James Heartfield writes...

James Heartfield is a director of audacity. He writes, lectures, and broadcasts on development and regeneration, and is currently based at the University of Westminster's Centre for the Study of Democracy.

James co-edited the collection of essays in Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-machine Age (2001), is author of Let's Build! - Why we need five million new homes in the next 10 years (2006), and is author of Green Capitalism - Manufacturing Scarcity in an age of abundance (2008)

Abolish the Green Belt and abolish the "City" 16.04.2008

Forget Eco-towns - Let's follow the example of Britain's Gypsies 15.04.2008

People and Places: A 2001 Census atlas of the UK 27.09.2004

Doug Henwood interview by James Heartfield - After the New Economy Date

Gloating as suburbs of San Diego burn Date

It's time to face down the environment lobby and build many more houses Date

Nowhere near enough new homes Date

Build more on greenfield sites and the Green Belt Date

James Heartfield

With a foreword by Robert Bruegmann

Edited by Kate Moorcock-Abley

ISBN 0-9553830-0-5

James Heartfield sees capitalists in the grip of a terrible nightmare. The nightmare is cornucopia. For the ruling classes nothing is more alarming than the steady rise in mass consumption. The age of plenty is anathema to them, and they dream instead of restoring strict limits on consumption. If scarcity is in danger of being overcome, their ambition is to artificially recreate it.

Capitalism has gone green at the start of the twenty-first century. After the austerity socialism of the past, environmentalism is the ideology of capitalism in retreat from production.

Copies of James Heartfield's pamphlet Green Capitalism - Manufacturing scarcity in an age of abundance are available through the author's website at www.heartfield.org. The launch is on 11 March 2008.

At the start of the twenty-first century society is suffering from a degraded sense of autonomous subjectivity. In The "Death of the Subject" Explained James Heartfield considers why all post-modernists, communitarians and ecologists see human subjectivity as a problem. He looks at the retreat from subjectivity in the defeated political alternatives of left and right, and the negative consequences for society.

Published in 2002 by the Sheffield Hallam University Press, which has since ceased trading, copies are available through the author's website at www.heartfield.org

Reviewing The "Death of the Subject" Explained, Michael Fitzpatrick appreciates Heartfield's argument; while subjectivity is in a precarious condition, reports of its death are exaggerated. 'Despite the wilful denial of its existence and importance, the subjective factor remains the most powerful force in society.' Clarification of '... the processes that are frustrating the emergence of a wider awareness of the potential of human subjectivity is the first step towards realising that potential.'

To read this review, first published on Spiked!, click here

Published by Design Agenda in 2000, Great Expectations - The creative industries in the New Economy argues that the hopes now invested in Britain's designers misrepresent both the way design works and its role within the economy. James Heartfield explains that '... creative industries will fail to satisfy the great expectations that are invested in them... the expectations border on the bizarre.'

Contact...

James Heartfield, 17 Giesbach Road, London, N19 3DA

Website: www.heartfield.org

e-mail: Heartfield@blueyonder.co.uk

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