Gavin Mueller

@gavinmueller.bsky.social

2519 Followers 966 Following

Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Critical Theory Tutor at the Sandberg Instituut. American, but slightly less so every passing day.

Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another, our End of Year Programme taking place on Thursday, June 11 (1-9PM) and Friday, June 12 (2-8:30PM) at De Thomas.

a tiktok-style meme video of eric hobsbawm hype moments and aura farming

Two employees looking at a third at a computer, saying "I think I know where he's getting all of the suggestions the company has been paying him for."

Summing Up Decades of Crypto-Trotskyism

Museum exhibit where you push a button to smell “vaginal secretion”

For Marx, rent is income persistently in excess of the prices of production, arising from monopolistic barriers to capital mobility that impede the equalization of profit rates. Commercial profit, by contrast, remunerates circulation and realization functions and gravitates around the average rate of profit. It becomes rent only where monopolistic barriers prevent new entrants from competing away above-average returns. This classical Marxian theorization contrasts sharply with contemporary accounts of “rentier capitalism” that label as rent any return based on ownership of supposedly “scarce” assets, regardless of whether this depends on the interruption of profit-rate equalization (Christophers 2020). Such accounts tend to conflate rent with profit, and thus come to see monopoly and rent everywhere.1 Once the link between rent and the competitive equalization of profit rates is abandoned, there is no benchmark average rate of profit against which to measure rent. Any income from ownership can appear “rentier.” Redefining capitalism as a rentier order in this way obscures the fact that rent is not a separate source of value creation, but a particular mode of appropriating finite surplus value produced through the labor process. What disappears, in the end, is capitalism’s foundation in the exploitation of labor.

Disco ball art project 1

cover of the book Vectoral Agents

the cover of the book Breaking Things at Work

cover of the book The Total Art of Stalinism by Boris Groys

screenshot of academic paper titled "ChatGPT is bullshit"

Cover of Dutch adaptation of Moby Dick