Theories of Capitalism and Postcapitalism
Seminar 1
Dr Harry Pitts

2. Unit outline
What is critical Marxism today? Marx in the media, politics etc…
New developments, not old: NRM, Open Marxism, social reproduction feminism, postoperaismo and its ‘postcapitalist’ fans.
NRM: legacy of the Frankfurt School, not just about mass culture!
An unfinished Marx- radically open, against ‘Worldview’ Marxism
Applied to real-world events, alternatives, policy proposals, aspects of popular and political debate.
How alternative are the alternatives? To what extent do they break with the concepts and social relations identified by ‘the critique of political economy as a critical theory of society’?

3. Unit structure: Seminar 1
Theories of Capitalism: Critical and Traditional What is critique? What is critical theory? And how does it differ from mainstream and ‘traditional’ theory? What kinds of thing does critical theory look out for in analysing capitalism as a distinct social formation?

4. Unit structure: Seminar 2
Conspiracy theory and bad critiques of capitalism
Are there better and worse critiques of capitalism?
Can a critique be ‘uncritical’ on the level of theory?
What makes a bad critique of capitalist society?
What kinds of social relations are posited in conspiracy theories, and how do they differ from a critical approach?
What is the relationship between truncated or distorted critiques of capitalism and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?

5. Unit structure: Seminar 3
Commodity fetishism and the critique of capitalism
What makes a good critique of capitalist social relations from the perspective of critical theory?
What do we critique when we critique capitalist society? Is it possible to critique capitalism in an uncritical way?
To what extent do arguments for #Lexit (i.e. a left-wing case for Brexit) successfully craft a critique of capitalist social relations?
What are their limitations?
How should we posit the relationship between human action and social forms of domination and economic/legal abstraction?

6. Unit structure: Seminar 4
Class and wealth: on the Great British Class Survey and the ‘99%’
What is class from the perspective of critical theory broadly considered?
How does the understanding of class as an antagonistic social relation differ from other theories of class in capitalist society?
Does the Great British Class Survey reflect the reality of class society, empirically or theoretically?
Is the central class divide in contemporary capitalism really that between the 99% and the 1%?
What relations and social forms does this distinction obscure? Does class really boil down to the people versus the elites?

7. Unit structure: Seminar 5
Care and Commons in a Crisis of Social Reproduction
What is social reproduction?
How does a social reproduction standpoint change our focus on capitalism and the possibilities of postcapitalist transformation?
To what extent can we say social reproduction is in crisis?
How central is social reproduction to the definition and understanding of capitalism?
What does an understanding of social reproduction and its crisis tell us about the activities and labour of care in the contemporary world?
And to what extent does a conceptualisation of the ‘commons’ pose an alternative?

8. Unit structure: Seminar 6
Theories of Postcapitalism: Fragment-thinking
How does the reading of Marx advocated by thinkers influenced by the Fragment on Machines differ from the critical readings explored in the first half of the unit?
To what factors can we attribute the increasing popularity of the Fragment scenario among intellectual, media and political audiences?
How far does it describe a real possibility with reference to the categories of interpretation and understanding outlined in the first half of the unit?
Does the Fragment describe a really existing capitalism, a future capitalism, or a fully postcapitalist vision of the future?
What are the implications for how we work and labour, and to what extent do changes in the latter signify or catalyse changes in the capitalist system more widely?

9. Unit structure: Seminar 7
Automation and the Post-Work Prospectus
To what extent does automation potentiate a transition from capitalist to postcapitalist society?
What might the critical theory approaches covered in the first half of the unit make of the claim that robots will free us from the compulsion to labour?
What important elements of capitalist social relations are absent in accounts of a fully automated post-work future?
What assumptions are present, and are these critical or ‘traditional’ in the way they understand capitalism?
What is the relationship between labour- or the lack of it- and capitalist social forms like value, wealth and money?
Can we escape one by escaping the other?

10. Unit structure: Seminar 8
Universal Basic Income and the End of Work Does the provision of a basic income guarantee a future where we no longer have to work to eat? What is the relationship between money, commodities and labour that proponents of the basic income posit, and how might the critical approaches to economic objectivity outlined in the first part of the unit differ? What is the wage, and how far does the basic income travel from it? What would the basic income need to do or look like to transcend capitalist social relations and bring about the postcapitalist society its proponents suggest it would?

11. Unit structure: Seminar 9
Alternative Currencies: Current Alternatives? Do alternative currencies really present a new way of acquiring the things we need? To what extent are they much the same as the currencies we have currently? What social relations remain in a world where our access to goods and services is still mediated by money? Does money itself imply the compulsion to labour? Can money be retained in a postcapitalist society? How specific are money and value to a capitalist society, and what is the relationship to labour that they posit? What are the alternatives to this?

12. Unit structure: Seminar 10
On Good and Bad Utopias How would life and work need to be organised to fulfil truly ‘postcapitalist’ characteristics, and what is the evidence that these forms of organisation are in development at present? What needs to be got rid of and what needs to be retained? More broadly: how does theory relate to practice? What do different ways of conceiving and critiquing the world imply for how we approach it politically, empirically and practically in our everyday lives?

13. Unit core reading
Bonefeld, W., Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason. London: Bloomsbury.
Available as an ebook through library.
Review articles in unit guide.

14. Formative assessment Book Review (1000 words)
Caffentzis, G., In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism.
Dalla Costa, M., Family, welfare and the state. Between progressivism and the New Deal.
Dinerstein, A., The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope.
Dyer-Witheford, N., Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex.
Federici, S., Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle.
Holloway, J., Crack Capitalism.
Lotz, C., The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money and the Culture of Abstraction.
Mason, P., Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future.
Srnicek, N., and Williams, A., Inventing the Future.
Weeks, K., The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries.

