just finished Lyndal Roper’s new book on the German Peasants' War of 1525. It’s brilliant! I was really frustrated, though, by how it ends with an extremely superficial caricature of Marx and Marxism as inherently economistic and promethean. On the very last page Roper... 1/7 praises “the sheer breadth of [peasants’] ideas, which addressed the environment, human agency, animals, and freedom,” and claims: “These were not the issues that interested Marx and Engels, because they did not point the way forward to the industrialisation of the... 2/7

‘Mute Compulsion’ has been shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize. Although this is a great honour, I have - after much consideration - decided to ask the Deutscher jury to withdraw my book from the shortlist. Here is the letter I sent the jury this morning: 1/8 Dear Deutscher Jury,
Thank you for shortlisting my book Mute Compulsion for this year’s Deutscher Memorial Prize. It is an immense honour, and I deeply appreciate the recognition. However, I am writing to request the withdrawal of my book from the shortlist. 2/8

The phenomenon of economic power bears witness to the historicity of the human being, to its unique capacity to externalise social relations in its material surroundings, to govern and reproduce these relations by inscribing them in the material infrastructure of the... 1/6 world they inhabit. Never in the history of humanity has this capacity been exploited as much as under capitalism; a fateful set of entanglements which threatens to undermine the conditions of human life on this planet. The social relations externalised in this manner... 2/6

Most attempts to account for the reproduction of capitalism rely on an assumption about the nature of power which tends to obscure the workings of economic power, namely that power comes in two fundamental and irreducible forms: violence and ideology. 1/8 Borrowing and slightly altering a term from Nicos Poulantzas, let's refer to this as 'the violence/ideology couplet'. Alternative versions of this duality include coercion and consent, hard and soft power, dominance and hegemony, and repression and discourse. 2/8

Capitalist expansion and entrenchment amid crisis and unrest: that is our conjuncture, and it invites us to ask an important question: How does capital manages to sustain its grip on social life? How is it even possible that a social order so volatile and hostile to life... 1/8 can persist for centuries? Why hasn’t capitalism collapsed yet? In the final sections of the first volume of 'Capital', Karl Marx narrated the story of how the rule of capital was historically established: "In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, ... 2/8

Technological development is determined by social relations. As Andreas Malm puts it, with reference to the advent of steam: "The relation chose the force, not vice versa." The history of capitalism is full of "roads not taken", to use David Noble’s phrase: historical... 1/9 junctures where certain technologies were abandoned, not because they were less productive, but because they were incompatible with capitalist relations of production. In these cases, capitalist relations of production hindered the development of the productive forces; 2/9

The primacy ascribed to productive forces in orthodox historical materialism can also be found in many of Marx’s writings. In 'The German Ideology,' he and Engels are quite unambiguous: "In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and...1/15 means of intercourse are brought into being which, under the existing relations, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces." In this familiar scheme, the relations of production are the variable which adapts to the immanently developing... 2/15