Aesthetic Materialism

    Lenin studied law at Kazan University.  He was expelled for his political activity, but nonetheless managed to pass the law exam - indeed, he was top-ranked - and was awarded a law degree in 1891.  Of course, his career took a different turn.  But he would have made a great lawyer.  He had a very lawyerly mind. What is a lawyer?  To use some contemporary (or perhaps slightly outdated) vocabulary, a lawyer is a member of the " professional managerial class ," or more accurately, the professionalized, that is to say, highly educated and salaried, sector of the proletariat - a highly specialized form of labor.  Indeed, Lenin's primary historical importance is his role in the historical development of the complex blending together of the movement of proletarian socialism with the general tendency of capitalism towards specialization and professionalization.  Lenin made important contributions to the theory of the "professional revolutionary,"...

 Recently, on facebook, someone commented that "You can't have markets without private property."  This was my response: You definitely can have markets without private property. Remember, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx distinguishes between "private property" and "personal property." He doesn't have any quarrel with personal property (individual property, like your toothbrush and your lawnmower). His quarrel is with private property - that is, bourgeois ownership of the means of production. (Notice that this is usually NOT individual property: rarely does 1 person own a factory. Usually a factory is owned by a corporation, a "fictive person," a made-up person that is recognized by the law, which is in turn owned collectively by its stockholders, which may number in the millions, all over the world.)   Private property is an innovation of capitalism. Early examples include the British East India Company and the V.O.C.,...

 Derrida positions himself as the savior of the text - a messianic figure, to be sure.  Like every good messiah, he saves the text, and, in order for the text to achieve salvation, according to the text, the text must be overturned.  The text overturns itself: he the mere vehicle of the text's glorious self-overcoming.

The naive philosophical position is that in order to evaluate the truth of any proposition, one must know the definitions of all of the words in that proposition.  This might be called the "reductive" theory of truth. But this is quite wrongheaded. Why is it wrongheaded?  Because it leads to a kind of infinite regress.  Suppose you have a statement p, which is made of words.  What do these words mean?  They have definitions - but those definitions are also made of words.  So in order to evaluate whether p is true, you now have to know the definitions of all the words in p, plus the words in the definitions of the words in p - call that p'.  But all of those words have definitions as well, which means one would have to know the definitions of the words in p, plus the words in p', plus all the words in the definitions of the words in p' - call that p''.  And one can continue expanding this indefinitely, to p''', p'''', and so on. ...

  The rationality described by Austrian economists is not only radically different from the way that humans actually act - in my opinion, anyway, it's not even all that rational.  The "homo economicus" behaves more like a badly programmed robot than any complex biological animal, humans included.  It certainly behaves nothing like a healthy human, who is capable of the evolutionarily-developed capacity for empathy, and whose actions are profoundly embedded in the context of a culture with a history.  Homo economicus behaves a bit like a sociopath, though even a sociopath is more human and more rational than this strange, cold, alien, artificial intelligence. Perhaps the aspect that is most gallingly inappropriate and bizarre - indeed, unrealistic - about homo economicus as a model for human behavior is this notion of "revealed preference".  The desires of homo economicus are completely on the surface, completely unambiguous.  Unlike real humans, they have ...

If the hipster is a living contradiction, the hippie is a living tautology: equally meaningless.  I call the hippie "the pleonasm."  The pleonasm looks outward and embraces everything around, but this frantic grasping, despite its colorful, happy outward appearance, cannot disguise the rot inside.