Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2013
Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): Let's start with Canada. What do you make of the current context of the Ca... more Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): Let's start with Canada. What do you make of the current context of the Canadian state? Is it exceptionally right wing in comparison with earlier governments, for example, on issues like Palestine or the environment? Or are current policies continuous with past policy trajectories? Ellen Meiksins Wood 2 (EMW): I don't think the two options here are mutually exclusive. Yes, this government is distinctively rightwing, not least on matters like Palestine and the environment. But, like everything else, it has a history. The simple continuity, of course, is that Canada was and remains a capitalist economy, with all this entails: the imperatives of profit-maximization imposed by the capitalist market, the necessity of constant capital accumulation, the constant need to reduce the costs of labour, the subordination of all social goods including ecological sustainability to the requirements of profit, the inequities and social injustices these imperatives inevitably engender, and the limitations placed on states as long as the economy is regulated by capitalist requirements. But let's be more specific. For
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2014
Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): Your book is called No Local and it is an immanent critique of inward look... more Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): Your book is called No Local and it is an immanent critique of inward looking reactions to neoliberal capitalism. One poignant episode you recount surrounds urban agriculture, and the idea that we've come to a really problematic situation when poor people are encouraged to grow their own food in addition to working their jobs and raising their kids. What is the political or strategic problem with localism? What are your thoughts, for example, on campaigns like "Occupy the Economy" and so forth? greg sharzer 2 (gs): First I'd like to quickly define some terms. 'Local' is a space distinct from larger regional, national and international spaces. But it's also relational, a moment in the global capital circuit. It's amorphous, changing depending on what you're measuring: political, social, economic, and so on. 'Localism' is the fetishization of scale. It's assigning some positive benefit to a place precisely because it's small. It's impossible to be anti-local, unless you're against units of measurement. But I think it's a mistake to think that small is always beautiful. Localism assumes 1) local economies are fairer than global economies, 2) local spaces are autonomous from, and therefore more open to democratic control than larger spaces, and 3) the political project of revolutionary socialism is dead or, more accurately, never existed in the first place. I think these problems mean that localist schemes for change, such as 1 Jordy Cummings is a labour activist and PhD candidate in Political Science at York University. With a background in journalism, Cummings has written for a variety of publications both journalistic and academic, including Socialism & Democracy and Basics Community News Service. His dissertation focuses on radical theory in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the transition to modernity, using a Political Marxist methodology. He is also editing a reader of George Comninel's writings and is Interventions editor at Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2015
Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): This issue of Alternate Routes has the theme of "Capitalism in the Classro... more Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): This issue of Alternate Routes has the theme of "Capitalism in the Classroom." So to begin I'd like to ask you, in the broadest sense, what you see as the effect of capitalism in its various forms in the classroom. Did neoliberalism introduce a different logic? What about post-crisis capitalism? Jim Silver 2 (JS): In the last thirty to forty years, the era of neoliberalism, capitalism has done a lot of damage to education. Consider the case of universities. Public funding has been systematically reduced in real terms over a long period. Tuition is rising in real terms, reducing access for many, but especially for those already on the margins of our society. A high and still rising proportion of classes are taught by nontenured faculty who are part-time, poorly paid and have minimal job security. Universities are increasingly corporatized-management is less collegial and more top-down, and private sector fund-raising has assumed enormous importance, adding to the influence exercised by corporations and wealthy individuals. An even greater problem lies outside the classroom. One of the strongest correlations in the social sciences is that between income and educational outcomes. The higher the income, the better are educational outcomes; the lower the income, the worse are educational outcomes. Those who grow up in poverty are much less likely to succeed educationally than those who are economically better off. Since a major consequence of the neoliberal era is the growth of poverty and inequality, more and more people are left behind educationally. This is worsened by the 1 Jordy Cummings is Interventions Editor of Alternate Routes, and a PhD candidate at York University. 2 Jim Silver is the Chair of the University of Winnipeg's Department of Urban and Inner-City Studies, and is a long-time Board member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2015
Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): You're from Toronto, and politicized in the era of the New Left, after att... more Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): You're from Toronto, and politicized in the era of the New Left, after attending grad school at Massey College and even taking a course with Foucault…Is there anything particular to Toronto's culture that has inspired you, as an educator, an activist and a socialist? Peter McLaren 2 (PM): I left Toronto kicking and screaming since I couldn't find a tenure-track university position in Canada, but the renowned American educator Henry Giroux (what irony, he is now a Canadian citizen!) had helped me find a position in Miami University of Ohio, and who could resist that offer? Working with Henry was an education on its own that could never be purchased. Henry has a generosity of spirit that still staggers me. Toronto, ah yes. Well, as far as my perceptions of schooling and society goes, there was This Magazine is About Schools that I read in the late sixties and into the seventies, edited by George Martell and Satu Repo. It was housed, as I recall, in Rochdale College, where I frequently hung out with friends. It became This Magazine sometime in the seventies, I think. I learned a lot from reading that magazine but I was never a subscriber, but rather an intermittent reader. Which probably accounts for why I didn't have much of a coherent theoretical trajectory when I started to write professionally in 1979. I was never recruited by left organizations, nor did I really attempt to join political groups, even school activists.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2016
The theme of this year's Alternate Routes is the "paradox of low-wage, no-wage work", and there i... more The theme of this year's Alternate Routes is the "paradox of low-wage, no-wage work", and there is a great deal of analysis of an allegedly new historical subject, "the precariat". What do you make of this "paradox"? Is capitalism really that different in 2015 than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago? Charlie Post 2 (CP): Capitalism is certainly different today than it was during the so-called "Golden Age" of 1945-1975. During those years, "full-employment"-unemployment below the "frictional" rate of 3-4 percent, the dominance of full-time work with unemployment insurance, health care, pensions and the like (provided by the state, private employers, or some combination)-was the norm. This "full-employment" model also included some measure of job security-either legal or contractual protections from arbitrary dismissal, etc. The "Golden Age" was, in my opinion, exceptional in the history of capitalism. It was the product of a combination of a long period of rising profitability (1933-1966) and a militant labor movement across the industrialized world. Workers had threatened the foundations of capitalist rule (France and Spain in the mid-1930s, France and Italy immediately after World War II, France in 1968, Portugal 1974-1975) or severely disrupted capitalist accumulation in mass strike waves in the mid-1930s, immediate postwar years and again between 1965-1975. Capital was forced to make major concessions to labor. The "full-employment" model and the expansive welfare state were the most important gains, giving workers unprecedented security of employment. However, the "Golden Age" was not typical of the history of capitalism. Piketty, in his greatly overrated Capital in the 21st Century, has demonstrated that the very slight decline in income and wealth inequality in this period was a short-interruption of capitalism's historic tendency to increase inequality. Not only was the period exceptional for small decreases in inequality, but in the "full-employment" regime. The period since the mid-1970s-with the growth of part-time (but still mostly
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2015
Jordy Cummings1 (JC): This issue of Alternate Routes has the theme of “Capitalism in the Classroo... more Jordy Cummings1 (JC): This issue of Alternate Routes has the theme of “Capitalism in the Classroom.” So to begin I’d like to ask you, in the broadest sense, what you see as the effect of capitalism in its various forms in the classroom. Did neoliberalism introduce a different logic? What about post-crisis capitalism? Jim Silver2 (JS): In the last thirty to forty years, the era of neoliberalism, capitalism has done a lot of damage to education. Consider the case of universities. Public funding has been systematically reduced in real terms over a long period. Tuition is rising in real terms, reducing access for many, but especially for those already on the margins of our society. A high and still rising proportion of classes are taught by nontenured faculty who are part-time, poorly paid and have minimal job security. Universities are increasingly corporatized – management is less collegial and more top-down, and private sector fund-raising has assumed enormous importance, adding to t...
