Unflat Ontology: Essay on the Poverty of Democratic Materialism
Keywords:
Flat ontology, materialism, value chain, theory of value
Abstract
The paper is dedicated to the problem of flat ontology in philosophy and its relation to the practice in economy.
The author argues that flat economy is based on a marginal utility theory of value and presents hierarchical value chains with concentration of power-capital as if they were flat and all the actors involved were equal. This is the work of democratic materialism, with its idea of radical equality of human and non-human interactions. This perspective, according to the author, should be opposed by the reconstruction of power-capital
relations in unflat ontologies
of the value-creation process.
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Žižek, Slavoj, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza (2018). Reading Marx. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Badiou, Alain (2005). “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic.” Radi- cal Philosophy (March/April): 20–24. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/ democratic-materialism-and-the-materialist-dialectic.
Barboza, David (2016). “An iPhone’s Journey, From the Factory Floor to the Retail Store.” New York Times, 29 Dec 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/tech- nology/iphone-china-apple-stores.html
Bichler, Shimshon, Jonathan Nitzan, and Piotr Dutkiewicz (2013). “Capitalism as a Mode of Power: Piotr Dutkiewicz in Conversation with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan.” In 22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World’s Foremost Thinkers, eds. Piotr Dutkiewicz and Richard Sakwa, 326–54. New York: New York University Press and the Social Science Research Council.
DeLanda, Manuel (2002). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Contin- uum.
DeLanda, Manuel (2006). New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.
Delanda, Manuel (2017). “Novaja ontologija dlja social’nyh nauk” [New ontology for social sciences]. Logos 27.3: 35–56.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1983). Anti-Oedipus [1972]. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1995). “Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium.”
Generation-online. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze7.htm. Elkington, John (2018). “25 Years Ago I Coined the Phrase ‘Triple Bottom Line.’ Here’s Why It’s Time to Rethink It.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr. org/2018/06/25-years-ago-i-coined-the-phrase-triple-bottom-line-heres-why-im-giving-up-on-it.
Feher, Michel (2015). “The Age of Appreciation: Lectures on the Neoliberal Condition.” Annual Lecture Series on the Political Practices of Ideas. Goldsmiths University of London. https://www.gold.ac.uk/architecture/projects/michel-feher/.
Harman, Graham (2016). Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Humphrey, Caroline (1985). “Barter and Economic Disintegration.” Man, New Series 20.1: 48–72.
Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2004). “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public” In Atmospheres of Democracy, 4–31. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno (2011). “From Multiculturalism to Multinaturalism: What Rules of Method of the New Socio-scientific Experiments?” Nature and Culture 6.1: 1–17.
Latour, Bruno (2014). “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?” Logos 4: 265–74. Marx, Karl (1890). Capital, Vol. I, Fourth Edition. Trans. Hans G. Ehrbar. http://content.csbs.utah.edu/ehrbar/cap1.pdf
Meillassoux, Quentin (2008). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Mirowski, Philip (2009). “Postface: Defining Neoliberalism.” In The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, 417–56. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nelson, Julie (2005). “Is Economics A Natural Science?” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 1.2: 261–69.
Nitzan, Jonathan, and Shimshon Bichler (2009). Capital as Power: A Study on Order and Creorder. London: Routledge.
Porter, Michael, and Mark Kramer (2006). “Strategy & Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility.” Harvard Busi- ness Review. https://hbr.org/2006/12/strategy-and-society-the-link-between- competitive-advantage-and-corporate-social-responsibility.
Rosanvallon, Pierre (2008). Utopicheskiy Capitalism: Istoria idei rynka [Utopian cap- italism: History of the idea of the market] [1979]. Trans. A. Zaytseva. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie.
Ruda, Frank (2013). “Remembering the Impossible: For a Meta-Critical Anamnesis of Communism.” In The Idea of Communism, 137–65. New York: Verso.
Ruda, Frank (2015). For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Sraffa, Piero (1960). Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stigler, George (1985) “Economics—The Imperial Science?” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 86: 301–13.
The Carter Center (2017). “A State Affair: Privatizing Congo’s Copper Sector.” The Carter Center. https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/news/peace_publica- tions/democracy/congo-report-carter-center-nov-2017.pdf.
Tsurukawa, Nicolas, Siddharth Prakash, and Andreas Manhart (2011). “Social Impacts of Artisanal Cobalt Mining in Katanga, Democratic Republic of Congo.” Öko- Institut e.V. https://www.oeko.de/oekodoc/1294/2011–419-en.pdf
U.S.Department of Defense (2002). “DoD News Briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers”. https://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx? Transcrip- tID=2636.
Virno, Paolo (2004). A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Whitehead, Alfred North (1925). Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj (2004). “What Donald Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know that he Knows about Abu Ghraib.” Lacan.com. https://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm
Zizek, Slavoj (2007). “How to Read Lacan.” Lacan.com. https://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454
Žižek, Slavoj (2015). Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza (2018). Reading Marx. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Published
2020-07-25
How to Cite
Kvachev, V. (2020). Unflat Ontology: Essay on the Poverty of Democratic Materialism. Stasis, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-13-34
Section
Articles
Copyright (c) 2020 European University at St Petersburg
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
