Frederick Harry Pitts
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 304367 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Frederick Harry Pitts |
| NOMBRES | Frederick Harry |
| APELLIDO | Pitts |
| FIRMA | PITTS F H |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Bath |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3749-6340 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 36 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 57 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2013 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Labour-time in the Dot.Com Bubble
From the age of immanence to the autonomy of the political
This article critically examines the transition from Marx to Spinoza within Antonio Negri’s postoperaist thought and explores a potential alternative rooted in Mario Tronti’s concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’. In Negri’s postoperaismo, the embrace of Spinoza reevaluates Marx’s critique of political economy through an optimistic lens, suggesting a tendency beyond capitalism. However, Negri’s embrace of a Spinozian plane of immanence entai…
Peripheralization and economic development
The concept of peripheralization explores the agency of peripheries to address uneven development, considering the power dynamics and material and discursive processes which underpin how peripheries become more (or less) peripheralized in relation to economic cores, over time. This paper adds that peripheralization is multi-causal. In other words, the paper claims that the agency of actors in peripheral areas needs to be understood as being compr…
Reopening the Debate on Open Marxism
The opportunities and limitations of Open Marxism (OM) for understanding structure and agency in capitalist society and political economy have been subject to various debates. Critics assert that, in spite of an auspicious commitment to keeping struggle in view, OM as a theoretical approach nonetheless tends to dialectically intertwine structure and agency in such a way that the latter disappears into the former. Critics argue that this presents …
Labour Process Theory and the legacy of operaismo. New directions, old problems
Simultaneous with the rise of Labour Process Theory (LPT), Italy was the centre of a parallel and prominent theorisation of the labour process in an overlapping intellectual and social context: operaismo. Both have undergone a recent resurgence. This paper provides a critical commentary on the development and claims of operaismo, drawing out some comparisons with LPT. Diversity in the operaist traditions and trajectories are recognised, but the p…
Contemporary class composition analysis
The political and organisational routes opened up on the contemporary left following the financial crisis have seen a revival of class composition analysis as a means of comprehending a broad array of social and economic phenomena both within and beyond the workplace. Contextualising contemporary class composition analysis as a long-standing component of autonomist Marxism, this article argues that its application amid the left's electoral turn e…
New cold war or 'world civil war'? Wertkritik and the critical theory of capitalism in an age of conflict
This article explores the contribution of Wertkritik , a contemporary tendency in German critical Marxist thought, to the theorisation of capitalism, and in particular its relationship with geopolitical conflict and war. Against traditional Marxist and liberal determinism, Wertkritik emphasises how the rationally organised 'forces of production' do not motivate the historical development of capitalism, but rather the forces of destruction . This …
Marx in Management and Organisation Studies
This book introduces new approaches that deploy concepts from Marx’s critique of political economy to renew the study of labour, value and social antagonisms in the broad area of management and organisation studies. Exploring established and emergent strands of Marxian theorising inside and outside management and organisation studies, it delves into, beyond and behind the ‘hidden abode’ of production to examine a range of issues including: the re…
Measuring and managing creative labour
Creative labour is often characterised as hard to measure and manage. As ‘immaterial labour’, it breaches the working day’s boundaries and produces uncertain outputs. These conditions, claim postoperaists, precipitate a ‘crisis of measurability’. Drawing on 33 interviews with workers at 10 graphic, brand and strategic design agencies in the UK and the Netherlands, this article disputes claims creative labour eludes quantification. Responding to c…
Labor, Humanism, and the Play of Mediation
This rejoinder focuses on two issues discussed in Samuel Mercer’s review of our book A World Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State Between Crisis and Utopia. The first concerns our alleged defence of concrete labour against abstract labour, the second concerns the accusation of humanism. Firstly, the rejoinder clarifies our understanding of concrete and abstract labour as dialectically intertwined, and the implications of this for c…
A World Beyond Work?
