I’ve been excitedly awaiting Jairus Banaji’s A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism for some time. His book Theory as History is one of the most interesting works of Marxist scholarship concerning modes of production, divisions of labour, and agrarian studies to date. I find his work particularly interesting because he stresses both the importance of … Continue reading Reading “A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism”
"Abolition of wages," "abolition of town and country," "abolition of family," "abolition of religion," "abolition of labor..." What does it mean to "abolish?" In the most simple sense it means to simply get rid of, to end, to be done with. And yet it seems more complicated than that. The use of the term "abolish" … Continue reading Notes on “Abolition” and “Revolution”
Material interest includes more general needs (food, water, shelter) but is also always particular and has integrated particular desires and forms of needs (not just food proper, people conceive of food in particular). Material fears are their fears that come from social situations and the material conditions. Many people have a general fear of invasive control into their personal lives. The particular form of that fear is contingent on what could enable that. The (Western) totalitarian fear as it exists today involves fears that are particularized through the relationship to mass media, surveillance, and the party-centered nation-state.
"Proletarian revolutions criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltryness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise … Continue reading The Biography, The Accounting of Life, Will Come – (Blanchot, Judgement, the Question of Political Redemption)
There's an argument, an argument that I've encountered numerous times on college campuses, and argument that bothers me very much. I was talking with one of my friends (a history major)about the nature of historical revisionism, specifically the way that individuals look at the past and then adjust certain cultural practices to be "good" or … Continue reading Confirmation by the Future: Dissecting a Fallacy
Pen and Screen 