Review: Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland (Liveright /W.W. Norton, 2022)
“Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour’s got me on the rails It never seemed to make no sense, I couldn’t tell the difference Stay married, hate her guts, no no no divorce Little girls all end up pregnant, hypocrites in every convent– Gotta get out of the land of DeValera!” –song by Larry Kirwan & Black 47 band, “Land…
Read MoreWhat We Owe the Past: William MacAskill, Effective Altruism and the Wrong Life
‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ – Karl Marx It was, after all, too good to be true. Following the aftermath of the allegations of corruption and bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange company FTX Trading Ltd., William MacAskill’s Twitter fell silent. The Oxford philosopher…
Read MoreMarcuse’s and Fromm’s Correspondence with the Socialist Feminist Raya Dunayevskaya: A New Window on Critical Theory
During the years 1954 to 1978, the Marxist-Humanist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya corresponded separately but intensively with two noted members of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. The correspondence covered dialectical social theory, socialist humanism, the structure and contradictions of modern capitalism, and feminism and revolution. As a whole, these exchanges illustrate…
Read MoreReview: Aaron J. Leonard, The Folk Singers and the Bureau (London: Repeater Books, 2020)
The heroes and heroines of my late teens were a remarkably and unapologetically rowdy bunch. Almost all were tagged Communists, or whatever was worse, and all were part of what was known as “the Great Folk Music Revival” led by Pete Seeger and a ragtag band of fellow singer/songwriters, chief among them the now iconic, though formerly firmly forgotten and…
Read MoreReview: John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America (New York: Forum, 2021)
The word “woke” has been used in connection with racial awareness for at least a century. In tracing the history of this word, Aja Romano (2020) notes that its earlier use, as a call for African Americans to be wary of mistreatment, changed in more recent times to designate a critical perspective on political racial dynamics—first…
Read MoreThe War in Ukraine and Putin’s Vlast: a sociological perspective
The true causes of the war in Ukraine are part of a larger picture of social transformation throughout Eastern Europe. To see it in its entirety, we need a science-based understanding of the nature of Putin’s rule with some help from sociology – not the kind that is reduced to opinion polls, but the sociology…
Read MoreOccupy Wall Street: “We Are What Democracy Looks Like!”
Given how extraordinarily successful it has been both in its own terms and in its capacity to grab the attention of the media, Occupy Wall Street has been conveniently misunderstood by its supporters and detractors alike. Recently, Mayor Bloomberg patronized it haughtily, saying “It’s fun and it’s cathartic — it’s, I don’t know, it’s entertaining…
Read MoreReview: Benjamin Heim Shepard’s Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action: Case Studies in Dialectical Activism (Rowman & Littlefield: 2021)
Benjamin Heim Shepard’s Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action opens with a tribute to German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, but it is Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga whose ludic spirit pervades this carnivalesque chronicle of creative civic activism in the belly of the beast that is New York City. Shepard’s method and mode are less dialectical than unabashedly…
Read MoreReview: Benjamin Shepard, Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action: Case Studies in Dialectical Activism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)
In Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action: Case Studies in Dialectical Activism, Benjamin Heim Shepard takes readers on a wide-ranging tour of urban activism, mainly in New York City. He defines sustainability broadly, integrating work for climate justice, community gardens and bicycling with organizing around sex work, libraries, harm reduction, and housing. Sustainability, here, means cities that…
Read MoreMirsaid Sultan-Galiev, the Pioneering Bolshevik Theorist of Imperialism, National Liberation and Socialism
The first show trial of a Bolshevik Given his prominence as a high-ranking Bolshevik, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev is very little known. This is partly because he was cut off early in his career by persecution and ultimate execution in Stalin’s purges and his writings suppressed for decades, but also due to distortion and lack of comprehension…
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