Constructive Criticism

Per Marx and Engels, every closed social order is doomed to one of two fates: Self-annihilation due to its own internal contradictions.

Crisis is endemic to capitalism, but in fact it is endemic to all organisms (i.e., patterns of matter apparently being driven through time by a logic other than that of matter itself).

On one level, there is no real separation between humanity and the rest of the natural world.

Capital has two core contradictions, or incompatibilities, with the world it exists within: The contradiction with human nature: the class divide which sees some exploited, made to suffer, deprived materially and spiritually of their natural human right to

Stereolab’s song “Ping Pong” does a wonderful job of conveying several important economic concepts, namely the “anarchy of production” which we have under capitalism, and the periodic crises resulting from overaccumulation and imperial conflict.

The following is written as a sort of near future sci-fi short story, to illustrate life in a virtual commune.

This post proposes a new organizational form called a “virtual commune”.

This is just a short note on the idea of “base vs superstructure”.

I threw a leaf in the stream.

Moralism is a certain pattern of thinking (and an accompanying rhetoric) which many comrades use, sometimes unknowingly.

The purpose of this post is to clarify the relationship between the following things Fascism Capitalism Democracy Liberalism Socialism What is fascism Fascism is part of how capitalism defends itself in times of extreme crisis.

A nice forest.

I went to try the veggie burrito at Aliberto’s.

I just watched some of the videos of the talks from the “Schelling Point Conference”.

I recently read a blog post analyzing various purported “socially responsible investing” (SRI) products and showing how they were anything but.

There is a nice idea – which I learned from the work of David Harvey (or in podcast form) – of analyzing society in terms of a number of “moments”, or aspects of society at a given moment in time.

This is my (Izzy Meckler’s) blog, about Marxism art poetry math

A lot of socialist rhetoric focuses on framing the capitalist class as the primary enemy of socialists and of the working class.

In a series of blog posts I have written, and probably in more that I will write in the future, I explain my understanding of Marxist ideas in partially mathematical terms.

During the most recent DSA meeting, a comrade argued against expelling Jamaal Bowman by stating that the resolution to expel him was “resolutionary socialism” – that is, that those who proposed it were just doing a lot of huffing and puffing, and not seri…

A lot of people think that Marx saw proletarian revolution as inevitable.

Proponents of the use of NFTs for establishing ownership of creative works have a correct diagnosis but an incorrect prescription.

Recently there was a minor controversy over a blogpost from Coinbase’s CEO discouraging employees from thinking about politics, and encouraging them to focus on profit-making.

A platform for hamburgers.

There’s a famous dubious argument that “proves” the set of $\mathrm{Tree}$ of (planar, rooted) binary trees is in bijection with the set of $7$-tuples of trees $\mathrm{Tree}^6$.

I’ve often heard people say that the interesting part of number theory is the interaction between addition and multiplication, but I only yesterday realized one reason why that is, triggered by convincing myself that $a b = \mathrm{lcm}(a,b)\mathrm{gcd}(a…

The ideas, knowledge, beliefs, laws and regulations, etc. contained in a culture would be the genetic instructions ordering the use of exosomatic energy. – p. 262 This is a good point and a nice way of characterizing the socio-technological layer of the w…

The other day I was sitting in The Coop in Cambridge, reading a book on combinatorial games, and so naturally I started wondering about games played in groups, or on their Cayley graphs at least.

If I say the word “swimming” to you, you’ve got a fair bit of information about what word I’m going to say next.