intellectuals

PMC Posturing - Asad Haider

Asad Haider investigates the idea of the "Professional-Managerial Class", and the idea that "identity politics" is an expression of this group's class interests. This article was originally published on Haider's blog.

The Socialism of The Intellectuals: Jan Waclaw Machajski

The following article on Jan Waclaw Machajski appeared in issue 1 of Virus, the magazine of the Anarchist Communist Group

An Ode to Chomsky

A 'personal essay' on dichotomies like decadence vs. health, particularity vs. universality, subjectivity vs. objectivity, and misanthropy vs. 'philanthropy,' which uses Noam Chomsky as a symbol of the 'positive' side of these dichotomies and a device to help us avoid the negative. It's important to reject misanthropy and (generally speaking) decadence. Along the way are thoughts on intellectuals, postmodernism, empiricism, left-wing intolerance, etc.

Pier Paolo Pasolini Interviewed by Enzo Biagi for the Italian television network RAI on July 27, 1971

A 1971 interview with a pessimistic Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which he discusses consumer society, the emptiness of success, television as an authoritarian mass medium, eroticism, the conformism of the intellectuals, and his enigmatic relation with the Gospel.

Corsair Writings - Pier Paolo Pasolini

A collection of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial articles and interviews from 1973-1975 on the “anthropological revolution” that transformed Italy during the 1960s and early 1970s, with its “development without progress”, “consumerist hedonism”, “false tolerance”, mass culture, impoverishment of language, neurosis, destruction of traditional peasant cultures (“cultural genocide”), “strategy of tension”, and phony anti-fascism, signaling the decline of the old fascism and the rise of a new, “permissive” fascism, a “Power without a face” that is the “worst kind of totalitarianism”.

A radical critique of academia

Against the Logic of Submission - Wolfi Landstreicher

A series of essays investigating the role of social relationships.

Stupefaction – Encyclopédie des Nuisances

A 1985 article denouncing the fake “communication” disseminated by the mass media of our time that is really nothing but a unilateral flood of “information” or “socially harmful noise” in which nothing is called by its real name, as a force of stupefaction and for the creation of well-informed ignorance, where, amidst the generalized falsification of reality, “a view of the whole can never be formed”, and even self-evident truths “dissolve in the surrounding cacophony” in which they recede into the distance of unverifiable hypotheses, as exemplified in the endless media speculation concerning the Moro kidnapping.