This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, betwee... more This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, between Perry Anderson and David Fernbach while pointing toward a new dialectical social theory with which to analyze cultural form in general and music in particular. The debate was in the first instance methodological, formal/technical vs. lyrical contextual analysis. Within this methodological debate we see inscribed the misunderstanding the sixties New Left had of the sixties counterculture, and thus the conditions of possibility for a missed encounter. Rock music was neither a direct instantiation of the times, as Anderson implies, nor was it an entirely new form that must be schematized sui generis with a new set of axioms, as suggested by Fernbach. Indeed, it was both and then some. In engaging this debate, I use canonical figures of the era as my primary case studies as well as what I call my excursions – miniature analyses that capture the broader point I am making in my cognitive mapping of the cultural production of the long sixties. From this project’s standpoint, it was the Left that missed an encounter with the counterculture, not the counterculture that missed an encounter with the Left. To continue this engagement, I have deployed what I have called a theory of the missed encounter. I engage what could have taken place, that is to say, if the implicit metaphysical and practical connection between rock music culture and the Left had been consummated, by examining why this could not have taken place, why there was a missed encounter. As against the more commonly theorized Popular Front and Punk eras which I stipulate as consummated encounters, the sixties, aesthetically and politically – did not coalesce in the same sense. The Missed Encounter, for me, is a heuristic, a point-of-departure. I presume, thus, with my own analysis that once one goes beyond mythology, a missed encounter is readily apparent. The purpose of my rethinking of the rock music canon is not positivist proof of a missed encounter, rather it is to formulate the ‘sixties question’ through the premises of its existence.
Jordy Cummings1 (JC): The theme of this year’s Alternate Routes is the “paradox of low-wage, no-w... more Jordy Cummings1 (JC): The theme of this year’s Alternate Routes is the “paradox of low-wage, no-wage work”, and there is a great deal of analysis of an allegedly new historical subject, “the precariat”. What do you make of this “paradox”? Is capitalism really that different in 2015 than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago? Charlie Post2 (CP): Capitalism is certainly different today than it was during the so-called “Golden Age” of 1945-1975. During those years, “full-employment” – unemployment below the “frictional” rate of 3-4 percent, the dominance of full-time work with unemployment insurance, health care, pensions and the like (provided by the state, private employers, or some combination) – was the norm. This “full-employment” model also included some measure of job security – either legal or contractual protections from arbitrary dismissal, etc. The “Golden Age” was, in my opinion, exceptional in the history of capitalism. It was the product of a combination of a long period of rising ...
Ellen Meiksins Wood2 (EMW): I don’t think the two options here are mutually exclusive. Yes, this ... more Ellen Meiksins Wood2 (EMW): I don’t think the two options here are mutually exclusive. Yes, this government is distinctively rightwing, not least on matters like Palestine and the environment. But, like everything else, it has a history. The simple continuity, of course, is that Canada was and remains a capitalist economy, with all this entails: the imperatives of profit-maximization imposed by the capitalist market, the necessity of constant capital accumulation, the constant need to reduce the costs of labour, the subordination of all social goods including ecological sustainability to the requirements of profit, the inequities and social injustices these imperatives inevitably engender, and the limitations placed on states as long as the economy is regulated by capitalist requirements. But let’s be more specific. For
This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, betwee... more This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, between Perry Anderson and David Fernbach while pointing toward a new dialectical social theory with which to analyze cultural form in general and music in particular. The debate was in the first instance methodological, formal/technical vs. lyrical contextual analysis. Within this methodological debate we see inscribed the misunderstanding the sixties New Left had of the sixties counterculture, and thus the conditions of possibility for a missed encounter. Rock music was neither a direct instantiation of the times, as Anderson implies, nor was it an entirely new form that must be schematized sui generis with a new set of axioms, as suggested by Fernbach. Indeed, it was both and then some. In engaging this debate, I use canonical figures of the era as my primary case studies as well as what I call my excursions – miniature analyses that capture the broader point I am making in my cognitive mapping of the cultural production of the long sixties. From this project’s standpoint, it was the Left that missed an encounter with the counterculture, not the counterculture that missed an encounter with the Left.
