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The only solution to the drugs problem is to make drugs a universal medium of exchange, the new general equivalent. That way, they would no longer be consumed. Shifting from use-value to exchange-value, they would become as abstract as gold or paper. You could store several thousand tons of drugs a…

After the best book, the most beautiful woman, or the finest desert you've ever seen, you tell yourself this is where the rest of your life begins.

In fact, something else happens: another book, another woman, another desert. And the rest of your life becomes life itself. It was merely the illus…

There is a profound problem with much of the literature on Benjamin, and on Central European culture as a whole. The young men and women who came of age in that culture - from the Age of Goethe way up to the 1930s - grew up on German romanticism, with its cosmic nostalgia, its soulful, heavy-laden…

[...] Capitalists are rewarded for their inner passivity and lack of integration; but it is urgent to see the human costs of this system, even to its ruling class. Lukacs deepens the case against capitalism by showing us how, even in its mansions on the hill, no one is at home.

[...] Something i…

I have been arguing that those of us who are most critical of modern life need modernism most, to show us where we are and where we can begin to change our circumstances and ourselves. In search of a place to begin, I have gone back to one of the first and greatest of modernists, Karl Marx. I have …