This book mounts a forceful critique of fashionable thinking on the possibility of a post-work, post-capitalist society achieved through automation, a basic income and the reduction of working hours to zero, suggesting this popular utopia is nothing of the sort
Class Composition, Labour's Strategy and the Politics of Work
This article locates the emergence of new thinking on the left around work, age and assets within the lineage of ‘class composition’ analysis arising from the autonomist movement in mid‐twentieth century Italy. With reference to contemporary debates around electoral and political strategy within the Labour Party, the article critically appraises the potential applicability of this extra‐parliamentary ‘militant methodology’ for the present day ide…
A Strategic Left? Starmerism, Pluralism and the Soft Left
This article places the Labour Party’s present post‐Corbyn renewal in the context of previous periods of renewal in the party’s recent history, associating with the new leadership of Keir Starmer a potential to rediscover the strategic project of the pluralist soft left as an alternative to the programmatic character of the hard left. After assessing the Corbynist hegemony established in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, it considers the cu…
The Politics of Postcapitalism
This article introduces the special issue on the politics of postcapitalism. Considering the theoretical foundations, empirical perspectives and political ramifications of claims made about a coming ‘post‐work’ or ‘postcapitalist’ society, it maps existing debates through a discussion of two key recent texts, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism . It first surveys how the relationship between labou…
A Liberal Marxism? Mutual Care, Global Humanity and Minimum Utopia
This article surveys The Norman Geras Reader: ‘What’s There is There’ , a recent collection of the work of Norman Geras, edited by Eve Garrard and Ben Cohen. The article explores the relevance of Geras’s attempted reconciliation between liberalism and Marxism to some of the key issues confronting the contemporary left: foreign policy and the failures of humanitarian intervention and non‐intervention; internationalism and the necessity for solidar…
The Multitude and the Machine
There has been a proliferating literature on postcapitalist and post‐work futures in recent years, underpinned by policy proposals like the basic income and a reduction in working hours. It has gained increasing uptake within left electoral politics and policy making. The generational potency of these ideas require that we understand their theoretical roots. This article considers the interplay between the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri …
Sonifying the quantified self
Today there is a proliferation of wearable and app-based technologies for self-quantification and self-tracking. This article explores the potential of an Open Marxist reading of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms - specifically those between embodied circadian and biologic…
Social form, social reproduction and social policy
Proponents recommend Universal Basic Income as a solution to a trifold crisis of work, wage and social democracy. Synthesising Marxian form analysis with Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, this article suggests that these crises relate to historically specific capitalist social forms: labour, money and the state. These separate but interlocking crises of social form are temporary and contingent expressions of an underlying, permanent cr…
Value-Form Theory, Open Marxism and the New Reading of Marx
Liberalism and critical Marxism
Critiquing Capitalism Today
This book critically introduces two compelling contemporary schools of Marxian thought: the New Reading of Marx of Michael Heinrich and Werner Bonefeld, and the postoperaismo of Antonio Negri. Each stake novel claims on Marx’s value theory, the first revisiting key categories of the critique of political economy through Frankfurt School critical theory, the second calling the law of value into crisis with reference to Marx’s rediscovered Fragment…
From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction
This article contests the suggestion that the automation of production and the provision of a basic income potentiate the transition from a post-work to a postcapitalist society. This vista—mainly represented by the work of Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams misses how capitalist work is both preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and determined by the specific…
Corbynism and Blue Labour
A crisis of measurability? Critiquing post-operaismo on labour, value and the basic income
This article critiques post-operaist conceptualisations of immaterial labour from the perspective of Marxian value-form theory. Critiquing the idea of the 'crisis of measurability' created by immaterial labour and the contention that this makes redundant the law of value, it contests the novelty, immediate abstractness and immeasurable productivity post-operaists attribute to contemporary labour using the New Reading of Marx. The first part explo…
Beyond the Fragment
