Category: Philosophy
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Protest and the Construction of Power
The surest sign that a protest is effective is if the military opens fire on it. I want to explain why this is. Of course, I’m considering both “protest” and “effective” in a narrow sense here but I think the general point is understandable on its face: as a challenge to the government, a protest’s…
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Thoughts on the Critique of the Gotha Programme
I wanted to talk about the Critique of the Gotha Programme because I feel it has relevance to our current situation where the left is in the political wilderness. The Gotha Programme’s aims, in the eyes of Marx, were to sand down the edges of the socialist movement such that it would not seem so…
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What Is Religion
In this bias I am going to lay out my general approach to religion and parareligion (or “secular religion”), mostly as a base to build off of in future articles. I want to establish a general framework that can be used to analyze religions and similar philosophical structures in a comparative way. I’ve always been…
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Whipping Ourselves and Weeping
This broad tendency among the Western left, from the end of the French Revolution to the present day, is fueled by an impulse towards self-flagellation. The question then is: why does the left feel the need to lash itself in penance? This is not a thorough study but I have been thinking about this for…
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What Is Capitalism?
What is the point of all this? The point is to be able to come to some sort of understanding of what capitalism means so we can understand the political implications and effects it has. We tend to be presented with capitalism as only partly political because it is so strongly associated with money. Because…
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French Propaganda Technique, or Why I Bounced Off of Jacques Ellul
These works of Ellul are thought-provoking but they are not works of first-rate philosophy. Ellul’s analysis in them is too limited. His observations can be made more useful but they will need someone who can go through his works line by line and elaborate the points that he touches on. As an account of these…
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What Is Divine Kingship?
It’s obvious that this includes two historical concepts — the divine right of kings in Europe and the mandate of heaven in China (and nearby regions) — but what else does it include and what does it not include? I live in the United States of America, a country whose population is officially about 70%…
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Technology of Authority
This is the theory of a theory, a pre-theory. Capitalism is not simply an economic system or mode of production, it is a method of establishing domination: a technology of authority. It is the more or less direct successor of divine kingship. When the European revolutions of the 19th century had destroyed divine kingship, at…
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Traffic, Flow, Code, and Boundary
Flow and code are not complete. When thinking about language, it’s easy to see code as just being a way to understand flow and to make it understood. However, this construction is missing one element: the interpreter or, in another sense, the destination. In the case of language, the presence of the interpreter is assumed.…
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Palestine, Resistance, and Ressentiment
When trying to make sense of the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, few among the supporters of Israel concede that Hamas had anything in mind but trying to kill Jews. The goals of the Palestinian people are always attributed to a hatred of Jews. Why is this?