Mtc Shafer
Biographic Data
| ID | 4378084 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mtc Shafer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mtc |
| FAMILY NAME | Shafer |
| SIGNATURE | SHAFER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida International University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0305-9505 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Marx and the Problem of Advertising
Why didn’t Marx write about advertising? While not a few Marxist theorists have attempted to account for advertising’s role in the later development of capitalism, Marx’s own inattention to this economic form has only rarely been recognized as the genuine puzzle that it is. Here we examine the role of advertising in Marx’s own time and his strange silence about it in his work. We demonstrate that prevailing Marxist accounts of advertising’s devel…
Marx on Slavery and Capital in the American Civil War
This article rereads Marx’s journalism on the US Civil War as a major development in his historical materialism and theory of capitalism. Against the view that Marx regarded American chattel slavery as a holdover of precapitalist social relations (and that he disregarded the significance of slavery in social history as a result), I find in his writings on the Civil War a complex analysis of the capitalist plantation and of the agency of enslaved …
Mute compulsion
Rifle Theory
Friedrich Engels’s “History of the Rifle” was among the longest and most detailed studies of technological development that either he or Marx produced. Yet the piece has been almost entirely forgotten. I recover Engels’s essay as a model for the historiography of technology and for the study of the politics of the technical object today, demonstrating its continuity with the larger critical project he was engaged in with Marx in these years. In a…
Engels after Frankfurt
The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt facilitated the first publication of Friedrich Engels's controversial Dialectics of Nature manuscripts in the 1920s. Yet the subsequent work of the institute's most influential members almost entirely turned away from the approach to natural science that Engels had advocated. The result was an indispensably incisive critique of social domination and a deepening skepticism about natural-scientific con…
Silence Is Violence, and So Is Speech
This synoptic essay reflects on contemporary impasses in the cultural politics of language. I argue that current controversies about linguistic violence reflect an unresolved tension between two distinct registers in which debates about language operate. One framework, best characterized in terms of the basic categories of discourse and power, is oriented toward the critique of structure; the other, which instead emphasizes speech and harm, is or…
The utopian shadow of normative reconstruction
Between mediation and critique
In the final years of legal apartheid, the small community of Quakers in Cape Town, South Africa sought to apply their tradition of political and theological nonviolence to the systematic injustice of their social context. Drawing on archival evidence, this article examines the writings of Hendrik W van der Merwe, a prominent white Afrikaner sociologist, activist, and Quaker. I argue that van der Merwe developed an unusual account of Quaker pacif…
Engels after Frankfurt
The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt facilitated the first publication of Friedrich Engels's controversial Dialectics of Nature manuscripts in the 1920s. Yet the subsequent work of the institute's most influential members almost entirely turned away from the approach to natural science that Engels had advocated. The result was an indispensably incisive critique of social domination and a deepening skepticism about natural-scientific con…
Rifle Theory
Friedrich Engels’s “History of the Rifle” was among the longest and most detailed studies of technological development that either he or Marx produced. Yet the piece has been almost entirely forgotten. I recover Engels’s essay as a model for the historiography of technology and for the study of the politics of the technical object today, demonstrating its continuity with the larger critical project he was engaged in with Marx in these years. In a…
The utopian shadow of normative reconstruction
Between mediation and critique
In the final years of legal apartheid, the small community of Quakers in Cape Town, South Africa sought to apply their tradition of political and theological nonviolence to the systematic injustice of their social context. Drawing on archival evidence, this article examines the writings of Hendrik W van der Merwe, a prominent white Afrikaner sociologist, activist, and Quaker. I argue that van der Merwe developed an unusual account of Quaker pacif…
The utopian shadow of normative reconstruction
Silence Is Violence, and So Is Speech
This synoptic essay reflects on contemporary impasses in the cultural politics of language. I argue that current controversies about linguistic violence reflect an unresolved tension between two distinct registers in which debates about language operate. One framework, best characterized in terms of the basic categories of discourse and power, is oriented toward the critique of structure; the other, which instead emphasizes speech and harm, is or…
Mute compulsion
Rifle Theory
Friedrich Engels’s “History of the Rifle” was among the longest and most detailed studies of technological development that either he or Marx produced. Yet the piece has been almost entirely forgotten. I recover Engels’s essay as a model for the historiography of technology and for the study of the politics of the technical object today, demonstrating its continuity with the larger critical project he was engaged in with Marx in these years. In a…
Engels after Frankfurt
The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt facilitated the first publication of Friedrich Engels's controversial Dialectics of Nature manuscripts in the 1920s. Yet the subsequent work of the institute's most influential members almost entirely turned away from the approach to natural science that Engels had advocated. The result was an indispensably incisive critique of social domination and a deepening skepticism about natural-scientific con…
Marx on Slavery and Capital in the American Civil War
This article rereads Marx’s journalism on the US Civil War as a major development in his historical materialism and theory of capitalism. Against the view that Marx regarded American chattel slavery as a holdover of precapitalist social relations (and that he disregarded the significance of slavery in social history as a result), I find in his writings on the Civil War a complex analysis of the capitalist plantation and of the agency of enslaved …
Marx and the Problem of Advertising
Why didn’t Marx write about advertising? While not a few Marxist theorists have attempted to account for advertising’s role in the later development of capitalism, Marx’s own inattention to this economic form has only rarely been recognized as the genuine puzzle that it is. Here we examine the role of advertising in Marx’s own time and his strange silence about it in his work. We demonstrate that prevailing Marxist accounts of advertising’s devel…
Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · History (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works)