Posts

As tempting as it is to fantasize on what could have been, the historian’s task, Hobsbawm quips, is to analyze what was. And so despite his sympathies and disappointments, Hobsbawm does what no ideological historian can do, but which only the best Marxist thinkers are capable of.

In 1966, the Tricontinental Conference convened in Havana, Cuba, bringing together over 500 delegates from 82 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the banner of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist solidarity and national self-determination.

Max Weber famously argued for an “elective affinity” between a Calvinist work ethic and the economic requirements of industrial capitalism. In its insistence on secularized vocation and deferment of worldly pleasure, according to Weber, the Protestant work ethic gave religious sanction to certain kinds of economic activity, namely, the reinvestment of wealth as capital to build society’s productive forces.

Christianity retains the impetus to anti‐fetishism, provided it unites with the Marxist science of critical perception.

The music brings out this sense of inexorableness that the text signals with words like bestimmen (designate, determine, appoint) and the clipped, forceful, almost untranslatable Not (destitution, misery, dire need).