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.

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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.

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A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality 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 contribution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A historical 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 particular system of production.

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Adapted from https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1960/08/19.htm

I was put onto this article from the reading of the terrific text on the Cuban and Venezuelan healthcare systems and practices by Steven Brouwer: “Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care”

This simple celebration, another among the hundreds of public functions with which the Cuban people daily celebrate their liberty, the progress of all their revolutionary laws, and their advances along the road to complete independence, is of special interest to me.

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A small but very important subsection from Robert Fogelson’s book “Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930”. I would say it speaks for itself.

Many subdividers also employed restrictions to exclude ‘‘undesirable’’ people as well as “undesirable” activities. By far the most common of these provisions were racial covenants. Under a typical covenant, an owner was forbidden to sell or lease the property to a member of any of a number of allegedly undesirable racial, ethnic, or religious groups. He or she was also forbidden to allow a member of these groups, other than chauffeurs, gardeners, or domestic servants, to use or occupy the property. A few subdividers had employed racial covenants in the mid-nineteenth century. In Brookline, for example, one forbade “any negro or native of Ireland” to occupy a dwelling, and in Baltimore another barred the sale or lease of a house to “a negro or person of African or Mongolian [that is, Asian] descent.” But such restrictions were very much the exception before the 1890s. Indeed, not even the most racist subdividers imposed racial covenants. A case in point was Francis G. Newlands, the mining magnate and U.S. senator who laid out Chevy Chase in the early 1890s. Newlands saw the United States as “the home of the white race.” To him, “race tolerance” meant “race amalgamation,” and “race intolerance” meant “race war.” Fusing the racism of the South with the racism of the West, he called for repealing the Fifteenth Amendment, thereby denying African-Americans, “an inferior race,” the right to vote, and restricting immigration to “the white race,” thereby excluding Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians. Despite his outspoken racism, Newlands did not include racial covenants among the minimum cost requirements and other restrictions he imposed on the first subdivisions at Chevy Chase.

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The conclusion to Mauss’s incredible essay on the uses and concepts of gifts.

Moral Conclusions

It is possible to extend these observations to our own societies. A considerable part of our morality and our lives themselves are still permeated with this same atmosphere of the gift, where obligation and liberty intermingle. Fortunately, everything is still not wholly categorized in terms of buying and selling. Things still have sentimental as well as venal value, assuming values merely of this kind exist. We possess more than a tradesman morality. There still remain people and classes that keep to the morality of former times, and we almost all observe it, at least at certain times of the year or on certain occasions.

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Cross posted from Nonsite.org.

Passages between brackets are drawn from the manuscript version of the essay and differ slightly from the published variant.

Published July 7, 1970

We on the democratic left are living through a real crisis. And precisely because I believe the Socialist Party has a very vital role to play in this period, I would like to say something about the problems we confront.

One aspect is that many people on the [so-called democratic] left today substitute psychology for politics. Now, I have no objection to a lifestyle, or how you wear your hair, or whether you eat pig’s feet[, or whether you want to dress so one cannot distinguish between male and female except upon very close inspection]. But to substitute this “how I feel, what my thing is,” for politics, is an extremely dangerous attitude which the Socialist movement must fight. In fact, the Socialist movement is one of the few movements which has the credentials for fighting it.

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This brief writing belongs to the Introduction to Boris Kagarlitsky’s book “Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed”. The work is both a valuable reflection of, and look into, the tumultuous years following the dissolution of the USSR.

‘You can’t hammer in a bolt.’ This was among the slogans used by the pro-government political bloc Russia’s Choice in its campaign for the parliamentary elections of December 1993. Spokespeople for the bloc explained to voters: it’s pointless to dream of a just society, so you have to reconcile yourself to the new order. The slogan turned out to be unintentionally ironic. The attempts by Yelstin, Gaidar and the other Russian ‘reformers’ to construct liberal capitalism in a country where there is neither a normal bourgeoise, nor a market infrastructure, were a case of ‘hammering a bolt’.

