Alien Politics retrieves from the writings of Marx an original theory of the state which remains viable and relevant today. Paul Thomas traces the process by which Marx's theory of the state as the instrument of the capitalist ruling class became transformed into communist dogma under the auspices of Lenin and other "official" Marxist stalwarts. He argues that Marx's writings still have something to teach us and should not be pulled down with the monoliths and mausoleums of communism. (...) The book continues the work of "Western Marxist" thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas who came to understand the modern state in terms different from the rightly-discredited "ruling class" theory of the state associated with Leninism. Such Western Marxist theorists--more careful and nuanced readers of Marx than their powerfully-placed antagonists--helped formulate a theory of what Thomas calls "alien politics." The theory of alien politics, originally elaborated by Marx in his early critiques of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, diverges from ruling class state theory because it counterposes the state against civil society rather than treating it as an epiphenomenon of civil society. Unlike ruling class theory, alien politics retains considerable relevance as a critique of state forms that still exist in the West as well as those that have collapsed in the East. This topical and groundbreaking book re-interprets Marx and demonstrates how his ideas remain critical for political theorists, social scientists and anyone interested in the modern state. (shrink)

_Mini-set E: Radical Politics/The Socialist Tradition_ re-issues works by H B Acton, George Brenkert, Tom Campbell, Antony Cutler, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, Athar Hussain, Amlan Datta, J Jupp, Dennis Kavanagh, Norman MacKenzie, Patricia Pugh and Paul Thomas among others which discuss the history of socialism and the marxist and anarchist traditions.

Karl Marx and the Anarchists examines Marx's disputes with the anarchist theoreticians he encountered at various stages of his career as a revolutionist. Marx's attacks on Stirner, Proudhon, and Bakunin are shown to be of vital importance to the understanding not only of the subsequent enmity between Marxists and anarchists, but also of Marx's own interpretation of revolutionary politics.

Author of "German Ideology" in the "Shengmaikesi" section and the "sole and their property" for the text to support, through Marx, Stirner, Feuerbach detailed study of the relationship between the three ideas that : First, it is Stirner on Feuerbach's materialist critique of this school, so that Marx realized that Feuerbach's doctrine of the danger, that is necessary to refute Marx's Feuerbach's humanism , but also to prevent its fall into Stirner's radical individualism; Second, it is Stirner's critique of Feuerbach (...) Marx forced to change their philosophical position, and finally turned to Marx also criticized Feuerbach criticized Stirner himself. (shrink)

Educators are central to the implementation of Britain’s Prevent Strategy, through the ‘Prevent duty’. This mandatory reporting responsibility, shared with professional practitioners in health and welfare, requires educators to spot and refer individual students potentially ‘vulnerable to’ or ‘at risk’ of radicalisation. The Prevent duty explicitly instructs educators and educational institutions to understand this responsibility as ‘safeguarding’ and to operationalise it through existing safeguarding paradigms and mechanisms, an approach mirrored by other Western countries. This framing of terrorism prevention as ‘safeguarding’ (...) within education, health and welfare has come under strong criticism from scholars who see it both as a perversion and as a securitisation of ‘traditional’ safeguarding. There has been too little consideration of what ‘safeguarding’ represents within modern education and how coherently, therefore, terrorism prevention approaches such as the Prevent duty fit. The article contributes to addressing this deficit, arguing that safeguarding within modern education is a form of anticipatory security, an approach of ‘new public management’, which sees anticipating and preventing risk to students as a core responsibility for all professionals. In this way, the article argues that counter-terrorism prevention responsibilities for educators, such as Britain’s Prevent duty, are entirely consistent with broader, pre-existing safeguarding paradigms within education. (shrink)

