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
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 More than one year after the last encampments were dismantled, no material trace of Occupy remains in the cities where it established itself. In the corporate media–once breathless with speculation as to the movement’s origins and intentions and loud in its declamations of criticism—there is now only silence. A movement which was portrayed as having come from nothing has, seemingly, returned to nothing, having changed nothing. The very social problems it denounced– widening inequality, the tyranny of finance capital, the totalitarian power of the surveillance-security state, the subordination of democracy to money-value: remain or are getting worse. … Continue reading After Occupy
by Jeff Noonan Human beings are integrally natural and social creatures, dependent upon natural life-support systems for their physical existence and socio-cultural life-development systems for the nurturing and realization of their emotional, cognitive, and practical-creative capacities. Societies whose developmental dynamics become alienated from their natural conditions of existence face inevitable doom. Oblivious to the ways in which their reproductive dynamics undermining the physical foundations of social life, they collapse the very basis upon which their institutions and value systems depend. Let us say that any society which unsustainably converts scarce natural resources into tokens of social power (as, for example, … Continue reading The spiritual crisis of capitalist civilization
by Jeff Noonan From its beginnings, philosophy has existed in a state of tension with the given world, the world as it immediately presents itself to human consciousness. There would be no need for philosophy were the truth inscribed on the surface of things, but experience teaches that appearances can be deceiving. Philosophy arises out of reflection upon this experience of a failure of identity between appearances and reality. Beneath its disciplinary divisions, philosophy is the search for a unified method of inquiry, argument, and communication capable of discovering, proving, and disseminating the truth. Philosophy must therefore be, as a … Continue reading Philosophy as critique and ideology
Philosophers for Change 