Abstract: The article talks about an epochal regression, seeking to avoid the social science melodrama. Situating its reflection upon the conceptual level, it examines the restoration of capitalism in social formations with a socialist project in the Marxian and Marxist terms, to test their theoretical capacity at historical analysis but mainly to show what the alternative movements and theory in Yugoslavia could have done, but did not do, when there was still time to intervene. More precisely it tries to extricate the locus where, in the socialist past, theoretical insights have come out to be disconnected from political commitments (i.e. the title should be understood: ‘What we should have learned from Marx and have failed to take into account in our practice’). In front of the principal contradiction between socialist processes and the political bureaucracy (indirect effects of the latter being capitalist processes), the alternative movements, neglecting the top managerial groups and their great influence within political bureaucracy, found themselves theoretically unprepared and practically powerless when the joint forces of reaction performed a top-down counter-revolutionary coup and, in fire and blood, destroyed socialist federation.

Abstract: The article reconstructs Wolfgang Streeck’s thesis that capitalism is coming to an inglorious, painful, and slow end. It looks at how super modern capitalism both increasingly exploits labor and mounts successful attempts to free itself from its partial dependence on labor. In this context, post-socialist ultra neoliberal economies are to be seen as part of the vanguard of these processes.

Abstract: The article’s purpose is to analyse the triad of ‘the political – politics – political power’ as a self-projection, self-representation, self-mediation of the political community; the political as a mediating symbolic structure and medium, the political order (nomos) as transcending all types of order, and politics as an activity devoid of its proper subject and finding its institutional form in political power and in the production of pictures of visibility.The starting thesis is that power is not a ‘pre-foundation’, ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ of appearances and visibilities. There is no such thing as the political, politics and political power ‘in themselves’, they always appear as enmeshed in visibilities and pictures of visibility. Thus a new research field is outlined at the borderline of the sociology of public space and the sociology of politics – the field of historical sociology of political visibilities.

Abstract: What are the consequences of the foreclosure of the political in an un-free form during the epoch of supermodern capitalism? What are the implications of the emergence and general diffusion of networked digital computer technology, along with the mathematicised formal logic that underpins its functioning, in relation to this foreclosure of the political? This paper begins by tracing the ways in which (following Reiner Schurmannand Martin Heidegger) modern subjectivity – which forms the political through the functioning of the three recursive relations to, near, and for oneself – is grounded in the human being seeking meaning in making sense of the relationship with itself; the human being is the ground, the originary source for making sense of everyday life. However, another trajectory of the political emerges with the evolution of capitalism, characterized by instrumental reasoning, a form that becomes dominant in our time. Supermodern capitalism is thus characterized politically by what Gilles Deleuze called “societies of control”. In the thirty years that passed since Deleuze’ essay, what he outlined has now become more concretely perceivable. There is the fundamental change denoted by the socialization of mathematized formal logic, that underpins the now-ubiquitous digital networked computers and associated technologies and symbolic practices. The incorporation of this new formal system of reasoning into capitalist economic structures has a fundamental social impact: the generalization of instrumental-calculative reasoning into the political, which means the interruption of the formation of political subjectivity through the interruption of the movement of the recursive relations centered on the self. This interruption marks a new process of socialization, where political concepts become transformed into digital social objects. ...

Abstract: Schumpeter; Marx; Capital

Abstract: It is generally assumed, given the many references to Ricardo in The Capital, that Ricardo is of the greatest importance to Marx's ideas and Marx's critique of classical economics.The purpose of this text is to show that Marx's ideas can be traced back to the early ideas of Adam Smith and to the rarely considered Ricardian socialists.

Abstract: The article proposes a reflexive theory of the conceptualizations of the capitalist crises. Reflexivity entails acknowledging that the notions of crisis do not simply and transparently reflect its essence, but can themselves reflect upon that essence. Firstly, I study the productivity of the appearance of the crisis and argue that the nature of the crisis is not given before its practical representation. Then I introduce the non-classical dialectical logic or what can be called an organon of the theories of mediating structures. Lastly, I apply the proposed theoretical construction in the analysis of the conditions for the possibility of the appearance of the current environmental crisis as a necessary and not contingent effect of the nature of capitalism.