2017 marks 45 years since the first English publication of Marx’s ‘Notes on Machines’ in Economy & Society . This paper critiques how Marx’s ‘Fragment’ has subsequently been repurposed in postoperaist thought, and how this wields influence on contemporary left thinking via the work of Paul Mason. Changes in labour lead proponents to posit a ‘crisis of measurability’ and an incipient communism. I use the New Reading of Marx, which picks up where d…
Beyond the Fragment
2017 marks 45 years since the first English publication of Marx’s ‘Notes on Machines’ in Economy & Society . This paper critiques how Marx’s ‘Fragment’ has subsequently been repurposed in postoperaist thought, and how this wields influence on contemporary left thinking via the work of Paul Mason. Changes in labour lead proponents to posit a ‘crisis of measurability’ and an incipient communism. I use the New Reading of Marx, which picks up where d…
A crisis of measurability? Critiquing post-operaismo on labour, value and the basic income
This article critiques post-operaist conceptualisations of immaterial labour from the perspective of Marxian value-form theory. Critiquing the idea of the 'crisis of measurability' created by immaterial labour and the contention that this makes redundant the law of value, it contests the novelty, immediate abstractness and immeasurable productivity post-operaists attribute to contemporary labour using the New Reading of Marx. The first part explo…
Class Composition, Labour's Strategy and the Politics of Work
This article locates the emergence of new thinking on the left around work, age and assets within the lineage of ‘class composition’ analysis arising from the autonomist movement in mid‐twentieth century Italy. With reference to contemporary debates around electoral and political strategy within the Labour Party, the article critically appraises the potential applicability of this extra‐parliamentary ‘militant methodology’ for the present day ide…
Corbynism's conveyor belt of ideas
In this reflection, we assess the theoretical faultline running through the contested current of Corbynist thought and politics at present. On one hand, we find a techno-utopian strand preoccupied with automation and the end of work. On the other hand, a nascent politics of social reproduction with a foreshortened potential to realise the promise of a continental-style solidarity economics in the United Kingdom. Both represent the latest in a ser…
A Strategic Left? Starmerism, Pluralism and the Soft Left
This article places the Labour Party’s present post‐Corbyn renewal in the context of previous periods of renewal in the party’s recent history, associating with the new leadership of Keir Starmer a potential to rediscover the strategic project of the pluralist soft left as an alternative to the programmatic character of the hard left. After assessing the Corbynist hegemony established in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, it considers the cu…
From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction
This article contests the suggestion that the automation of production and the provision of a basic income potentiate the transition from a post-work to a postcapitalist society. This vista—mainly represented by the work of Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams misses how capitalist work is both preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and determined by the specific…
Contemporary class composition analysis
The political and organisational routes opened up on the contemporary left following the financial crisis have seen a revival of class composition analysis as a means of comprehending a broad array of social and economic phenomena both within and beyond the workplace. Contextualising contemporary class composition analysis as a long-standing component of autonomist Marxism, this article argues that its application amid the left's electoral turn e…
Sonifying the quantified self
Today there is a proliferation of wearable and app-based technologies for self-quantification and self-tracking. This article explores the potential of an Open Marxist reading of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms - specifically those between embodied circadian and biologic…
Social form, social reproduction and social policy
Proponents recommend Universal Basic Income as a solution to a trifold crisis of work, wage and social democracy. Synthesising Marxian form analysis with Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, this article suggests that these crises relate to historically specific capitalist social forms: labour, money and the state. These separate but interlocking crises of social form are temporary and contingent expressions of an underlying, permanent cr…
The cultural intermediaries reader
The critique of political economy as a critical social theory
Werner Bonefeld Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason, Bloomsbury: London, 2014; 246pp: 9781441161390, 63 [pounds sterling] (hbk) In the tradition of the best critical and Marxist theory, this brilliant, vital book encompasses and challenges everything. Marx and Adorno are present not only theoretically, as implied in the book's title, but also stylistically. The experience of reading Bonefeld's …
Labor, Humanism, and the Play of Mediation
