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Review of Haymarket’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition for The Bias magazine.

“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.

Nature has a specific history. This is a history in which organic life, inclusive of humanity, acts on and changes the world, at the same time as the world acts on and changes organic life.

Shelving books is, in fact, a dialectical art. Against the rigid, metaphysical hierarchies of the Dewey Decimal System, the dialectical approach begins not with stale Platonic categories (“Philosophy,” “Art,” “Religion”) but with the understanding of the varied internal relations among books.

Walter Rodney’s rejection of rigid models of historical interpretation and “necessary” trajectories of socialist development transcends Cold War limitations. Instead, his authentic use of Marxist historical materialism impels him to begin, per Lenin, with the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”