To continue this engagement, I have deployed what I have called a theory of the missed encounter. I engage what could have taken place, that is to say, if the implicit metaphysical and practical connection between rock music culture and the Left had been consummated, by examining why this could not have taken place, why there was a missed encounter. As against the more commonly theorized Popular Front and Punk eras which I stipulate as consummated encounters, the sixties, aesthetically and politically – did not coalesce in the same sense. The Missed Encounter, for me, is a heuristic, a point-of-departure. I presume, thus, with my own analysis that once one goes beyond mythology, a missed encounter is readily apparent. The purpose of my rethinking of the rock music canon is not positivist proof of a missed encounter, rather it is to formulate the ‘sixties question’ through the premises of its existence.
a close reading, in particular by scholars attempting to make sense of 20 th century capitalism i... more a close reading, in particular by scholars attempting to make sense of 20 th century capitalism in the United States. Only when armed with knowledge of the peculiarity of the American question can we begin to understand the specificity of a logic that continues to subsume everything in its wake. As well, the book is an explicit defense of the school of thought labeled "Political Marxism" (henceforth PM). Post consciously places his work in this growing body of knowledge that emphasizes historical specificity, empirical clarity and unintended consequences, thus a theory of social property relations. Like Robert Brenner on England or George Comninel on France, Post problematizes both standard and critical accounts of the making of American capitalism. One sees the unintended consequences and class struggles, on a regional and then finally national scale, subsequent to the Civil War. Given what some call the "Americanization" of global capital, the implications of this work are indeed far reaching.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2013
Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): Let's start with Canada. What do you make of the current context of the Ca... more Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): Let's start with Canada. What do you make of the current context of the Canadian state? Is it exceptionally right wing in comparison with earlier governments, for example, on issues like Palestine or the environment? Or are current policies continuous with past policy trajectories? Ellen Meiksins Wood 2 (EMW): I don't think the two options here are mutually exclusive. Yes, this government is distinctively rightwing, not least on matters like Palestine and the environment. But, like everything else, it has a history. The simple continuity, of course, is that Canada was and remains a capitalist economy, with all this entails: the imperatives of profit-maximization imposed by the capitalist market, the necessity of constant capital accumulation, the constant need to reduce the costs of labour, the subordination of all social goods including ecological sustainability to the requirements of profit, the inequities and social injustices these imperatives inevitably engender, and the limitations placed on states as long as the economy is regulated by capitalist requirements. But let's be more specific. For
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2014
Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): Your book is called No Local and it is an immanent critique of inward look... more Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): Your book is called No Local and it is an immanent critique of inward looking reactions to neoliberal capitalism. One poignant episode you recount surrounds urban agriculture, and the idea that we've come to a really problematic situation when poor people are encouraged to grow their own food in addition to working their jobs and raising their kids. What is the political or strategic problem with localism? What are your thoughts, for example, on campaigns like "Occupy the Economy" and so forth? greg sharzer 2 (gs): First I'd like to quickly define some terms. 'Local' is a space distinct from larger regional, national and international spaces. But it's also relational, a moment in the global capital circuit. It's amorphous, changing depending on what you're measuring: political, social, economic, and so on. 'Localism' is the fetishization of scale. It's assigning some positive benefit to a place precisely because it's small. It's impossible to be anti-local, unless you're against units of measurement. But I think it's a mistake to think that small is always beautiful. Localism assumes 1) local economies are fairer than global economies, 2) local spaces are autonomous from, and therefore more open to democratic control than larger spaces, and 3) the political project of revolutionary socialism is dead or, more accurately, never existed in the first place. I think these problems mean that localist schemes for change, such as 1 Jordy Cummings is a labour activist and PhD candidate in Political Science at York University. With a background in journalism, Cummings has written for a variety of publications both journalistic and academic, including Socialism & Democracy and Basics Community News Service. His dissertation focuses on radical theory in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the transition to modernity, using a Political Marxist methodology. He is also editing a reader of George Comninel's writings and is Interventions editor at Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2015
Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): This issue of Alternate Routes has the theme of "Capitalism in the Classro... more Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): This issue of Alternate Routes has the theme of "Capitalism in the Classroom." So to begin I'd like to ask you, in the broadest sense, what you see as the effect of capitalism in its various forms in the classroom. Did neoliberalism introduce a different logic? What about post-crisis capitalism? Jim Silver 2 (JS): In the last thirty to forty years, the era of neoliberalism, capitalism has done a lot of damage to education. Consider the case of universities. Public funding has been systematically reduced in real terms over a long period. Tuition is rising in real terms, reducing access for many, but especially for those already on the margins of our society. A high and still rising proportion of classes are taught by nontenured faculty who are part-time, poorly paid and have minimal job security. Universities are increasingly corporatized-management is less collegial and more top-down, and private sector fund-raising has assumed enormous importance, adding to the influence exercised by corporations and wealthy individuals. An even greater problem lies outside the classroom. One of the strongest correlations in the social sciences is that between income and educational outcomes. The higher the income, the better are educational outcomes; the lower the income, the worse are educational outcomes. Those who grow up in poverty are much less likely to succeed educationally than those who are economically better off. Since a major consequence of the neoliberal era is the growth of poverty and inequality, more and more people are left behind educationally. This is worsened by the 1 Jordy Cummings is Interventions Editor of Alternate Routes, and a PhD candidate at York University. 2 Jim Silver is the Chair of the University of Winnipeg's Department of Urban and Inner-City Studies, and is a long-time Board member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2015
Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): You're from Toronto, and politicized in the era of the New Left, after att... more Jordy Cummings 1 (JC): You're from Toronto, and politicized in the era of the New Left, after attending grad school at Massey College and even taking a course with Foucault…Is there anything particular to Toronto's culture that has inspired you, as an educator, an activist and a socialist? Peter McLaren 2 (PM): I left Toronto kicking and screaming since I couldn't find a tenure-track university position in Canada, but the renowned American educator Henry Giroux (what irony, he is now a Canadian citizen!) had helped me find a position in Miami University of Ohio, and who could resist that offer? Working with Henry was an education on its own that could never be purchased. Henry has a generosity of spirit that still staggers me. Toronto, ah yes. Well, as far as my perceptions of schooling and society goes, there was This Magazine is About Schools that I read in the late sixties and into the seventies, edited by George Martell and Satu Repo. It was housed, as I recall, in Rochdale College, where I frequently hung out with friends. It became This Magazine sometime in the seventies, I think. I learned a lot from reading that magazine but I was never a subscriber, but rather an intermittent reader. Which probably accounts for why I didn't have much of a coherent theoretical trajectory when I started to write professionally in 1979. I was never recruited by left organizations, nor did I really attempt to join political groups, even school activists.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2016
The theme of this year's Alternate Routes is the "paradox of low-wage, no-wage work", and there i... more The theme of this year's Alternate Routes is the "paradox of low-wage, no-wage work", and there is a great deal of analysis of an allegedly new historical subject, "the precariat". What do you make of this "paradox"? Is capitalism really that different in 2015 than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago? Charlie Post 2 (CP): Capitalism is certainly different today than it was during the so-called "Golden Age" of 1945-1975. During those years, "full-employment"-unemployment below the "frictional" rate of 3-4 percent, the dominance of full-time work with unemployment insurance, health care, pensions and the like (provided by the state, private employers, or some combination)-was the norm. This "full-employment" model also included some measure of job security-either legal or contractual protections from arbitrary dismissal, etc. The "Golden Age" was, in my opinion, exceptional in the history of capitalism. It was the product of a combination of a long period of rising profitability (1933-1966) and a militant labor movement across the industrialized world. Workers had threatened the foundations of capitalist rule (France and Spain in the mid-1930s, France and Italy immediately after World War II, France in 1968, Portugal 1974-1975) or severely disrupted capitalist accumulation in mass strike waves in the mid-1930s, immediate postwar years and again between 1965-1975. Capital was forced to make major concessions to labor. The "full-employment" model and the expansive welfare state were the most important gains, giving workers unprecedented security of employment. However, the "Golden Age" was not typical of the history of capitalism. Piketty, in his greatly overrated Capital in the 21st Century, has demonstrated that the very slight decline in income and wealth inequality in this period was a short-interruption of capitalism's historic tendency to increase inequality. Not only was the period exceptional for small decreases in inequality, but in the "full-employment" regime. The period since the mid-1970s-with the growth of part-time (but still mostly
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2015
Jordy Cummings1 (JC): This issue of Alternate Routes has the theme of “Capitalism in the Classroo... more Jordy Cummings1 (JC): This issue of Alternate Routes has the theme of “Capitalism in the Classroom.” So to begin I’d like to ask you, in the broadest sense, what you see as the effect of capitalism in its various forms in the classroom. Did neoliberalism introduce a different logic? What about post-crisis capitalism? Jim Silver2 (JS): In the last thirty to forty years, the era of neoliberalism, capitalism has done a lot of damage to education. Consider the case of universities. Public funding has been systematically reduced in real terms over a long period. Tuition is rising in real terms, reducing access for many, but especially for those already on the margins of our society. A high and still rising proportion of classes are taught by nontenured faculty who are part-time, poorly paid and have minimal job security. Universities are increasingly corporatized – management is less collegial and more top-down, and private sector fund-raising has assumed enormous importance, adding to t...
