Posts tagged: excerpts

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  Fear and the state

  In a violent and warming world the rich can afford to protect themselves—with gated neighborhoods, getaway homes, and walled nations—and the poor are left with few options but climbing over the barriers and sometimes cramming their life stories into a sympathetic narrative. As other doors have been slammed on migrants by successive administrations—the “line” to get in has become so long and serpentine, it effectively serves as another wall—claims of fear are increasing.

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  Il servo padrone by Theodor Adorno

  The self-education of the ruling clique, with all its concomitant discipline, stifling of spontaneous impulses, cynical scepticism and blind lust to command, would not be possible if the oppressors did not themselves submit, through hirelings among the oppressed, to a part of the oppression they inflict on others.

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  Happy Birthday Karl!

  An excerpt from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

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  What Endures of the Romance of American Communism

  Today, the idea of socialism is peculiarly alive, especially among young people in the United States, in a way it has not been for decades. Socialists today must build their own, unaffiliated version of how to achieve a more just world, from the bottom up. It is my hope that Romance of American Communism, telling the story of how it was done some sixty or seventy years ago, can act as a guide to those similarly stirred today.

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  Personal trust in an age of state surveillance

  When shared between members of a civic-minded community, trust is the one thing that can keep state power in check — unless, of course, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by fear and, in the silence that follows, grow apart from one another.

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  All the little flowers by Theodor Adorno

  The most blissful memory of a person can be revoked in its very substance by later experience. He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

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  The Midnight Hour: The Watts Uprising

  The lead-up to the Watts rebellion in 1965 and the findings of the Hard-Core Unemployment report published in December 1965 by two veteran researchers at UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations.

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  What makes Marx's Capital so brilliant?

  At a glance, the commodity is a product and a variety of use-values, but, if examined in greater depth, it is an ideational form that acts in excess of human volition precisely to restrict or constrain human beings, a form into which everything is enclosed.

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  Could this package really be from Chelsea Manning?

  A mysterious package arrives on the doorstep of journalist Jessica Bruder. It's the start of an eye-opening journey into the pervasiveness of government surveillance and how protect individual privacy while trusting your comrades.

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  Dialectical thought according to Adorno

  Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. But since it must use these means, it is at every moment in danger of itself acquiring a coercive character: the ruse of reason would like to hold sway over the dialectic too.

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  For an Agonistic Pluralism

  The introduction to Chantal Mouffe's The Return of the Political, a critique of liberal democracy's inability to understand the problems of ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts.

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  Ideology and the State

  The State is a 'machine' of repression, which enables the ruling classes to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation).