Christian Caiconte - Reading Group

Value, Health and Radical Needs Reading Group

This is a collective of activists and researchers interested in the study of the contemporary social condition (Value), its costs (Health) and its possible transformation (Radical Needs). If you would like to join the reading group, please contact me via christiancaiconte@gmail.com. Below are the links to the group's posts published in Progress in Political Economy.

The header image is a detail of Relative Conversations (2005), a collection of paintings by Australian artist Judith Wright.

4 Talking Points from Karl Marx’s Grundrisse - Progress in Political Economy (PPE)The Value, Health and Radical Needs Reading Group spent 15 months slowly and carefully reading Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. The task was certainly daunting, but also intellectually rewarding in equal measure. Since in these notebooks Marx is clearly developing a logical method of presentation that he has yet to fully master, we found it particularly difficult to keep sight of the central theme of each of its sections. Some long paragraphs where Marx works up calculations, describes historical events or recounts the ideas of selected political economy authors were also admittedly challenging. As a result of our efforts at a reflective reading, we feel that we possess a deeper understanding of the inner workings of capitalist society. We now bring our new knowledge, in its collective character, to written form.

Heller on Needs, or How to Think Radically in a Quantified World - Progress in Political Economy (PPE)This post is written jointly by the Value, Health and Radical Needs Reading Group, a collective of activists, early career researchers and PhD candidates interested in the study of the contemporary social condition (Value), its costs (Health) and its possible transformation (Radical Needs). Agnes Heller’s The Theory of Need in Marx has impressed us as an abiding and complex reflection on the concept of need. Her prose is inspiring both politically and on an everyday level, in a way that only a philosophical discourse rooted in the Marxist tradition can. Certainly, this says much about the intellectual movement related to her work, that is, the Budapest School, the “informal group of followers”—as Jon Grumley calls it—of Georg Lukács. But Heller’s argument also stands on its own. What she offers is an analysis of this seemingly commonsensical category, need, approaching it from a standpoint that is at the same time historically sensitive and openly moral. Her concern is, in other words, with the immanence of capitalist needs, as well as with the transcendence of the needs that are proper to the human being as such.

The World in a Grain of Sand - Progress in Political Economy (PPE)Nivedita Majumdar’s book The World in a Grain of Sand: Postcolonial Literature and Radical Universalism promises to analyse postcolonial literature from a standpoint of radical universalism. In six of her seven chapters she fulfills this promise.