This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, betwee... more This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, between Perry Anderson and David Fernbach while pointing toward a new dialectical social theory with which to analyze cultural form in general and music in particular. The debate was in the first instance methodological, formal/technical vs. lyrical contextual analysis. Within this methodological debate we see inscribed the misunderstanding the sixties New Left had of the sixties counterculture, and thus the conditions of possibility for a missed encounter. Rock music was neither a direct instantiation of the times, as Anderson implies, nor was it an entirely new form that must be schematized sui generis with a new set of axioms, as suggested by Fernbach. Indeed, it was both and then some. In engaging this debate, I use canonical figures of the era as my primary case studies as well as what I call my excursions – miniature analyses that capture the broader point I am making in my cognitive mapping of the cultural production of the long sixties. From this project’s standpoint, it was the Left that missed an encounter with the counterculture, not the counterculture that missed an encounter with the Left. To continue this engagement, I have deployed what I have called a theory of the missed encounter. I engage what could have taken place, that is to say, if the implicit metaphysical and practical connection between rock music culture and the Left had been consummated, by examining why this could not have taken place, why there was a missed encounter. As against the more commonly theorized Popular Front and Punk eras which I stipulate as consummated encounters, the sixties, aesthetically and politically – did not coalesce in the same sense. The Missed Encounter, for me, is a heuristic, a point-of-departure. I presume, thus, with my own analysis that once one goes beyond mythology, a missed encounter is readily apparent. The purpose of my rethinking of the rock music canon is not positivist proof of a missed encounter, rather it is to formulate the ‘sixties question’ through the premises of its existence.
Jordy Cummings1 (JC): The theme of this year’s Alternate Routes is the “paradox of low-wage, no-w... more Jordy Cummings1 (JC): The theme of this year’s Alternate Routes is the “paradox of low-wage, no-wage work”, and there is a great deal of analysis of an allegedly new historical subject, “the precariat”. What do you make of this “paradox”? Is capitalism really that different in 2015 than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago? Charlie Post2 (CP): Capitalism is certainly different today than it was during the so-called “Golden Age” of 1945-1975. During those years, “full-employment” – unemployment below the “frictional” rate of 3-4 percent, the dominance of full-time work with unemployment insurance, health care, pensions and the like (provided by the state, private employers, or some combination) – was the norm. This “full-employment” model also included some measure of job security – either legal or contractual protections from arbitrary dismissal, etc. The “Golden Age” was, in my opinion, exceptional in the history of capitalism. It was the product of a combination of a long period of rising ...
