by Jeff Noonan
While there is still absolute deprivation of basic needs, this crime is not caused by lack of productive capacity, but inequality in the appropriation of natural resources and social wealth. Continue reading Freedom and de-alienated labour
by Jeff Noonan
Sharing is an unambiguous good only when it stems from caring, and what is shared is life-valuable, i.e., it meets a real need. Continue reading The sharing economy: an alternative to capitalist exploitation?
by Jeff Noonan
The person who loves to think is critically minded. That person is not an undisciplined skeptic, but one who can detect contradictions between principle and practice, and between principles and the values to which they purportedly lead as means. Continue reading Taking notes 58: For the love of thinking: eleven theses
by Jeff Noonan
With new technologies, younger generations are shaped in their sense of self by the changed work and social relationships of on-line environments, so nineteenth and twentieth century forms of working class consciousness and struggle seem impossible to revive. Continue reading Capitalism, socialism, and everyday life in the twenty-first century
by Jeff Noonan
At the basis of all concrete identities: “Muslim,” “Sunni,” “French citizen,” etc., lies a core human being, a capacity for self-making within the objective contexts of natural and social life. Continue reading Taking notes 52: Philosophy and understanding Paris and the on-going crisis: 10 theses
by Jeff Noonan Interpreted from the perspective of revolutionary politics, the relationship between the local and the global is at once spatial and temporal. Life unfolds in the here and now, but the forces that structure actions in the here … Continue reading The dialectic of the local and the global
by Jeff Noonan Despite six years of global economic crisis and austerity, and despite much talk, even amongst liberal economists, of the threats growing inequality poses to democratic forms of capitalism, there has been little effective political mobilization in favour … Continue reading Preservative struggles in the age of austerity
by Jeff Noonan The basic principle of historical materialism is that all complex socio-cultural systems and institutions are rooted in and ultimately depend upon reproductive and productive labour. Reproductive and productive labour connect human beings to each other and the sustaining natural environment. “The production of life,” Marx wrote in The German Ideology, “both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation… appears as two-fold relation: on the one hand, as a natural, on the other, as a social relation—social in the sense that it denotes the cooperation of several individuals.”[1] The second principle of historical materialism … Continue reading Sociality, solitude, and the struggle for socialism
by Jeff Noonan With unnoticed irony, Roger Cohen, writing in The New York Times on Bastille Day, July 14th, 2013, lamented the weeks of protest in Egypt that culminated in the army’s removal of the government of Mohammed Morsi. Cohen argued that since the street protests overturned the results of a free election, they were undemocratic, even though massively popular. “When is a coup not a coup? It seems when tens of millions of Egyptians support it and choose to portray it as part of a continuing revolution that was betrayed by the ousted President, Mohammed Morsi, of the Muslim … Continue reading The difference Democracy does (and does not) make to peoples’ lives
by Jeff Noonan On May 31st what began months before as opposition to the cutting down of trees in Taksim Square in Istanbul exploded into country-wide opposition to the increasingly authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As was the case with the Arab Spring and Occupy, the Turkish youth and workers’ movement caught global commentators unawares. Turkey had been held up as a model of “moderation” amongst “Muslim” countries: tolerant, democratic, capitalist, a NATO member, and a trusted American ally. Suddenly, the social fissures that had opened up the space for revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, for Occupy … Continue reading What does Revolution mean today?
Philosophers for Change 