Capital Class

Capital, Class & Technology in Contemporary American Culture

In the tradition of Mike Davis and Fredric Jameson, Nick Heffernan engages in a series of meditations on capital, class and technology in contemporary America. He turns to the stories we generate and tell ourselves - via fiction, film journalism, theory - to see how change is registered. By investigating a variety of texts, he observes how structural change affects the way people organise their lives economically, socially and culturally. Case studies include Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, William Gibson's cyberspace trilogy, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World. Using the links between narrative cultural forms and the process of historical understanding, he brings together debates that have so far been conducted largely within the separate domains of political economy, social theory and cultural criticism to provide a compelling analysis of contemporary cultural change. By relocating postmodernism in the context of changing modes of capitalism, Heffernan puts the question of class and class agency back at the centre of the critical agenda.

General Report ... in Regard to the Share and Loan Capital Traffic in Passengers and Goods, and the Working Expenditure and Net Profits from Railway Working of the Railway Companies of the United Kingdom

Problems in Class Analysis

First published in 1983, Problems in Class Analysis presents a coherent theory of labour’s domination by capital, based upon the notion of the capitalist nature of both the product relations and of the productive forces themselves, including science and technology. The author demonstrates that all knowledges are a product, direct or indirect, of economic relations, so that different knowledges will be the product of different social classes as determined by their position within economic production relations. By posing and re-solving fundamental problems in class analysis, Dr. Carchedi forms a bridge between the theory of the production process and contemporary debates in economics, sociology and epistemology.