Abstract: The paper proposes a rethinking of the concept of nature in terms of non-predetermined possibility. In the first part the author retraces the notion of nature implied by the theory of mediation structures; in the second part he moves to a critical rereading of Aristotle and Hegel and their respective understanding of nature in order to outline a basis for a redefinition of nature that could help the contemporary critical theory, social and human sciences. Put succinctly, nature is conceived as a constitutive exteriority that functions as an internal element. Nature is limiting its own self in such a way that it produces the very distinction between natural and not natural as a natural distinction. Thus it allows us to question the nature of technology, of history, of society, of culture, in short, of everything that traditionally has been opposed to nature.

Abstract: This article problematizes Marx's theory of labour. It shows that Marx's understanding of labour is not a coherent and uncontradictory whole, but contains varying, sometimes incommensurable moments. The thesis says that Marx analyzes labour as a structure of mediation. This is the case regardless if he refers to labour as mediation between man and nature on a more abstract philosophical level, or, on the contrary, stresses its concrete historical character, where the self-movement of capital is mediated by labour. Returning to Marx's theoretical legacy, I show how, beyond his multidimensional reflections on labor,this specific view of labour as a mediator persists. The purpose of the distinction between multiple levels of analysis in Marx's work is to explicate the boundaries of his concept of labour. In the spirit of Weber's ‘disenchantment of the world’ it may be asserted that Marx reduces labor to its ‘disenchanted’ form. Moreover, the article argues that it is possible to conceptualise other forms of labour via engaging with and against Marx's work,where those other forms are relegated solely a secondary status. The latter will be done by juxtaposing Marx's notions to the concepts of the theory of the mediating structures and its organon – the non-classical dialectical logic developed by the Institute for Critical Theories of Supermodernity.

Abstract: Initially, at an abstract level, the ‘objectification’ in Marx's philosophy is discussed against the background of a more general dialectic between ‘appropriation and alienation’ characteristic of every essentially hermeneutic philosophy. Such an approach that narrows the scale of activity crystallizes then at one concrete level in the idea of labour as the universal essence of every human action and has rightly deserved criticism on the part of Aristotle, Hegel, or Arendt. The article attempts to uncover the connection of this solution with Locke's comprehensions, in which the objectifying attitude towards the world and the role of property merge into a peculiar sense of ‘one’s own’, independent of the will of others, and becomes a framework for the meaning of human activity in general. From this general statement, three inferences are offered. First, Locke's and Marx's approach is opposed to the idea borrowed by Kant that for something to be ‘own’, it does not mean to be ‘proprietary’ to its owner. Second, on the basis of Marx's wording, an opportunity for non-alienated work is stated possible, not only under the terms of the removed private property. Third, there is a disagreement with Marx's idea of the labour contract as a form of commodity-purchase of the labour power.

Abstract: Despite the efforts to revise Foucault’s early courses at the Collège de France towards an anti-Marxist interpretation, these lectures constitute an indelible sign of the French philosopher’s fruitful intervention in the field of Marxist analysis of exploitation. I focus on the lectures from 1972-3, 1973-4. As I attempt to show, Foucault’s analytics of power developed in these lectures helps us understand the embeddedness of political technologies in the process of capital accumulation. My reading concentrates particularly on the role of violence (and different mechanisms and institutions of violence and coercion), not only as a “prelude to the history of capital” (Marx), but as its constant fellow-traveler. As Foucault shows, “apparatuses and techniques of imprisonment” are means to “accumulate people” for the ends of capitalist production and in this sense are not only indispensable for the reproduction of capital but function also as “levers” of its accumulation.

