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The Mirror Of Production
''The Mirror of Production'' () is a 1973 book by French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard. It is a systematic critique of Marxism. Baudrillard's thesis is that Karl Marx's theory of historical materialism is too rooted in assumptions and values of political economy which Marx attempted to critique to provide a sufficient framework for radical action. According to Baudrillard, the fault of Marxism is in prioritizing the very concepts that undergird capital, for example, necessity, value, and labor. He furthermore argues that the Marxist view fails to take into account the role of signs and symbols in the production process, as well as the increasing importance of consumer culture. The book is a semiotic critique of the political economy of the sign. Baudrillard states that Marx's critique of political economy was based on forms of production and labour. Marx did not transcend political economy but merely saw its reverse or its "mirror" side. Marxism merely strengthe ...
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Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (, ; ; – 6 March 2007) was a French sociology, sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are ''Seduction'' (1978), ''Simulacra and Simulation'' (1981), , and ''The Gulf War Did Not Take Place'' (1991). His work is frequently associated with Postmodern philosophy, postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed , and had distanced himself from postmodernism.: "Asked about postmodernism, Baudrillard said: “I have nothing to do with it. I don’t know who came up with the term... But I have no faith in ‘postmodernism’ as an analytical term. When ...
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Productive Labour
Productive and unproductive labour are concepts that were used in classical political economy mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries, which survive today to some extent in modern management discussions, economic sociology and Marxist or Marxian economic analysis. The concepts strongly influenced the construction of national accounts in the Soviet Union and other Soviet-type societies (see Material Product System). Classical political economy The classical political economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, raised the economic question of which kinds of labour contributed to increasing society's wealth, as against activities which do not increase wealth. In the introduction to ''The Wealth of Nations'', Smith spoke of the "annual labour" and "the necessaries and conveniences" a nation "annually consumes" before explaining that one of the two steps to increase wealth is reducing the amount of "unproductive labour". "Annual" and "annually" refer to a cyclical reproduction pro ...
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Books By Jean Baudrillard
A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium. Originally physical, electronic books and audiobooks are now existent. Physical books are objects that contain printed material, mostly of writing and images. Modern books are typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover, what is known as the ''codex'' format; older formats include the scroll and the tablet. As a conceptual object, a ''book'' often refers to a written work of substantial length by one or more authors, which may also be distributed digitally as an electronic book (ebook). These kinds of works can be broadly classified into fiction (containing invented content, often narratives) and non-fiction (containing content intended as factual truth). But a physical book may not contain a written work: for example, it may contain ''only'' drawings, engravings, photographs, sheet music, puzzles, or removable content like paper dolls ...
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1973 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 – The United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Denmark 1973 enlargement of the European Communities, enter the European Economic Community, which later becomes the European Union. * January 14 - The 16-0 1972 Miami Dolphins season, Miami Dolphins defeated the 1972 Washington Redskins season, Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII, with the Dolphins ending the season a perfect 17-0. This marked the first and only time that an NFL team has had a perfect undefeated season, an achievement the team holds to this day. * January 15 – Vietnam War: Citing progress in peace negotiations, U.S. President Richard Nixon announces the suspension of offensive action in North Vietnam. * January 17 – Ferdinand Marcos becomes President for Life of the Philippines. * January 22 ** ''Joe Frazier vs. George Foreman, The Sunshine Showdown'': George Foreman defeats Joe Frazier to win the heavyweight world boxing championship in Kingston, Jamaica. ** A Royal Jorda ...
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Mark Poster
Mark Poster (July 5, 1941 – October 10, 2012) was Professor Emeritus of History and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where he also taught in the Critical Theory Emphasis. He was pivotal to "bringing French critical theory to the U.S., and went on to analyse contemporary media."
"Mark Poster 1941-2012 obituary," article 8 November 2012 by Matthew Reisz in ''Times Higher Education'' magazine, UK


Early life

Poster was born in New York on 5 July 1941, studied at the Wharton School and completed a PhD in history at New York University in 1968. His research interests included Europ ...
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Mirror Stage
The mirror stage () is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The mirror stage is based on the belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside themselves) from the age of about six months. Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infant's development from 6 to 18 months, as outlined at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936. By the early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of " Imaginary order". This evolution in Lacan's thinking becomes clear in his later essay titled "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire". History of development Lacan's concept of the ...
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Robert Kurz (philosopher)
Robert Kurz (24 December 1943 – 18 July 2012) was a German philosopher, social critic, journalist and editor of the journal ''Exit!'' He was one of Germany's most prominent theorists of value criticism."Erneuerer des Marxismus: Robert Kurz ist tot"
''Spiegel Online''. 20 July 2012. Retrieved on 6 September 2012.


Life and work

Robert Kurz was born on 24 December 1943 in Nuremberg to a German working-class family. During his military service he was involved in pacifist propaganda and participated in the "Ostermärschen," protest marches against atomic weapons in the 1960s. Kurz studied philosophy, history and paedagogy at the university of Erlangen without taking a degree. He participated in the "student revolt" in 1968 and took par ...
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Moishe Postone
Moishe Postone (17 April 1942 – 19 March 2018) was a Canadian historian, sociologist, political philosopher and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studies. Life and career Postone was born on 17 April 1942, the son of a Canadian rabbi. He received his PhD from University of Frankfurt in 1983. His research interests included modern European intellectual history; social theory, especially critical theories of modernity; 20th-century Germany; antisemitism; and contemporary global transformations. He was co-editor with Craig Calhoun and Edward LiPuma of '' Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives'' and author of '' Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory''. He was also co-editor with Eric Santner of ''Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century'', a collection of essays that consider the meaning of the Holocaust in twentieth-century hi ...
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Virtualization
In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s with IBM CP/CMS. The control program CP provided each user with a simulated stand-alone System/360 computer. In hardware virtualization, the '' host machine'' is the machine that is used by the virtualization and the ''guest machine'' is the virtual machine. The words ''host'' and ''guest'' are used to distinguish the software that runs on the physical machine from the software that runs on the virtual machine. The software or firmware that creates a virtual machine on the host hardware is called a '' hypervisor'' or ''virtual machine monitor''. Hardware virtualization is not the same as hardware emulation. Hardware-assisted virtualization facilitates building a virtual machine monitor and allows guest OSes to be run in isolation. Deskt ...
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Labor Power
Labour power (; ) is the capacity to work, a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do the work, i.e. labour power, and the physical act of working, i.e. labour. Human labour power exists in any kind of society, but on what terms it is traded or combined with means of production to produce goods and services has historically varied greatly. The general idea of labour-power had existed previously in classical political economy. Adam Smith's ''The Wealth of Nations'' and David Ricardo's '' On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation'' already referred to the "productive powers of labour". However, Marx made the concept much more precise, critically examining the functions of labour-power in production, how labour-power is used, organized and exploited, and how it is typically valued and priced in bourgeois society. Under capitalism, according to Marx, the ''productive powers of labour'' ...
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Alienated Labour
Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class. The theoretical basis of alienation is that a worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of these actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realised human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus va ...
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