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DESPITE THE CREATION OF AN AUTOCRATIC and anti-Semitic regime after the Khomeneiite revolution of 1979, the European Community and later the European Union continued to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran; and even with new, insufficient sanctions in place, trade with Iran continues until today. It is the capitalist state’s primary task to allow the further realization of capital, but there is a certain sense in which politics surpasses this function. [Read More]

[Cromwell and the English people] borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte T. J. CLARK, IN “FOR A LEFT WITH NO FUTURE,” compares the “immobilized” state of the present-day Left with the impasse of Enlightenment radicals in the years between the Restoration of 1815 and the Revolutions of 1848. [Read More]

THE INTERVIEW WITH DOMENICO LOSURDO in Platypus Review 46, which coincided with translation into English of his book Liberalism: A Counter-History, seems to be part of a broader attempt to raise the estimation of him as theoretician of the Left.1 His role as a new standard-bearer for the Left, however, does not especially interest me. I am interested in the central claims of Liberalism that the interviewers should have – but failed – to challenge him on. [Read More]