Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism - Werner Bonefeld, Kosmas Psychopedis

Human Dignity Cover

2005 book edited by Open Marxists Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis.

Against the background of growing uncertainty about the future development of capitalism, and in the face of war, terror and poverty, this book asks: What do we have to know to prevent misery? What can we do to achieve conditions of human dignity? And what must we hope for? The volume argues that all social life is essentially practical and explores the central most important value of human dignity. It discusses practical consequences in relation to the theory of revolution and contemporary anti-globalization struggles.

Full PDF is available after the introduction below.

Submitted by UseValueNotExc… on December 1, 2023

In Memoriam
Kosmas Psychopedis died on 13 December 2004. Words cannot express the sadness felt and the loss encountered. Kosmas, our friend, showed us what it means to be ein guter Mensch.

Farewell, Kosmas

Contents:

1 Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism
Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis

Part I Critique of Capitalism and the Question of Revolution

2 Some Aspects of Marx’s Concept of Critique in the Context of his Economic-Philosophical Theory
Hans-Georg Backhaus

3 Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s Conception of Reality
Hetmut Reichelt

4 Social Critique and the Logic of Revolution: From Kant to Marx and from Marx to Us
Kosmas Psychopedis

Part II Social Autonomy: Time, Experience and Means

5 Beyond the Muck of Ages
Michael A. Lebowitz

6 The Untimely Timeliness of Rosa Luxemburg
Joseph Fracchia

7 Time of Reification and Time of Insubordination. Some Notes
Sergio Tischler

Part III Human Dignity: Anti-Capitalism and Perverted Forms of Resistance

8 Nationalism and Anti-Semitism in Anti-Globalization Perspective
Werner Bonefeld

9 Stop Making Capitalism
John Holloway

Chapter 1
Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism

Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis

I

The world has become a dangerous place. There is not a single news bulletin without a report on the war on terror, accounts of yet more casualties, attacks on populations, security alerts, and further restrictions of civil liberties. Critical judgement appears abandoned in a thoughtless world. The citizen has become a security risk. War is defined as peace-making; liberty and freedom are restricted ostensibly in order to protect liberty and freedom; deception and propaganda have entered the stage of a theatrical politics that, under the guise of choice and democratic values, pronounces the age old wisdom of tyranny – those who are not with us, are against us – as a means of defending choice and democracy. Torture and the disappearance of people into prisons whose existence, paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, is an unknown known, have become accepted means in the defence of those same values and norms that protect against torture and incarceration without cause, due process, access to lawyer, etc. Then there is the calculated murder of people by suicide bombers, abductions and beheadings, and assassinations, etc.

The events of September 11 demonstrated with brutal force the impotence of sense, significance, and thus reason and truth. The denial of human quality and difference was absolute – not even their corpses survived. And the response? It confirmed that state terrorism and terrorism are two sides of the same coin. They feed on each other, depend on each other, encourage each other, and recognize each other in their totalitarian world views: them and us. Between them, nothing is allowed to survive. Doubt in the veracity of the action is eliminated by the authoritarian decision to bomb and maim, to search and destroy.

Largely unreported but no less disturbing is the increase in poverty across the world. According to Martin Wolf, an ardent advocate of globalization, the gap in the average living standards between the richest an poorest countries has increased from a ratio of about 10 to one a century ago to 75 to one and under existing conditions of globalization ‘it could easily be 150 to one’ in half a century (Wolf, 2004). However, the widening of the gap between the poor and the rich is not simply a matter of a world divided into rich countries and poor countries. Whole populations ‘exist’ below subsistence levels, not only in the so-called Third World but, also, in the rich capitalist countries. Recent estimates suggest that about 33 million people live below the poverty line in the USA – the richest country in the world (Vulliamy, 2003).

In the context of poverty and increasing social strife, Martin Wolf has argued that the success of globalization requires stronger states. As he put it in relation to the so-called Third World, ‘what is needed is not pious aspirations but an honest and organized coercive force’ (Wolf, 2001). And the developed world? The dynamic of the new economy was sustained by three elements: the enormous increase in consumer debt, especially in the USA, a huge transfer of resources in the form of interest payments from debtor countries to Western banks, especially to US banks, and military Keynesianism – increased war spending – that subsidized the military-industrial complex and sustained the credit-based boom of the 1990s on a global scale (cf. Veltmeyer, 2004). On the other side, then, of Wolf’s neo-imperialist demand for action is a world economy that is dependent upon, and overshadowed by, a mountain of debt. Debt entails a politics of debt, and Wolf’s insistence that the free economy and the strong state belong together is therefore to the point. Terrorism, as Soros (2003) reports, provided not only the ideal legitimation but, also, the ideal enemy for the unfettered coercive protection of a debt-ridden free market ‘because it is invisible and never disappears’. The premise of the politics of debt is the ongoing accumulation of ‘human machines’ on the pyramids of accumulation. Its blind eagerness for plunder also requires organized coercive force to sustain the huge mortgage on future income in the present.

