Max Stirner is mainly remembered as the “nihilist” thinker derided by Karl Marx. But, a newly translated article by German socialist Hermann Duncker argues, Stirner’s philosophy of self-liberation has important lessons for the working-class movement.
We can’t talk about the rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump, reactionary and bizarre conspiracy theories like QAnon, and the increasingly pervasive sense of nihilism across global politics without talking about neoliberalism.
In his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos offers a novel — and profoundly disturbing — conception of value creation: a handful of visionaries are the sole source of all “real value.” This aristocracy mercifully blesses customers, clients, and even Amazon workers with social goods.
Capitalist "liberty" is just another word for private tyranny. Workers, not capitalists, should control economic enterprises.
Critic and philosopher Herbert Read was a contradictory figure — an anarchist and a knight, a lover of medieval art and industrial design — but at the center of his work was the belief that we can all be artists.
For some, searching for a surer moral footing upon which to launch a socialist political program has again raised the specter of Christian ethics.
History shows that when working-class strength threatens the status quo, even moderate conservatives won’t balk at making common cause with fascists.
Richard Linklater’s new film, Hit Man, works thanks to the star power and charm of Glen Powell. You won’t even mind the not-entirely-convincing film noir twist.
I grew up in a suffocatingly conservative environment. Jean-Luc Godard’s films helped show me that my own conception of who I am and what kind of life I could lead could look radically different.
A cocktail of elite arrogance and naivete across the Anglophone world, combined with the support of billionaires like Sam Bankman-Fried, produced effective altruism. The result has been reactionary, often racist intellectual defenses of inequality.
Mark Lilla’s prosecution of radical thinkers in the name of intellectual seriousness can only lead to a flat and lifeless politics.
Walter Benjamin's Marxism owed much to his early engagement with anarchism and surrealism.
If there’s a lesson from Back to the Future Day, it’s that the future can’t save us.
Despite the mass of evidence proving Martin Heidegger’s Nazi commitment, academics often dismiss concerns about his politics as nonphilosophical. Two new books make a compelling case for rejecting this line of argument.
Recently genealogists discovered that Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is a distant relative of Antonio Gramsci. Though they share little else, Meloni has engaged in a campaign for control over cultural institutions that Gramsci would understand well.
In his new book, Slavoj Žižek advances a provocative understanding of Christianity as a progressive, secularizing force. It’s classic Žižek — by turns brilliant and infuriating.
Movies about class and inequality are back in the mainstream. Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger is a powerful interrogation of the injustices of class and caste society.
In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama diagnoses the political and psychological malaise caused by capitalism. His analysis makes one thing clear: liberalism is incapable of addressing the social, economic, and ecological crises it faces.
Zeev Sternhell was a historian of nationalism who demolished the myth of French “immunity” to fascism. His focus on the history of ideas allowed him to trace the genealogy of France’s home-grown far right — yet proved less able to understand the social forces that powered fascist movements across the continent.
