Clear Articles

I look at that Dad and his son walking to their car and I’m thinking maybe I’d like to paint them, and also ‘One blood demands one Reich.’” (Actually, more like a sentence that Bret Easton Ellis — stop having opinions, Bret and go back to writing novels! My question here is first about the

Continue reading Is Life Worth Living?

This is that they sentimentalize informal human relations. Some may instead consider that a better purpose for society would be to restore capitalism, so that society’s surplus product might be privately disposed over in the form of personal riches or used to glorify one or another of the religions that Hägglund rejects. Hägglund concedes the

Continue reading Free Time and Paid Work

He doesn’t distinguish between better and worse ways of spending one’s free time, at least not as explicitly as the structure of his argument calls for. But other commitments — to my partner, for example, or to literature, seem different. And the means he uses to avoid it are the same venerable means used by

Continue reading Socialist Freedom and Capitalist Freedom

And this has consequences for how we think about socialist politics, consequences to which I will now turn. Neoliberals often act as if coordination can and should crowd out all collective action. (1) Is Marx’s commitment to “the free development of individualities” identical with his commitment to individual freedom? So what is going on here?

Continue reading Free Time and Free People

JULY 15, 2020 To find LARB’s symposium on Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, click here. Rather than finding a hidden truth to these processes, Hägglund inserts a different notion of value altogether, the finite lifetime of the individual. Rather than advocate revolution and pursue the corresponding lines of analysis and organization, however, Hägglund supports

Continue reading Socialism for Liberals

We will get up in the morning not because we are forced to labor to survive but because we can see that our work is meaningful and of vital importance to others. Under capitalism we learn to work in terms of “How can I survive?” or “How can I get rich?” whereas under democratic socialism

Continue reading What Is Democratic Socialism? Part I: Reclaiming Freedom

Lowering the relative value of wages and sustaining a rate of profit depends on a surplus population of the unemployed who are willing to work for less, either domestically or in poorer countries to which production is moved. No matter how benevolent my intentions may be, all the resources I devote to my employees count

Continue reading What Is Democratic Socialism? Part II: The Immanent Critique of Capitalism

To sustain our form of life we must prioritize doing what is profitable, even at the expense of doing what we know needs to be done. Thus, Roberts is right to point out that my vision of democratic socialism requires “an ethical transformation” of who we are, but the argument is not “moralistic” (as he

Continue reading What Is Democratic Socialism? Part III: Life After Capitalism

In the early drafts I found myself trying too hard to be like, “This part of Santa Fe’s amazing, so let’s get the characters there.” Or, “What if they went to Bandelier National Monument, or the cliff dwellings outside of town? Way back. I spent a lot of time there growing up, but it was always

Continue reading The Good and the Bad, the Honest and the Dishonest: A Conversation with Richard Z. Santos

We also talked about Waffle House hash browns, and who would win driving head to head down a lone stretch of asphalt. I am a big believer that humans are not naturally just violent creatures. Where I’m from, there is no corner store. Red Hill is a dying town bleeding people. Red Hill is like

Continue reading True Southern Heritage: An Interview with S. A. Cosby

It could not be otherwise. A monkey man? And no, I didn’t keep a journal. In other words, one can argue that your love of and life with Patricia have now been immortalized. Is there an afterlife?” That theme of wondering what comes next has appeared often in his writings, but there was an urgency

Continue reading Two Questions for Rudolfo Anaya

And it’s not that Christ was resurrected — Osiris returned from the dead, too. Even more than in the realm of mythology, Mithraism was crucially different in how it was experienced by worshipers. Mithraism, for all of the anxiety it inculcated among the Church Fathers, had some notable differences. Initiates marked their entrance into the

Continue reading What Was Christendom?

It took days for the bodies to be pulled from the rubble and identified, among them students, undocumented immigrants, a painter, and a mother of six. I can’t hear it without thinking of the expression “faire son deuil” — literally, to do one’s mourning — which strikes me as rather callous. One can’t help thinking

Continue reading Letter from Marseille

She likes the film because it’s “so cautious, so small,” and because every scene seems to occur “in a railway station, a drawing room, a cinema, a tearoom, as though all of England were nothing more than cramped spaces where middle-class lovers could gaze at one another in anguish.” The narrator, who goes unnamed throughout

Continue reading Cringe and Catastrophe: Madeleine Watts’s Climate Fiction

Kore-eda discusses complicated family dynamics, the relationship between art and truth-telling and what brought him to France. This is the first time the French novel has been translated into English. In our second interview, Kate and Medaya are joined by scholar and translator Joyce Zonana, who discusses her translation of Henri Bosco’s 1946 novel Malicroix.

Continue reading French Connections: Hirokazu Kore-eda on The Truth; Joyce Zonana on Henri Bosco’s Malicroix