Pieces by Sean Sayers

REVIEWS Post-Industrial Socialism Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (trans. David Fernbach), Heretic Books, f.3.50 pb Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (trans. Michael Sonenscher), Pluto Press, 1:.3.95 pb The ‘debate on the concept of the proletariat’ is, suggests Rudolf Bahro, ‘outdated’; it ‘tends right from the start to be scholastic’. Farewell to the Working […]

Materialism, Realism and the Reflection Theory* Sean Savers I The reflection theory is the traditional theory of knowledge of Marxism. It is this theory which is put forward by Engels and which is developed and defended at length by Lenin in MateriaZism and EmpirioCriticism [1]. The basic principles of this theory are simply stated and […]

Locke also has a principle – we should notice which limits the volume of goods that may be accumulated to that quantity which can be properly used or disposed of. A person ‘offended against the Law of Nature’ if he allowed the things in his possession to spoil or perish ‘without their due use’ (25). […]

as I ~have already said, this seems too banal and obvious. Hopefully not that’ everything is always changing’, since this is false. There is stability within change. We cannot describe change except by talking about ‘things which change’, and to say that a thing is changing is . to imply that within the process of […]

cerned with converting visual sensations into a picture. Drop from ‘picture’ the connotations of ‘picturesque’ and think in terms of visual enquiry and description. Thus, Oezanne’s pictures are as much description and enquiry as mathematical pictures; symbolic logic pictures and pictures in physics – models. Cezanne studied objects and tried to grasp and present the […]

Discussion Ordinary Language Philosophy and Radical Philosophy 1. Sean Savers The Editorial of Radical Philosophy 6 (pl) concerns ordinary language and ordinary language philosophy. It is a vapid and compromising piece of writing on a topic upon which radical philosophers have previously been clear and decisive; and what it says is such an abandonment of […]

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••• mEDTAllllDESS AS A mORAL [OD[EPT ………………………. SEAnSAVERS (, The concept of mental illness has been the subject of heated controversy in recent years; and this debate has caught the attention of a wide public. The reason for this is not simply that the debate has sometimes been conducted in heated terms; but, more importantly, […]

REUIEWS greatest merit… His I”as a call to arms, to hatred: class against class, against a patient and mortal enemy with whom there could be no accommodation. THE WATCHDOGS Sean Savers The Watchdogs, however, is more than a work of mere passion – it is also a theoretical critique of academicism, particularly in philosophy; and […]

noTES A REACTION TO RADICAL PHILOSOPHY J.M.Hinton No one, I believe, can yet say with any confidence to what extent the ‘mere’ attempt to uproot perennial forms of falsehood from our ways of thinking may itself change the world. If only for this reason, it is a mistake to reach the conclusion that contemporary British […]

Now it does seem to me that Norman does trade on this “rationalist” view in his discussion of Tolstoy. For he does say “Andrew’s ‘discovery’ is in each case”‘the acquisition of an enlarged and clearer view of human nature and of man’s relation to the world” (p.9) “The ‘way of seeing the world’ (the “religious […]

2 Commentary Who are my peers? The Research Assessment Exercise in Philosophy Sean sayers British universities have just gone through their third Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The ʻresearch outputʼ (i.e. publications) of every participating department has been graded by panels of ʻexpertsʼ on a seven-point scale. The purpose of this massive operation is to provide […]

41Frantz Fanon would have been seventy in the summer of 1995 and the volumes under review celebrate the anniversary of his birth. Most of the twenty-one contributions to the Critical Reader are papers delivered at the ʻFanon Todayʼ conference held at Purdue University in March 1995; the handsomely produced The Fact of Blackness originates in […]

If the Encyclopédie project of Diderot et al. is remembered today, it is not because it is much consulted, but for the tremendous Enlightenment optimism that made its conception (if not its completion) possible. In historical terms, it is the idea of the Encyclopédie that is most important, not what is contained within the volumes […]

Reviews Whatever happened to analytical Marxism? G.A. Cohen, If Youʼre an Egalitarian, How Come Youʼre So Rich?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. xii + 233 pp., £30.95 hb., 0 674 00152 2. This is a strange and disappointing book. The jokey and populist title is misleading. In fact the book contains the […]

I imagine that for Western Marxists (such as myself) History and Class Consciousness will have meant ideological analysis rather than what Lukács called ʻorganizational problemsʼ. This book will, in other words, have meant a breakthrough in the study of ʻthe antinomies of bourgeois consciousnessʼ (subtitle of one of its most famous chapters) rather than those […]

in Vaneigemʼs expressionist polemic. Here, you suffer jolt after jolt, as intriguing commentaries on particular rights finish, and another right is bannered in capitals across the page (in this, it recalls the experience of Hegelʼs Logic, where the expositions in smaller type – oral improvisations transcribed by his students – are more accessible than the […]

The reception of Adorno in Britain and America has largely focused on Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, late works which accepted the tragedy of an ongoing betrayal of Marxism in the Soviet Union and an ongoing capitalism in the West. Hence those Adornoites who emphasize optimism of the will rather than pessimism of the intellect […]

Reviews BioaestheticsGerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. A. Derieg, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2007. 320 pp. £11.95 pb., 978 158435 046 0. This book offers a clear yet complex analysis of the conditions under which art (and indeed politics) could be understood as revolutionary. Yet it posits a distinction […]