A World Without Money

A World Without Money
Author: The Friends of 4 Million Young Workers
Publisher: Pattern Books
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2020-08-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0422915068

Un Monde Sans Argent: Le Communisme was originally published in three parts, as three separate pamphlets, in France, between 1975-6. It was produced by Dominique Blanc, shortly after the dissolution of the Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs révolutionnaires. The name Quatre Millions de Jeune Travailleurs was apparently 'adopted' from a 1971 PSU youth publication (Parti Socialiste Unifié - a French Socialist Party), presumably to satisfy French publishing laws, and texts continued to be published under this name through the 1970's including the widely distributed tract A Bas Le Proletariat/Vive Le Communisme. Whatever, though, the book speaks for itself. Just read it.

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Publisher: TheBookEdition
Total Pages:
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ISBN: 2958098303

From Crisis to Communisation

From Crisis to Communisation
Author: Gilles Dauvé
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2019-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1629633038

“Communisation” means something quite straightforward: a revolution that starts to change social relations immediately. It would extend over years, decades probably, but from Day One it would begin to do away with wage-labour, profit, productivity, private property, classes, States, masculine domination, and more. There would be no “transition period” in the Marxist sense, no period when the “associated producers” continue furthering economic growth to create the industrial foundations of a new world. Communisation means a creative insurrection that would bring about communism, not its preconditions. Thus stated, it sounds simple enough. The questions are what, how, and by whom. That is what this book is about. Communisation is not the be-all and end-all that solves everything and proves wrong all past critical theory. The concept was born out of a specific period, and we can fully understand it by going back to how people personally and collectively experienced the crises of the 1960s and ’70s. The notion is now developing in the maelstrom of a new crisis, deeper than the Depression of the 1930s, among other reasons because of its ecological dimension, a crisis that has the scope and magnitude of a crisis of civilisation. This is not a book that glorifies existing struggles as if their present accumulation were enough to result in revolution. Radical theory is meaningful if it addresses the question: How can proletarian resistance to exploitation and dispossession achieve more than aggravate the crisis? How can it reshape the world?

The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought

The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought
Author: Alastair Hemmens
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2019-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030125866

What is work? Why do we do it? Since time immemorial the answer to these questions, from both the left and the right, has been that work is both a natural necessity and, barring exploitation, a social good. One might criticise its management, its compensation and who benefits from it the most, but never work itself, never work as such. In this book, Alastair Hemmens seeks to challenge these received ideas. Drawing on the new ‘critique-of-value’ school of Marxian critical theory, Hemmens demonstrates that capitalism and its final crisis cannot be properly understood except in terms of the historically specific and socially destructive character of labour. It is from this radical perspective that Hemmens turns to an innovative critical analysis of the rich history of radical French thinkers who, over the past two centuries, have challenged the labour form head on: from the utopian-socialist Charles Fourier, who called for the abolition of the separation between work and play, and Marx’s wayward son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who demanded The Right to Laziness (1880), to the father of Surrealism, André Breton, who inaugurated a ‘war on work’, and, of course, the French Situationist, Guy Debord, author of the famous graffito, ‘never work’. Ultimately, Hemmens considers normative changes in attitudes to work since the 1960s and the future of anti-capitalist social movements today. This book will be a crucial point of reference for contemporary debates about labour and the anti-work tradition in France.

The Ascent of Money

The Ascent of Money
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781594201929

Ferguson tells the human story behind the evolution of money, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest Wall Street upheavals. The author shows that finance is, in fact, the foundation of human progress.

Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Author: Maximilien Rubel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1987-08-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1349187755

Everyone knows that in socialism private companies are replaced by state enterprises which employ wage-workers in order to produce profits which accrue to the state. 'Not so!' say the authors of this book. In the nineteenth century, socialists as different as Marx and Kropotkin were agreed that socialism means a marketless, moneyless, wageless, classless, stateless world society. Subsequently this vision of non-market socialism has been developed by currents such as the Anarcho-Communists, Impossibilists, Council Communists, Bordigists and Situationists. By tracing this development, this book challenges the assumptions of both supporters and opponents of what is conventionally regarded as socialism.