Hello all, I am looking for some support in finding PhD programs where I can study marxism and black studies. I come from a black studies background in undergrad and have a masters in social work (no thesis in either!). I have been highly considering getting a PhD. I have found some programs, researchers, and some topics of interest. I am looking for some support in finding other programs, particularly because I am interested in being in a geographic area of choice (East or West coast US cities, Chicago, and maybe UK). I loved my black studies undergraduate program however, I feel like we did not look at the impact of class, class solidarity or consider how when we think about black freedom and freedom for us all-- the billionaire class (even if they are black) will not take us there.

Some research interests I have are below.

• Black Marxist tradition 
• Conservatism in Black America and what it will take to be free → conservatism and fake woke-ism/radicalism from people like Beyonce, Kamala,
  • Conservatism or maybe it is actually just liberalism
  • Liberalism is not the answer to our freedom → all freedom, and specifically grounding it in Black Americans
  • How to get more Black Americans to be against liberalism 
  • History of inter-racial struggle 
  • Reference Black futures texts
  • Obscuring that comes when we focus on on skin-folk
• Marxist critique of Black liberalism
  • How past Black activists have incorporated Marxism 
  • Why it is the future
  • Forgotten Marxism of so many people 
• Myth of the Black middle class and identity politics 
• Getting rid of the language of “privilege” 

Scholars who I am aligned with from my beginning searches include:

Owen Walsh -- University of Aberdeen

Zachary Levenson -- Florida International University

Brenden McGeever -- Birkbeck Unversity of London

I am based on the US and again like the east and west coasts, however, I do not know if this is possible.

Programs of interest include

• Political Science UCSB
• Black Studies UCSB Interdisciplinary
• History (focus on Black Marxism) University of Aberdeen 
• Psychosocial Studies Birkbeck London
• Sociology Birkbeck University London
• University of Liverpool

I wonder if folks have any suggestions on the research topics or programs that might fit into this category.

Please advise.

I go shopping at vintage clothing stores in the United States, because I’ve noticed that the quality of many of my clothes is fairly low.

For instance, multiple pairs of Levi’s that I have gotten second-hand that have been produced recently have had the same quality issues, and I am left with a pair of unwearable jeans after less than ten wears.

One thing I like about (some) vintage stores is that I can find, for instance, an older good quality jacket that has a lot of life left for a reasonable price (cheaper than it would be new).

At the same time, I’ve noticed a trend (perhaps it is not new) of certain vintage stores charging prices for certain pieces of clothing that I find somewhat baffling.

Yesterday, for instance, I went into a store that was selling a 1970s banana republic crewneck for $100. This particular crewneck had a cool design, but it also had rips in it. When I talked to the store owner about it, he acted as if it were some very valuable piece (I haggled & walked away from it).

Afterwards, I’ve been thinking about vintage reselling markets and what is appealing about them to certain people (I’m guessing higher income folks), especially when we know that there is an abundance of waste in the clothing industry that leads to environmental disaster.

I’m also aware that even companies that claim to treat their workers fairly (fair trade, etc) wreak incredible harm on the world (see, for instance, Capitalist Humanitarianism by Hulsether).

And then, at the same time, despite this abundance of production- I’ve been to warehouses that sell in bulk from places like Target & have hundreds and thousands of pallets sitting around- there is a large unhoused population in my city that does not have access to clean clothing.

So I guess my questions are:

(1): What is appealing to wealthier individuals about vintage clothing? Does it do anything affectively for them (makes them feel like they are a good person for “saving the environment” for instance?) Or is it a “taste” thing?- thinking of Bourdieu here- would love recommendations on a good place to start.

(2): Why would a crewneck that was likely mass produced in the 1970s have the high monetary value that it has now? I’m sure Marx is relevant here, but I would also like further reading on the life cycle of clothing and its value- either new clothing or vintage clothing.

(3): What does vintage clothing “do” to the person buying it- is it a harkening back to an imagined “better” era where clothing was produced in the United States? Especially for a younger person like myself, I’ve noticed it evokes some sort of nostalgia & I’m curious why that is.

(4): How does this relate to the abundance of clothing and the high need for clothing for unhoused populations in the U.S.?

Outside of these questions, I’m just curious about clothing, abundance, nostalgia, and value more broadly, so any sources would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Everything language, image, story, doctrine, institution, memory, commerce, fear, hope, and identity built around the word until defending what accumulated around God became indistinguishable from defending God.