Abstract: The article raises the problem of the naturalistic evidences that underlie supermodern biocapitalism, biotechnologies and biopower, and proposes phenomenological landmarks for their critique. The specifics of biocapitalism is traces in three dimensions: cleavage of the modern unity between work and life; extraction of ‘biologically gained time’ as a specificsurplus value; modal transformation of biopower in the formula ‘make survive or let live’. Parallel to that, the phenomenological destruction, respectively critique, is deployed of the capitalist ‘force for working’ (‘being-able-to-work’), following a line from what was unthinkable for Marks but is subject to thematization with Husserl – the generative time of the subjectively lived life and the kinaesthetic habitualization of the ‘being-able-to-work’. This unreifiable (and unconscious) bodily fundament introduces a structural indefiniteness into every capitalist socialization of the processing of natural and social processes.

Abstract: Marx defined the value of labour power by the labour time socially necessary for its reproduction.But reproduction of labour time requires more than just the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the power of an individual life, because labour power is to be reproduced beyond the living individual, at the scale of the population. Therefore,the value of labour power has a biopolitical dimension, which can be read through Marx's comments on biological reproduction of the workers, the inevitable exhaustion of the individual labour power, the mortality, death, and birth rate in the workers' families. The paper claims that if we take into account that biopolitical dimension, the value of labour power would depend also on surplus population. Building on that, I will try to demonstrate, in the context of fake news production, that the surplus labour channeled by the social media has transformed the biopolitical apparatuses of security into relays crucial to the operation of the labour market, and in that sense, that the reproduction of labour power has become productive, production and exploitation have become coextensive with life.

Abstract: The article aims to achieve a summarized representation of the problem of subjectness as a problem of returning the functions of subjectness in history (if there is a possibility to talk about it in singular) above all in the case of abductive inference as one of the pre-deductive forms of inference in the endogenous practical logics of the dialectical.Since the latter can hardly be thought effectively in the theories of structures of self-mediation without the modality of the exogenous non-classical logic of the dialectical, the text will proceed from the more general problem of the conditions for the possibility ofits introduction, the main among which is the successful content formalization of Marx’s syllogistics. That is why the first paragraphs of the article are based on a critical examinationof the productivity of two of the formalizations of Marx’s syllogistic, which followhis Capital – David Harvey’s, on one hand, and Deyan Deyanov’s, on the other. This will give a chance, in the next paragraphs of the paper, to show clearly the reasons why the second content formalization is essential in the nonclassical logic of the dialectical.This logic’s main characteristics will be presented in the third and fourth paragraphs as a necessary condition for understanding the problem of subjectness in abductive inference as a practical logic not only in the narrower sense for the cases of scientific discoveries,but also in a wider sense, as a logic in cases of technological inventions and economic innovations (or generally in innovative labor). Precisely with this background in mind and in contrast to the critical consideration of other analysis of subjectness, such as Georg Lucacs’s and Louis Altusser’s, inspired by the Marx’s revolutionary form of science, the final part of the article outlines some important specifics about the

Abstract: In this article, we consider a paradigmatic assumption of ours – namely, that the figures of non-classical dialectics, which we call Mirror Syllogistics, can be thought temporally. The statement this article starts with is that these are three different ways of flowing of social time which are independent of one another but intricately interwoven in reality.We will enter through the wide open door of the marvelous gigantic edifice built by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in order to show that the three types of logical correlation(U-S-P, P-U-S, S-P-U) are also three ways of connecting the times (past, present, and future). We demonstrate the link of the three temporal structures (and their logical forms)with the very fabric of social order – the socialization of nature, the relations of power and counter-power, of deprivation and donation. The article is developed and conceived within the framework of the theory of structures of mediation, a theory following the tradition of Marx and Hegel. Working within it, we see a possible way out of the impasse of positivism and a new possible way of thinking time, the mystical, negation, etc.

