“The book under review furnishes ample proof that professional historians do not have the market cornered on rigorous historical method, and the most fascinating portions of Batterson’s brilliant book draw on reasoning methods that may be common to mathematicians but elude the practitioners of other disciplines….” –The Historian | more…
Losurdo provides us with an ideological map of opportunist Continental left-wing philosophy. The Western Marxists that he criticizes are the Frankfurt School (Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas); French theory ( Alain Badiou; Michel Foucault); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (authors of Empire); Hannah Arendt; Slavoj Zizek; Ernst Bloch; Norberto Bobbio; Leon Trotsky and his disciples (including Perry Anderson) and others. Losurdo demonstrates the influence of Western Marxism on such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser who did not wholly succumb to it…. | more…
we’re born with the wit to master Advanced Drone Escape 101 and How to Breathe Through Dust 202. By the time this war began, I was already a seasoned student. I had passed the tests five times already, miraculously surviving five destructive wars in just 25 years. So I was familiar with the drill: grab your documents, your children and whatever food you can carry, and run. But knowing the drill doesn’t make it easier. | more…
It is true that what Losurdo leaves us is not an encyclopedia nor a comforting panacea. Instead, like Virgil leading Dante through the inferno, he offers to help light the way as our guide through this capitalist imperialist hellscape. Like Virgil, however, Losurdo cannot see this journey through for us. | more…
….cites a popular and influential book by a self-proclaimed Marxist that invites us to “change the world without taking power.” “Here,” declares Losurdo, “the self-dissolution of Western Marxism ends up departing from the terrain of politics and settling in the land of religion.” Losurdo is clear that “changing the world” involves an intensification of anti-colonial struggle, and an ongoing renewal of Marxism, not limited to any hemisphere. | more…
Despite the explicitly national flavor of its title, the core themes that run through ‘Paraguayan Sorrow’ resonate broadly in space and time. No doubt thanks to his international education and background, Barrett was able to quote, compare, and draw inspiration from writers and case studies from around the world…. | more…
The dialectics of ecology can help us move beyond critique and start developing a socialist ecological politics appropriate for the Anthropocene. This is all the more important because, contrary to some recent interpretations, Marx’s writing does not on its own give us practical solutions to the ecological contradictions of our time. Instead, we are now faced with “two opposing tendencies” with different prescriptions for how to respond to the global ecological crisis. On the one hand, some are proposing the “acceleration of capital through the financialization of nature” – a proposal that “can only lead to total disaster, the barren negation of humanity itself”. On the other hand, we find two alternative socialist projects – the idea of ecological civilisation coming from China, and the strategy of planned degrowth in rich economies. These two socialist projects will eventually have to converge, according to Foster, but how they do so remains to be seen… | more…
A year later, I still hear the explosion in my dreams. I still wake up in a cold sweat, reaching out to make sure my son is breathing beside me. The physical scars have mostly healed, but the emotional ones remain as fresh as the day it happened. People tell me I should be grateful we survived, and I am. But survival isn’t the same as living… | more…
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…
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…
I’ve seen how American political leaders toy with the idea of change, how they dress up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice. Yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised hope and “change we could believe in,” yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging unyielding support for Israel, leaving us to live through even more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris’ niceties included no concrete promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue financial support for Israel. And Trump’s bluntness, as he promises to come back swinging, reminds us not to hold out hope for change. | more…
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…
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