Attempting to establish land tax and stamp duty in France in 1787

The paper examines the short-term introduction of land tax and stamp duty by Lomnie de Brienne in the summer of 1787 and their further abolition in September 1787. The introduction of new taxes became an urgent need in France in 1787. The huge budget deficit, external debts forced the government to first turn to notables for public approval of the reform plan, and after the failure of this idea, to register through the Paris Parliament in the summer of 1787. Parliamentarians opposed the introduction of these taxes. To combat the deficit, they called for a general economy, cut costs and increased income, demanded the convening of the States General, on which new taxes should be introduced. Discussions and correspondence with the king continued in July and early August 1787. At the royal meeting on August 6, taxes were adopted, but parliament did not obey and advocated their abolition. The king sent parliament into exile. Negotiations began, which led to a compromise: the land tax and stamp duty were canceled, and the term of two twenty was extended until 1792. The work analyzes the stages of the adoption and cancellation of new taxes, highlights the requirements of parliament and the royal administration, studies the land tax edict and the stamp declaration, collection and edict on their cancellation, considers remonstration and decisions of the Paris Parliament, the kings answers and analyzes the reflection of these events in the press and publicism.

Classical critical theory, epistemological dialectics and general economy. Reply to criticism raised in Belgrade and Shanghai

In my response, I initially defend my preference for classical Critical Theory, emphasizing its continued relevance in capitalist modernity, stressing that the epistemological approach does not imply dogmatism with regards to scientific theory or Historical Materialism, just as it does not imply closure with regards to political democracy. When it comes to the dialectics of the classics, I also defend an epistemological approach, arguing that the dialectics aiming for truth implies critique and negativity. However, confronted with the duality of transcendental ideas and historical relativity, I express my confidence in human intuition. Following Hegel, determinate negation must sublate the intuitively conceived universality to a new conception that contains the result of the negation. Finally, I do not see how the conceptual aporias of general economy can be solved by the current political degrowth project. Still, politics is what we need more of, namely social democracy.

‘Alt var blod og intet var lykke’

This essay examines the connections of motherhood and work in Olga Ravn’s novel Mit arbejde (2020). The novel takes up a feminist-marxist tradition for considering reproduction and maintenance as work that creates value for capitalism, but which remains unacknowledged by the general economy. It combines genres of horror and kitchen sink realism in order to describe the pain of giving birth and the toil of motherhood. While the narrator/protagonist is unable to free herself from the everyday responsibilities of reproductive work, she does find moments of complex happiness in the both vital and repetitive care work. Structured upon the temporality of motherhood the novel points to how the work of reproduction might make other futures possible.

Automutilation and Metonymy: The Economy of the Pulse

Exploring an economy of the pulse in an analysis of two films, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Lucio Fulci’s L’aldilà/The Beyond (1981), this chapter shows how ‘splatter’ images have the force of ‘felt’ intensities insofar as the pulse is a flexible and momentary intensity that suggests the flow and flexibility of a ‘felt’, but unseen, operation. Georges Bataille’s concepts of automutilation and metonymy are operations indebted to the consumption, expenditure, and the ‘loss’ in general economy that communicate through affective energies. This chapter argues that the pulse entails a different kind of spectatorship than that seen in subject positions by which meaning is returned in value in a restricted economy. The pulse entails a spectatorship of expenditure in which the spectator is ‘put at stake’ and ‘loses’ oneself to the experience.

Blood and Convulsive Affect: Vectors of the Pulse as Sovereign Operations

This chapter conceptualises the vectors of the pulse as the quantities of magnitude and direction that communicate. The vector discloses the difficulty in isolating the place of the pulse, which in turn suggests the ‘putting at stake’ of self as a sovereign operation experienced in Georges Bataille’s general economy. This chapter analyses the vector in relation to the form of spectatorship that Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film Possession gives rise to. The film is remarkable for the way it relates the magnitude and directional flow of blood to a frenzy of the body in a kind of convulsive affect. Blood points to the sacrificial expenditure, or dispossession, of the self, which nevertheless produces an intimate communication or communion between characters, film, and spectator.

Creative Economy: A Literature Review on Relational Dimensions, Challanges, and Policy Implications

In the development of the global economic system, the cumulative knowledge from past to present is of great importance. This knowledge produced by social life offers creative individuals and groups an opportunity to produce new meanings, values, contents and a source of inspiration. The influence of creative sectors in the urban life and socio-economic climate built by the industrial society created by the industrial revolution has started to increase in recent years. In the current industrial economic organization style, together with entrepreneurship, the creativity based on knowledge and technology have been added nowadays, to the land, labor and capital required for production. However, worldwide studies focus on the beneficial aspects of creative economies. There are not many studies in the literature on the past and future problems and development of the creative sector from a long-term historical perspective. In this context, it is necessary to reveal the relational ties of creative sectors with other fields; how they are positioned in national economies and how they will be analyzed. In this framework, the study aims to determine the position of the creative economy in the general economy by using the studies in the literature, to reveal the relational ties of the creative sectors with other actors, to identify the challenges in the sector, and to reveal the policy implications in creative industries. As a result of the study, it has been observed that the creative sectors are nested cellularly in all sectors of the general economy, from tourism to the automotive sector, from urban life to social networks, due to the internet, information communication technologies and digital applications. Since the outputs of the creative economy are based on the intellectual property rather than physical products, it has been determined that problems arise in the financing, accounting of services and contents introduced in this field, and measurement of the products at international standards. In addition, it has been observed that the time perception in creative sectors and the time perception of the industrial economic system differ from each other. Another important finding obtained as a result of the research is that creative economies create class differences in urban spaces and cause social segregation.