Although he may have received little attention here for some time, this site maintains an active interest in Alain Badiou and the contribution of his work to the rethinking of the revolutionary project. In the following piece, originally appearing in a very interesting issue of Belgrade-based Prelom magazine, Alberto Toscano is concerned to delineate Badiou’s [...]
Posts under ‘Authors’
The crisis, 3 years and counting
Three years of the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, and no end in sight. The following piece gives a sketch of where things are at. Eddy Laing is the author of the three-part Costs of Empire (to be found here, here, and here on this site), as well as the essay Why Historical Materialism [...]
What could the end of capitalism look like?
We’ve had some interesting and important discussions on this site (see, recently, the comments on the Henwood piece and on the interview with Albo, Gindin, and Panitch) which have sometimes referenced fictitious capital and have often come back to three very large questions: the character and cause of the neoliberal period of the past 30 [...]
Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3
This is the final portion of an examination of some principal themes in Bill Martin’s book, Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation. The first two parts of this essay have been published over the past two days and can be found below. Marxism, Politics, and Evil: A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism” John Steele [...]
Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
This is the second part of an essay on the book Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, in which Bill Martin argues that Marxism requires morality in order to guide a revolutionary politics. Part I, which was posted yesterday, was principally concerned with exposition. Today’s post takes up the principal line of argument of [...]
Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
Is Marxism, or revolutionary politics generally, sufficient for human emancipation? In Ethical Marxism, Bill Martin argues that Marxism requires ethics as the necessary foundation of any politics which may actually be capable of leading to this goal. Following is the first part of an essay critically examining this book and this thesis. The entire piece [...]
Marx and subjectivity
I found this review while browsing Nate’s always-interesting blog What in the hell… and asked him if we could repost here. (It’s been slightly revised for the khukuri posting.) The book, and review, deal with the question of understanding the relations of production within capitalism, and particularly the role of subjectivity (and its production) therein [...]
No new deal!
I’ve started to think that there are some analogies between Negri and Zizek: a similar prolificality of work, and what I’ve begun to see as a similar playfulness (although Negri suffers in this comparison, Zizek being both more prolific and funnier). Be that as it may, this little piece begins playfully enough, but leads into [...]
The crisis of the capitalist state and the crisis of the left
What are the parameters of the situation we face today? How serious? What sort of period are we in today: what time is it? What are our political needs? These are the sorts of questions — important and urgent — posed (although not in these words) by the following. Consider the ruling class responses in [...]
‘Dialectical voluntarism’ as a basis of politics
What is the basis of an emancipatory politics? In what does collective human freedom consist? Although he doesn’t phrase it in these terms, these are the questions (I would say) that underlie Hallward’s investigation in this essay, which originally appeared in Radical Philosophy. ‘Voluntarism’ refers to a theory giving some sort of primacy to the [...]
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