Aesthetic Materialism

  I have gone back and forth many times on the question of whether we are entering a period of fascism.   If it is indeed true that we are entering a period of fascism, then we should focus all of our energy on defeating fascism.  That means that we have to build a democratic (small d) coalition large enough to defeat fascism.  This means that we have to put aside all of our other political disputes, embracing people we otherwise might not, in order to win them over to the side of democracy.  We have to accept them as they are, not try to change them, and make ourselves appealing to them. So, for instance: if there are people who are anti-vaxxers, or people who question the origins of Covid and think it may have been intentionally designed in a lab, or who perhaps just think that people should be free to make their own medical choices, we have to welcome them into our movement.  If there are conspiracy theorists, in general, we have to welcome them into our...

    There are a lot of ways to look at Donald Trump.  One useful way is to think of Donald Trump as a member of what I like to call the lumpenbourgeoisie.  As far as I know, I made that term up.  I don't know if that is a term that other people have used before - if they have, I am probably using the word differently than they did. As I see it, there's the actual class that has monopolistic control over the means of production - the bourgeoisie - and then, somewhere below that, there is the lumpenbourgeoisie.  But I am not using this terminology in a crude, vulgar, mechanical, economistic sense.  It's not as if there's some number which divides the bourgeoisie from the lumpenbourgeoisie, as economic income brackets.   To understand the difference between the bourgeoisie and the lumpenbourgeoisie, one must understand the concept of class formation .  Marx wrote about this complex and fascinating topic, though his remarks are brief and sca...

  There are many reasons that I'm opposed to world government.  One of them is that the concept of world government is utterly opposed to science.    Society cannot progress without experiment, and experiment cannot be effective without comparison.  Different people must be governed differently so that we can learn precisely in and through this difference. (This is analogous to resistance against monoculture.  Imagine if one language eliminated all other languages.  Imagine what damage this would do to the science of linguistics.  The science would be utterly ruined.  Similarly, for the same reasons, I oppose one religion dominating and eliminating all other religions .  We must fight to preserve the languages and religions of, for instance, Native American peoples, which are getting eliminated by global capitalism.  And just as linguistics as a science cannot progress without a multiplicity of living linguistic traditions, similarl...

  Like almost all of the great works of the 20th century, Pop art is a joke.  Pop art, at its best, is a witty articulation of the paradoxical - indeed, contradictory - conditions of the commodification of art.  For instance, there's the work by the MSCHF art collective in which they bought an original Andy Warhol drawing for $20,000, then drew 999 high-quality forgeries of it, shuffled them together, and sold them for $250 a pop.  Or, for that matter, Maurizzio Cattelan's famous banana duct-taped to a wall, sold for $120,000.  Or Salvatore's invisible statue, "Io Sono," which sold for $18,000 .  Of course, that's not a new idea: Yves Klein's "the Void," (1958) - an empty space - recently sold for a million dollars .  Or what about Andy Warhol's own pranks, from his prints of Campbell's Soup cans to his art that he didn't touch, manufactured in his factory by unnamed underlings, to his "oxidation" paintings (1977) - blocks o...

Psychoanalysis, in my opinion, can be best understood as a set of tactics, within rhetoric. Persuasion is a beautiful thing.  When people disagree, they can fight, and one of them can defeat the other physically.  Or, they can try to persuade each other of their own worldview.  If this is successful, they will learn to understand each other, the two worldviews will come into harmony, and they will, at least in some sense, agree.  Sometimes the best way to persuade another person is through a straightforward logical argument, with a thesis statement, supporting evidence and reason, and so on.  But sometimes this is not the most effective tactic. In the late 19th century, people were diagnosed with something called hysteria- something that is now no longer generally recognized as a legitimate medical diagnosis.  It was mostly women who were diagnosed with hysteria, and in fact the term has the same etymological root as "uterus."  Ancient Egyptians and Gr...

People say "Everything is political."  That's true, in a way - or, as I prefer to put it, everything can be interpreted politically.  That's one way of interpreting things, and with sufficient mental gymnastics, it can be applied to just about anything.  A person who is addicted to politics is likely to see politics everywhere. Similarly, you might say, everything is gambling.  That is, everything can be interpreted as a kind of gambling.  Walking across the street is gambling - you're betting your life that you will make it across without being run over.  Breathing is gambling - you're betting that you won't inhale the pathogen of a fatal disease.  Everything involves risk, and all risk has an element of randomness.  Thus everything that humans do could be looked at as gambling, just as easily as we can see everything that humans do as political. Or you might interpret everything - everything that humans do - as a kind of addiction.  That se...

I've made the point many times that the problem with Marxism is that it isn't scientific enough. How can we make Marxism more scientific?  This is a huge project, and there are many directions to pursue in the process of attaining this extremely difficult goal.  But there is one aspect of the problem that absolutely must come first: The first thing that Marxists must learn, if they are going to get anywhere at all, is this: Marxists must learn to live with other Marxists. Emo Philips joke:  'Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!”  He said, “But nobody loves me.”  I said, “God loves you.  Do you believe in God?”  He said, “Yes.”  I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?”  He said, “A Christian.”  I said, “Me, too!  Protestant or Catholic?”  He said, “Protestant.”  I said, “Me, too!  What denomination?”  He said, “Baptist.”  I said, “Me, too!  Northern Baptist or Southern...