notes on Rancière’s “Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy”

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”

Review: Evald Ilyenkov’s “Intelligent Materialism”

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”

FAIRY TALES TOLD BY A COMMUNIST SUPER-COMPUTER

[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