In my contribution to the book, The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does (edited by Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen, Oxford University Press, 2023.), I offer a critical account of the Effective Altruism movement, arguing that it best understood as a symptom of reification, the process under advanced capitalism by which thought and culture come to resemble the commodity form. (CLICK ON CHAPTER IMAGE, ABOVE, TO DOWNLOAD PDF.)
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Why, after centuries of impassioned moral critique and sound philosophical argument, do human beings continue to mutilate, torment, and kill their fellow sensitive creatures in the tens of billions each year? In this essay (a revised version of which appears in my new book, The Omnivore's Deception), I draw on Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology of anti-Semitism and bad faith to reveal the existentialist dimensions of human domination. Originally published in John Sorenson, ed., Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable (Candian Scholars Press, 2014). (CLICK ON CHAPTER IMAGE, ABOVE, TO DOWNLOAD PDF.) |
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In this essay, I describe the transition in critical theory from truth to "truth," i.e., from truth as critical description of reality to truth as a purely discursive and nominal concept. I argue that poststructuralist theory has weakened the Left's ability to make empirical claims and hence to understand and map the totality of social relations. (CLICK ON CHAPTER IMAGE, ABOVE, TO DOWNLOAD PDF.)
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"It has become common to view mass historical traumas like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust as singularities--in other words, events of such...almost metaphysical significance that they exceed intelligibility. Drawing on Kant's analytic of the sublime, in which the subject, in confronting an awesome or terrifying phenomenon from a position of safety, comes to realize his or her own powers of transcendence and moral superiority, I argue that the holocaust sublime encourages the viewing subject to 'face' overwhelming horrors of the past without having to confront the subject's actual responsibility for the atrocities of the present. By pitting the extraordinary or 'singular' against the banal and everyday, the holocaust sublime thus obscures, rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make genocidal practices inevitable." Published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 68, No.1 (January, 2009). (CLICK ON CHAPTER IMAGE, ABOVE, TO DOWNLOAD PDF.)
Video games are among the most powerful forms of media today. They are also among the most culturally injurious, socializing hundreds of millions of people into forms of aggression, war, and toxic masculinity.
Originally published in WPI Magazine, Fall 2013.
Originally published in WPI Magazine, Fall 2013.
"Why Capitalism Shouldn't Be Saved," in Tikkun Magazine (Volume 24, Number 3, May/June 2009).
"Capitalism is rightly credited with having unleashed enormous forces of productivity and technology. But it has also reduced much of the world to ruin and squalor. After four centuries of triumph as the dominant mode of global development, capitalism has furnished for itself a world in which one out of two human beings lives on $2 per day or less, and more than one in three still lacks access to a toilet. Most children in the world never complete their education, and most will live out their lives without dependable medical care. As the world economic crisis deepens, already deplorable conditions in the Third World will only deteriorate further. Meanwhile, our planet is dying...."
"Capitalism is rightly credited with having unleashed enormous forces of productivity and technology. But it has also reduced much of the world to ruin and squalor. After four centuries of triumph as the dominant mode of global development, capitalism has furnished for itself a world in which one out of two human beings lives on $2 per day or less, and more than one in three still lacks access to a toilet. Most children in the world never complete their education, and most will live out their lives without dependable medical care. As the world economic crisis deepens, already deplorable conditions in the Third World will only deteriorate further. Meanwhile, our planet is dying...."
BOOK REVIEW: "Solidarity Between Beings: Review of Marco Maurizi's Beyond Nature: Animal Liberation, Marxism, and Critical Theory," Society and Animals (2024).
Click on Image at left for PDF.
EXCERPT: "Maurizi, a socialist as well as an animal rights activist, begins Beyond Nature on a personal note, lamenting the mutual suspicion with which Marxists and animal advocates have often viewed one another. Marx and Engels dismissed the animal welfare movements of their time as expressions of cheap bourgeois sentimentalism, and their dismissive view is still widely shared by socialists and leftists today. Many contemporary vegans, meanwhile, have embraced the free market as a solution to the problems of the animal economy, hoping that consumers can be weaned off animal products through new plant-based and cellular meat alternatives – with the help of “enlightened” venture capitalists. Notwithstanding these tensions between the two traditions, Maurizi sets out to reconcile them, arguing that neither animal liberation nor socialist praxis can succeed without the other."
Click on Image at left for PDF.
EXCERPT: "Maurizi, a socialist as well as an animal rights activist, begins Beyond Nature on a personal note, lamenting the mutual suspicion with which Marxists and animal advocates have often viewed one another. Marx and Engels dismissed the animal welfare movements of their time as expressions of cheap bourgeois sentimentalism, and their dismissive view is still widely shared by socialists and leftists today. Many contemporary vegans, meanwhile, have embraced the free market as a solution to the problems of the animal economy, hoping that consumers can be weaned off animal products through new plant-based and cellular meat alternatives – with the help of “enlightened” venture capitalists. Notwithstanding these tensions between the two traditions, Maurizi sets out to reconcile them, arguing that neither animal liberation nor socialist praxis can succeed without the other."
"Blood and Soil: Notes on Lierre Keith, Locavores, and Death Fetishism," in Upping the Anti (AK Press), Issue 12, Aug. 16, 2017. In this essay, I review and deconstruct Lierre Keith's book The Vegetarian Myth, a defense of raising and killing animals for food. (I later revised and expanded on this article for Z Magazine--available here.) Derrick Jensen criticized me in a later issue of the journal. I then responded to Jensen here.