Further Reflections on the Reactionary and the Revolutionary

There is a way in which it is quite easy to understand how the reactionary mindset might, in certain ways, find the Marxist mindset highly congenial and helpful, even if the reactionary would not concur with the basic conclusions of Marxism. Marxist historical science rests on a basic understanding of the relationship between the material […]

Bureaucracy, Surveillance, and Public Reason

The revelations of Assange and Snowden in the last decades certainly gave libertarians and populists everywhere more reason for paranoia and distrust of the “deep state” and its supposedly totalitarian aspirations. American citizens in particular are constantly afraid of the invasion of their privacy, the fact that the government and/or some mega tech organization may […]

Revolution and Reaction

A recent tweet by Anton Jaeger, describing the historical project of Frankfurt Marxists like Adorno and Horkheimer, helped me to better formulate a thought which I’ve been entertaining for a while: that we are reaching a juncture in history where there is no longer a meaningful difference between being a revolutionary and being a reactionary. […]

MMT and Use-Value

This post is not intended to discuss the compatibility or incompatibility of Marxism and Modern Monetary Theory, at least not in a comprehensive way. Rather, it is intended to speculate about the relationship between MMT and one particular distinction upon which Marx’s whole system rests, namely the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. This distinction is […]

China’s Threat to the Liberal Order

Tensions between China and the U.S in the last few years have produced so much newsworthy material that it is vain to attempt to summarize the main events here: trade wars, Hauwei, coronavirus, travel bans, Hong Kong, and now there is talk of Cold War — a whole lot of drama and hype. Suffice it […]

To Be Part of a Collective

(Header image by Grant Legassick.) Not a few commentators have noted that coronavirus has revealed the many dysfunctions underlying the fabric of American liberal society. Those dysfunctions have been aggravated yet more in the violent response to the murder of George Floyd — a response that has also “gone global,” revealing the truly imperial dimensions […]

Propaganda is Everywhere

A brief thought: I have noticed recently just how ubiquitous the presence of propaganda is, in many forms. Much of it is an indirect form of “government” propaganda, disseminated through liberal news media from the commanding heights of the liberal aristocracy. Much of it is counter-propaganda, delivered from the voices of conservative sensationalists over talk-radio, […]

Pope Benedict XVI’s Critique of Marx

The following paragraphs were discarded and adapted from the draft of a forthcoming article to be published elsewhere. In a programmatic passage from Capital Vol. 3, chapter 48, Marx describes, with a particular eloquence, the possibilities for human freedom offered by a technologically advanced communism: In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where […]

City of Wisdom

In the Republic, Plato paints a vivid picture of the ideal city, in which the aim of all politics consists in the cultivation of a common life of wisdom, or the pursuit of wisdom — philosophy. Famously, this is why the ruler of the Plato’s city must himself be a philosopher, if he is to […]

Update – and Thoughts on Political Strategy for Catholics

1. A Respite from the Discourse. I am taking a break from Twitter in order to devote more time to writing and blogging. Twitter is useful as a sort of “public notebook,” a convenient platform to air my thoughts on important questions in a short form. Unfortunately, Twitter is also the public sphere of our […]