Archive of Chris Crawford

Benjamin, Brecht, and Adorno, each in their own way, try to square their admiration for the early work of Georg Lukács with his later work, after his reputation gained official authority and was swallowed up by the ambience of the Comintern.

Ruling the Void offers an authoritative and chilling assessment of the prospects for popular political representation today. In the long-established democracies of Western Europe, electoral turnouts are in decline, membership is shrinking in the major parties, and those who remain loyal partisans are sapped of enthusiasm. Peter Mair’s classic book weighs the impact of these changes, which together show that, after a century of democratic aspiration, electorates are deserting the political arena.

Fredric Jameson demonstrates that it is the moment of reification which enables the emergence of commodification as such; or to put it the other way around, the existence of a tendency to commodification is then what motivates reification and encourages its influence in all kinds of areas (the psychic and the cultural, for example) in which it did not previously hold sway or seem applicable.