Text of the Matter is back with episode 3.3, “Work in the Time of Cholera”. We dig into Marx’s analysis of the workday and the history of exploitation that surrounds it as a concept, as well as the altogether new forms of cooperation and social organization that are born out of industrial work and the combination of human with machine. From the exploitation of child labor to the conflicts between factories as one gains advantage over the other, we return to the 19th century where Marx sees the future of exploitation expressed by the Capitalist imagination.

In this episode of Text of the Matter we continue through Capital Vol I, Book 2, going into detail on how Marx conceives Capital as a thing different from money, commodities, and their circulation. Through human labor, technology, materials, spaced, etc. are transformed into some sellable; just as human labor itself becomes the proletariats only means of earning their keep. Within this industrial context, is it possible to harness these technologies in a different way? As technology increasingly removes human intervention from production has the character of Capital changed? And how do we imagine revolutionary politics after these major shifts?

Today we divert from Capital to set the stage for what was to come. The Communist Manifesto, unlike Marx's later work, was a polemic that contains many seeds of method that Marx would use later in his life. Coinciding with European revolution across the continent, we give a bit of historical context to expand the reasons that led to the writing of Capital and the explosion of revolutionary thought and action in the 19th and early 20th century.

We begin our dive into Karl Marx's masterwork Capital I. In this episode we analyze his concepts of labor, commodities, fetishism, circulation, and hoarding as we work toward his central concept of Capital itself. Alongside our past work on dialectics, we may now elaborate and demonstrate what Marx means by dialectical materialism and how it is a unique contribution to the history of philosophical, political, and historical analysis. Unlike our previous analyses, Marx engages with a world of history and events that does not treat the mind as form in itself, but rather an element of human existence embedded in a world of economy.

We begin our dive into Karl Marx's masterwork Capital I. In this episode we analyze his concepts of labor, commodities, fetishism, circulation, and hoarding as we work toward his central concept of Capital itself. Alongside our past work on dialectics, we may now elaborate and demonstrate what Marx means by dialectical materialism and how it is a unique contribution to the history of philosophical, political, and historical analysis. Unlike our previous analyses, Marx engages with a world of history and events that does not treat the mind as form in itself, but rather an element of human existence embedded in a world of economy.

Today we continue our conversation on how the idealist dialectic transitions from a form of idealist rationalism to a materialist theory of history and economy. To understand Marx, it is important to grasp the important tool that generated his form of thinking, on contradiction, on labor, and on alienation. While this own't be the last you hear about Hegel, it is our last direct confrontation in this series. Marx transforms Hegel's abstract and speculative drives into direct analysis of real economy and history. Thank you for joining us.

Today we begin a transition, from the deeply philosophical and idealist dialectics of W.F.Hegel to the historical, economic, and materialist dialectics of Karl Marx. To begin this transition, we must in someway produce a closure of our analysis of Hegel, however difficult that may be. To do so we will move through multiple concepts at the heart of Hegel's analysis of the human subject and society: the family, the community, the nation, and the Absolute. With the grounds that we have lain, beginning with Kant, we are now prepared to enter the political and economic field and the contemporary problems that populate it.

When reading Hegel, we find points of both complex logical reasoning and a mad production of language and concepts. This dynamism between points of strange speculation and orgiastic representations of culture as a whole, creates two Hegels that are often difficult to reconcile.  The work of Robert Brandom attempts to remove the wild layer of idealization to produce a consistent theory of human rationality and the process by which that rationality forms consistent mores, laws, and structures of meaning. Ray Brassier uses this analysis to delineate the power of dialectics as a means to transcend classical philosophy, while Slavoj Zizek sees Brandom's work as reducing Hegel to a logical form that cannot recognize the radical power of negativity.

Egon and Misha work through this series of texts on Hegel to understand how genealogy relates to Kant and Hegel's philosophical inventions, what differentiates classical philosophy from theory, how do dialectics model the way in which we develop norms and values, to define what Zizek believes is the radical character of negativity that makes Hegel central to all philosophy, as well as many other fascinating ideas.

Text of the Matter begins a series explaining and investigating the concept of problematics and what it means in relation to politics, aesthetics, and thinking. This series will closely follow Misha's writings in his papers "One or Several Materialisms" and "Problematic Matters".

In a new series for Text of the Matter, Egon takes a look at Hegel's philosophy through the writings of "philosophical entertainer" Alan Watts, analyzing how the two strangely overlap and using Watt's thinking on nonduality to expand our thinking about the dialectic.