What the f**ck is social reproduction?

Interview with Silvia Federici

Berlin, November 6, 2011 - Third day of the discussion series "What to do with communism?" On the podium: Christian Frings, Bernd Gehrke, Detlef Hartmann, Lucy Redler, Michael Wilk.

Presentation given by Beverly Silver at the conference "Transformation within and beyond capitalism", organized by Rosa Luxemburg-Foundation in Berlin on October 13, 2011.

Video lecture on Karl Marx's "Capital": David Harvey talks about the necessity of class struggle.

Slavoj Žižek deconstructs the practice of ethical consumption.

November 8, 2009 - "Über Marx hinaus" (Beyond Marx). The editors and authors Karl-Heinz Roth and Max Henninger present the same-titled book in Mehringhof, Berlin. It is a collection of more or less heterodox Marxist positions that takes up blank spaces and errors in the Marx'an torso and follows them to develop new positions.

Presentation by Slavoj Žižek at the Marxism conference in Bloomsbury on July 2, 2009.

Karl Reitter and Stefan Kraft argue in their preface that the strict separation between the young wild and the old mature Marx leads to nowhere. However, they have decided to publish a selection of Marx early works. Karl Reitter explains in this first part of the interview the conditions under which Marx early works were written. He then describes how these early works can be determined without artificially exaggerating the strict separation between the young wild and the old Marx.

The blurb of the mentioned book by Karl Reitter and Stefan Kraft says that Karl Marx engaged in "a radical dispute with wage labor", and that he was as much a "critic of the state". Karl Reitter describes in this second part of the interview how Marx talked about wage labor, the state and politics in his early works.

An infamous hypothesis on the difference between the young and the old Marx was formulated by Louis Althusser. He assumes an "epistomological rupture" in Marx's works, i.e. he (schematically) divides Marx's works into a hegelian-philosophical early work and a later essentially scientific work that came to completion in the volumes of "Capital".

A further concern of the preface is to defend Marx against his followers in their orthodox vests. It argues strongly against the view of Marx as the founder of a however defined meta-philosophy called dialectical materialism. In part 4 Karl Reitter speaks about the bogey "dialectical materialism" and shows how it does not live up to the multilayered early works of Marx in any way.

In No. 17 of the magazine Grundrisse Karl Reitter presents what he calls an "alternative to the interpretation of value critique". He explains the essentials of his interpretation of capital.

Karl Reitter is currently working at a new book on Marx' works. It particularly wants to shed more light on the relation of Spinoza and Marx. In this last part of the video interview, Karl Reitter gives a short preview on the topics and questions of his new book project.

"The problem with the concept of 'civil society' is the following: the antagonistic character of society is oppressed." Civil society is only a euphemism for the whole range of different resistance fighters.

The identitarian character of a union contradicts with Holloway's argument. He thinks that anti-identitarian struggles are necessary to change a society. "All struggles have to somehow go beyond their limits."

"Left governments, revolutionary or reformist, weren't able to change society radically." Therefore it is necessary to re-think revolution.

Holloway compares international struggles in the past with those today. He uses the examples of the coup in Chile and the Zapatistas in Mexico. The traditional internationalism is currently being replaced by a new globalism: it is not about a struggle at one place and people in other countries who act in solidarity to this, but about having struggles everywhere.

The preface of the current publication "Das Weltkapital" indicates that a next volume with the working title "The political economy of the last world power" has been planned. In that volume Robert Kurz will discuss the hopes and laments of bourgeois theoreticians who see a looming "pacific century", that is the rise of China and India to real world powers, and in the case of China even to a new hegemon. Is that a realistic scenario? Or do these countries eventually have to succumb to the crisis steamroller of a globalized capitalism? Kurz answers this question with a foward look onto his new book project.

Interview with Robert Kurz - The crisis process of globalization provokes several reactions that follow crude patterns. In most cases they indulge in nostalgia for national states in their comfortable Fordist prosperity, or - complementary to that - they rave against the "locusts", often with an antisemitic subtext. A return to normal, that is back to the national state, and a respectable accumulation in a hegded zoo without the locusts is not possible any more. Robert Kurz explains why.

In "Das Weltkapital" the term globalization is strictly separated from that of the world system. In Kurz's new publication globalization appears as an ecompassing process of crisis induced by the micro-electronic revolution. For a detailed account see this second part of the interview.

A theoretical core element of the "value critique" ist the so-called "gender separation" that is co-constitutive for capitalism. Kurz explains what is meant by that and how this separation has negative effects on women in the crisis process of globalization in two ways.

Robert Kurz explains in his book taht capitalism as such is already designed as a world system. The author explains in this video-clip how this can be understood and how this fact can coexist with statehood as the other pole of capitalist socialization.

Interview with John Holloway, Berlin April 2004 - The starting point for Holloway's philosophy is the "no". In the society we live in we have to say "no" first. According to Holloway, as a result of that we have to "come back to the question of revoltuion", "but not in the same way as in the past": The idea to take over the state first in order to change the society afterwards has turned out to be wrong.