Instead of approaching the free market abstractly, in this short series, I’ll approach it from the standpoint of my own experience. In short, I’ll treat the free market in an autoethnographic account. Autoethnography is just what the word suggests: it is a genre of ethnographic writing and research that connects the personal to the cultural, placing the self within a social, historical context. For the Marxists who may by chance read this essay, one might think of it in terms of what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci referred to as a means to knowing oneself as a product of history1 although I do not subscribe to the belief that we are merely historical products.
On Gramsci’s Fall: A Review
Gramsci’s Fall.
In Nora Bossong’s latest novel,
Gramsci’s Fall, we meet forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver whose marriage is falling apart with extra-marital affairs coming to a close and a career in a German university at a dead end. When he is offered an opportunity to research on one of Antonio Gramsci’s missing notebooks, he fights with his wife and readily agrees to join his friend in Rome in the hope to finally make a breakthrough with his childhood obsession. As he delves into Gramsci’s past, we find our narrator falling in love with a young woman, visiting his own past; a childhood he wishes to abandon, a marriage that was a bad decision, a career that never took off and then a child to fulfil his middle-class ideal life.
Monthly Review | Engels s Ecologically Indispensable if Incomplete Dialectics of Nature monthlyreview.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from monthlyreview.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How Astronomer Anton Pannekoek Planned To Storm the Heavens 07/02/2021
Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek combined the roles of an important socialist thinker and a prominent scientist. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
There has always been a healthy crossover between Marxism and the natural sciences. Frederick Engels kept abreast of the latest scientific knowledge in his own time. In his work
Dialectics of Nature, Engels warned that no matter how far humans were able to perfect their forms of social organisation, a time would inevitably come when the Earth could no longer sustain organic life:
And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the Earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.
While fake unity just means doing whatever Republicans want, authentic unity requires marginalizing the promoters of lies and racism in the interest of creating a more genuinely equal society.