Ellen Meiksins Wood2 (EMW): I don’t think the two options here are mutually exclusive. Yes, this ... more Ellen Meiksins Wood2 (EMW): I don’t think the two options here are mutually exclusive. Yes, this government is distinctively rightwing, not least on matters like Palestine and the environment. But, like everything else, it has a history. The simple continuity, of course, is that Canada was and remains a capitalist economy, with all this entails: the imperatives of profit-maximization imposed by the capitalist market, the necessity of constant capital accumulation, the constant need to reduce the costs of labour, the subordination of all social goods including ecological sustainability to the requirements of profit, the inequities and social injustices these imperatives inevitably engender, and the limitations placed on states as long as the economy is regulated by capitalist requirements. But let’s be more specific. For
This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, betwee... more This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, between Perry Anderson and David Fernbach while pointing toward a new dialectical social theory with which to analyze cultural form in general and music in particular. The debate was in the first instance methodological, formal/technical vs. lyrical contextual analysis. Within this methodological debate we see inscribed the misunderstanding the sixties New Left had of the sixties counterculture, and thus the conditions of possibility for a missed encounter. Rock music was neither a direct instantiation of the times, as Anderson implies, nor was it an entirely new form that must be schematized sui generis with a new set of axioms, as suggested by Fernbach. Indeed, it was both and then some. In engaging this debate, I use canonical figures of the era as my primary case studies as well as what I call my excursions – miniature analyses that capture the broader point I am making in my cognitive mapping of the cultural production of the long sixties. From this project’s standpoint, it was the Left that missed an encounter with the counterculture, not the counterculture that missed an encounter with the Left.
To continue this engagement, I have deployed what I have called a theory of the missed encounter. I engage what could have taken place, that is to say, if the implicit metaphysical and practical connection between rock music culture and the Left had been consummated, by examining why this could not have taken place, why there was a missed encounter. As against the more commonly theorized Popular Front and Punk eras which I stipulate as consummated encounters, the sixties, aesthetically and politically – did not coalesce in the same sense. The Missed Encounter, for me, is a heuristic, a point-of-departure. I presume, thus, with my own analysis that once one goes beyond mythology, a missed encounter is readily apparent. The purpose of my rethinking of the rock music canon is not positivist proof of a missed encounter, rather it is to formulate the ‘sixties question’ through the premises of its existence.
a close reading, in particular by scholars attempting to make sense of 20 th century capitalism i... more a close reading, in particular by scholars attempting to make sense of 20 th century capitalism in the United States. Only when armed with knowledge of the peculiarity of the American question can we begin to understand the specificity of a logic that continues to subsume everything in its wake. As well, the book is an explicit defense of the school of thought labeled "Political Marxism" (henceforth PM). Post consciously places his work in this growing body of knowledge that emphasizes historical specificity, empirical clarity and unintended consequences, thus a theory of social property relations. Like Robert Brenner on England or George Comninel on France, Post problematizes both standard and critical accounts of the making of American capitalism. One sees the unintended consequences and class struggles, on a regional and then finally national scale, subsequent to the Civil War. Given what some call the "Americanization" of global capital, the implications of this work are indeed far reaching.
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Papers by Jordy Cummings
To continue this engagement, I have deployed what I have called a theory of the missed encounter. I engage what could have taken place, that is to say, if the implicit metaphysical and practical connection between rock music culture and the Left had been consummated, by examining why this could not have taken place, why there was a missed encounter. As against the more commonly theorized Popular Front and Punk eras which I stipulate as consummated encounters, the sixties, aesthetically and politically – did not coalesce in the same sense. The Missed Encounter, for me, is a heuristic, a point-of-departure. I presume, thus, with my own analysis that once one goes beyond mythology, a missed encounter is readily apparent. The purpose of my rethinking of the rock music canon is not positivist proof of a missed encounter, rather it is to formulate the ‘sixties question’ through the premises of its existence.
To continue this engagement, I have deployed what I have called a theory of the missed encounter. I engage what could have taken place, that is to say, if the implicit metaphysical and practical connection between rock music culture and the Left had been consummated, by examining why this could not have taken place, why there was a missed encounter. As against the more commonly theorized Popular Front and Punk eras which I stipulate as consummated encounters, the sixties, aesthetically and politically – did not coalesce in the same sense. The Missed Encounter, for me, is a heuristic, a point-of-departure. I presume, thus, with my own analysis that once one goes beyond mythology, a missed encounter is readily apparent. The purpose of my rethinking of the rock music canon is not positivist proof of a missed encounter, rather it is to formulate the ‘sixties question’ through the premises of its existence.