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In the late 1960s it seemed to many almost certain that Jean-Paul Sartre would be remembered as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century and the most important public intellectual on the left of that era. Certainly it seemed so to me at the time. Sartre had in the 1930s taken Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and its reactionary and religious version of phenomenology and transformed them in Being and Nothingness into his new humanist philosophy of existentialism, a leftwing philosophy of freedom.
"Perhaps what I champion is not so much the anarchist as much as the 'anarch,' the superior individual who, out of sheer strength of will, rises above the herd in defiance and contempt of both the sheep and their masters."
— Keith Preston, "The Thoughts That Guide Me: A Personal Reflection" (2005)[1]
letter
By: newpoliticsWinter 2011 (New Politics Vol. XIII No. 2, Whole Number 50)
Seth Farber’s response to my “Chomsky, Anarchism, and Socialism” (Summer 2010 New Politics) places a very heavy burden on what is a book review, not a major study of Chomsky’s political thought. As such, I believe it does exactly what a book review should: give a basic outline of the book being reviewed, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and indicate to the reader why the reviewer recommends or does not recommend reading the book.
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For several years I worked closely with an anarchist youth collective in Indianapolis that ran a left-wing bookstore. While they were a bold, feisty group of determined activists (a welcome change from the timid and hidebound peace church "progressives" that dominate the left in Indianapolis) with whom I very much enjoyed working, I did find their anti-intellectualism disquieting.
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This truly path-breaking book goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom which reduces Marx to an Eurocentric and economistic thinker; as Douglas Kellner comments, Kevin Anderson shows that Marx “is the sophisticated and original theorist of history some might not have ever expected him to be.” Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including his journalistic work written for the New York Daily Tribune as well as unpublished material on non-European societies, it brings to the fore a global theorist whose soci
The title of Oscar Wilde’s essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" has long perplexed readers, especially anarchists who rightly feel that the essay belongs in their canon rather than that of the Marxists, the Fabians, or the Labour Party.[1]
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If the purpose of a memoir is to tell the story of a life or the evolution of an individual’s thinking, this one by Christopher Hitchens, the jowly, balding erstwhile enfant terrible doesn’t ring true. There’s no metamorphosis in thinking here — it’s more a whipsawing of opinion if not a trading up. And despite a heavy lathering of opinions, there’s precious little of his adult life as lived.
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Among the great British Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm is the only one to remain in the Communist Party until the late 1980s. His decision to do so has never fully been explained. Thus the publication of his autobiography, Interesting Times, is an exciting event, as it has the potential of addressing this question. How did Hobsbawm manage to reconcile himself, for example, to 1956? Did he not at least feel disillusioned when he learned about Stalinist atrocities?
We are witnessing today a paradoxical and unsettling phenomenon: the rise of fascist-inspired political movements in the European arena (from France to Italy, from Belgium to Austria), accompanied, in the heart of intellectual circles, by a massive campaign to denigrate the entire anti-fascist tradition.
February 2004 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. From September 1978 to February 1979, in the course of a massive urban revolution with millions of participants, the Iranian people toppled the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941-1979), which had pursued a highly authoritarian program of economic and cultural modernization. By late 1978, the Islamist faction led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had come to dominate the antiregime uprising, in which secular nationalists, democrats, and leftists also participated.
The justification of the intensive bombing of Serbia in 1999 as part of the need to avoid "another Holocaust" is only a recent event in the Americanization of the Nazi Holocaust: specifically its use as a propaganda theme for the defense of U.S. great power interests.
translated by Marvin Mandell
I. Of a Certain Jean Meslier
Michel Onfray, the brightest star among the younger French philosophers, is a brilliant prodigy, a gifted and prolific author who, at the age of only 46, has already written 30 books.
By: newpoliticsFebruary 1, 2010
The merger of the online journal Democratiya, with Dissent, provides an obvious point to begin assessing the role of Alan Johnson’s creation. The following is not intended as the last word on this subject, but as a contribution to a process of analysis. The approach here will be to focus on the argumentation used in Democratiya, specifically in the one article written for the journal by Johnson.
In spite of their undeniable differences, Marx and Weber have much in common in their understanding of modern capitalism: they both perceive it as a system where "the individuals are ruled by abstractions (Marx), where the impersonal and "thing-like" (Versachlicht) relations replace the personal relations of dependence, and where the accumulation of capital becomes an end in itself, largely irrational.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay — Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)
Michael Harrington is rarely taken seriously as a Marxist thinker — indeed, his Marxism is rarely taken seriously at all, by either his critics or sympathizers.
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HOW HAVE MARXIST THEORISTS and activists, Socialist parties and Communist States understood Anti-Semitism? How did they confront the rise of fascism in Germany? Spanning the period between The Communist Manifesto and the fall of the Berlin Wall, German historian Mario Kessler’s On Anti-Semitism and Socialism examines the relationship to Jews, and to anti-Semitism, of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky, other individual Marxists, and various political parties in Germany and the Soviet Union.
CRITICAL THEORY HAS ITS POLITICAL roots in what has been termed “the heroic phase” of the Russian Revolution. This was the period from 1917-1923 in which the radical democratic vision of workers’ councils — or “soviets” — dominated both the communist movement and its radical offshoots.
