From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist. Although use-values serve social needs and therefore exist within the social framework, they do not express the social relations of production. Marx, Critique of Political Economy (1859) We don't need a … Continue reading notes on Rancière’s “Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy”

Never written an editorial post before on here, so--hello! I'm Crane, a lapsed philosophy academic and adjunct currently working in the Chicago area. At the risk of carrying my education out in public, I'm planning to publish short entries here bi-weekly as I try to get a handle on Marxism and radical traditions of thought … Continue reading Back to Blogging

In a sentence, Intelligent Materialism is Ilyenkov's attempt to defend the standpoint of a future, communist cosmology. In one sense, Ilyenkov's cosmology is classical (following the pre-Socratics) as inquiry into the logos of the cosmos. However, the triad Spinoza-Hegel-Marx makes up for the anemia of prior, purely contemplative cosmologies. First, common to all three, we … Continue reading Review: Evald Ilyenkov’s “Intelligent Materialism”

Speculative thought is important, and unless you are doing speculative thought you are not doing any thought at all. You are only playing about. CLR James, "Lectures on the Black Jacobins" I knew little about Ilyenkov when I began to read him, but immediately fell in love with his anger and acumen. [1] This is … Continue reading from the activity of logic to the logic of activity

(Notes on Adorno’s “Society.” Dedicated to my friends in the Adornotes reading group, or "Frankfurt School 2." Thank you for keeping me sane this summer!) Society cannot be defined. Adorno tells us that “society” falls under the category of concepts described by Nietzsche whose names denote processes, not objects, and therefore elude definition. In his … Continue reading we live in a society

[Written in the fall of 2018] If the newly discovered W.E.B. Du Bois science-fiction short story “Princess Steel” (published and introduced in 2015 by Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert) has been dated correctly and was, in fact, written sometime between 1908-1910, this would mean Du Bois had drawn up schematics for a communist supercomputer before … Continue reading FAIRY TALES TOLD BY A COMMUNIST SUPER-COMPUTER