Activity

[...] 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 …

[...] Marx's point in presenting this immense and bizarre chorus is to show capitalism as a maelstrom that sweeps the whole world into its flood, past and present, reality and mythology, East and West: everything and everyone is caught up and whirled in the world market, nothing and no one has the …

[...] The idea implicit in Working, as a kind of subtext, is something like this: the workers know they are being screwed, but they do not revolt, because what they do instead is to use all their brains and all their sensitivity to give their work meaning, to drench it with beauty and excitemen…

There is another striking way in which young Marx worries about sex and conceives it as a symbol of something bigger. When workers are alienated from their own activity in their work, their sexual lives become an obsessive form of compensation. They then try to realize themselves through desperate …