Aesthetic Materialism

   "Democratic Centralism" is Contrary to Marx Those who advocate for "Democratic Centralism" are forgetting their theory - and their history. First, let me apologize if this article is a bit "inside baseball".   It contains terms which will be relevant and meaningful only to those who are already fairly familiar with Marxist theory, and indeed anyone who reads this without having digested that tradition is apt to misunderstand what I am asserting here.  I'll try to explain them as I go along.  (I've also written this somewhat in the style of those kinds of writers - generally bad - and I apologize for that.)  For starters, there is that very phrase, "Democratic Centralism," which contains the words "Democratic" and "Centralism." For many people, especially Americans, these words will have meanings and associations that are totally unrelated to the topic of this essay, and which will only cause confusion.  When we thin...

Like many other things on this blog, this is a little mental exercise, an experiment in thought.  I'm not necessarily saying that I advocate the following ideas - in fact, I generally don't.  But I thought it would be interesting to think through an idea that occurred to me - an idea for a moral framework , or a system of " meta-ethics " as they are sometimes called.  I'm not saying this is the best moral framework, and in fact I think it's probably not.  But so far as I know, no one else has put forward this framework.  Maybe someone else out there has, but I'm not aware of it.  So I thought it would be interesting to explore. I call this system " alethic utilitarianism ".  As you may know, if you read this blog, I'm not a utilitarian of any kind.  But this is a form of utilitarianism that is distinct from all the other forms out there: act utilitarianism , preference utilitarianism , etc., etc..  The "alethic" part is just a fanc...

 Evaluate the following sentence: "Nietzsche was resentful towards the growing power of the masses."

Karl Marx's corpus of theoretical work is both a vital, necessary tool for proletarian struggle, and an obstacle for proletarian struggle.  It is an obstacle that must be overcome, and it is the tool with which we will overcome it. In this essay, I will briefly sketch some of my most major disagreements with Karl Marx.  This list is not exhaustive.  But I want make it clear from the outset that I am not attacking Marx from a right wing, anti-communist position that supports capitalism.  On the contrary, I am trying to show that Marx was insufficiently radical, in the sense that in his analysis of political economy, he failed to go all the way "to the root."  I am trying to perform an immanent criticism of Marx - that is, instead of criticizing Marx from an external perspective, I am trying to point out how Marx failed from the perspective of the constitutive structure of his own project.  This is, of course, what Marx himself did in his own life, vis a v...