If the celebrated existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered today it is likely to be for his novels and fiction, or for his post-war classic Being and Nothingness. Less often discussed is his groundbreaking work of Marxist philosophy, Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the philosophy of praxis he develops in it. But, as Lorenzo Buti argues, it is in this work that his true political power lies.
Verso editor Jessie Kindig remembers socialist feminist activist and author Meredith Tax, and we reprint the 2021 introduction to Tax's classic of socialist feminist labor history, The Rising of the Women.
"There are two great examples of the attempt to replace politics with what André Singer calls “the republican experiment (ensaio republicano)”: the Italian Mani pulite and the Brazilian Lava Jato. These were efforts to create a political movement on the basis of anticorruption. The first ended in the spectacular failure and inversion of the Berlusconi years. The second was a decisive cause of Bolsonaro’s rise."
No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bear within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production.
A list of new and old Marxist classics for the age of pandemic, the anthropocene, tech giants, and late global capitalism.
In this excerpt from Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence, Elsa Dorlin traces the lineage of the model citizen vigilante in the American tradition. In defense of a nation, she tells us, the vigilante enacts a form of racial justice that seeks to execute the natural enemies of private property, the family, and white society. What is bred? The Racial State.
When we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath.
In this excerpt from Combat Trauma, Nadia Abu El-Haj highlights the painstaking efforts taken to grant American soldiers an exemption from the violence they commit.
The logic of the day, which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech. Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
We need radical ideas and systemic change to combat the urgent threat of climate disaster. This reading list of eco-utopian thinking can help guide us.
In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. Now that they, officials and recruits, have stepped visibly out of my dream and dispossessed me of my past life and my language, I no longer need to dream of them. In Fascism the nightmare of childhood has come true.
Lynette Russell contextualises the importance of Patrick Wolfe in the study of settler colonialism.