The dynamic of the constituted irrationality of an economic system that produces poverty in a world of plenty, of an economic system that for its profitable functioning requires the lengthening of the working day in the face of mass unemployment, was well focused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels when they argued:

society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence; too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does bourgeois society get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones (Marx and Engels, 1996, pp.18-19).

How, then, might it be possible to organize economic relations that satisfy human wants, that recognize the equality of individual human needs, and that therefore allow humanity to walk upright in dignity, and that thus guarantee human autonomy?

II

From within the logics of economic rationality and of political power, human values such as dignity and integrity are a scandal. They are rightly seen to resist the full utilization of technical efficacy of social labour power and its transformation into an effective and compliant resource that feeds the well-oiled systems of economic production and political domination. Indeed, human dignity is a subversive value. It demands social relations in which Man recognizes himself as a purpose and where, therefore, Man exists as the subject of his own social world.1 The demand for social relations based on human dignity entails thus the intransigence of a critical theory of society against all relations where Man exists as a mere resource or means.

A social theory that does not put humanity at the centre and which therefore is premised on the so-called autonomy of social systems over and above the social individual, has to view humanity as a mere agent of objective forces. Dignity here appears in the perverted form of worth that is conferred on individuals according to their effectiveness as market agents, that is, the worth of an individual is governed by the ‘price mechanism’. For example, Giddens (1998) argues that the welfare state imprisons the creative potential of individuals, and he therefore demands the ‘release’ of labour from the ‘welfare state prison’. The empowerment of labour as a self-reliant and self-responsible agent does, however, require greater educational efforts on the part of labour so that it acquires those transferable skills that enhance its capacity to respond flexibly to changing labour market conditions. Against the background of millions and millions of people living in poverty, does it really make sense to attribute their lack of conditions to the individual shortcomings of a whole class? Would the world’s poor and hungry be happily employed if they were to have those transferable skills that the theoreticians the new modernity say they must have to succeed?

Instead of social solidarity, the new modernity is said to require the worker to become his own ‘employer’, or, as Beck (1998) put it, a ‘labour-force-employer’. Beck, however, appears to understand that the empowerment of the worker as a self-responsible and self-reliant employer of his or her own labour-power is in itself not sufficient. He suggests, like Giddens, that the new ‘modernity’ depends on the creativity, self-responsibility and self-reliance of individuals. However, he also argues that the new modernity is socially ‘self-reflective’. It is thus said to possess some degree of social responsibility that transcends its fragmentation into self-responsible actors. He creates the idea of a new Man who combines entrepreneurial qualities with communitarian commitments. This is his figure of what he terms the ‘communal-welfare employer’ who combines two elements: ‘it is the combination between Mother Teresa and Bill Gates’ (Beck, 1998, p.332). It seems thus that Mother Teresa is to make capitalism humane within a socially extended cloister, and Bill Gates is to invest it with entrepreneurial energy. This, then, is the conventional idea of flexible Man whose endeavour to accumulate on the pyramids of accumulation does not lack its charitable attributes. Others have argued, and rightly so, that the reality of flexible Man corrodes the character (Sennet, 2000). The new adaptable worker is thus seen as a ‘just-in-time’ worker – ever ready to be called upon, every ready to be made redundant, and ever mobile to go where required and to do what is told in the shortest possible time. In other words, the flexible worker is a worker without time – a worker that can be switched on and off like a machine and who can operate a multitude of functions as a self-responsible object of the world of things. Time is money, and money confers worth upon individuals. ‘The economy of time: to this all economy ultimately reduces itself’ (Marx, 1973, p.173).

