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Why football always precedes sociology by Luigi Guelpa

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When in 1998, on the eve of the World Cup in France, it was written that the future of football belonged to multiracial teams, some might have thought it a provocation, one of the many exaggerations that football allows, just as it allows adults to cry in front of eleven men in shorts or the illusion that a victory on penalties can improve a nation’s GDP. Today, on the eve of the World Cup organized by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, we must recognize that provocation has become commonplace. Not because the world has become better. The world rarely improves. It simply changes shape. And football, the most reliable sociological laboratory of the contemporary age, noticed this before universities, governments, and often even citizens. In 1998, France seemed an exception. It was the France of Zidane, Thuram, Desailly, and Djorkaeff, a team that seemed to have been built by an enlightened official from the Ministry of Integration rather than a coach. The France Black-Blanc-Beur was ...
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The Strange Birth of the Social Worker

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One of the most striking aspects of these sections (p129-159) of Workers and Capital is the way that Tronti develops a conception of socialization that is simultaneously central to later autonomist Marxism and yet markedly different from the forms it would take in the work of Antonio Negri. Reading these passages today, one encounters not an anticipation of the socialized worker as a figure of emerging autonomy, but rather a careful analysis of how the socialization of labour first appears as the socialization of capital itself. The argument proceeds from a deceptively simple observation. Labour-power is not naturally capital. Nor are the means of production. They become capital only within a historically specific social relation. For Tronti, the decisive question is therefore not labour in the abstract but the transformation of labour-power into capital through the wage relation. The secret of capitalist production lies not in humanity’s generic capacity to labour but in the historica...
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Making Capital Dance the Tarantella, to Death

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There is a moment, somewhere between 1905 and the present, where history stops behaving like a sequence and begins to feel more like pressure – layered, uneven, already thinking ahead of itself. Russian Revolution of 1905 lingers here not as an origin point but as a method: a way the working class learned to move before it was fully visible to itself. Tronti reads this moment not as past but as rehearsal, a fragment of the future lodged inside capital’s own unfolding. Capital, at its most developed, begins to resemble intelligence – planning, calculating, anticipating. It learns to simulate control over its own laws, to render crisis as administration, turbulence as policy. And yet, beneath this apparent mastery, something slips. The state, that great theatre of order, flickers with instability. Crisis migrates upward, appearing as a problem of governance rather than production, as if the factory had already solved itself and only parliament remained confused. But this is misdirection....
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From the Collective Capitalist to Working-Class Strategy

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To read Workers and Capital today is to confront a provocation that has lost none of its force: that capital does not develop autonomously, according to its own internal logic, but is compelled, reshaped, and reorganised by the struggles of the working class. What appears as the rationality of capital – its planning, its institutions, its capacity for coordination at the level of the whole of society – is, in fact, the historical product of antagonism. At a certain level of development, capital no longer appears as a fragmented set of individual enterprises but as a social power . The emergence of what Mario Tronti calls the collective capitalist marks this transformation: capital becomes capable of organising itself as a totality, a “functionary of the total social capital,” coordinating production, circulation, and reproduction across the entire social field. This is not simply an economic shift but a political one. The “plan” of capital – its capacity to govern itself and, through...
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Totality Without Exit? Abolition After Real Subsumption

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Review of Abolishing Capitalist Totality. What Is to Be Done under Real Subsumption? Jason Bonilla This book, comparable to a grenade, was published in 2026 by Minor Compositions, founded on collective intelligence. It is an ambitious anthology, eagerly awaited for a decade, whose war machine – borrowing from Deleuzian-Guattarian terminology – traces lines of flight that unfold from communist theory and the problem of communization – Théorie Communiste and Endnotes – to critical philosophy and the problem of totality – Kant and Hegel – , revolving around a relatively obscure but enormously powerful concept: subsumption in Marx, specifically the distinction between formal and real subsumption of labor as stages in the organization of productive processes under capital. Although the volume does indeed revolve around the concept of subsumption, in my view the two vital concepts that run through the discussion, across its nearly 600 pages, are communization and totality. Communization, fol...
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More Smiles, More Money? The Politics of Making Housework Visible

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Louise Toupin’s Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77 arrives as both an archival excavation and a provocation, as an invitation to re-enter a field of struggle whose coordinates feel uncannily contemporary. What Toupin reconstructs is not merely a campaign organized around a contentious demand, but a political experiment that sought to recompose the very terms through which labour, value, and subjectivity are understood. In this sense, the book operates in a register that is at once historiographic and strategic: it is concerned not only with what happened, but with what remains possible. At the centre of this reconstruction lies a deceptively simple gesture: to take seriously the proposition that housework – long dismissed as natural, private, or pre-political – is in fact “multi-faceted, invisible, and unrecognized labour” that is indispensable to capitalist accumulation. From this starting point, the Wages for Housework current unfolds less a...
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Minor Communism, or Inventing the People

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There is a recurring tendency in contemporary debates about communism to oscillate between two unsatisfying positions. On one side lies a melancholic archaeology of lost revolutions: the twentieth century revisited as a graveyard of organizational forms, exhausted strategies, and failed futures. On the other side is a speculative enthusiasm for post-political transformation – networked uprisings, decentralized swarms, and algorithmic collectivities – that sometimes dissolves politics into a metaphysics of circulation. What tends to disappear between these poles is the question of how revolutionary thought mutates as it travels through different historical and geographical conditions. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s Communism After Deleuze is a fascinating intervention precisely because it situates itself in that terrain of mutation. The book asks what it might mean to think communism through the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but it does so by displacing the familiar E...
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