Subjects Archives: Philosophy

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?

Given the fragments, literally, of the works of Epicurus available to Marx at the time, the materialist analysis that he manages to develop from them is pretty amazing.

In this episode, Money on the Left cohost Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) expands upon the argument made in his video essay, “Inglorious Basterds: Nazi Desire Fully Employed,” which takes a neochartalist lens to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008).

Mental illness is a serious problem, reaching epidemic status, and the problem is increasing rapidly amongst young people not only in South Africa but globally. There is a tendency in society to either: (1) disregard mental illness as a serious problem, or (2) to recognise mental illness as a problem but fail to treat the underlying causes that result in mental illness.

Despite economic war, sabotage, low oil prices, international sanctions, and political violence, the Venezuelan people are still standing and supporting the leaders of the Bolivarian Revolution.

“The Far Left Is Winning the Democratic Civil War” was the headline over a Washington Post report (5/16/18) on the results of recent primary elections.

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has turned in her campaign materials to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and warns that Russiagate is being used to silent dissent.

Ringa Ranga Rajah, a London devotee of recently departed Ambalavanar Siva, complained bitterly last year when 14 March went by and I neglected Marx and Einstein. The former died on 14 March 1883 and the latter was born on 14 March 1879. I promised to make amends and this year Sundays 11 and 18 straddle the date.