This rejoinder focuses on two issues discussed in Samuel Mercer’s review of our book A World Beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State Between Crisis and Utopia. The first concerns our alleged defence of concrete labour against abstract labour, the second concerns the accusation of humanism. Firstly, the rejoinder clarifies our understanding of concrete and abstract labour as dialectically intertwined, and the implications of this for c…
The Politics of Postcapitalism
This article introduces the special issue on the politics of postcapitalism. Considering the theoretical foundations, empirical perspectives and political ramifications of claims made about a coming ‘post‐work’ or ‘postcapitalist’ society, it maps existing debates through a discussion of two key recent texts, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism . It first surveys how the relationship between labou…
The Multitude and the Machine
There has been a proliferating literature on postcapitalist and post‐work futures in recent years, underpinned by policy proposals like the basic income and a reduction in working hours. It has gained increasing uptake within left electoral politics and policy making. The generational potency of these ideas require that we understand their theoretical roots. This article considers the interplay between the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri …
Corbynism and Blue Labour
Time and work
‘A science to it’
This paper details a research project exploring how working time is structured in the digital industries in the UK, drawing on a case study of a Bristol web enterprise situated in the 'Silicon Gorge’ high-tech hub, and incorporating ethnography, interviews, observation and time diaries. The role of the Internet in blurring the demarcation between paid and unpaid labour features prominently in the work patterns of the research participants. The cu…
Theorising cultural work
Defining cultural work as “symbolic, aesthetic or creative labour in the arts, media or other creative or cultural industries” (p. 4), Theorising Cultural Work is composed of three sections, each a
A hidden history
In this article I craft a definition of the role of the creative industries through time and in their contemporary specificity. I consider some of the possible approaches to the situation of the creative industries vis-à-vis the rest of the economy. I steer a middle course through contemporary debates around whether, on the one hand, the economy is cultural or, on the other, whether culture is economic. I suggest that the two bear influence upon …
Creative Industries, Value Theory and Michael Heinrich’s New Reading of Marx
This article utilises the new reading of Marx found in the work of Michael Heinrich to analyse the creative industries. It considers the role played in the production of value by the labour that takes place in the sphere of circulation. The specific focus is on creative industries such as graphic design, advertising and branding. It applies Heinrich's conceptualisation of 'social validation' to these sectors. This suggests that valorisation depen…
The Critique of the Equation and the Phenomenology of Production
In Representing Capital , Fredric Jameson distinguishes two stages of inquiry present within Marx’s magnum opus . The first is the critique of the equation. The second is the phenomenology of production. The distinction suggests compelling methodological applications. This review explores some implications for the analysis of capitalist social relations
The cultural intermediaries reader
Time and work
The critique of political economy as a critical social theory
Werner Bonefeld Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason, Bloomsbury: London, 2014; 246pp: 9781441161390, 63 [pounds sterling] (hbk) In the tradition of the best critical and Marxist theory, this brilliant, vital book encompasses and challenges everything. Marx and Adorno are present not only theoretically, as implied in the book's title, but also stylistically. The experience of reading Bonefeld's …
Rhythms of Creativity and Power in Freelance Creative Work
Freelancers work for companies, but also apart from them—at home, on-site, or in shared workspaces. This chapter examines how clients and freelancers manage the employment relationship at a distance. Utilising interview data with Dutch creative freelancers, Lefebvre’s method of ‘rhythmanalysis’, Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of ‘capital as power’, and Holloway’s understanding of human creativity as ‘doing’, the chapter examines the conflicting rhyt…
Virtual Workers and the Global Labour Market
Juliet Webster and Keith Randle Eds., Virtual Workers and the Global Labour Market (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), ISBN: 978-1-137-47918-1
Beyond the Fragment
2017 marks 45 years since the first English publication of Marx’s ‘Notes on Machines’ in Economy & Society . This paper critiques how Marx’s ‘Fragment’ has subsequently been repurposed in postoperaist thought, and how this wields influence on contemporary left thinking via the work of Paul Mason. Changes in labour lead proponents to posit a ‘crisis of measurability’ and an incipient communism. I use the New Reading of Marx, which picks up where d…
Corbynism's conveyor belt of ideas
