AGAINST THE CLASSICAL LIBERALIST trope of modernity as rational, disenchanted, and enlightened, this article argues to reconstruct it as spell-bound by religion – namely, by capitalism as religion.
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Platypus Affiliated Society members D. L. Jacobs and Justin Spiegel interviewed Michael Wayne, author of Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique (2014) in two parts: email and in-person conversation on December 2, 2021. What follows is an edited transcription of their discussions.
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WHY IS THERE WAR? Because capitalism is self-contradictory, and this is expressed in conflicts among workers as well as among capitalists, and between “national” working classes and capitalist states, between politicians and political parties both within and between nation-states, and often these conflicts are violent.
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BENEDICT CRYPTOFASH CRITICIZES me for using the “Left” as a concept for its alleged idealism and metaphysical essentialism. But by identifying the “Left” with a group of people, e.g. members of Jacobin/DSA et al., Cryptofash reifies the phenomenon of the Left, and in the worst possible way, by personalizing it.
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HAS BASE-BUILDING FAILED as a strategy for the socialist movement? What is our movement’s vision for a reconstituted socialist society? In regards to these questions, I’ve been thinking about a recent essay by D. L. Jacobs. I disagree with a lot of what Jacobs wrote, but the piece also highlighted some points I’d been neglecting.
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