To Have or To Be?  turns fifty in a few days. Written by Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist, it analysed the corrosivity of ‘late capitalism’, an epoch most obviously characterised by consumerism. Consumerism comes with constituent attitudes. It encourages us, for instance, to value assets based on their saleability. Entrenched in our consciousness, via the unconscious, Fromm argued that many of these attitudes altered our understanding of ourselves, our contemporaries

Season's greetings, Karl (and to you, my esteemed reader). There’s just something about self-verifying utopianism that doesn’t quite hit the spot the rest of the year , but it’s Christmas, so let’s cut Marx some seasonal slack. This isn’t solely an assault on the long-since-dead ideologue, but rather a repository of festive feedback, reflecting not only on Marx’s conceptualisation of surplus value and capitalism, but our conceptualisation of Christmas, too. Though undoubtedly

Though I cannot recall quite how, I recently stumbled across a fascinating POLITICO  article by former Harvard lecturer John F. Muller titled “ Halloween Is More Political Than You Think ”. It discusses trick-or-treating in America, focusing specifically on Milwaukee, and the surprising observations Halloween brings to the table in discussions on both racial and class divisions. Muller explores how poor, inner-city ethnic minorities often travel to affluent white suburbs duri

For the Senate Judiciary Committee to work, there must be a gap between the requisite information and the Senate’s ultimate decision. The committee should have a concentrated body of senators to discover information about a candidate to make a just decision. Pam Bondi’s recent hearing  would need to reveal something the Senate did not already know, and that new knowledge would have to play a decisive role in the political judgment.  As expected, this did not occur. Instead, w

The work of Marx has endured in the minds of the scholarly and unscholarly alike since its publication; he is both the authoritative...

Thrust into the international spotlight by his immensely successful book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind , Israeli historian and...