Subjects Archives: Philosophy

For academics working on Frantz Fanon Alienation and Freedom is no less than a gift. With the publication of this book we finally have the complete available works of Fanon in English. Aptly divided into neat sections – Theatre, Psychiatric Writings, Political Writings, Publishing Fanon, Frantz Fanon’s Library and Life.

In this in-depth interview, Akeel Bilgrami speaks on a wide range of issues of intellectual relevance and contemporary importance such as the relationship between Gandhi and Marx, issues of modernity, Chomsky’s philosophy, personal influences, academic philosophy in India, secularism, caste and current politics in India, Hindutva politics and the criminal threat of the present government, the Hindutva political challenge and ways of resistance, and the importance of Left politics.

The police lied and said that when they knocked on the door and announced themselves, the Panthers immediately began shooting at them. This was later proven to be a lie.

In this period of global crises and ferment, radical and revolutionary activists are reaching for modes of organization and political practice that can help advance their struggle for human liberation. For growing numbers, the political and organizational perspectives of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin are becoming a pole of attraction–providing an increasingly desired coherence and revolutionary edge.

In May 2017 artist Joana Moll, alongside Tactical Tech, purchased 1 million online dating profiles for 136€ from U.S.Date, a supposedly U.S.-based company that trades in dating profiles from all over the globe.

Another Hot, Dry Year Is Fueling The State’s Deadliest, Most Destructive Wildfire. Scientists Say Wildfires Here Are Consistently Surpassing Their Projections.

RICHARD DAWKINS, author of one of the best known texts on human nature, The Selfish Gene, declares we are “machines created by our genes”–that “[w]e are survival machines–robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report earlier this week on “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” apparently based on the fact that “coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” even though Marx’s birth was in May (1818).

Mike Peters explores the legacy of Steve Biko, a radical who spent his life fighting for Black liberation and for the overthrow of the Apartheid government in South Africa.

FAR-RIGHT Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s son has threatened violence against the country’s Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) if it blocks his father from running in Sunday’s second-round poll.

War is romantic only when it is limited to the confines of a sanitized imagination. Movies that portray heroic soldiers vanquishing demonic enemy combatants or rescuing fallen comrades may whip up jingoistic war fever, but horrific images of real children and elders maimed, scarred, dismembered and killed during armed conflicts have the power to end wars.

What passes for Critical Theory today is nugatory; it is philosophically weak, and politically compromised. In Thompson’s words, the project has ‘abandoned the search for the real mechanisms and sources of social power’.

Since the extreme right-wing government of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, there has been an increasing crackdown on political and student activists, who are often branded as Maoists and anti-nationals.

Capitalism vs. water.

Samir Amin, the renowned Marxist thinker and economist, passed away on August 13 in Paris. Born in Cairo on September 3, 1931, to an Egyptian father and a French mother, he had his initial education in Egypt before moving to Paris where he obtained his doctorate in Political Economy.

Frederick Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (hereafter The Origin) was published in 1884. In it he argued that early humans had lived in non-hierarchical societies in which women were not oppressed.

The spread of Western gender categories through European colonization.

Some who read my writing may ask, “why don’t you criticize the Republicans as much as you do the Democrats?” My response to such a question is that it should be obvious by now which of the two corporate parties currently holds the Black polity and working class “constituencies” generally in a state of political captivity.

Political memories are short, but just 15 years after Iraq was destroyed and the chain reaction sent most of the Arab world back to the dark ages, it is now “treason” to question the word of the Western intelligence agencies, which deliberately and knowingly produced a fabric of lies on Iraqi WMD to justify that destruction.

How can we understand the way that capitalism comes to be gendered and racialised?