The novel characteristics of the new modern conditions are, however, rather stale. The theoretician of the autonomy of the state argued that human dignity is not an inviolable characteristic of each individual person. Rather, ‘[t]he value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another’ (Hobbes, 1996, p.59). The buyer, Hobbes argues, ‘determines the price’, and thus determines the ‘value’ of each individual human being. Individual worth is thus contingent upon market success. Hobbes also argued that human dignity is different from ‘human worth’. Dignity is a public value. As he put it,

[t]he public worth of a man, which is the value set on him by the commonwealth [that is, the state], is that which men commonly call DIGNITY. And this value of him by the commonwealth, is understood, by offices of command, judicature, public employment; or by names and titles, introduced for distinction of such value (ibid.).

Lastly, there is honour. Honour is a recognition of a person’s ‘power’ to provide help: ‘[t]o pray to another, for aid of any kind, is to HONOUR; because a sign we have an opinion he has power to help; and the more difficult the aid is, the more is the honour’ (ibid., pp.59-60). The theory of the new modernity revitalizes these notions of worth, dignity and honour as values of the ‘self-determining’ ‘new worker’ who, set free from the prison of the welfare state, is empowered to act as a ‘self-reliant’ ‘economic agent’, and who might, when in need, honour the powerful by asking them for aid.

Roughly one hundred years after Hobbes, Diderot’s motto ‘have courage and liberate yourself from the yoke of religion’ summoned reason as human critical self-activity. At about the same time, Kant destroyed the idea that the value of the human being is relative and contingent upon the market, and that dignity is conferred upon individuals by the state. ‘In the realm of purposes, everything has either a price or a dignity’ (Kant, 1974, p.87). Dignity cannot be sold, quantified, or conferred. Dignity is a general human value that belongs to each concrete individual. It is an indivisible human value. As a general human value that subsists and is recognized in each individual, human dignity entails human equality, not as an abstract equality, but as the equality of individual human needs. As such a concrete value, human dignity subsists through the mutual recognition of individual human needs. It thus is the polar opposite to commodity exchange relations where every human being has its price, and where the individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his wallet. Human dignity entails the idea of a humanity that walks upright, of Man as an autonomous social being who organizes his own social conditions self-consciously and who is thus in possession of himself as the subject (cf. Bloch, 1986). For Man to live in dignity it is precisely necessary that society never again obtains as an abstraction over and above the social individual. In short, ‘every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man [Mensch] himself’ (Marx, 1964, p.370).

Within the critical tradition of social theory, the focus on the human being, her conditions and possibilities, is often belittled as some sort of romantic invocation of a subject that does not exist. Louis Althusser (1996) argued that one can recognize Man only on the condition that the philosophical myth of Man is reduced to ash. Nicos Poulantzas (1968, p.65) radicalized this view when he argued that Marx’s theory amounts to a radical break from the ‘historical problematic of the subject’. These authors thus seek to dissolve Man as a social subject into the ‘substance’ of its inversion: the relations between things where Man obtains as a mere personification of structural properties (cf. Bonefeld, 2004). Just like the religious idea of God, social objectivity is affirmed as an extra-mundane ‘being’. The critical idea that society is nothing else but ‘the human being itself in its social relations’ (Marx, 1973, p.712) is thus turned upside down: Capital is the subject (Jessop, 1991). However, objective things can have no dignity. Dignity belongs to subjects. Does capital bestow dignity on the human object? This perspective, then, affirms what Marx negated. He negated the idea of capital as a self-constituted subjective-thing and argued, instead, that its appearance as an autonomous thing is an objective delusion that needs to be deciphered on a human basis. He therefore argued, that the human subject subsists in inverted form, that is, in the form of capital. The human subject vanishes in the world of things that it itself created and continuous to create. In distinction to the affirmation of capital as a subjective thing, the purpose of a critical theory of society is to reveal the human content of abstract forms, and thus to decipher their social constitution (cf. Bonefeld, 2001).

Here one is again reminded of Kant’s critical Enlightenment. He demanded from scholarly work that it reveals the true character of the constitution of social existence and argued that the failure to do so amounted to a deceitful publicity (Kant, 1979). Furthermore, he decapitated the value-neutrality of scientific work when he argued that only that ‘science is true which helps the common Man to his dignity’ (Kant, 1868, p.625). What therefore makes a critical theory of society ‘critical’ is not dependent on the answers it gives. Rather, its critical dimension is entailed in the question that it asks. Why does this content, that is human social relations, exist in the form of capital? How is it that human beings produce through their own labour a social reality that increasingly enslaves them? The suppression of the human subject in favour of objective structures is uncritical (cf. Psychopedis, 2004). Instead of enquiring about the social constitution of these structures, it presupposes them as always already existing extra-mundane things, analyses their functional requirements of reproduction, argues that human social practice unfolds within a framework established by objective laws, and instead of asking how the human condition might be improved, it honors these structures either in theological terms (the deist conception of social reproduction as something achieved by the invisible hand of the price mechanism) or positivist terms (the endowment of social structures as self-positing subjective-objective things). At issue is thus the standard of critique.