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This is a chapter out of Graham Harrison’s Book “Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering”. Although the book is more of an essay containing fragmentary thoughts, I found this chapter substantial in the sense that it clearly outlined the various institutional avenues in which projects such as neoliberalism cement their ideology.

This chapter considers the global emergence of neoliberalism. It looks at the ways in which neoliberal practice has emerged, expanded and established for itself ‘paradigmatic’ status. In other words, it shows how neoliberalism has shifted from an ambitious and embryonic set of policy interventions to something resembling a framework or set of premisses within which policy is articulated. The practices of neoliberalism have been iterated over such time as to shift the habits, conduct and repertoire of development practice tout court. The layering of large numbers of neoliberal policies has not only led to a progressively more totalising implementation of liberalisation; it has also defined the terms upon which policy and development are thought about and articulated per se. This is, of course, not a completed process (in the last chapter we developed a framework which is anathema to the idea of completed processes, preferring instead a series of practices in place of means–ends distinctions), but it has enabled neoliberal ideas to aspire to ‘meta-development’ status: that is, as the terms upon which development is discussed rather than solely as a predominant model of development. At the level of ideas, this shift or tendency is rather like the analysis of Hay in which neoliberalism moves from normalising to normative (Hay 2004).

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Due to the prolific number of footnotes that Michael’s article contains, the essay will simply be linked to here. It is an important walk through the trajectories that various essentialist concepts have taken in the course of modern Northern American history. What surprised me most was this quasi-progess — where it appears that the concept of race has been disposed of, it’s kernel is carried over into a different, yet sadly, familial form.

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Herein is a speech delivered in August 1934, and published in 1935. It reappeared in Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and others “Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934,” page 25-69, Lawrence & Wishart, 1977, and was transcribed by Jose Braz for the Marxists Internet Archive.

The role of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal into man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated as deeply and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such research would not be in the interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter, who use the energy of the masses as a sort of raw material to be turned into money, could not, of course, enhance the value of this raw material. Ever since remote antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves and slave-owners, they have used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as we today use the mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by the historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of gods, a seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with the mentality of a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century and who occupied himself between whiles with philosophy of a kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics; Böhme preached that “Man should meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the Elements, and on the Creatures which do proceed from them, and likewise on the Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell."

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Written in 1948.

The fact of the crisis has been stated not only by us Marxists. The concept of “crisis” has long taken root in bourgeois philosophy. When, for example, Siegfried Marck, a famous neo-Hegelian, wanted to define Rickert’s place in the development of philosophy, he called him a thinker of the “pre-crisis era.” Indeed, if we carefully trace the development of bourgeois philosophy in recent decades, we will see that literally every two years the foundations of philosophy are again and again called into question. It is no coincidence that this development was initiated by Nietzsche’s program: a reassessment of all values. This continues endlessly in modern philosophy; a year during which a crisis did not break out in some area of philosophy is a year without any events.

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The text here is an extract from Adolph Reed Jr’s 2000 work “Class Notes”. This publication is the founding inspiration for the theme and title of this site here – long live Reed.

This book is built on commentary about current issues and events in american politics over most of the 1990s. As such, it expresses an on-going attempt to make sense of contemporary American political life from a critical perspective. most of the essays published here appeared originally in substantially the same form in my regular columns in the progressive and the village voice, or in similar venues. writing in those venues presents a special challenge—to convey complex, perhaps unconventional ideas clearly and concisely to a general audience. I’ve found this challenge very useful partly because i work out my own views on many issues by writing about them; to that extent, these essays are much less a set of didactic pronouncements than a sustained attempt to think things through, and the obligation to communicate those views effectively to others encourages preciseness and clarity. Having to ask constantly, “what would this formulation mean to someone outside my own head or outside a narrowly specialized community of discourse?” imposes a requirement to bring abstractions down to the ground, to imagine how— if at all— they appear in, explain or bear upon the daily world we inhabit and reproduce. the challenge is more important, though, as a corrective to the flight from concreteness that has increasingly beset left theorizing and social criticism, and as a result political practice, in the u.s. in recent decades.

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