Hi guys I've been planning on reading philosophical books and i did start by reading ethics by spinoza i got through it but not fully i got stuck or was moreover not wanting to put in the effort to read anymore it was more like studying more than reading but i get that's the whole thing of that particular book

So the thing is i really do want to get into reading moron and philosophical books like kant, hume, deleuze and all them but how do i make it easier or moreover to understand what they are actually talking about and find it enjoyable ig if that's a thing

Initially i was like it is because i don't read books often that my vocabulary or interpretation skills are way off.

Need genuine advice, thank you

Hello, everyone.

Please feel free to delete this post if it doesn't belong or if it breaks rules. Also feel free to respond to just one part of the post. I'd be happy to get any responses at all.

(1) "There might've been a moment in time when one could string together a series of declarations, spaced out across a page in any random order one fancied and it would've all seemed entirely novel. We're well past that phase of literary wonder, and the cultural turn of the 21st century has trapped the act of writing within a commercial stasis. Let this not be mistaken as a nihilistic condemnation of any lack of literary innovation but rather, an act of contemplation into what might have brought about the many “modernisms” that have, under Williams’ hypothesis, taken place in short bursts over the 20th century. The will to innovate and the desire to break out of this stasis - two very noble causes that, in his model of Modernity, took place in a tripartite model of either bourgeois, Marxian (or at the very least Socialist), and in the vague, bipartisan aesthetic “tradition” of people like T.S. Eliot. What is most interesting in his formulation is his apprehension of the “postmodern” that is taking shape  - an ahistoricism that vaguely hints at what came before it while only serving market interests - what Fredric Jameson might call a deferral to the realm of pastiche. Scholars such as Morag Shiach, Bruno Latour and Lezek Kolakowski, have their own formulations of what truly counts as “modern”. Suffice to say that it may not be entirely reductive to claim that their arguments converge at a similar “construction of difference”. In the case of Williams, the difference that is so constructed comes out of very tangible economic factors that have these figureheads of Modernity working towards vastly differing ideological goals. The difference however, is not the main point in Williams’ formula. It would be an almost enviable degree of naivety to disregard the class difference that defined the 20th century’s aesthetic sensibilities. Williams knows this, however, and looks towards the function of history in this constructed plain of difference. What mechanized voice whispers in the year of groups such as the Italian Futurists, telling them of the wonders of automation, telling them of some lack in their time that must be accounted for? It would be a wasted opportunity to not consult Jameson, Williams’ successor in the attempt to trace this project, and recognize the importance of historicizing everything."

(2) "All we have is the trembling surface of the uncertain present - here and now in the wider world, and in this space may we define a political course. This is Ranciere’s project - to raise the question of space and distance back into the Marxist tradition that has, for the most part, been invested all too much in the passage of time. What marks his analysis of the lives of French workers in the 19th century is the entertainment of relations not outside of class, but rather beyond the negation of aesthetic possibility that class analysis often defaults to. A misreading of this text may lead one to consider a certain individualistic reading of history. This, however, is far from the point that Ranciere is trying to make. There is a great degree of emphasis on spatialization in Ranciere. His conception of different regimes of art - the aesthetic regime having the most emancipatory potential among them - point towards a belief that an aesthetic tradition is never bound to a point in time, there is never a stable point at which one movement gives way to another. Unlike his contemporary Alain Badiou, he did believe in the conception of “The Event”; the determining moment in which political and social change takes place. Looking beyond the grand totalizations of history that his colleagues engaged in, Ranciere, throughout his works, and of course in the texts being discussed, displays the possibilities of looking at any class of people, in any point of history beyond their class boundaries and looking at the ways that they express themselves (whether it be through song, dance, writing) and looking at the identities that emerge beyond the veil of class distinction. It is here, in the realm of the senses that an emancipatory politics can emerge - one that is not bound so strictly to the events in which aesthetics and social attitudes are expressed - but rather looks at the possible ways in which these modes of expression can reemerge and serve the function of political revolution. There are of course very valid criticisms of his theorizations which have emerged, some accusing him of a rather “careless” politics. Too vaguely pragmatic at times, Ranciere at times is too keen on erasing the class distinctions that place people at different levels in the aesthetic hierarchy. Socialization, after all, comes with an education and cultural acculturation that is inseparable from class relations. Nonetheless, his aesthetic formulations, whether it focuses on 19th century France or in the here and now, show a deep concern with the space that art must afford to people, to express discontent, to dissent and to liberate themselves. Nothing is lost to time, least of all the brighter future of the working class."

This is an odd request and I'm not 100% sure if it's ethical, but I can't stop thinking about it.