The critical tradition of social theory teaches us not only to think without fear. It also teaches us that Man is the highest being for Man. The focus on the human being is an essential element of the subversive character of a critical theory of society.

It is Man, who, as a single individual, as a group, or as a mass, understands himself as subject and who defends himself against a merely objective existence – in politics, in religion, in philosophy. One can say that subversion is a truly human phenomenon. Man objects to be a mere football of the almighty. Here he is mere object. Similarly, as a servant of the master he is mere object, regardless of whether we conceive this in social or religious terms. Man is never at the centre of politics (as the political parties say), but he is a means of politics…And an object he remains most of all when he is kept in a state of ignorance…Subversion operates against systems of thought, against political and economic systems, that threaten nature and therewith always also Man (Agnoli, 1996, p.29).

The negation of negative human conditions is the categorical imperative of reason. Is it not reasonable to demand that all relations ‘in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being have to be overthrown’ (Marx, 1975, p.182)? The standard of critique is the human being, her dignity and possibilities. The struggle for human dignity is a revolutionary right.

III

Globalization has become the popular term to describe contemporary developments. Its rise to prominence disguises the fact that it remains a rather vague and spongy term. Its lack of precision is symptomatic for a world in flux, and its spongy character reveals, by default, the uncertainty, social insecurity and misery that characterizes our contemporary world. Similarly, the anti-globalization movements. These movements have, on the whole, to be welcomed. Yet, there is no room for complacency. What does anti-globalization means, what does it wish to achieve, and what are its means of resistance? These questions are particularly relevant in a context where the historical alternative to capitalism has fallen into discredit as a consequence of tyrannical regimes that legitimized themselves as socialist. If socialism is, however, not endorsed as the alternative to capitalism, what other alternatives exist and can be hoped for? Resistance against capitalism that does not, in its purpose, aims, and means, pose an alternative to capitalism is a contradiction in terms and thus disarms itself. There is thus the risk of anti- globalization to succumb to an anti-capitalist capitalism that purports to eradicate social injustice while it in reality contributes – be it consciously or unconsciously – to the realization of its barbaric potentials. There should be no ‘understanding’ of nationalist forms of anti-globalization, of violent and indeed terrorist means of anti-globalization struggle, of forms of resistance that do not respect human life, and that therefore mimic, in their means and aims, capitalism’s indifference to human values, and that, as a consequence, base their calculations on that same constituted instrumental rationality which recognizes humanity only as a means, never as a purpose.

Anti-globalization values such as global justice, global fairness, and global solidarity are most important. These are the values of a humane world, of a world that recognizes Man as a purpose. How can these values be realized? What is their existing meaning, and what does the achievement of a truly just, free, equal, and democratic world entail? What is the ‘reality’ of human misery and how might it be transcended? Is this reality of human misery and suffering just a consequence of unfortunate circumstances that can be rectified by well-meaning individuals? Is it really possible to argue that contemporary conditions can be improved by the good will of politicians and a benevolent politics that secures general well-being in the name of humanity? Or is our existing misery in fact a necessary reality, however specific its concrete circumstances? The demand for a world based on the values of justice, equality, freedom, solidarity, and democracy has thus to be grounded in a critical theory of society that deciphers the reality of the human condition in the light of its positive transformation. Paraphrasing Kant, what do we have to know to prevent misery?; what can we do to achieve conditions of human dignity?; what must we hope for? These questions are at the centre of this volume.

