A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One-Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby
by John Marsh
136 pages / $19.95 / 978-1-68590-083-0
Excerpted from Chapter 2: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires
“But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” —Nick Carraway, on closing his relationship with Jordan Baker
Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby.
The previous chapter explored how clothes in The Great Gatsby followed a Veblen-like logic of conspicuous leisure and, still more so, conspicuous consumption. For Veblen, what unites conspicuous leisure and
The southern border became, not the firm line of defense of national sovereignty as our contemporary demagogues would have us see it, but the portal for the low wage laborers on whose backs an empire was being built. But the door was meant to be a revolving one and herein lay the conflict. | more…
In Yabebyry, where Barrett has gone from clandestine fugitive to a symbol of pride, hopes are high that his writing can also help lead to a new future. “Rafael Barrett planted a seed here,” said Esquivel Romero. “I’m convinced that through these efforts we’ll see our young people being more prominent, defending themselves, and defending the rights of the community and its people.” | more…
One of the titles Fitzgerald gave to his novel—he was never satisfied with any of them—was ‘Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires.’ The title juxtaposes landscape (ash heaps) and humans (millionaires), and its preposition, Among, implies a shared world, one that includes both setting and character. And so it is. Or was. Until the city turned to its master builder to clean up the mess—a master builder whose reading of ‘The Great Gatsby’ would inspire him to redeem the wasteland. | more…
The author’s premise is that the state and capitalism dovetail to exploit people and Mother Nature for profit, a contradiction humanity must overcome to build a sustainable society. This is a systemic dilemma pushing humanity and the ecology to the brink. Transcending capitalism means transcendence of the state with people actively involved, a premise that Mészáros develops at a level of abstraction some readers might find challenging. My advice is to stick with it. I think the effort will reap intellectual and practical rewards. | more…
The Class Struggle and Welfare: Social Policy under Capitalism
By David Matthews
978-1-68590-086-1 / 240 pages / $28
Excerpted from:
CHAPTER 8: Healthcare under Capitalism
Fundamental to the Marxist method is dialectics, with change understood as emerging from the interaction between objects and phenomena. The health status of any individual arises from the dialectical interaction between the materialism of their body and the materialism of the social context within which the body is situated. The body has its own biological structural organization, governed by its own internal biological forces. Without doubt there exists an expected way in which the body functions, reflecting its inherent structural operation, which,
It is not a hard-headed attitude which drives Western Marxists’ suspicion of intellectual and political currents which they dismiss with the label of “Third Worldism”, but rather an inability to suspend a race-based emotional solidarity which has no adequate normative grounding. The appeal to emotional solidarity implies that a proper understanding of the Eurocentric character of Western Marxism and the positions that Western Marxist intellectuals have taken on the pivotal events of the twentieth century can only be understood in terms of a detailed sociology of knowledge… | more…
“Transcending the unfortunate temporal and spatial amputation of Marxism will not be possible if the Marxists in the West do not restore their relationship with the world anticolonial revolution, which is mostly led by communist parties and which was the principal question of the twentieth century and continues to play an essential role in the century we have entered for some years now.” – Domenico Losurdo | more…
Losurdo’s scrappiness has kept him off the list of Marxist philosophers deemed central to the conversations of our time, but there is injustice in that. His service to left counter-histories has for a long time been incomparable, each of his books a multilingual tour de force, with bibliographic sweep and an eye for the ephemeral quotation. In Western Marxism and elsewhere, he consistently unearths rare passages from his sources, interweaving textual evidence with readings that overturn conventional wisdom. Incorporating juvenilia, discarded drafts, and lecture notes as well as major texts, his Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (1992), Heidegger and the Ideology of War (1991), Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (2002), and Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005) have chipped away at the Anglo-American theory industry by demonstrating its shameful, if subtle, gravitation toward the right wing of Continental philosophy. | more…
Singh’s brilliance belies his young age and his essay “To Young Political Workers” shows a political maturity that any older revolutionary would have been proud to have written. Similar to Vladimir Lenin’s What is to be Done, he expounds on the state of the political crisis facing the Indian liberation movement and offers a new conception of the party-form that the HSRA should take. His understanding of strategy, of when to go on the offensive, when to retreat, when to go underground, and his application of military maneuvers to politics reveals his cogent sense of tactics. His criticisms of the Indian National Congress party – Nehru and Gandhi in particular – for their unwillingness to organize the factory proletariat and peasantry were both timely and necessary when written… | more…
Paraguayan Sorrow:
Writings of Rafael Barrett, A Radical Voice in a Dispossessed Land
By Rafael Barrett
Edited by William Costa
240 pages / $26.00 / 978-1-68590-078-6
“…what makes you shudder is when he declares: ‘Now I’m going to pull up all the trees around the property so that it looks nice.’
Yes, the gleaming, stupid façade must look clean, bare, with its brazen colors that profane the softness of the rural tones. People must say: ‘This is the new house of so-and-so, that man who is now so rich.’ It must be possible to contemplate the monument to so-and-so’s endeavors without obstruction. Trees are surplus to requirement: ‘They block the view.’ And there is not only vanity in this eagerness to strip the ground: there is hatred, hatred of trees.
Is this possible? Hatred of beings that, unmoving, with their noble limbs always open, offer us the caress of their shade without ever tiring; the silent fertility of their fruits; the multifarious, exquisite poetry that they raise up to the sky? They claim that there are harmful plants. Perhaps there are, but that should not be reason to hate them. Our hatred condemns them. Our love would perhaps transform them and redeem them….” | more…
