The Left, Right and Science: Relativists and Materialists
None of the seventeenth-century founders of modern science – Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Hooke, and Newton – could have imagined the peculiar world of contemporary anti-science polemics. They thought that having some control over nature, particularly over human health, was – however desired – almost an unimaginable goal. They believed that certain methods – experience, experiment,…
Read MoreBook Review: Joan Braune and Kieran Durkin’s Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future
This book is a significant contribution to ongoing efforts to re-evaluate Fromm’s work. Featuring prominent Fromm experts, including Joan Braune, Kieran Durkin, Michael J. Thompson, Lauren Langman, and Neil McLaughlin, this edited collection approaches the writings and thought of Erich Fromm from multiple angles, offering incisive analyses of his innovations and contributions as a radical…
Read MoreOccupy Together and ‘Mass Left Radicalism’: Great to see!
Occupy Together and ‘mass left radicalism’: Great to see! By Bill Fletcher, Jr. Occupy Together did not come out of nowhere precisely because it was the result of a convergence of forces and factors without any of which it is highly unlikely that we would have seen the movement gain steam. Credit, however, must go…
Read MoreBook Review: Moisés Kopper’s Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil’s Public Housing
In this 2023 book, Moisés Kopper ethnographically investigates the political, material, and subjective layers of the Brazilian housing policy Minha Casa, Minha Vida (MCMV). Drawing on fieldwork conducted mainly between 2012 and 2015, in a local housing association and social movement in Porto Alegre called Conselho de Desenvolvimento do Partenon (Codespa), the author critically traces…
Read MoreEyeless in Gaza
The trouble with war is that it has two sides. Everything would be so much easier if war had only one side. Ours, of course. There you are, drawing up a wonderful plan for the next war, preparing it, training for it, until everything is perfect. And then the war starts, and to your utmost…
Read MoreWall Street Walkers
Resistance always “comes out of nowhere” and smug establishments always are bewildered by it. Such was the case with the irresistible rise of the American civil rights movement, the May 1968 upheaval in France, and the breakup of the Soviet bloc. Just over a month ago it looked like mighty financial players would have it…
Read MorePlato’s Revenge: An Undemocratic Report from an Overheated Planet
I By midsummer 2099, as yet more record temperatures were reported from an ever wider collection of places, the intergovernmental office of environmental studies finally announced the answer to a long-debated question. Many figures for the rise in the mean temperature of the Earth during the twenty-first century had been predicted, but it turned out…
Read MoreGo to Wall Street
I have often remarked that Occupy Wall Street filled a hole in the American democracy. Even I, a skeptic of the intentions of many business institutions and a constant critic of current policies, didn’t quite realize there was so big a hole. I thought America’s true concerns were being diverted, even thwarted, by special interests,…
Read MoreProstitution, Liberalism, and Slavery
Inconvenient statistics, feral facts like the average life expectancy of prostitutes, the average age of induction into prostitution, the average income of prostitutes, and so forth – hard demographics – have never disturbed those who defined the sex business as a force of liberation. The fact that the ‘freedom’ being realized is mostly the freedom…
Read MoreCatalytic Conversion
“Occupy Wall Street” has had tremendous effects even if they were all to pack up their tents and leave right now. It has refocussed the political agenda after years of contrived misdirection by the legislators and “official” commentators who depend on Wall Street for patronage. It has put looting and its consequent inequality firmly at…
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