Teaching this October! we will examine the relationship between production and social reproduction in the Soviet Union, its distinctiveness within global capitalism, prospects for alternative development and internal systemic contradictions.
In my latest show, Igor Shoikhedbrod joins me for a discussion on a major work by Kojève on politics and state theory that was never published until recently. We discuss how Kojève's thought on law and the state differs from thinkers like Bloch and Pashukanis. Part two next month.
Robert Skidelsky (1939-2025) on the Ukraine war:
‘I have long since learnt that courage and suffering, while rightly evoking admiration and pity, do not of themselves validate the cause for which they are incurred.’
https://t.co/7XYFoi2H8f
My essay "The risk of action" against ideas of "abyssal" freedom:
"To imagine freedom as a freedom from historical constraints is not only misleading, but disempowering. It veils the conditions and contradictions through which genuine action and transformation might occur..." /1
Today, on March 8 we launched @RedThreads1917 ! We conceive of our distinctive contribution as a Universalism from the East. This is at once a geographical and a political-theoretical position, a reclaiming of the struggles for and within twentieth-century socialism.
Abolishing profit means abolishing the social relation in which surplus labour is privately appropriated as profit. The labour process continues. What changes is the form of social mediation: production would be organized for use rather than for valorization.
Marcuse’s fame did such a disservice to his thought, and current attacks are not only anti-intellectual but anti-materialist. I tried to show that his Hegelian aesthetics, the sensuous “shining-forth” of truth, is mediated by labour through and through.
https://t.co/dbZgQNnq76
To mark the 30th anniversary of Gillian Rose's death, I wrote an essay for @Parapraxis_Mag on Rose's philosophy of death, Nietzsche's "proud death", and Rose's conversion to Christianity.
https://t.co/Tdcqs1qiVl
My article on Gillian Rose, 'persons' and 'things', and the phenomenology of necessary illusion, is out now in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy @rphilos
https://t.co/jQVWjobuVV
Marco Filoni's The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève has been translated into English
This is a story of Kojève's life and work, narrated by bringing together archival material, (un)published texts, correspondence, and written and oral testimonies
https://t.co/xRRCVFZrgC