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 [...]
Posts under ‘Philosophy’
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 [...]
‘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 [...]
Bill Martin: Into the Wild
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Vern Grey: Questions provoked by Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism
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A new pamphlet
“Into the Wild,” Bill Martin’s long essay recently published on this site, has now been published as a pamphlet by our sister site Kasama. The pamphlet, which includes as an appendix Martin’s earlier essay “Dear Professor Badiou: About the RCP Assault on Alain Badiou, Philosophy And (Ultimately) Communism Itself,” can be downloaded as a pdf [...]
Democratic materialism vs. materialist dialectics
We’ve published a couple of beginning engagements (here and here) with Badiou’s important new “big” book, Logics of Worlds, a process continued in the following, which is published here for the first time. In it Jordan Seaver gives an exposition of some of the themes — and some of the problems he finds — in [...]
What justifies a revolution?
This essay, which appears to be part of a longer piece not yet published, appears on lacan.com. “Ne s’autorise que d’elle même,” of course, is “not authorized except by itself.” With Lenin, as with Lacan, the point is that a revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même: one should assume the revolutionary act not covered by the [...]
Bill Martin: Into the Wild – 3
This is the final installment of Bill Martin’s essay. The first two were published earlier this week and appear below. Taking stock of contingency in politics (and quite possibly in the other domains of truth as Badiou understands them) means grappling with this notion of line without linearity. Just as a provocation (for now), I [...]
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