Let’s discuss Nietzsche’s explicit hatred of the syllogism and its enduring relevance to reactionary politics more generally. According to him, “the knife-thrust of the syllogism” is how “Greek taste undergoes a change in favour of dialectics,” how “the rabble gets on top.” “That…
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In the first few weeks of 2024, amid intensifying news of world war and a flare-up of the global pandemic, I made the strange decision to focus on readying for publication three short fiction stories. On some level this is just because of my mood. However, I also chose the three…
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The history of the Communist movement is full of intrigue, espionage, and infiltration. One of my go-to examples is from the United States, where in the 1960s an already-weak movement was divided and browbeaten by FBI agents pretending to be ultra-principled, far-left agitators:
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What makes this book special?
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Commodity fetishism is the observation that through many small separate acts of market exchange we command each other to behave in very specific ways, while disclaiming this same power and attributing its commands to blind necessity. It’s a key concept in Marx’s critique of…
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A great deal has been written lately about the potential decline of the U.S. dollar’s dominance in international trade and the rise of alternative trade mechanisms involving other currencies such as the yuan. To better contextualize these events, it’s useful to revisit some major…
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A reader sent us an e-mail asking for theory-writing tips, and they liked my reply, so I’m sharing a slightly edited version of it in case it is of use to others.
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Everyone is anti-capitalist now! Good. Questions remain, though: What exactly is capitalism? And what are communists planning to do about it?
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There is much talk these days about World War 3. This anxiety is a very well-justified reaction to loud saber-rattling. However, fear runs the risk of becoming nihilistic resignation. The uncritical adoption of an incorrect theory of social behaviour, even in protest…
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There’s a very common cliche in rhetorical political argumentation that goes something like this: “I am concerned about the quality (or style, or approach) of your argument. Not for my own personal sake — no, I’m actually very ambivalent (on your side, even!). I’m raising my…
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A while back I explained why I was very skeptical of “Crypto” hype on a Marxist basis. I want to try something similar against “Artificial Intelligence” hype.
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Since 2009, alternating Liberal and Conservative administrations in Canada have been united in their efforts to try to make a national tradition out of “Black Ribbon Day.” This August 23rd “remembrance” attempts to draw an equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust and “the crimes of…
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Liberal academics like to couple, on the one hand, some of Hegel’s absurd lines about non-Western civilizations (Asian, African, Indigenous-American), and on the other, his defense of the virtues of the State and his opposition to the celebration of incipient liberal democracy…
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Writing is lossy. A writer cannot convey to a reader an exact idea as they envisioned it in their minds. If they describe white sands and turquoise seas, the reader will contribute to this construction: some might borrow elements from Greece, others from Jamaica. If a…
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The cyclic revival of “Roman Antiquity” and “European Aristocracy” and “the Roaring ’20s” and “the ’70s” and “the ’80s” in Western fashion and mass-media, always curated so as to avoid improper focus on imperial genocide or slavery, resembles nothing so much as the boom-and-bust…
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Friends who live far away necessarily write to each other a lot. Sometimes a stray idea from this correspondence gets developed into an essay, but more often than not it’s forgotten. We decided to collect and share a few instances of wordplay to save them from oblivion, because…
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Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary renowned for his presentation of the materialist point of view.
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I’ve become very skeptical of the concept of “brainwashing.” Over the past few months this skepticism has boiled over into open and explicit disagreement with even well-meaning pushers within the Marxist-Leninist corner. I often find it difficult to explain concisely why it is…
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What is dialectics? Here are two definitions:
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Engels said in 1874, discussing Polish independence: “A people which oppresses another cannot emancipate itself.” This line, and other similar ones by Marx and Engels, are celebrated for their incipient proletarian internationalism. However, they are often subtly misinterpreted…
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If the goal is emancipation, there’s no alternative to relentless, impeccable, fact- and trajectory-focused historical education. We all need to become decent students and able teachers of history. The teaching of history as a “sack of potatoes” is a vulnerability in capitalism…
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I do not like to get into useless fights about “what Lenin truly meant” or “what Lenin would have wanted.” It’s not a discussion I can settle, and not even a discussion I care to settle. Instead, I want to explain what I take from his work. To this end, I will refer to…
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The category of “Really Existing Socialism” is usually invoked, both by proponents and detractors, in conversations about discrepancies between revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice. The general idea is that revolutionary statesmen — say, Stalin — fell short in some…
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In 2013, in the wake of the boom of the canonical “BitCoin,” using some of the same technological principles but tapping into contemporary internet-meme culture, “DogeCoin” was born. Despite its origins as a joke, on 5 May 2021 it reached a market capitalization of…
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What can we make of the tendency of Westerners to flippantly regurgitate the accusation of “brainwashing” against another country and its people, but then display indignation when that same allegation is made about their own?
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Before I discovered Marxism, I discovered feminism. And before I discovered feminism, I used to be a chauvinistic liberal. As I grow older I sometimes like to look back and examine how this particular trajectory — of arriving at Marxism from a standard petty-bourgeois background…
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US Presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings due to war. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90% in 2001 as the wrathful nation geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H. W. Bush ranks second place with 89% in 1991, right as the US…
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On July 26, 2020 I sat down for two hours and laid out on Twitter why I was skeptical of accusations that China was committing a genocide against the Uyghur people in its western province of Xinjiang. I spoke out, despite lacking professional credentials, because I was frustrated…
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Most of what we hear about Tiananmen in 1989 focuses on student activists, since they dominated Tiananmen square itself and waved banners demanding “freedom and democracy.” However, the real history of the protests is a bit more complex.
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Factories were designed by capitalists as exploitative panopticon enclosures. Nevertheless, they socialized workers, and became sites of organization and struggle. Yasha Levine’s superb research into surveillance technology should not lead to numbing cynicism about the potential…
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A while back a friend was illustrating the many ways in which Slavoj Zizek fell short as a Marxist theorist (I had retained some sympathies from when I first discovered him as a liberal) with a pretty bad bit of writing on Mao Zedong. To Zizek’s credit, as usual, it’s at least…
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Far too much has already been said and written about Noam Chomsky, and some of it has the counter-productive effect of further enhancing his myth. This is because his fans often read his being attacked from “both the right and the left” as inherent proof of his brilliance. The…
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The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow…
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Whenever there is a political incident in Latin America, instead of informing and clarifying, many “experts” set out to insist over and over that the situation is too complex to be understood in terms of archaic left-right dichotomies.
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HackerNews is a discussion forum hosted by YCombinator, Silicon Valley’s premier “startup accelerator” investment fund. It has a longstanding and reflexive hostility to any ideas critical of the tech-worker turf, so I was surprised when a write-up of how to escape “toxicity in…
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On my view, the core Marxist insight is the following: Feudal lords were the masters of feudalism. Capitalists, however, aren’t the masters of capitalism. They are merely the high priests of capitalism. The master of capitalism is Capital itself.
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