15. Summative assessment
Essay (4000 words) (100% of final mark)
‘Capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living’ (Denning 2010, p. 80). Critically assess this claim with reference to post-work proposals for a universal basic income and/or the automation of labour.
‘The context of crisis and generalized vulnerability opens onto a myriad of struggles around social rights, resources and survival, all of which put life at their centre. Everyday life, bodily survival, and collective life: the problem of human needs touches most in the crisis’ (Zechner and Hansen 2015, online). Discuss this claim with reference to one or more examples of contemporary political or social practice.
‘What really does it mean to say ‘no’ in a society that is governed by the movement of economic abstractions?’ (Bonefeld 2016, p. 237). Answer this question by critically assessing one or more examples of contemporary political or social thought or practice.
‘Is there a community outside the community of money?’ (Neary and Taylor 1998, p. 91). Answer this question by critically comparing proposals for the universal basic income and/or alternative currencies.
To what extent do proposals for ‘postcapitalist’ alternatives address the crisis of social reproduction? Critically discuss with reference to one example from the following: basic income, automation, alternative currencies.
‘In this kind of working existence it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work’ (Lazzarato 1996, pp ). Critically assess this claim with reference to conceptualisations of ‘immaterial labour’ in contemporary capitalism.
‘The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket’ (Marx 1993, pp ). Discuss with reference to proposals for a basic income and/or alternative currencies.
To what extent is automation liberating? Critically assess this question with reference to postcapitalist visions of the future.
Discuss the strengths and limitations of Mason’s understanding of the basic income as a ‘transitional measure’ for changes in the form of wages and social reproduction.

16. This week’s readings
Horkheimer, M., 1976[1937]. Traditional and Critical Theory. In Connerton, P. (ed.), Critical Sociology. London: Penguin, pp
Bonefeld, W., Chapter 1: Critical theory and the critique of political economy. In Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason. London: Bloomsbury, pp
Heinrich, M., Chapter 1: Capitalism and Marxism and Chapter 2: The Object of Critique in the Critique of Political Economy. In An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp & pp
Adorno, T., 1976[1957]. Sociology and Empirical Research. In Connerton, P. (ed.), Critical Sociology. London: Penguin, pp

17. Discussion
Break up into four groups- one for each reading (hopefully)!
Take ten minutes to discuss main points from each reading
Summarise to the rest of the class (just a few minutes) what the main points are.

18. What is capitalism? 1. Feudal society to bourgeois society
Formally free
Formally equal
Impersonal power (changing?) realised *through* freedom & equality
2. Surplus and profit
Not just needs and wants but self-expansion of value (not ‘consumerism’!)
Capitalist wears a character mask also- not a moralising critique (or personalising critique- of which more next week)

19. Capital Decisive social and economic category.
A sum of value the aim of which is to be further valorised.
Interest-bearing, merchant, industrial.
Latter: production of goods organised for expansion of capital through sale of products of labour as value-bearing commodities.
Primitive accumulation: historical decisiveness of capital as a social form violently displaced feudal relations, ‘freeing’ labour through dispossession- continues today.
This is important for how we understanding economic categories.

20. Conceptuality and non-conceptuality
Objective economic categories undergirded in concrete antagonistic social relations.
Ideas express real relations- critique of political economy also a critique of the reality of which it is an ‘image’. Its ‘categorical presuppositions’
Class antagonism not an aberration but constitutive of society itself.
Economic forms not natural but socially constituted.
Critical theory grasps what is socially constituted as the possible terrain for alternative practices- why critique? Comfort, hunger- not socialism!
But dialectics decodes how human practice results in ‘alien’ forms. Contradiction, with political implications for ‘postcapitalist’ alternatives.

21. Negative dialectics
Adorno- negative dialectics. Not general, a la Worldview Marxism, but specific to a bad world.
Not a natural process accomplishing socialism through the forces and relations of production.
Not a positive resolution but the negation of one principle carried over in a ‘sublated’ way.
Things appear as they do in such a way that essence must always appear.
So not a process but a mode of presentation- presenting things so as to decode their essence.
The subject vanishes in the object, but dialectics ‘unfolds’ the objective to make it clear.

22. ‘Standpoint’
The contradictions and antagonisms are not only a matter of presentation, but a real and constitutive part of the world.
Theory, too is part of that world. No ‘external’ standpoint to take.
This is immanent critique. Through the exposition of the system, the explosion of the system. That which is natural is socially constituted.
The ‘starting point’ of critique therefore not, say, ‘man’ in general, but definite social relations.
Their abstract reification in objective economic categories rest in practice, in ‘actual conditions of life’.

23. Traditional and critical theory
Traditional theory takes a standpoint outside its object. Adorno in America- the subject rules over the object.
Horkheimer: ‘there is always, on the one hand, the conceptually formulated knowledge and, on the other, the facts to be subsumed under it’.
Division of labour! Partial, no grasp on totality, ‘the working of an incalculable social mechanism’
But adapting Kantian schema as socially preformed shows theory is already practical and practical life already conceptual. Materialism?
‘Facts’ ‘co-determined by human ideas and concepts’, prior to ‘theorisation’.
The coin in the pocket- carries a concept, but also our ability to subsist.

24. Critical theory
So relationship between theory and the facts is not an external one but internal- critical theory moves within this relationship.
Critically accepts the appearances of things in society- to not do so would be ‘pure idealism’.
Adorno: ‘appearance is always the appearance of reality, never pure illusion’. Does away with ‘false consciousness’ idea!
But critical acceptance is here also condemnation.
In presenting what is held as natural as socially constituted, opens up the question of alternatives at the same time as presenting how things are already.
Marcuse: ‘the judgement that human life is worth living’.
But to what extent do the alternatives on offer live up to this principle?