Oral Presentation by Christos Memos¹
¹ Lecturer in Sociology, Department of Sociological and Psychological Sciences, Abertay University, Dundee, UK, United Kingdom
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 1
Session: 9
Abstract
The paper argues that the inability to imagine and create an alternative and qualitatively different global human condition is part of the crisis and the retrogression of reason, which, in turn, constitutes an aspect of the various forms of the ongoing global capitalist crisis. The expanded cult of positivist empirical research and the dominant perception that science is measurement had as a result the definite eclipse of subversive reason, the positivization of thought and the loss of negative critique. Instead of insight into society as a whole and social critique, contemporary social sciences have been marked by their adherence to the crude immediacy and symptoms of the global crisis. Thus, they have been reduced to a mere technical expertise unconcerned with the social production relations and the forms of organization through which society produces and reproduces itself today. In distinction, critical theory poses the question of social constitution and orientates itself to the foundations of society, which are torn by the antagonistic and class divided character of the capitalist social relations. In this sense, the paper considers the unfolding economic, political, social, individual, environmental, and cultural expressions of the continuous global crisis of capitalism as various manifested forms of the most fundamental and constituting contradiction of capitalist modernity, which is ‘the class antagonism between capital and labour’, and more specifically, the ‘presence of labour within the concept of capital’. The paper maintains that the different strands of the crisis of capitalism must not be examined as discrete phenomena, and in a manner external to each other, but rather as interconnected aspects, coalesced into an entangled whole, with a view to tracing their inner connections and the common social constitution, which produce a ‘unity of crisis’. Finally, the paper argues that negation of the social preconditions that generated the permanent crisis of capitalism and critical insight into the roots and sources of suffering and destruction of both human beings and nature place negativity and the social struggles for concrete anti-capitalist alternatives at the centre of the fighting against barbaric solutions to the crisis of capitalism and pave the way forward towards a defetishized and emancipated social world.