IV

Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt elaborate Marx’s concept of social reality.2 Oriented on Hegel’s dialectics, and developing the insights of especially Adorno’s negative dialectics, they show that the structural reality of capitalism has no separate existence from human social practice. At issue is thus the critique of the fetishism of economic categories. Their chapters reconstruct Marx’s concept of reality, not as a reality of extra-mundane structural entities, but as a reality of human social practice, however perverted this practice might be in form of abstract economic categories. Backhaus analyses the origins of Marx’s labour theory of value and argues that economic theory is unable to define its own subject matter. He therefore argues that the critique of political economy amounts to a theory social constitution. Reichelt argues against the conventional separation between social structures and social life-world and shows that capitalist social structures are inverted forms of human relations. Their critical reconstruction has huge implications for the theory and practice of revolution: if, as they argue, there is no externality to capitalist social forms, how might one conceive of social autonomy as the means and ends of revolution? It is against this background that Kosmas Psychopedis examines the theory of revolution, including the contributions of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Benjamin and Arendt. The categorical imperative of revolution can easily be ascertained. It is the imperative of realising human values, of establishing relations of human dignity, and of securing solidarity as the substance of the democratic self-determination of a society of the free and equal. However, the simple question of human emancipation is most difficult to conceive in practice: Can one, as Rousseau had it, ‘force people to be free’? Can revolutionary violence be justified? And how can one coordinate the ends of revolution with the means of resistance? Thus the difficult question of revolution: how can one secure the human content of revolution without compromising this same content in the organizational means of revolution?

The following three chapters examine conceptions of revolutionary transformation through the lenses of Marx, Luxemburg, and Benjamin. Mike Lebowitz develops the movement towards human emancipation as a movement of the political economy of labour. Within bourgeois society the concept of labour has a double meaning. It means exploitation, subordination, and indignity; and it means the precise opposite: human self-realization and thus a means of emancipation. Lebowitz explains how Marx’s central insight into the collective power of labour is both simple (the collective power of labour appears as the power of capital) and yet very difficult to grasp, given the way in which it is disguised by the social forms of capitalism. On the theoretical level, a political economy of the working class is required to break the illusion of capital’s ‘contribution’. On the practical level, the divisions separating the diverse members of the ‘collective worker’ must be replaced by solidarity based upon recognition of their differences and of their complementarities. This recognition cannot be decreed from above – it can only develop through the practical activity of resisting subjects. This is the topic of Joe Fracchia’s contribution. His thesis that the emancipation of the exploited must take the form of self-emancipation is developed through an assessment of the legacy and contemporary timeliness of Rosa Luxemburg. He places her writings on party/class relations in their historical context, develops her contribution to the dialectics of movement and organization, and examines her alternative account of socialism. Fracchia shows that Luxemburg’s position on the crucial issue of the subjectivity of the working class is vastly superior to that of far better known ‘Western Marxists’ whose significant work on social objectivity leaves aside Luxemburg’s important insight into the historical force of experience. Sergio Tischler also focuses on experience and examines its material force by contrasting the time of insurrection to the time of capital. He argues that the time of insurrection follows a different rhythm from that of the capitalist form of time as homogenous, abstract, repetitive, monotonous time. The time of insurrection is the time of solidarity, human purpose and democracy. History, he argues does not repeat itself. However, where resistance to oppression did not make history and where history was thus not made, history does indeed repeat itself in the struggles of today. In contrast to the mythologization of the past as a past that legitimizes existing relations of power, the past struggles of the oppressed achieve a new historical form in contemporary struggles, reconciling the time of history as a time of struggle for human emancipation. Examining Benjamin’s conception of time, he argues that the time of human solidarity is the time of the democratic organization of necessity through the realm of freedom.

The final part contains chapters by Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway. Bonefeld argues that struggles against globalization that appeal to a national community in lieu of a critical analysis of the social relations of capitalism are inadequate from a theoretical standpoint. From a practical standpoint, the more popular discontent with capitalism is channelled into nationalism, the greater the danger of an anti-capitalist capitalism that glorifies the national state as a force of a homogeneous national community, including both racist violence and anti-Semitism as means of rendering national homogeneity effective. Nationalism offers a barbaric response to globalization. This then poses socialism as the alternative to barbarism, and Bonefeld concludes that the key that unlocks socialism’s door is the struggle for social autonomy. This is the focus of John Holloway’s contribution. He argues that one cannot live with dignity in capitalism and that a dignified life begins with the struggle against capitalism. He explains that human dignity entails ‘humanity in action’ (cf. Bloch, 1986) against all forms of oppression and exploitation. Dignity is the upright walk of humanity.

References

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  • 1Man with a capital ‘M’ is used here and throughout in the sense of Mensch.
  • 2We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer who provided chapter summaries of immense clarity and insight. This section draws on these summaries.

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