Recently I have had the pleasure of reading a series of essays by Elena Louisa Lange. I highly recommend that anyone serious about the matter engage with her work, it is outstanding.
Just a few essays worth finding:
Hegel‘s Contribution to Capital. ‘Essence’ and ‘Appearance’ as Categories of the Critique of
Political Economy
Exchanging without Exploiting:
A Critique of Karatani Kōjin’s The Structure of World History\
Historical Materialism 23.3
Moishe Postone: Marx’s Critique of Political Economy as Immanent Social Critique
Chapter 31
The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical theory
Money versus Value?:
Reconsidering the ‘Monetary Approach’ of the ‘post’-Uno School, Benetti/Cartelier, and the Neue Marx-Lektüre
Historical Materialism (2019) 1-34
The Critique of Political Economy and the ‘New Dialectic’
The Proof is in the Pudding:
On the Necessity of Presupposition in Marx’s Critical Method
The Transformation Problem as a Problem of Fetishism
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XL | Number 3 | 2019
Sadly, I find myself having to edit this recommendation with an addendum rejecting Lange's political conclusions, which remind me more of German National-Bolshevism meets anti-Germanism from the 1990's and early 2000's.
- The "woke" Left is really in power, and they are the true fascists
https://elenalouisalange.substack.com/p/battle-of-ideas-talk-on-woke-capitalism?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 Also, see the absolutely terrible little book The Conformist Rebellion, which at some point I will no doubt have to read in full and review (I have read the Introduction, the first essay which is arguably antisemitic, and Nick Nesbitt's article, which is actually quite decent.)
- COVID health conventions are a trick by capital to dominate us and anyone not calling it that "fully accept or even foster neoliberal domination"
- Climate change is a myth, apparently? Or rather, "energy austerity" is fascist.
- Any support for the Palestinians is antisemitic and genocidal because apparently all of the Palestinians want to drive the Jews into the sea, as opposed to the clear and committed antisemitism of Hamas
"The escapism into sentiments of general humaneness, accompanied by the insufferable talk of “conflict”, which expresses that one is dealing with two equal opponents, necessarily presupposes the splitting off of the annihilationist anti-Semitic character of the Palestinian cause. Furthermore, any complaint about civilian casualties is propaganda if it ignores the fact that civilian life in the fully militarised Gaza Strip is first and foremost a thorn in the side of Hamas and the Palestinian majority that supports it. Hamas itself is blurring the line between civilians and combatants, raising even children as martyrs, abusing them as human shields, and then feigning grief over their deaths. None of this bothers the propagandists of compassion any more than the fact that the Israeli army does everything it can to avoid unarmed casualties. The brutally equidistant reporting, which does not even shy away from using Hamas as a reliable information source in an attempt to maximise sentimentality, fuels the delusions of those who adhere to the traditional historical revisionist hallucination of an Israeli war of annihilation against the Palestinians." [Italics mine]
Everything said here about Hamas is absolutely true. And yet, that Likud and its allies precisely hope to push all of the Palestinians out of Israel, to cleanse it, and that they have been quite explicit about it, is a hallucination? The conflation of the Likud regime with Israel and the Hamas organization with Gaza Palestinians does enormous violence to both the Israeli opposition to Likud and to the Palestinians who do not support Hamas, but further still says "If they support Hamas, even passively, then Israeli war crimes and atrocities are not merely justified, but in fact neither war crimes nor atrocities, but self-defense." Not only is this not communist, it falls well below the conventions of international military law and the Geneva Convention.
- This was preceded by a very odd piece in October where she proclaimed that "I do not support Palestine. I do not support Israel." In a way, that is a perfectly reasonable point, insofar as communists support the abolition of relations of domination, not the equality of identities that naturalizes those relations of domination. No, it is odd because it uses Ayn Rand to oppose the idea of solidarity, not solidarity with this or that group, but with anyone, presumably including workers in struggle? Also, by the November article, clearly marching behind the Israeli flag.
A number of her papers are available at academia.edu
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