In late August 2012, artist Paul Thomas and philosopher Timothy Morton took a stroll up and down King Street in Newtown, Sydney. They took photographs. If you walk too slowly down the street, you find yourself caught in the honey of aesthetic zones emitted by thousands and thousands of beings. If you want to get from A to B, you had better hurry up. Is there any space between anything? Do we not, when we look for such a (...) space, encounter a plenitude of other things —a slice of plaster, an old vinyl record, a flattened piece of aluminum, painted metal surfaces, nameless interstitial powder, the reflection of sky, some letters of the alphabet, roughened concrete. Between what we take to be things there exist other things, as if the universe were jammed with entities like clowns in a crowded Expressionist painting. An abyss of things that emanates from them, not a yawning void that threatens to engulf them, but a sunlit nothingness filled with dust that seems to spray out of them like dry mist sparkling with firefly swarms. In these so-called spaces, we encounter the work of causality. Look: someone painted over this crack, some sunlight rippled in a mirage, a hole appeared. When we look for causes and effects, we don't encounter a basement of efficiently whirring machinery. Rather, we encounter these in-between spaces, where we had not thought to look. What we see are stage hands moving the scenery about—they are doing it in plain sight, the best place to hide, right in front of you, in the place we call the aesthetic dimension . In Tibetan Buddhism these spaces are called bardo , which just means the between. There is no such thing as a moment of your life that is not a between, according to this view. There is the between of living. There is the between of dying. There is the between of the transition between lives. There is the between of dreaming. There is the between of meditation. There is the between of two humans holding cameras walking down a street in Sydney. The between of two buildings, a space bursting with objects as if a billion jack in the boxes had exploded at once. Some of the lids are stuck, sometimes a nose bursts out and the hinge won't open any further; at other times, the jack in the box flies right out and pulps against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Time opens up. Each surface is a poem about the past. A myriad stories begin to proliferate, as if a thing were a crisscrossing of books, a whole library of them, each page whispering parts of paragraphs and broken pieces of word. The stories tell us things—they are quite literal, look, this guy painted part of this wall, then they came and stripped off the panel and touched up the holes. Form is the past. When you look at appearance, you are looking at the past. Where is the present? And essence is the future. The hints of unknown, unseen things, the absolute impossibility of grasping everything about this plastic pipe, the way photons entering the camera lens obey a speed limit and splash onto receptors, going into and out of coherence. At the electronic level, it's quite clear that causality is aesthetic. I can't see an electron without deflecting it. Everything is a refrigerator with a light on—or off—inside. For me, for you, for this arrangement of tiles sandwiched between a door and a slab of marble. To a photon, an electron is a refrigerator with a closed door, and a light that might be on—or off—inside. How can you know whether the light is on inside? Why, you open the door of course. But then you are looking at the past. You never see the light in the refrigerator before you open the door. This future is not a predictable future that is a specific number of now-points away. You will never reach it. You will never be able to sneak up from the side and see through the refrigerator. Nor can a photon see through the refrigerator of an electron. Nor can paint see through the refrigerator of this plastic pipe. You take a photo—click—the past appears, another open refrigerator. But the thing you have just made, the photograph, the graphing of the photons—it is another thing, another story. You can read the words, but the meaning always eludes you. It always lurks just off the edge of the sentence, just at the very edge of this ragged slice of paint, just at the edge of this building, between this one and that one. Thousands of secrets, everywhere. Masks that lie and tell the truth at the same time: this pink paint is not blue paint, that's true. But the thing, the thing in itself, that paint sliding off a brush onto that pipe—it is nowhere to be seen, like a light behind a closed door. When you walk too slowly down the street, you start walking into millions of levels of pastness, levels emitted not just by the humans or the dogs and cats, but also by this garbage can, this mottled pink surface pockmarked with nail holes. You walk surrounded by as many futures as there are things. You walk, or rather you occupy a peculiar shifting ground of nowness, created by the relative motion of the past sliding against the future, not touching. You begin to realize that the present does not exist. A thing is a train station where one train is always arriving and one train is always leaving. Hundreds of train stations everywhere, hundreds of relative motions. The idea of a universal, regular, atomic sequence of instants that contains everything is absolutely ludicrous, the philosophers have known this for thousands of years, and to hide the absurdity, to get from A to B, Houston to Sydney, crossing the International Date Line without too much laughter, you have embedded piezoelectric devices in as many pieces of hardware as possible, devices in which quartz talks to electrons, making train stations where the trains seem to run on time. When you walk too slowly down the street, you begin to realize that Zeno had a point. You can seemingly divide each moment, each step, infinitesimally. So perhaps there are no moments, no steps. Or perhaps time is not a box that everything goes in. Perhaps time is, as Einstein argued after all, a way that things send out ripples. Where one house touches another house, there arise hundreds of things, hundreds of meeting places (Old English thing , meeting place). Hundreds of times. I have a thing for you. Come over here, let's do a thing. Stay in the sunlight and shadow between worlds, in the sunlit canyon between this building and that building. See how paint touches this pipe, caressing then leaving, no one will notice if a surface is left exposed, not quite filled in. See how shadows are reflected in pale cream glass—see the luminous abyss of causality spreading out before your very eyes, right in front of security. All kinds of beautiful crimes are committed right here, and as American cars keep telling you, and you never notice, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. They are here, or rather, here is them, and now is them. Kissing in the shadow. Tim Morton Rice University. (shrink)

