Pseudoradicalism

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Action Will Be Taken: Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents
Featherstone, Liza; Henwood, Doug; Parenti, Christian
Article
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 tha...
Against Post-Modernism: A Marxist Critique
Callinocos, Alex
Book
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.
Anti-War Movement's Strange Allies: Hard Line Islamists: Canada's progressive Muslims wonder why left would embrace theocrats
Glavin, Terry
Article
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 p...
Clinton Manipulates Language of Intersectionality to Preserve Support from Minority Voters
Chibber, Vivek; Kalek, Rania; Gosztola, Kevin
Article
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 ...
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
Hughes, Robert
Book
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 unpleasan...
The Fire This Time: Burning Bridges
D'Arcy, Steve; Canyon, Syrah
Article
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 'd...
Heroes of the Exile
Marx, Karl
Article
1852
Je Suis Charlie? It's a Bit Late
Malik, Kenan
Article
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 the...
The Left and the Jihad
Halliday, Fred
Article
2006
The left was once the principal enemy of radical Islamism. So how did old enemies become new friends?
Liberal Condescension
Diemer, Ulli
Article
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 man...
The limits of anti-racism
Reed, Adolph J.
Article
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 r...
Multiculturalism or World Culture?: On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
Goldner, Loren
Article
1991
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 valu...
Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social: Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
Goldner, Loren
Article
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) pi...
The Postmodern Left and the success of neoliberalism
Jay, Scott
Article
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.
The postmodern left and the success of neoliberalism
Jay, Scott
Article
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 resis...
Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
Kitching, Gavin
Article
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 object...
The Power of Nonsense
Johnson, Alan
Article
2011
Slavoj Žižek's diagnosis of late capitalism is of genuine interest. His remedies, however -- dictatorship and terror -- are a disgrace.
The Professor of Parody
Nussbaum, Martha
Article
2000
It is difficult to come to grips with Judith Butler’s ideas because it is difficult to figure out what they are.
The Rain On Our Parade: A Letter To My Dismal Allies
Solnit, Rebecca
Article
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 w...
Rebels Without a Cause: The Assault on Academic Freedom
Vigo, Julian
Article
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 t...
Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House: Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution
Solnit, Rebecca
Article
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 surp...
Tourists of the Revolution
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus
Article
1973
The Trouble with Theory: The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
Kitching, Gavin
Book
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, ...
Why both sides are wrong in the race debate
Malik, Kenan
Article
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.
Why make a fuss about the murder of a brown-skinned Muslim girl?
Diemer, Ulli
Article
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 'fem...