- Action Will Be Taken
Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2004
Marxism's decline isn't just an intellectual concern -- it too has practical effects. If you lack any serious understanding of how capitalism works, then it's easy to delude yourself into thinking that moral appeals to the consciences of CEOs and finance ministers will have some effect. You might think that central banks' habit of provoking recessions when the unemployment rate gets too low is a policy based on a mere misunderstanding. You might think that structural adjustment and imperial war are just bad lifestyle choices.
- Against Post-Modernism
A Marxist Critique
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1982
Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernists leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
- Clinton Manipulates Language of Intersectionality to Preserve Support from Minority Voters
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton has been a master class in how to divorce economic issues from issues of race and gender by pushing the language of "intersectionality," which enables the political class to head off threats to their power and protect the status quo.
- Culture of Complaint
The Fraying of America
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1993
Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic that we expect nothing else.
- The Deadly Jester
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
On Slavoj Žižek. A review essay on In Defense of Lost Causes.
- Je Suis Charlie? It's a Bit Late
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
Hardly had news begun filtering out about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, than there were those suggesting that the magazine was a 'racist institution' and that the cartoonists, if not deserving what they got, had nevertheless brought it on themselves through their incessant attacks on Islam. What is really racist is the idea only nice white liberals want to challenge religion or demolish its pretensions or can handle satire and ridicule. Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.
- Liberal Condescension
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election, a debate has erupted on the liberal left about the best way to deal with working class people who voted for Trump. The disagreement, for many of the participants, appears to revolve around whether liberals ought to spend their time giving patronizing lectures about white privilege, or patronizing lectures about other aspects of reality. What people on both sides of the debate seem to share is the assumption that the job of middle-class liberals is to lecture the working class.
- The limits of anti-racism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2009
The contemporary discourse of 'antiracism' is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality -- whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of 'racism' -- over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither 'overcoming racism' nor 'rejecting whiteness' qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the 'revolution' or urging God's heavenly intervention.
- Make Art! Change the World! Starve!
The Fallacy of Art as Social Justice - Part I
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2012
- Multiculturalism or World Culture?
On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2000
Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
- The new Islamo-Marxism: Where Trotsky meets bin Laden
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2004
- Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social
Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2001
We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
- The Postmodern Left and the success of neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The international Left promotes its own image rather than engaging in the bitter reality of resistance against neoliberalism. It does not need to believe in postmodernism because it is postmodernism.
- The postmodern left and the success of neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The rise of neoliberalism across the globe for decades, and its continued resilience since the 2007-2008 financial crisis in particular, forces us to ask why there has not been a more successful resistance against it.
- Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
A great deal of "theory" in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual landscape filled with curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it. In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
- The Power of Nonsense
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2011
Slavoj Žižek's diagnosis of late capitalism is of genuine interest. His remedies, however -- dictatorship and terror -- are a disgrace.
- The Professor of Parody
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2000
It is difficult to come to grips with Judith Butler’s ideas because it is difficult to figure out what they are.
- The Rain On Our Parade
A Letter To My Dismal Allies
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2012
O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we're talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.
- Rebels Without a Cause: The Assault on Academic Freedom
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Examining current academic culture which falsely labels "words as violence" and how it is affecting acedemic freedom, notably by some who think of themselves as being on the left, who are employing totalitarian tactics which ultimately cause professional and economic harm.
- The Sharia socialists
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2006
- Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House
Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2011
Diversity of tactics does not mean that anything goes and that democratic decision-making doesn't apply. If you want to be part of a movement, treat the others with respect; don't spring unwanted surprises on them, particularly surprises that sabotage their own tactics -- and chase away the real diversity of the movement.
- Tourists of the Revolution
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1973
- The Trouble with Theory
The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2008
Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
- Why both sides are wrong in the race debate
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms.
- Why make a fuss about the murder of a brown-skinned Muslim girl?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
History gives us numerous examples of social movements which come, over time, to adopt positions directly opposed to the principles on which they were founded. It appears this has happened to the 'feminists' who seek to silence those who speak out about violence against Muslim women.
- Zizek and Linksfaschismus
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2011
I’m not sure there’s a clearer index of the basic intellectual dysfunction of the anglo-american theoretical left than the persistent popularity of Zizek and his work.
|
AlterLinks
© 2019. The information provided is copyright and may not be reproduced in any form or by any means (whether electronic, mechanical or photographic), or stored in an electronic retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher. The content may not be resold, republished, or redistributed. Indexing and search applications by Ulli Diemer and Chris DeFreitas.
|
