Political economy
Karl Marx
Capital, commodity production, class and the historically specific organisation of social labour.
Theory without passwords
Thinkers & concepts
Short guides for orientation, not substitutes for primary texts. Each entry names disputes instead of pretending that difficult terms have one settled meaning.
Reading guides
Politics and culture
Antonio Gramsci
Hegemony, common sense, intellectual work and the institutional organisation of consent.
Ethics and politics
Baruch Spinoza
Affect, conatus, freedom and the composition of collective power.
Democracy and caste
B. R. Ambedkar
Caste, social democracy, constitutional morality and the material conditions of equal citizenship.
Difference and relation
Gilles Deleuze
Multiplicity, difference, institutions and the changing capacities of arrangements.
Desire and institutions
Félix Guattari
Collective enunciation, institutional analysis, ecology and political desire.
Feminist political economy
Silvia Federici
Social reproduction, unwaged labour, enclosure and struggles over the commons.
Culture and power
Stuart Hall
Representation, articulation, race, popular culture and conjunctural analysis.
Concept lexicon
Spinozist traditions
Affect
A body’s capacity to affect and be affected, not merely a private feeling with a name. Spinozist and Deleuzian traditions use the term to examine changes in collective capacity: how encounters enlarge or diminish what people can do together. Other disciplines use ‘affect’ differently, so context matters.
Deleuze and Guattari
Assemblage
A provisional arrangement of heterogeneous elements—bodies, rules, tools, utterances and spaces—whose relations produce capacities that no element holds alone. The English word translates a difficult Deleuze–Guattari vocabulary; it should identify concrete relations rather than serve as a fashionable synonym for ‘collection’.
Political theory
Civil society
The associations, institutions and practices that sit between intimate life, economic organisation and formal government, though the boundaries remain disputed. In Gramscian analysis, schools, churches, media and voluntary organisations can help organise consent while also becoming sites of counter-organisation.
Marxian critique
Commodity
A good or service produced for exchange. In Marx’s analysis, a commodity joins a useful quality to a social form in which different kinds of labour become comparable through exchange; the term is therefore more specific than simply ‘an object’. Used carefully, it asks how production is organised and for whom.
Spinoza
Conatus
Spinoza’s term for the striving by which each thing endeavours to persist in its being. It is not simply conscious self-interest. Human striving is relational: encounters and institutions shape whether capacities are strengthened, frustrated or redirected, making conatus relevant to ethical and political analysis.
Gramscian theory
Hegemony
Leadership secured through a shifting combination of consent, institutions, habits and coercive capacity. Gramscian uses stress that rule is stabilised not only by force but when a social project appears practical or natural. Hegemony is never absolute; it is organised, disputed and remade.
Critical theory
Ideology
A disputed concept for the forms through which social relations are understood, justified or misrecognised. It may refer to explicit doctrines, practical assumptions or material institutions. Treating ideology as merely other people’s false beliefs misses how every standpoint is socially organised and open to criticism.
Political economy
Value
A contested term that can name usefulness, price, moral worth or, in Marx’s critique, a historically specific social relation expressed through exchange. Political economy becomes clearer when writers state which sense they mean instead of allowing price, need and social labour to blur together.