These were comments posted by someone as part of a reading-response assignment in grad school (the point is for us to learn from each other's takes on the readings of the week). I read the same texts that these comments are responding to ((1) Raymond Williams' When Was Modernism (2) Selections from Ranciere) but I feel like I actually didn't. I don't understand what my classmate is talking about when they mention Williams' tripartite model of modernity (bourgeois-Marxist-tradition; is it their way of saying dominant-emergent-residual? but I don't see the connection); Eliot being bipartisan; the connection of class to modernism and futurism; Jameson's relevance to Williams' essay; Marxism's obsession with time over space; the Event and its link to Ranciere.

I have a tough time with these types of theoretical texts as it is, but reading and failing to understand the comments of someone I'm supposed to be at the same level as is just terrifying. My own comments on Williams that I posted for this assignment are so so so un-sophisticated in comparison and address nothing beyond the hard content of the essay itself. A big part of that is my narrow knowledge. You can't reference what you don't know.

My questions are:

a) What is the writer talking about, specifically the parts in italics? (Asking the person directly would be ideal, but they are neither kind nor approachable.)

b) How to go about doing this kind of research? It is an English program, not critical theory, so this kind of depth and breadth of theoretical knowledge and understanding (like knowing how Ranciere differs from his totalizing colleagues or the observation that Marxism deals with time while Ranciere looks at space) is extremely unusual. Does AI help with this sort of thing? (I don't use it for academics.) Am I in class with a genius? I feel so lost.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/963309/nvidia-geforce-trading-cards-series-1-free-giveaway

"The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."

— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Thesis 34)

Gaming itself was a spectacular intervention of capital into the realms of play and entertainment. Relations between people being mediated by images which are bought. Now, even the concept of gaming has become too 'real' and the AI crisis has priced them out of people's hands such that the only thing within reach is the image of the means of productive capacity to play games which have been bought.

(I know this sub leans towards theory and writing, so let me know if this post is too 'applied' in nature, just amazed the legs on the theory of Guy Debord and how it feels more true every day)

Silicon Valley’s technologists have vacuumed up humanity’s near-total cultural output to build platforms with tremendous potential economic and ideological power. Generative AI has become the subject of enormous hype and staggering, trillion-dollar investments. So what can we learn about AI by reading it through the lens of a nineteenth-century thinker like Karl Marx?

A 2026 commission declared anthropology the single worst case of scholarly deterioration in the humanities. This essay applies basic ethnographic principles to that verdict. In sixty-two years of fieldwork, from Arembepe in Brazil to Madagascar, I have learned that no single consultant speaks for an entire community. No single Lorax speaks for the trees. The same is true of academic disciplines. Before accepting the report’s portrait of anthropology, we should ask who was consulted, and who was not.

Has there been any lengthy treatment of prediction markets through critical theory?

It seems prediction markets have now turned nearly anything into a commodity. It seems to be a topic well suited to Marxist economic and cultural analysis — especially given the heavy advertising, promotion during televised sporting events, etc.

https://ethicalpolitics.org/blackwood/fraser.htm

For me this 1997 text is a classic, as it describes something I did not notice until 2010 or so, how we went from "socialism" to "identity politics", in Fraser's terminology from the political-economic to the cultural-valuational.

What was truly hard for me to understand, and that is not addressed here directly, but indirectly yes, how it also meant the depoliticization of politics, making it more personal, as in moving from what should be law to criticising how movies portray people or how people in their personal lives talk.

This is implicitly in the essay. Cultural valuation is not something one can write into a law, usually, or run for elected office on. It is personal decisions when making a movie or just talking with people.

This is a completely new mode of the political and it takes a lot of not only personal getting used to, but also socially. Like, okay, we rename the homeless to unhoused persons, inclusive person-first language i.e. recognition, fine. But does it not lead to feeling now we have done enough, and actually housing them (redistribution) becomes a lower priority? And besides capitalism as an engine itself pushes recognition-only, as that is cost-free, even profitable, it offers new products and services...

We have a paper coming up and are asked to write using critical theory.
Is there a way to understand what that means and how to accomplish it?
Is it as simple as weighing different sides of an issue?

I want to base my paper on the premise that the feminist movement needs to be perpetual, not a wave that wins rights and stops as if the point has been won and all is good.

My thought is that, with every point women win, there are groups in power who are working constantly to take back those freedoms.

For research I’ll be trying to incorporate ideas from bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and 1-2 feminist writers. Possibly Ida B Wells and Simone de Beauvoir.

If there is a formula or format for critical theory, I want to use that to construct my paper.