Abstract: As students of philosophy at the University of Sofia in the early 1970s, we were impressed by Prof. Petar-Emil Mitev. Using the simple sociological approach of counting the number of quotes from the officially dubbed “classic” authors (Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin) in the official Soviet journal “Voprosy filosofii”, he was able to highlight the subservience of Soviet philosophy to political conjecture. The conclusions, however, applied to all Soviet satellite states. This prompted us, self-organized in the so-called Marxian Seminar, to look for possibilities of criticizing “real socialism” through the discovery of “the authentic Marx”. Others from our group successfully entered the high echelons of communist government; that urged them and the rest of us to address the dilemmas of a sociologist facing totalitarian power. The attempt at critique of socialist reality via Marx failed; the experience of sociologists in power, since the 1960s up to the end of communism in 1989, had some success: thanks to them, certain reactions of the power elite became softer. On the other hand, sociologists were not consulted on decisions of the Communist Party’s Politbureau that shaped Bulgaria’s fate. It might be useful to compare problems of the positioning of sociologists then and now.

Abstract: According to modern science and technology, all components of the world are an object of calculation and mastering in the name of human utility. Reality in itself, explored and used in this manner, raises no principal moral or normative limits to human interference,it is not a field of appearance of the sacred or divine, not a revelation of a more profound,metaphysical, i.e. ‘ultimate’, truth. In this condition, a religious experience requires as acrifice of intellect, in remaining difficult to communicate and share, and only within the confines of personal interhuman relations. The possibility of reaching a restoration of religion’s force is not excluded but it would require the coming of new prophets and saviours.

Abstract: The article discusses approaches to Weber’s theis of the disenchantment of the world in following the reflexive strategy that Weber calls ‘critique’ (in the Kantian sense) of conceptsthat opens them toward their historically changing diagnostic potential. Attentionis focused on the in-depth archaeology of Weber’s thesis that Johannes Weiss proposes,an archaeology that makes explicit the meaning antagonisms between the rationalism of modern science, the ethical rationalism of the religions of salvation, and the magical image of the world, clarifying junctions between Weberian and Nietzschean motives and problematizing ‘the future of religion’ in this context. IN the spirit of Weiss’s privative definition of modernity as ‘a time foreign to God and devoid of prophets’, the commentary is moved by an interest in the antinomies of modern disenchantment seen as the demoralization of the world that is a condition of possibility of Modernity’s naturalistic projects; and also by the interest in such operative sociological concepts as ‘image of the world’, ‘relation to the world’, ‘religious habitus’, which are relevant to the thesis of disenchantment but which Weber doesn’t clarify explicitly.

Abstract: Interviews Edith Hanke

Abstract: This paper will follow approximately the following strategy. First of all, I will briefly show what the logic of Weber's work with genetic – as opposed to classifying – concepts is and what possibilities it opens for historical theoretical consideration. I will then follow some possible results from the application of this logic to the concepts of ‘rationalism’(‘Western rationalism’) and ‘capitalism’ (‘modern capitalism’). Special emphasis will be placed on some specific configurations (historical encounters) that such work on rationalism and capitalism comes across, but I will show that these mongrel formations also highlight the fields of possible disintegration. All this, as I will summarize in the end, allows us to shed additional light on the interrelationship between rationality and capitalism.Finally, rather as a promise of future work, I will briefly consider a different (J. Schumpeter's)vision of the relationship between rationality and capitalism, which nevertheless stems from Weber's contexts.

Abstract: A Talk Between Antoinette Koleva and Kolyo Koev

Abstract: In the article I start from the already discussed problem of subjectivity in the abductive inference, aiming to offer a deeper experimental analysis of its endogenous practical logic in the light of the problem of the so-called metamorphoses of magic and disenchantment in the context of the problems of theories of self-mediation structures. To this end, I first present in detail the problem of the functions of the abductive inference, and against this background then I present an experimental analysis of the case of innovative labor – the story of Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric lamp and his attempts to turn it into an economic innovation. In it, against the background of general moments of factual history,the results of an analysis of the endogenous practical logic of the dialectical and the results of an analysis of the nonclassical logic of the dialectical are explicitly presented(retaining in each of these analyzes the point of view of one another, although in most cases implicitly). Thus, analyzing the abductive inference from the perspective of the problems of theories of self-mediation structures, the article summarizes the chances that this inference provides for thinking multidimensionally the metamorphoses of magic and disenchantment as a special case of the more general problem of both the functioning and the mutual mediation of functionally differentiated and functionally diffuse structures.