Darwin's understanding of evolution as involving his original concept of natural selection involves discussions of development, progress, human pride, the construct o `primitivism,' and slavery. These discussions have to a remarkable extent been ignored by political theorists. This omission is all the more surprising in that these same discussions also call to mind Rousseau's often misunderstood concept of perfectibility.

Author of "German Ideology" in the "Shengmaikesi" section and the "sole and their property" for the text to support, through Marx, Stirner, Feuerbach detailed study of the relationship between the three ideas that : First, it is Stirner on Feuerbach's materialist critique of this school, so that Marx realized that Feuerbach's doctrine of the danger, that is necessary to refute Marx's Feuerbach's humanism, but also to prevent its fall into Stirner's radical individualism; Second, it is Stirner's critique of Feuerbach Marx (...) forced to change their philosophical position, and finally turned to Marx also criticized Feuerbach criticized Stirner himself. (shrink)

MARX AS POLITICIAN by David Felix Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 308pp., $27.50.

The Nanoessence project aims to examine life at a sub-cellular level, re-examining space and scale within the human context. A single HaCat skin cell is analysed with an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) to explore comparisons between, life and death at a nano level. The humanistic discourse concerning life is now being challenged by nanotechnological research that brings into question the concepts of what constitutes living. The Nanoessence project research is based on data gathered as part of a residency at SymbioticA, (...) Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, University of Western Australia and the Nanochemistry Research Institute, (NRI) Curtin University of Technology. The space of the body can be seen at an atomic level as having no defining boundaries. More generally, molecular self-assembly seeks to use concepts of supramolecular chemistry, and molecular recognition in particular, to cause single-molecule components to automatically arrange themselves into some useful conformation (reference Wikipedia). Nano assembly, or bottom-up approach, is the construction of a supramolecular chemistry by the assembly of nanoscopic particles, or even atoms and molecules. The proposal for nanotechnology to reshape nature atom by atom develops an interesting debate as to the constitution of life. The Nanoessence project aims to construct a physical experience to examine this scientific and metaphysical world. Nanoessence is an interactive audio-visual installation. In the Nanoessence installation the viewer will interface with the visual and sonic presentation through his or her own breath. In the context of the project breath has a strong conceptual and metaphorical link to a Biblical inception of life. The project attempts to maintain a high quality of authentic data to engage the viewer in a sensorial qualitative experience of quantitative data. (shrink)

I have in this paper used Rousseau's advocacy of popular festivals, and through this his no less influential appeal to Antiquity, as ways of connecting his thought with important aspects of the French Revolution, aspects which Rousseau can be seen to have inspired. To connect Rousseau with the Revolution is in no way to make of him a proponent avant la lettre of what J.L. Talmon called ‘totalitarian democracy’. This unfortunately influential concept is in my opinion an oxymoron of dubious (...) applicability even to our own, sad century -- and of no application at all to a century in which the word ‘totalitarian’ had no meaning and, indeed, did not exist. As to democracy, I am content to regard Rousseau's fervent advocacy of radical, participatory democracy as being as unalloyed as any political argument can be. (shrink)

