Marx After Growth 2: The Esoteric Marx (Sean O'Brien, the87press)

This lecture explores an 'esoteric' current of Marxian thought rooted in the critique of value and distinct from the ‘exoteric’ Marx of traditional Marxism. Whereas classical political economy takes for granted capitalist forms such as value, labour, the commodity and money, Marx insists on the historical specificity of a social process in which labour is abstracted in order for commodities to be exchanged as values. This critical aspect of Marx’s work, however, was largely neglected by traditional Marxists, who tended - like classical political economists - to treat capitalist forms as natural and transhistorical features of human society. Drawing on Marx's analysis of the value-form, this lecture offers an overview of the esoteric Marx and considers the implications of his critique for theories of domination, abstraction and crisis.
Sean O’Brien is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. His research has appeared in Cultural Critique, Discourse, Science Fiction Studies, and Bloomsbury’s Companion to Marx, and is forthcoming in Crossings. He is co-editor of ‘Demos: We Have Never Been Democratic’, a special issue of the visual culture journal Public based on work developed during the 2015 Banff Research in Culture residency. His criticism has also appeared in a number of electronic journals and literary magazines, including GUTS Magazine, The Capilano Review, Vector, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Current projects include a collaborative book, Anti-Social Reproduction, and a monograph, Precarity and the Historicity of the Present: American Culture from Boom to Crisis.
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