henryjwallis

Thomas Necchi takes on Burroughs, addiction, and the "Ugly Spirit" that animates his work.

By writing The Peoples’ Era in 2014—a revolutionary theory for a “citizens’ revolution”—Mélenchon performed a Marxist analysis of contemporary capitalism and its crisis. He redefined the notion of “the people”, those for whom revolution is now necessary. He shed light on the objective necessity to break with the capitalist order. This break, this politics of rupture, is perfectly communist. And this is the heart beating in all the work of the France Unbowed: to unite the people around a program of rupture.

For Said, humanism was a worldliness, a recognition (born from and shared with one of his great heroes, Giambattista Vico) that history, as something human beings made, was something they could understand and which they ought to claim responsibility for if they want it to be something else.

Jean Jaurès is not well-known or much-translated in English. The hero of turn-of-the-20th-century French socialism was revered across the international left following his assassination in 1914. This article discusses why he was loved by everyone from social democrats to individualist anarchists, and what can we learn from him today.

Citizen Marx is a new book that studies Marx’s intellectual development in conversation with 19th-century republicanism. I thought it was quite good.