by Belle Waring on August 28, 2024
OK guys, here’s the deal. Last night I had a decently long dream in which Vishnu appeared to me personally, blue but golden with godly light and so on, to explain to me that he was real, and that I should worship him but not necessarily his avatars, more just him, (though I objected that Rama and Krishna are more approachable). And further that he was indeed the Mahavishnu, i.e. supreme deity, like, the Trimurti is a heresy and he and Brahma and Shiva are not coequal in a tripartite god relationship. Also, I should brush up on my Sanskrit so I could read devotional texts. I vaguely agreed, I mean, he’s an incomprehensible being of supreme power. So far so good. But then I woke up.
And I went to tell my mom, ‘you will not believe the dream I had last night, this is so crazy, my dreams are wilding out, should I start worshipping Vishnu? Because this is crazy.’ And in the gauzy spiderweb in the bitter-smelling boxwood outside the window I saw the outline of a bird, as if one had flown darting onto it and then vanished, and that’s when I remembered my mother has been dead for years now. At that point I turned to her, because I always love to see her like this, and hugged her once until she fell through my arms, and then I woke up, in the smallest bedroom of my house, where I have been staying with my sister. There is a big tree out the window beside the bed here, and a loud window A/C unit there partially blocking the view, but you can see it, the blue of the morning sky almost just the same as the blue paint in the room, which is tiled with paintings and photographs. Bishop Johnathan Mayhew Wainwright is a little forbidding there at the bottom of the bed.
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by Chris Bertram on August 28, 2024
(Originally drafted for a conference at Frankfurt in 2018 to mark the 40th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. I’ve done a bit of editing of my conference script and added a few footnotes etc, but it isn’t necessarily produced to the scholarly standards one might require of a journal article.)
In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, G.A. Cohen attributed many of the ills of capitalism to the market mechanism. Later in his career he came to see the market as practically ineliminable. Insofar as he was right about the market in his earlier work, it may turn out that the alternatives to capitalism he championed at the end of his life will also generate the pathology he deplored: the systematic bias in favour of output over leisure and free time. The following explores some of these tensions.
Introduction
In the second half of his career, G.A. Cohen concentrated his discussion of capitalism on its wrongs and injustices. According to his diagnosis, the primary injustice in capitalism arose from the combination of private property and self-ownership, which enables capitalists – who own the means of production – to contract with workers – who own only themselves and their labour power, on terms massively to the capitalists’ advantage. The workers, who produce nearly all of the commodities that possess value in a capitalist society, see the things that they have produced appropriated and turned against them as tools of exploitation and domination by the capitalists. But the wrongness and injustice of capitalism, the theft of what rightfully belongs to workers, is only one part of what is to be deplored about capitalism. In chapter 11 of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, a chapter where he went beyond the expository and reconstructive work he undertook earlier in the book, Cohen articulated a different critique, this time focused not on injustice but on the ills to which capitalism gives rise. In that chapter he attacks capitalism for stunting human potential through a bias towards the maximization of output, a bias which condemns human beings to lives dominated by drudgery and toil. Relatedly, he attacks capitalism both for stimulating demand for consumption that adds little of real value to people’s lives and because for damaging of the natural environment through pollution. In developing this critique, Cohen also notes that the bias towards output he identifies is celebrated by Max Weber as exemplifying rationality itself, a celebration which Cohen thought ideological and mistaken.
Though both the wrongness and the badness of capitalism arise from the conjunction of private property and the market, it seems natural to emphasize the role of private property more in the production of injustice and to stress market relations more in the genesis of its badness. It is the fact of what the capitalists own that gives them decisive leverage over workers in the labour market, making exploitation within the workplace consequently possible; it is the market that compels everyone, capitalists and workers both on pain of extinction, to act in ways that end up being so destructive for human and planetary well-being.
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by Kevin Munger on August 28, 2024
Harris’ nomination locks in another Boomer presidency. This single generation — those born in the nineteen years between 1946 and 1964 — is guaranteed another presidency. 36 consecutive years, not counting the Biden Interregnum (he’s technically too old).
Despite being a Boomer, you may have noticed that she’s the young, exciting candidate.
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