Matthew Wang Downing’s
Philosophy Blog

Recent Readings (Nov 12, 2021)

I haven’t been updating my Reading List as much as I could have been. The way that page is organized makes if a bit of a mess, and what might be easier for me here is to just make a blog post about things I’ve read and listened to that stood out to me recently. So this is a test to see how that goes!


  • On the Origins of Capitalism from Feudalism, and Historical Materialism More Generally

    • Marx - Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’

    • Robert Brenner on the primacy of productive forces or of production relations

      • (What are productive forces but the material process from start to end of production? Then production relations are simply the social power relations between the people involved in providing labor towards this production process—the labor of calculative coordination, physical transformation, and transportation—viewed this way, productive forces are the engines, while production relations provide the fuel in cases of overreach and overconsumption beyond the productive capacity of the time; and in other periods, who attempt to fetter, constrain, and shape advancements in productive capacity to maintain old power structures. But technology, once invented, is very difficult to forget, especially once it is brought into the productive process—it is quickly very sticky in that people accustom rather quickly to a certain level of productive capacity.)

A Tale of Conservative University Sociology

Rosa Luxemburg, the 2008 Crisis, & the Marxist Approach to Economics as a Science