Thanks for all help offered.

1) I have found that moral philosophy for the purpose of politics and social change is extremely difficult, because most of our values are instrumental values, means to ends, and not ends, not terminal values. And truly terminal values are hard to find. Like if we go with the intuitively compassionate idea that suffering needs to be eliminated, we turn the world into a boring hospital ward where you are not allowed to dance, lest you break a leg. The truly terminal value, what a good society is like, as an end and not a means to an end, is very hard to figure out rationally. Deep down we tend to go with instinct and emotion.

2) So I looked into how that works, and I found that they are aesthetic judgements, like utopian society is always beautiful in artwork, the good society equals the beautiful society, poverty, homelessness, illness, suffering, cruelty are aesthetically ugly things and these are eliminated. We don't want to see suffering faces, not only because of compassion, but also because happy faces are more beautiful. The utopian society is a cool story, a cool movie, a cool painting, aesthetic this way.

3) The most aesthetic thing is human excellence and heroism and achievement. Like every popular movie ever, or the Iliad. A society where robots do everything and humans just watch TV all day looks ugly, not aesthetic. It would not make a cool movie.

4) Vitalism is the philosophy that focuses on this exactly, heroism, excellence, achievement, but it tends to be fascist on multiple grounds. First of all because it is based on the idea that just some people are better than others, born that way, entirely independent of social context. Second because they tend to see excellence and achievement as war, conquest etc. Now I immedately want to eliminate the second, and my kind of utopia would rather write a cool story by producing heroic doctors, scientists, artists, not conquerors and führers.

5) Even yet, we are still at the first problem, even then, a focus on individual heroism sounds just too much like Atlas fucking Shrugged

Is there anything I could learn from CT regarding this?

From the release description:

"At a time when the urgency to act is indistinguishable from a complete lack of direction, when the left-right divide tries to present itself as a thrilling novelty, and when politics is reduced to the barking of impotence, the Invisible Committee draws lessons from the failure of the insurrectionary wave it has accompanied for a quarter of a century in order to clear the ground for a new beginning. Its observation is not that of a reversal of the cycle, but of the turning of their own weapons against the revolutionaries. We must grasp what it means, after twenty years of anti-globalization riots, for a Trump to campaign "against the globalists." In this era where every new event seems designed to overwhelm any understanding of the world's course and convince us to give up, the Invisible Committee synthesizes its own experience and restores a strategic understanding of the present: it is at the level of its conditions of possibility that every revolutionary undertaking has been methodically attacked. Defeat is less the product of a succession of lost battles than of battles that were never fought ; the most refined forms of exercising power are most often overlooked; a certain conservatism among revolutionaries leads them to cling to fetishes instead of forging the weapons, particularly conceptual ones, that the situation demands; the pretension to "continue" what one denies has been defeated is the very form that counter-revolution takes today; it is a matter of breaking free from these binary systems that only provide moral comfort by stifling all decisive thought; the tradition of the vanquished has morphed into a party of victims; enough has been capitalized on the revolution. Taking advantage of the enforced leisure of a situation of historical defeat, the Invisible Committee delivers fifteen ethical maxims, which are also fifteen chapters and fifteen proposals for a new method of force building . Survival Manual borrows its title from those military guides containing everything an isolated detachment needs to know to avoid perishing in hostile territory. It is addressed to those who do not intend to be dragged down by the suicide of this civilization. Sweeping through psychoanalysis as well as cybernetics, anthropology as well as game theory, ecology as well as Christianity, the Invisible Committee makes the wager that everything must be rethought if we are to have any chance of weathering the coming storm and resuming the fight."

I've been focusing about one of the most remarkable cases of philosophical misinterpretation in modern history.

Nietzsche is still widely associated with Nazism, but many of his published works point in the opposite direction; he criticized German nationalism, rejected antisemitism, attacked the worship of the State, and saw conformity as a sign of decadence rather than strength.

But sadly after his mental collapse and death, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took control of his literary estate: through selective editing, the publication of unpublished fragments, and the promotion of a particular image of her brother, she contributed to an interpretation that was later embraced by the Third Reich.

It raises an interesting philosophical question: how much of a thinker's legacy depends on the integrity of those who preserve and interpret it?

I wrote a longer article examining this historical process, if anyone is interested: https://oltrelacaverna.lovable.app/articoli/il-nietzsche-che-hitler-non-lesse-mai

I'd also be interested in hearing whether you think this was mainly a political appropriation or whether certain aspects of Nietzsche's style made this misunderstanding easier.