This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com

and by Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles, perfect for dig listeners like you.

One that you might like is marks towards the center of possibility by Kojin Karatani, edited by Gavin Walker.

Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani's Marx, towards the Center of Possibility,

has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory.

Written at a time when the political sequences of the new left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with a widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of

Marxism from 1968, Karatani's Marx takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction in the reading of Marx

as a literary thinker, treating capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as

itself a theory of signs.

Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-68 Japanese thought,

but also because its heterodox reading of Marx that debuts in this text,

centered on his theory of the value form,

will go on to form the basis of Karatani's globally influential work.

Marks towards the center of possibility by Kojin Karatani, edited by Gavin Walker.

Out now from Verso Books.

Music books. Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

New York City's inequalities have defined the course of this plague.

It's hitting working-class black and immigrant New Yorkers the hardest,

the people who live in the smallest, most crowded quarters,

who must work to eat, and thus who must use a subway system

abandoned by the sheltering in place middle and upper classes to get to their jobs.

...