Morning Comrades! As time passes I am going to be retiring certain designs and the above is the first. One, I’ve gotten Cease & Desists each time I’ve run this and I am not in the position to get into a legal argument with anyone at this point and secondly, well, it is time for new things. With that, this design is dropping on Friday for the very last time. White shirt, left chest print, a perfect cue for the summer.
Since I forgot this subsection last week, we are getting two this week. Again, these are book recommendations I gave my students at University for this summer, that do not require a vast or deep understanding of Philosophy per se but are intelligent, enjoyable books for your summer.
Old Gods, New Enigmas by Mike Davis
Marx has returned, but which Marx? In this book, Mike Davis’s first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis explores Marx’s inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause—and solution—of the planetary environmental crisis?
The Communist Horizon by Jodi Dean
In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is still possible if we organise on the basis of our common and collective desires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party.
On the Reproduction of Capitalism by Louis Althusser
Written in the afterglow of May 1968, the text addresses a question that continues to haunt us today: in a society that proclaims its attachment to the ideals of liberty and equality, why do we witness the ever-renewed reproduction of relations of domination? Both a conceptually innovative text and a key theoretical tool for activists, On the Reproduction of Capitalism is an essential addition to the corpus of the twentieth-century Left.
One of the many substack newsletters I subscribe to is Popular Information and whilst about half of the time I am a little too lost to understand the detail of regional US politics it often covers subjects such as the rampant corruption and corporate bullshit we all know too well from the US. This is a great article worth your time today.