Month: September 2013
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sense of wonder
From childhood I can remember experiencing rare moments of overwhelming wonder. I did not have words to describe what I felt, but it was as if everything in all of its complexity somehow made perfect sense and I was part of it, inseparable from it. In youth, when I learned about political injustices—racism, imperialism, global…
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the life of the group vs. what the group accomplishes
This Monday during Cihan Tuğal’s comparative analysis of revolts in North Africa, Southern Europe, and Turkey—part of the Berkeley Sociology Colloquium Series—he offered this gem about the occupation of Gezi Park: Even though a non-commodified space monetarily redistributes resources among its participants, it does not result in an egalitarian world beyond the revolt itself. [from…
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If arrival is inevitable, then who needs a map? (#marxtheory)
Is there a positive relationship between the following three themes in Marx’s writing (in The Marx-Engels Reader): 1) his analysis of material world and superstructure (with the former determining the latter), 2) his forecast of the ultimate inevitability of proletariat revolution and communism, and 3) his underdevelopment of a theory of subjective political strategy? Before…
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Marx’s promise of a glorious hereafter (#marxtheory)
Marx (in Marx Later Political Writings) poses the observable revolutionary transition within industrializing societies from feudalism to capitalism as analogous to a predicted revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism. Where he does not discuss this analogy explicitly, it nonetheless serves as a foundational concept for his various descriptions, critiques, polemics, and predictions. Looking back, we…
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cooperative societies with state aid (#marxtheory)
That the workers want to create the conditions for co-operative production in all society, and hence first of all on a national scale, means only that they are working for the overthrow of present-day conditions of production, and has nothing in common with establishing co-operative societies with state aid! But as far as present-day co-operative…
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attaining salvation behind society’s back, privately (#marxtheory)
Amongst other things it [the Paris proletariat] throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, cooperative banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement renouncing an overthrow of the old world by means of its own great resources, and instead seeks to attain its salvation behind society’s back, privately, within its own limited conditions of existence, and hence…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 