I am presenting a working paper at the Toronto Christian Left Conference (July 23-24), whose theme is Rethinking the Christian Left from the Belly of Empire: Charting New Paths Beyond Colonization. As an offering to this discussion, I am centering the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 and Latin American liberationist Christianity as a way to think … Continue reading The Tricontinental Conference & Latin American Liberationist Christianity
I am very pleased to share my first article published in an academic journal, "Ideology, Fetishism, Apophaticism: Marxist Criticism and Christianity," which is forthcoming in New Blackfriars and can be read online in full here. (Note: if the token has expired on this link, see below for a draft version.) Publication in this journal is … Continue reading Ideology, Fetishism, Apophaticism: Marxist Criticism and Christianity
"Ruht wohl, ihr heiligen Gebeine" is the magisterial concluding chorus to Bach's Johannes-Passion. Simultaneously comforting and disquieting, part lullaby and part lament, invocation and injunction, it is the perfect encapsulation of Good Friday. As John Eliot Gardiner notes, the stately theme evokes the image of Christ's body being lowered reverentially, even ceremoniously, into the grave. … Continue reading Subversive Bach
I reviewed another new book from Haymarket—Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition—for The Bias magazine. Can't Pay, Won't Pay is a product of the collective theorizing and organizing of the Debt Collective. It's an excellent primer on the history of neoliberalism's weaponization of debt as well as an effective … Continue reading Beyond Jubilee: Debt Abolition
"Cardboard Darwinism," writes biologist Stephen Jay Gould in an essay of the same name, "is a reductionist, one-way theory about the grafting of information from environment upon organism," or what amounts to a form of biological determinism. Gould's critique of this hollowed-out version of Darwin's theory comes in the context of a larger critical appraisal … Continue reading Cardboard Darwinism & Double Transference
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster." Thus reads one of the Hopi prophecies which echo throughout Philip Glass's haunting soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi (1982). As those familiar with Godfrey Reggio's cult film know, the title itself refers to "a state of life that calls for another way of living," a … Continue reading Dialectical Ecology
Moving is never a pleasant experience, which is especially true amidst a pandemic and 100°-plus heat waves in Los Angeles. But it is the occasion for an undertaking which is simultaneously both thrilling and exasperating: sorting and re-shelving books. I've been in the throes of this all-consuming passion for the last week or so as … Continue reading On Sorting Books
The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (Verso, 2018) compiles a series of lectures given by Walter Rodney, the black Guyanese radical, at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. (Jesse Benjamin and Robin D.G. Kelley have done amazing work in editing and presenting these lectures as a book.) Writing from the … Continue reading Two World Views of the Russian Revolution
I had the privilege of reviewing Hadas Thier's new book, A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics (Haymarket), for The Bias magazine. The book is a timely and succinct overview of Marx’s argument in Capital (mostly volumes 1 and 3). Now more than ever, we need not just a robust moral critique … Continue reading Unmasking Mammon
Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World (Pluto Press, 2019). Vijay Prashad's Red Star Over the Third World is an explosive little book that admirably conveys the profound impact of the October Revolution and its continued influence for communist movements in the Third World – with a focus here on Asia, the Middle East, … Continue reading Red Star Over the Third World
