Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.
The history of Marxist theory is replete with figures who lament the sectarianism of everyone except themselves. In his new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Gabriel Rockhill stands in this august tradition…
As that opening signals, this book review is McManus at its most exasperated (or, at least, about as as exasperated as he gets in intra-left contexts). I’ll be interviewing him about it on my podcast on Tuesday, so I’ll save my own thoughts for that conversation. For now, I’ll just say that if you’re even slightly interested in the Frankfurt School, “western Marxism,” or the mind-numbing confluence of shoddy scholarship and neo-Stalinism of which Rockhill is perhaps the main current representative (see his attempted takedown of Slavoj Žižek, which I discussed here, for another example), you should give Matt’s review a read.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, check out the two articles I wrote for Jacobin:
Trump’s Goal Is to Suppress Votes, Not Prevent Election Fraud
On Iran, Trump and the American Empire Blinked
On the same subject as that last one (and of interest to Philosophy for the People readers, three of the four participants were philosophy professors and the fourth has written extensively about moral philosophy), see this debate, which was recorded late last week and released this week.
Finally, while I’ve got your attention, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s just over halfway there. Consider chipping in!
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