In this reflection, we assess the theoretical faultline running through the contested current of Corbynist thought and politics at present. On one hand, we find a techno-utopian strand preoccupied with automation and the end of work. On the other hand, a nascent politics of social reproduction with a foreshortened potential to realise the promise of a continental-style solidarity economics in the United Kingdom. Both represent the latest in a ser…
Critiquing Capitalism Today
This book critically introduces two compelling contemporary schools of Marxian thought: the New Reading of Marx of Michael Heinrich and Werner Bonefeld, and the postoperaismo of Antonio Negri. Each stake novel claims on Marx’s value theory, the first revisiting key categories of the critique of political economy through Frankfurt School critical theory, the second calling the law of value into crisis with reference to Marx’s rediscovered Fragment…
From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction
This article contests the suggestion that the automation of production and the provision of a basic income potentiate the transition from a post-work to a postcapitalist society. This vista—mainly represented by the work of Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams misses how capitalist work is both preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and determined by the specific…
Corbynism and Blue Labour
A crisis of measurability? Critiquing post-operaismo on labour, value and the basic income
This article critiques post-operaist conceptualisations of immaterial labour from the perspective of Marxian value-form theory. Critiquing the idea of the 'crisis of measurability' created by immaterial labour and the contention that this makes redundant the law of value, it contests the novelty, immediate abstractness and immeasurable productivity post-operaists attribute to contemporary labour using the New Reading of Marx. The first part explo…
Value-Form Theory, Open Marxism and the New Reading of Marx
Liberalism and critical Marxism
A Strategic Left? Starmerism, Pluralism and the Soft Left
This article places the Labour Party’s present post‐Corbyn renewal in the context of previous periods of renewal in the party’s recent history, associating with the new leadership of Keir Starmer a potential to rediscover the strategic project of the pluralist soft left as an alternative to the programmatic character of the hard left. After assessing the Corbynist hegemony established in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, it considers the cu…
The Politics of Postcapitalism
This article introduces the special issue on the politics of postcapitalism. Considering the theoretical foundations, empirical perspectives and political ramifications of claims made about a coming ‘post‐work’ or ‘postcapitalist’ society, it maps existing debates through a discussion of two key recent texts, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism . It first surveys how the relationship between labou…
A Liberal Marxism? Mutual Care, Global Humanity and Minimum Utopia
This article surveys The Norman Geras Reader: ‘What’s There is There’ , a recent collection of the work of Norman Geras, edited by Eve Garrard and Ben Cohen. The article explores the relevance of Geras’s attempted reconciliation between liberalism and Marxism to some of the key issues confronting the contemporary left: foreign policy and the failures of humanitarian intervention and non‐intervention; internationalism and the necessity for solidar…
The Multitude and the Machine
There has been a proliferating literature on postcapitalist and post‐work futures in recent years, underpinned by policy proposals like the basic income and a reduction in working hours. It has gained increasing uptake within left electoral politics and policy making. The generational potency of these ideas require that we understand their theoretical roots. This article considers the interplay between the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri …
Sonifying the quantified self
Today there is a proliferation of wearable and app-based technologies for self-quantification and self-tracking. This article explores the potential of an Open Marxist reading of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms - specifically those between embodied circadian and biologic…
Social form, social reproduction and social policy
Proponents recommend Universal Basic Income as a solution to a trifold crisis of work, wage and social democracy. Synthesising Marxian form analysis with Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, this article suggests that these crises relate to historically specific capitalist social forms: labour, money and the state. These separate but interlocking crises of social form are temporary and contingent expressions of an underlying, permanent cr…
A World Beyond Work?
This book mounts a forceful critique of fashionable thinking on the possibility of a post-work, post-capitalist society achieved through automation, a basic income and the reduction of working hours to zero, suggesting this popular utopia is nothing of the sort
Sociology (29 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Political Economy and Marxism (19 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Economics (15 obras) · Political economy (14 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras)