Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Communism

  • Ernst Bloch on Law and the State

    Substack latest. We humans are hopeful. Ernst Bloch was on to something. But man on his own is without reasonable hope. We are reduced to praying. The above thought occurred to me during the penumbral twilight period betwixt sleeping and waking.

  • Ronald Radosh on David Horowitz: A Critical Appreciation

    On very rare occasions, something surfaces at The Bulwark worth reading. Radosh, who is well worth reading, gives his take on Horowitz's flipping of his ideological script, and takes him to task for his late extremism. But how is this judgment by Radosh not itself extreme: What David is being celebrated for is the opposite…

  • The Fallibility of Memory: Chamberlain, Chambers, Communism

    The other day I was trying to recall the name of the author of Witness and I came up with Houston Chamberlain. The author, of course, is Whittaker Chambers. The confusion was presumably sired by 'Chamber.'  Memory, though infirm, is not wholly unreliable. If it were, I would not have been able to realize my…

  • Kimball on Kolakowski on Marxism as a Bogus Form of Religion

    I have argued time and again that Marxism is not a religion. But many have a burning need so to misunderstand it. What the great Kolakowski says below reinforces me in the correctness of my opinion.  As for Fredric Jameson, whom Roger Kimball discusses in his Guilt of the Intellectuals, I haven't read him and…

  • Trotsky’s (Misplaced) Faith in Man

    On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own. The last days of Lev…

  • Lenin: 100 Years Later

    Here: Academic Marxists of various stripes still appeal to Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet The State and Revolution in an effort to find a more “libertarian” Lenin. But this is at once a chimera and a bad joke. Like Marx himself, but even more intensely and ferociously, Lenin combines a Jacobin defense of terror and tyranny with a…

  • Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases

    Anthony G. Flood: I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had…

  • Herbert Aptheker

    To understand the Left and its depredations, you must study communism. Herbert Aptheker was a major player in the CPUSA. Our friend Tony Flood, once a card-carrying member of the CPUSA, and an assistant to Aptheker, points us to a Wikipedia piece on the man which will provide some background to Aptheker and his work. …

  • Old Commie Update

    Remember Angela Davis? Here she links the 'war on Gaza' with the 'racist lynching of George Floyd.'

  • When Rand Met Oppenheimer

    A Neglected Opportunity

  • Edith Bone (1889-1975)

    A brief Stack post in memory of one whom Communism sucked in and spit out.  In the measure that leftists work to erase the historical record, we must work to preserve it.

  • Stop Concealing Soviet Crimes

    Why no equal time for Soviet crime? An explanation.

  • The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

    Substack leader. In this entry I unpack what I consider to be a brilliant insight of Finkielkraut. Alain Finkielkraut: Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith…

  • The Downward Drift of the Democrat Party

    Substack latest.

  • Like a Moth to the Flame

    Top o' the Stack: A Saturday sermon of sorts on romantic folly.