First posted January 02, 2015 Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson 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… Read More Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Dilip Simeon Permanent spring: Seminar # 607, March 2010 ON 30 April 1908, two young men, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose, entered the boundary of the Muzaffarpur Club in Bihar and waited for the hated judge Douglas Kingsford to appear. They were members of Jugantar, the foremost nationalist-revolutionary group to emerge during the Swadeshi movement… Read More Permanent Spring: Indian Maoism and the Philosophy of Insurrection
First posted June 12, 2015 To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care any more. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators… Read More Lee McIntyre. The Attack on Truth and our age of willful ignorance
First posted March 11, 2013 Those who are obsessed by language finally come to the conviction that there is nothing but interpretation: Stanley Rosen in Hermeneutics as Politics (1987) It seems almost unnecessary to note that this theoretical perspective is matched by the self-abnegation of its praxis. To be sure, postmodern theory itself arose due to the… Read More Michael Rectenwald: Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism
First posted March 29, 2013 Derrida: A Biography, by Benoît Peeters Reviewed by Emily Eakin In May of 1951, at the age of twenty, Jacques Derrida took the entrance exams for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure a second time, having failed, as many students do, in his first attempt the previous year. Fueled by amphetamines after… Read More Derrida: The Excluded Favorite
As was the case with the British Empire, today’s global form of extractive capitalism is a system of human sacrifice hidden in plain sight. A critical look at the palm oil industry reveals both the violence of this trajectory in an exemplary way and the challenges for a transition into a just world, social thinker… Read More The Sacrificial Altar of Extractive Capitalism: Notes on Abolition and Transition
First posted March 29, 2017 Foucault’s argument that knowledge is historically contingent must itself be historically contingent, and one wonders why Derrida bothered to explain the infinite malleability of texts at such length if I could read his entire body of work and claim it to be a story about bunny rabbits Post-modernism and the… Read More Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism and its impact, explained
First posted July 22, 2017 Sam Kriss Neoliberalism is not particularly hard to define. It’s not only an ideology or a set of principles; it’s a system of practices, and an era, the one we’re living in now. What it means, over and above everything, is untrammeled ruling-class power, an end to the class-collaborationism of… Read More ‘Neoliberalism’ isn’t a left-wing insult but a monstrous political system of inequality
The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors Darshana Narayanan Watch videos of Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the wildly successful book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and you will hear him being asked the most astonishing questions. “A… Read More The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari
First posted on August 14, 2017 NB: Outlook asked me to write an article on ‘the decline of idealism’, with a focus on the Left. Here is what I wrote – it has appeared in the current issue under the title The Idea and its Mutant – DS Before discussing the idealism of the Left, it would be… Read More The decline of idealism