Fragt man heute Vertreter verschiedener Disziplinen nach der Bedeutung des Hannoveraner Universalgelehrten Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, so hort man jeweils immer wieder: Leibniz hat Bedeutendes fur unser Fach geleistet. Leibniz beeindruckt nicht nur durch die Exzellenz seiner Leistung, sondern auch durch die Breite seiner Betatigungsfelder. Der aus einer Ringvorlesung an der Leibniz Universitat Hannover hervorgegangene Band fuhrt nun an die Vielfalt der von Leibniz ausgehenden der Leistungen und Anregungen heran. Insbesondere behandeln die Beitrage die Bedeutung von Leibniz fur die Geschichtswissenschaft, die (...) Theologie, die Philosophie, die Rechtswissenschaft und Juristerei, die Politikberatung, das Versicherungswesen, die Mathematik, die Ingenieurwissenschaften und die Sprachwissenschaft. Abgerundet wird der Band durch eine Einfuhrung von Werner Eisner und eine biographische Skizze aus der Feder von Eike Christian Hirsch. (shrink)

Contemporary moral philosophers have produced an enormous amount of rich and varied published work on virtually all the issues falling within the scope of ethics and moral philosophy. Morality and the Good Life is a comprehensive survey of contemporary ethical theory that collects thirty-four selections on morality and the theory of value. Emphasizing value theory, metaethics, and normative ethics, it is non-technical and accessible to a wide range of readers. Selections are organized under six main topics: Concepts of Goodness What (...) Things are Good? Virtues and Ethics Realism vs. Anti-Realism Value and Obligation The Value and Meaning of Life The text includes both a substantial general introduction featuring explanatory summaries of all the selections and an extensive topical bibliography, which enhance the volume's research and pedagogical utility. The most up-to-date and wide-ranging survey of its kind, Morality and the Good Life is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in contemporary ethical theory, moral philosophy, and theory of value. (shrink)

The social exchange theory of reasoning, which is championed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, falls under the general rubric “evolutionary psychology” and asserts that human reasoning is governed by content-dependent, domain-specific, evolutionarily-derived algorithms. According to Cosmides and Tooby, the presumptive existence of what they call “cheater-detection” algorithms disconfirms the claim that we reason via general-purpose mechanisms or via inductively acquired principles. We contend that the Cosmides/Tooby arguments in favor of domain-specific algorithms or evolutionarily-derived mechanisms fail and that the notion (...) of a social exchange rule, which is central to their theory, is not correctly characterized. As a consequence, whether or not their conclusion is true cannot be established on the basis of the arguments they have presented. (shrink)

While Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics does not provide a guide for action in the form of rules for a decision process as deontological or consequentialistethical theories purport to do, he does present a description of the virtuous agent and the virtues that this agent exercises in his choices of action. In this paper Iargue that Aristotle’s mature virtuous agent characteristically exercises the virtue of wisdom (sophia) as well as the practical virtues of character and intelligence in his choices of (...) action and that students of virtue (those sincerely interested in becoming virtuous by acting as the virtuous agent does) can derive certain action-guiding rules from a description of these three virtues and how they are exercised by the mature virtuous agent in any given choice of action. (shrink)

Algorithms are powerful because we invest in them the power to do things. With such promise, they can transform the ordinary, say snapshots along a robotic vacuum cleaner’s route, into something much more, such as a clean home. Echoing David Graeber’s revision of fetishism, we argue that this easy slip from technical capabilities to broader claims betrays not the “magic” of algorithms but rather the dynamics of their exchange. Fetishes are not indicators of false thinking, but social contracts in material (...) form. They mediate emerging distributions of power often too nascent, too slippery or too disconcerting to directly acknowledge. Drawing primarily on 2016 ethnographic research with computer vision professionals, we show how faith in what algorithms can do shapes the social encounters and exchanges of their production. By analyzing algorithms through the lens of fetishism, we can see the social and economic investment in some people’s labor over others. We also see everyday opportunities for social creativity and change. We conclude that what is problematic about algorithms is not their fetishization but instead their stabilization into full-fledged gods and demons – the more deserving objects of critique. (shrink)