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[...] Most likely, the term dialectical image obscures the simpler truth Benjamin was trying to convey. Under capitalism, he thought, we fetishise consumer goods – imagining that they can fulfil our hopes for happiness and realise our dreams. By considering old fetishes for now obsolete products or…

Classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo saw nothing mad in the free-market capitalist economy; rather, they treated prices, profits and rents, the law of supply and demand, as natural phenomena. Marx’s incendiary point was that these were historically specific features of a particular econom…

Thus, from its inception, the Frankfurt School was riddled with paradoxes. Marxist, but not so Marxist that it would declare its philosophy in its name. Marxist, but not so Marxist that it would live up to what Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, words that have been deemed so key to his work th…

[...] The Marxist Jewish intellectual son was once more standing against the capitalistic values by means of which his businessman father had achieved material success. And yet, once more, that son was dependent on daddy’s money in order for him to fulfil his manifest destiny – to castigate the eco…

If Freud had lived and carried on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish milieu which supplied his patients’, wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt, ‘we might never have heard of an Oedipus complex.’ What she meant is that thanks to the father–son tensions unleashed by t…