“Sometimes, when I see you face to face, I am puzzled as to whether I am your ancestor or your inheritor ... ”

What whispered confidences and secrets may citizen and alien trade as they make their moves? What new things may be afoot in their wake? In 1762, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau added a conditional “but” after the phrase “man is born free” in The Social Contract, was he implying that there could be hidden costs to birth in the human species?

Negative Negation It is said that one should always begin with the simplest questions. Why did Marx observe that corporations (i.e., stock companies) were the negative negation of capital? Everything that follows is an attempt to address this question. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the...

Another conversation threw up a fascinating image: “During our regular night shifts, the general manager used to be abrasive with any worker he saw dozing. He used to take punitive action against them. One night, one hundred and eight of us went to sleep, all together, on the shop floor. Managers, one after the other, who came to check on us, saw us all sleeping in one place, and returned quietly. We carried on like this for three nights. They didn’t misbehave with us, didn’t take any...

1. Moving Titles An animated sequence at the beginning of Raqs Media Collective’s two-screen film The Capital of Accumulation (2010) performs the title of the work’s reversal of the most important of Rosa Luxemburg’s economic studies, The Accumulation of Capital (1913). 1 What can this mean as a reflection on the legacy, the corpse, and the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg? In her 1913 book, Luxemburg boldly exposed the shortcomings of Karl Marx’s understanding of the process of the...