In The Fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm.An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said, no, I was a teacher.What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. “Oh well,” I heard him say finally, behind me: “I guess I have to take your course to find out.”

I see this as a terrific example of where reasoned and well formed criticism can stand on its own, in spite of the divergent trajectory which the author appears to take later on in his life through his reactionary offshoots.

As with any analytical field of inquiry which aspires to achieving insights, syntheses and increased understandings of the world, Marxism contains a broad array of unique and differeing perspectives, some of which fall far short of the high standard of rigor demanded of a scientific field. Here, Geras addresses several lazy and incongruent arguments put forward by Marxists who are themselves claiming to remedy pitfalls in Marx’s views; a public purging of sorts, these types of obloquy.

Class Letters seeks to be a regularly updated feed of articles, unified by the goal of building a socialist~communist consciousness, itself thereafter seeking a real body politic.

Alongside more clearly defined political and philosophical texts, Class Letters incorporates works from different scientific, and health fields, bound by the commitment that communist work can, and should be scientific. Without a doubt, there is a purposeful goal of educating, and the goals of the autodidact are encouraged – we have a reverence for education and it’s transformative potentials.

In looking to imagine and crystallise potential alternatives to the seemingly unending vortex of underdevelopment and poverty in third and second world nations, an understanding of the deficiencies and insufficiencies of the current macroeconomic arrangement is an obvious starting point. The post-Bretton Woods monetary consensus, which promised to guarantee mutual ‘real growth’ through endless liberalization of domestic markets and fluctuating exchange rates, has in whole been failure for developing countries. Instead, of self-sufficiency and self-confidence, there isn’t even what one one called ‘multi-lateral beneficence’, but rather, a reliance and dependency on the most powerful players in the game, at the mercy of commodities swings and speculative exuberance (rather than being ’liberated’ and domestically sound, buffered from ‘shocks’). One wonders what one would do if they swapped shoes. What shall we do once we take control of these responsibilities?

This is part 2 of the post on Jason Fung’s ‘Cancer Code’. I found this a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions in which the effect on mortality is masked by a surrogate of survival; early detection. When tracked for long enough time, early detection does more harm than good, and thus, fails as a successful surrogate. You can find part one here.

I encourage everyone to read the entirety of Jason’s “The Cancer Code”. It’s a terrific work of ‘popular’ scientific writing, a story as much about the biology of Cancer as it is about the sociology of biomedical practice and research.

This post will be in two parts, both of which I find are illustrative of the difficulties of public health strategies. One makes particularly obvious the severe misanthropic consequences of profit seeking drives in the areas of health and medicine, and the second is a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions which may be completely benevolent in intention – something that all states irrespective of political structure must address. Part one is contained below, you can find part two (here)[]

Original at https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ . Linked to it via Paul Cockshott.

The Question

That said this is a question that is not absurd a priori. As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship. As I’ve mentioned before, the dominant feature of the historical debate among scholars about the shape of the Roman economy is between ‘modernists’ who argue the Roman economy is relatively more like a modern economy (meaning both that it was relatively more prosperous than other ancient economies but also that the Romans themselves maintained a more modern, familiar outlook towards money, investment and production) and ‘primitivsts’ who argue that actually the Roman economy was quite primitive, less prosperous and with the Romans themselves holding attitudes about the economy quite alien to our own. But here we need to get into a bit more specificity because beneath that quick description it is necessary to separate what we might call the ‘old modernists’ and the ‘new modernists.’

Darwin’s Delay

Few events inspire more speculation than long and unexplained pauses in the activities of famous people. Rossini crowned a brilliant operatic career with William Tell and then wrote almost nothing for the next thirty-five years. Dorothy Sayers abandoned Lord Peter Wimsey at the height of his popularity and turned instead to God. Charles Darwin developed a radical theory of evolution in 1838 and published it twenty-one years later only because A. R. Wallace was about to scoop him.

The articles contained in this book were written some ten years ago. Author and reader may well ask why they should be republished just now. At first sight they might seem to lack all topicality. Subject and tone alike may appear remote to a considerable section of public opinion. I believe, however, that they have some topicality in that, without entering upon any detailed polemics, they represent a point of view in opposition to certain literary and philosophical trends still very much to the fore today. Let us begin with the general atmosphere: the clouds of mysticism which once surrounded the phenomena of literature with a poetic colour and warmth and created an intimate and ‘‘interesting’’ atmosphere around them, have been dispersed. Things now face us in a clear, sharp light which to many may seem cold and hard; a light shed on them by the teachings of Marx. Marxism searches for the material roots of each phenomenon, regards them in their historical connections and movement, ascertains the laws of such movement and demonstrates their development from root to flower, and in so doing lifts every phenomenon out of a merely emotional, irrational, mystic fog and brings it to the bright light of understanding.

A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it per- ceives capitalism dialectically, as a social total- ity that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contri- bution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A histori- cal materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a par- ticular system of production.