Arthur Bueno is going to present a working paper on 'Capital, Desire, and Neurasthenia'

This paper reflects on the affective implications of capitalist forms of life by exploring the affinities between Karl Marx’s Capital and Georg Simmel’s writings on money and modern culture. Such an endeavor rests on the assumption that, as stated by a contemporary reviewer of The Philosophy of Money, many of Simmel’s arguments “read like a translation of Marx’s economic discussions into the language of psychology.” In line with this, I suggest that Simmel’s phenomenologically precise description of modern forms of life can be interpreted as a consistent analysis of the affective implications of commodity fetishism. More precisely, this paper develops the idea that money – in particular when it attains the form of capital – is an embodiment of pure, self-referential desire. Contrary to what is often stated regarding the first chapters of The Philosophy of Money, this does not mean that Simmel’s account relies on a merely subjective theory of value, as in orthodox economics. Rather, such a conception of money and capital as pure desire can only be based on a value theory that is at once pre-subjective, subjective, intersubjective and objective. In the context of this systematic reconstruction, some of the most defining features of affective experience in modernity come to appear as expressions of what Simmel, following the psychology of his time, called neurasthenia, i.e. a continuous oscillation between feelings of hyperesthesia and anesthesia.

Ute Daniel is going to present a working paper on 'Marx and Weber on Doing History'

The historiography of democracy mostly tends to focus on movements and endeavours the aims of which were to foster democratic developments and political participation. These topics are extremely important. But they do not help to understand why democratic constitutions were established or universal franchise was introduced (or why both was rejected). So my project asks why monarchs and
governments, parliaments and parties in the course of the 19th and early 20th century extended the franchise (or why they refused to extend it). The underlying hypothesis is, that universal suffrage – the core of democracy as we understand it today – was brought about neither by pro-democratic movements nor by governing classes convinced of the inevitability of democratic developments before 1914, but by the First World War.

Urs Lindner presents a working paper on 'Class and Caste: What is the Scope of Ascriptive Inequality?'

The paper is a side product of my research project on affirmative action. It is written for a German volume (Marxismus und Soziologie, edited by Tine Haubner and Tilman Reitz). Motivated by the fact that class inequalities are commonly not targeted by affirmative action programs, my paper deals with the question of to what extent class relations can themselves acquire an ascriptive form. In a first step, the distinctiveness between modern class relations and ascriptive inequalities is established with respect to the work of Marx and Weber. Secondly, I discuss how three Marxo-Weberian approaches elaborate on this problem: Charles Tilly’s theory of ‚categorical inequalities’, Nancy Frasers recognition-redistribution approach and Veit Bader’s and Albert Benschop’s ‚protheory of social inequality’. I argue that Bader/Benschop’s approach is the most promising one as it complicates the distinction between class and ascriptive inequalities with that of positional and allocative inequalities. In a third step, I shortly exemplify my considerations by taking into account transformations of the Indian caste system.

Christoph Henning asks: What can we learn from Karl Marx today?

On May 1, thousands of people in Germany are again on the road to demonstrate for more justice and improved working conditions. As a 'Labor Day', the national holiday continues the legacy of the workers' movement, which since the second half of the nineteenth century has struggled in many places against the oppression and exploitation of the working classes newly created by industrialization. For the socialist-communist camp within the workers' movement, Karl Marx once provided the theoretical background, and even today the social theorist is gladly quoted. But what does Karl Marx actually say? Christoph Henning, Junior Fellow for Philosophy at the Max Weber College of the University of Erfurt, asked: 'What do we still have in common with Karl Marx's contemporary workers today, and what can we do for our work? Can capitalist societies still learn from Marx today?'

The writings of Marx still address us in many ways. So we can find a number of answers. I would first distinguish between crisis diagnosis and therapy. If one follows the Marxian theory, then the disruption of the present is mainly due to economic mechanisms: the capitalist mode of production in which everything is based on the profit-making of capital is a process, subject to a destructive growth strategy. If the prospects for profit become uncertain, as in the past decades, the capital goes hunting for other profitable investment opportunities, 'robbery' - public goods, natural goods, intellectual property, or hitherto collectively managed regions are incorporated into capitalist forms by use of violence. This is called 'privatization, globalization, or financing', or less soothingly, for example, 'takeover'.
According to Marx, profit is achieved on the one hand through the exploitation of labor, but on the other hand also by the appropriately questionable appropriation of seeming, miserable goods (accumulation by expropriation). And as in the time of Marx, most people today still need to find a 'buyer' for their workforce, and to make themselves as marketless as possible, at the risk of impoverishment and exclusion. In the present, therefore, not only are processes such as the rising social inequality or the spread of crisis-prone financialised capitalism us well explained with Marx, but also the increasing phenomena of an 'exhaustion' or a burnout which I would call with Marx 'alienation'.
As to the possible answers to this smoldering crises, one can learn from Marx that 'national' answers lead to a dead end. Of course, one can try to get rid of these dangers and build walls (in the minds or at the supposed borders). But since capital, goods and money (and, in many cases, labor too) are mobile on a global scale, the problems may be exacerbated in this way - and they also see xenophobia and exclusion. It is therefore still a matter of transforming the destructive tendencies of the capitalist mode of production either into socially and more environmentally compatible ways of dealing, or, if this does not succeed, at least to curb them, but without falling back into repressive and exclusive patterns of a central administration. To strive for this in international co-operation is a challenge that has grown even more since the time of Marx. Since the next year marks the 200th anniversary of Marx, I therefore expect a small revival. We will also organize events in Erfurt.