Marx makes many references to how ideas are related to a social basis, but Sohn-Rethel regards it of great significance that science escapes this focus. Elaborating no social basis for scientific ideas allows them to stand alone as essentials to be simply taken for granted, their source and social formation unquestioned.
Simplistic, black and white judgements are dominant right now, but there is good reason to think that this war may turn out to be much more than a struggle over a lily-white democratic versus autocratic principle.
…if Australia can’t renew itself within terms appropriate to its own region—that is, renew our relations with Indigenous Australians, as well as the peoples of the Pacific and of Indonesia and Asia generally—it will remain an outpost supported only by imperialist powers…
One does not have to be a Taliban supporter to see that this defeat reflects deep changes in not only geopolitical relations but ways of life that are making their mark on what the West can do practically.
…we should not take too seriously the portrayal of Biden as a leader deeply formed in the experience of grief…he is also a Cold War warrior, with a demonstrable inclination to pursue the Democrats’ hawkish orientation towards war where it encounters resistance.
Rather than addressing the realities of our place in the region, the Morrison government’s emerging defence strategy is an attempt to hold the old assumptions in place. It is utopian conservatism at its worst.
Amplified by the powers of high technologies, capitalist expansion has moved to a new level, recalibrating the borders between humans and the natural world and producing effects across species.
…we have to face the fact that the United States is in serious decline. It is powerful militarily, in the technical sense, but socially it is falling apart. What future is there for an empire-dependent outlier community in this circumstance?
As lockdown restrictions begin to be lifted, do we have to remind ourselves that we have become deeply committed over forty years to a global way of living, producing and distributing that has been expanding and cross-referencing in ways that have no comparison with the past?
Intellectual practice as social form, high-tech science as bearer of the Anthropocene There could hardly be a more dramatic development than is occurring today where the balance of powers between the natural world and one of its component species - 'Homo sapiens' - shifts, such that 'Homo sapiens' becomes a significant driver of changes that begin to shape, even unbalance, the natural world. This process is what is increasingly being called the Anthropocene.
