chrismorda

The reports of statements from Israeli soldiers documenting their horrendous war crimes1 have greatly discomforted those who engaged in cheerleading for the brutal Israeli assault on Gaza. It is hard to proclaim the “purity of arms” of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) when its members wear t-shirts showing the stomach of a pregnant Palestinian woman…

‘If you can’t beat them, empathize with them – then crush them.’ Behold the new operational motto of the beleaguered Pentagon as it strains to humor George W. Bush’s endless, limitless, clueless ‘war on terror.’ All the military needs is a few good PhDs. The Pentagon customarily has called upon white lab-coated scientists to conjure…

John Desmond (“J.D.”) Bernal was one of the great scientists of the 20th century, pioneering the use of X-rays to solve the structure of proteins. His intellectual power embraced not only a wide range of the sciences – physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics – but also the history of science, the social function of science,…

The Folk scene in New York in the early Sixties provided a primer on what happens when Show Biz and celebrity overwhelm a Progressive community. Should you return, today, to the funky precincts once home to the Peace Eye Bookstore, Jack Smith’s legendary apartment/performance space, store front theaters, and all of New York’s old Village…

Appreciation of Labor Day requires an active sense of irony. Local celebrations of workers’ collective strength in the United States predated the declaration of May Day, its international equivalent. While May Day never took root in the United States, the day’s selection for a global event resulted from the earlier scheduling of an American one.…

The upheaval in Iran has shaken up Iranian and even regional politics. Not since the Palestinian Intifada of 1987 has the Middle East seen such a massive and persistent grassroots mobilization.  At the same time, the Iranian upheaval is also the product of deep divisions inside nation’s dominant classes.  On the one hand, reform-minded and…

Who “Owns” Foreign Policy? In recent times there has been much talk about the power of lobbies or special interest groups to influence foreign policy.  For instance, did the oil lobby or the weapon’s manufacturers  play a role in George W. Bush Jr.’s decision to go to war in Iraq?  What sort of hold does…

Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism Eds. John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, & Sergio Tischler (London: Pluto Press 2009) Negativity and Revolution is a rigorously argued collection of critical essays, edited by John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, and Sergio Tischler that meshes Adorno’s forbiddingly dense Negative Dialectics with an open-ended autonomist Marxism, as such, there is…

In order to understand the significance of the ruptures of 1989, I want to put them into a broader historical context that began with the American and the French revolutions (themselves part of a wider movement that R.R. Palmer described in his classical study as The Age of Democratic Revolution).  But the political possibilities opened…

The concepts of tolerance and freedom according to Spinoza and Mendelssohn*  In this article, I would like to examine the political connotation of Spinoza’s concept of freedom, as elaborated in the Theological-Political Treatise. It does not deal in particular with its metaphysical connotation, as elaborated and defined in the Ethics. On the one hand the…