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  1. Action Will Be Taken 
    Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2004
    Marxism's decline isn't just an intellectual concern -- it too has practical effects. If you lack any serious understanding of how capitalism works, then it's easy to delude yourself into thinking that moral appeals to the consciences of CEOs and finance ministers will have some effect. You might think that central banks' habit of provoking recessions when the unemployment rate gets too low is a policy based on a mere misunderstanding. You might think that structural adjustment and imperial war are just bad lifestyle choices.
  2. Against Post-Modernism 
    A Marxist Critique

    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1982
    Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernists leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
  3. Anti-War Movement's Strange Allies: Hard Line Islamists
    Canada's progressive Muslims wonder why left would embrace theocrats

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2006
    Canada's anti-war movement has become not only the primary vehicle for an obscure, formerly left-wing group that attacks anyone who opposes Shariah courts in Canada, it's also now the main source of public respectability for a Toronto think-tank that advocates for the establishment of theocracies that hang gay people.
  4. Clinton Manipulates Language of Intersectionality to Preserve Support from Minority Voters 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    The presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton has been a master class in how to divorce economic issues from issues of race and gender by pushing the language of "intersectionality," which enables the political class to head off threats to their power and protect the status quo.
  5. Culture of Complaint
    The Fraying of America

    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1993
    Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic that we expect nothing else.
  6. The Fire This Time: Burning Bridges
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    Some activists hold back from condemning tactics that are politically stupid and destructive, like the recent Ottawa arson attack by an anarchist group, because of a commitment to the doctrine of a 'diversity of tactics'. However, the original idea behind a diversity of tactics, that is, a variety of approaches to organizing for change, has been appropriated by activists devoted to property destruction as a media spectacle, who feel that they should be exempted from criticism by other activists, no matter how much their tactics serve to undermine the building of a broad-based movement against capitalism.
  7. Heroes of the Exile
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1852   Published: 1960
  8. Je Suis Charlie? It's a Bit Late 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015
    Hardly had news begun filtering out about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, than there were those suggesting that the magazine was a 'racist institution' and that the cartoonists, if not deserving what they got, had nevertheless brought it on themselves through their incessant attacks on Islam. What is really racist is the idea only nice white liberals want to challenge religion or demolish its pretensions or can handle satire and ridicule. Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.
  9. The Left and the Jihad
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2006
    The left was once the principal enemy of radical Islamism. So how did old enemies become new friends?
  10. Liberal Condescension
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election, a debate has erupted on the liberal left about the best way to deal with working class people who voted for Trump. The disagreement, for many of the participants, appears to revolve around whether liberals ought to spend their time giving patronizing lectures about white privilege, or patronizing lectures about other aspects of reality. What people on both sides of the debate seem to share is the assumption that the job of middle-class liberals is to lecture the working class.
  11. The limits of anti-racism 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    The contemporary discourse of 'antiracism' is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality -- whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of 'racism' -- over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither 'overcoming racism' nor 'rejecting whiteness' qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the 'revolution' or urging God's heavenly intervention.
  12. Make Art! Change the World! Starve!
    The Fallacy of Art as Social Justice - Part I

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
  13. Multiculturalism or World Culture? 
    On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1991   Published: 2000
    Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
  14. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social 
    Deconstruction and Deindustrialization

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2001
    We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
  15. The Postmodern Left and the success of neoliberalism 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    The international Left promotes its own image rather than engaging in the bitter reality of resistance against neoliberalism. It does not need to believe in postmodernism because it is postmodernism.
  16. The postmodern left and the success of neoliberalism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    The rise of neoliberalism across the globe for decades, and its continued resilience since the 2007-2008 financial crisis in particular, forces us to ask why there has not been a more successful resistance against it.
  17. Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    A great deal of "theory" in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual landscape filled with curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it. In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
  18. The Power of Nonsense
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    Slavoj Žižek's diagnosis of late capitalism is of genuine interest. His remedies, however -- dictatorship and terror -- are a disgrace.
  19. The Professor of Parody
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2000
    It is difficult to come to grips with Judith Butler’s ideas because it is difficult to figure out what they are.
  20. The Rain On Our Parade 
    A Letter To My Dismal Allies

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we're talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.
  21. Rebels Without a Cause: The Assault on Academic Freedom
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Examining current academic culture which falsely labels "words as violence" and how it is affecting acedemic freedom, notably by some who think of themselves as being on the left, who are employing totalitarian tactics which ultimately cause professional and economic harm.
  22. The Sharia socialists
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2006
  23. Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House 
    Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    Diversity of tactics does not mean that anything goes and that democratic decision-making doesn't apply. If you want to be part of a movement, treat the others with respect; don't spring unwanted surprises on them, particularly surprises that sabotage their own tactics -- and chase away the real diversity of the movement.
  24. Tourists of the Revolution
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1973
  25. The Trouble with Theory
    The Educational Costs of Postmodernism

    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
  26. Why both sides are wrong in the race debate 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms.
  27. Why make a fuss about the murder of a brown-skinned Muslim girl?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    History gives us numerous examples of social movements which come, over time, to adopt positions directly opposed to the principles on which they were founded. It appears this has happened to the 'feminists' who seek to silence those who speak out about violence against Muslim women.

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