28

All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into. —Samuel Beckett, Molloy IN WALTER BENJAMIN’S MAGNUM OPUS, The Arcades Project, capitalist modernity is in several instances depicted as a “hellish” existence.1 He describes this condition as history continuing to truck along in its course, but only doing so regressively. [Read More]

ON JULY 29, 2010, Vaughn Cartwright and Emmanuel J. Tellez interviewed Noam Chomsky, prolific author and activist, on behalf of The Platypus Review, to discuss the history of the Left and the state of radical politics today. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Vaughn Cartwright: In our society, it behooves intellectuals to avoid radical opposition to capitalism and the state. This was as true in the 1960s when you wrote your famous essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” as it is now. [Read More]

This text was written collaboratively and originally published by the anti-Deutsch group, Initiative Sozialistisches Forum (Socialist Initiative Forum) as “Der Kommunismus und Israel” in the collection Furchtbare Antisemiten, ehrbare Antizionisten. Über Israel und die linksdeutsche Ideologie, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, 2002. Translated and reprinted with permission of the authors. COMMUNISM, ACCORDING TO MARX, is the “riddle of history solved.” The riddle consists in the fact that, with the establishment of the capital-relation, the division of the human race into those who dominate and those being dominated, exploiters and exploited, has been exacerbated to such an extent that, caught between complete reification, on the one hand, and the transition to the “association of free individuals,” on the other, revolution seems imminent even as it recedes ever farther into the distance. [Read More]