[1] Lukács, Georg.  The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature.  Translated by Anna Bostock.  (MIT Press.  Cambridge, MA: 1971).  Pg. 29.

[2] As necessitated by the production of relative surplus-value.  Postone, Moishe.  Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory.  (Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY: 2003).  Pgs. 289-291, 293, 347, 350.

[3] “If it did not come to end in 1989, as conservative critic Francis Fukuyama expected, this is because, in Hegel’s sense, as freedom’s self-realization in time, History had already ceased.  Long before the new geopolitical configurations and institutional forms of the post-Soviet world, a new and unprecedented, though scarcely recognized, political situation had taken shape: The last threads of continuity connecting the present with the long epoch of political emancipation were severed.”  Leonard, Spencer.  “Going it Alone: Christopher Hitchens and the Death of the Left.”  Platypus Review.  (№ 11: March 2009).  Pg. 2.

[4] On the “chain of presents,” Postone, Moishe.  “Deconstruction as Social Critique: A Review of Derrida’s Specters of Marx.”  History and Theory.  (Volume 37, № 3: October 1998).  Pgs. 371, 386.

[5] Berardi, Franco.  After the Future.  Translated by Arianna Bove, Melinda Cooper, Eric Empson, Enrico, Giuseppina Mecchia, and Tiziana Terranova.  (AK Press.  Oakland, CA: 2011).  Pg. 18.

[6] On the dotcom crash: ibid., passim, pgs. 80-82; on September 11th: ibid., passim, pgs. 12-13, 78, 95; on the global economic downturn: ibid., passim, pgs. 71-73, 75, 139-143.

[7] “Progress opened up a future that transcended the…predictable, natural space of time and experience… The future contained in this progress is characterized by two main features: first, the increasing speed with which it approaches us, and second, its unknown quality.”  Koselleck, Reinhart.  “On the Relation of Past and Future in Modern History.”  Translated by Keith Tribe.  Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.  (Columbia University Press.  New York, NY: 2004).  Pg. 22.

[8] “The idea of the future is central to the ideology and energy of the twentieth century, and in many ways it is mixed with the idea of utopia.”  Berardi, After the Future.  Pg. 17.

[9] “The decisive threshold had been passed when change began to be ascertainable and measurable by the scale of an individual lifespan; when in the course of a single individual life the change was evident enough to demand a drastic adjustment of cognitive and moral standards.  Then it was duly reflected in the new and novel sense of history as an endless chain of irreversible changes, with which the concept of progress — a development which brings change for the better — was not slow to join forces.”  Bauman, Zygmunt.  Socialism: The Active Utopia.  (Routledge.  New York, NY: 2010).  Pgs. 18-19.

[10] Berardi, After the Future.  Pg. 18. Continue reading →