Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour, and its central concept of “real abstraction,” implicitly recognized something that has become undeniable today: that environmental crisis is a crisis of thought. As atmospheric carbon increases our basic brain functioning decreases. But in another sense it may have always been a crisis of thought. What if the value form, with its quite literally world-destroying demand for accumulation, has produced for us our mode of abstract thinking? This might include, as Jason Moore as recently suggested, generating the abstract ideas of “Nature” and “Society.”
Join us Monday 29 July, 4pm, to ponder these and other abstractions, with selected readings from Sohn-Rethel, Moore, and Alberto Toscano (and optional David Cunningham). Red Lion Pub (2446 N Lincoln; Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton). Contact us for pdfs.
As always, contact us to propose events!
On our calendar:
V21 Collective summer reading groups: THE STATE 22 July
“Political Sentences” InterCcECT miniseminar with special guest Jan Mieszkowski 7 August
Join InterCcECT for a reading session Monday 21 January, 5pm-7pm. Red Lion Pub 2446 N Lincoln (Red, Brown, Purple Lines: Fullerton).
For almost a century, “Political Theology” has named a set of inquires into the secular ideologies that legitimate power and secure social cohesion. How should these inquiries adapt to the specificity of late late capitalism, and what light can their answers shed on the superglue sustaining the preposterous contradictions of the present?
August calls us to revisit and redirect 
