The Russians had hardly gone when the Mohammedans began to rob and to pillage. Window-frames, doors, staircases, woodwork, everything was taken away. Many Syrians had abandoned the whole of their household goods and the stores accumulated for the winter and had fled. Everything fell into the enemy’s hands. (More…)
The struggle of Democracy and Reason against Autocracy and Brute Force, on land and in the air, upon the sea and under the sea, is reaching its climax. With each succeeding month the ignoble foe has smirched himself with new atrocities which yet in the end bring their own terrible retribution. (More…)
Democracy, whether ancient or modern, lives always in terror of tyrants who are always imminent or thought by it to be imminent. (More…)
Predictably, a lot of the talk these days on the American left has to do with dissecting how we came to be in such a horrible situation. With all three branches of government now firmly in the hands of the Republicans, there is a not unreasonable desire among their opponents to know how this happened and what can be done about it. (More…)
Kim Stanley Robinson is the most insightful speculative futurist writer active today. In novels like 2312, the Science in the Capital series, and The Mars Trilogy, Robinson has built his trade on looking forward at how the events and conditions of the present might play out over the course of years, decades, and centuries. (More…)
The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. (More…)
If I had a dime for every time some knowledgeable pundit has declared Marxism to be dead, well, I could spend a lot less time writing about capital and a lot more time enjoying it. The frequency of assertions of the irrelevance of Marx’s work varies directly with periods of calm in the global economy such as the so-called Great Moderation of the quarter century before 2007. (More…)
I have, from time to time, been wont to quote the opening passage of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is perhaps the most compelling statement of the deeply unsettling character of the modern world. “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.” (More…)
Verso has recently published a collection of Lewis Lapham’s essays under the title Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy. If a book more apposite to our current situation has been published in the last 18 months I am unaware of it. (More…)
It is well-known that there are currently 2.4 million people in US prisons and jails. What is less-known is that they write and are producing a new wave of American literature. (More…)
I’ve been reading Alexander Sedlmaier’s Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold War West Germany. I picked it up after seeing it in the Cambridge University Press catalog, and only subsequently did I realize that I’d seen Sedlmaier give quite an interesting presentation at a German Studies Association conference in New Orleans long ago. (More…)
As a practical matter, it seems to be very difficult to write a book about the Frankfurt School (or any of its related figures) which is not hagiographical, impenetrable, interminable, or some combination of the three. I can count on one hand the number of titles on this topic that did not prompt me to the immediate consumption of alcohol or some sort of stimulant. (More…)