mind reader

I spent a little of my time today listening to other contemporary Marxists [1] – and then wondering about how to add to some aspects of their argument/s. In particular, in the interview I’m referencing, there’s a piece on meritocracy, capitalists, and innovation. Because interviews suck there’s too much pressure on the thinking and I think we’re robbed of Blakeley’s authentic response. So, I wanted to think about my own views on this, and how this might fit in the historical materialist but also intersectional approach we bring to mind reader together. For Marx, innovation under capitalism represents *a* manifestation of human creative capacity - what he terms “species-being” - twisted and alienated through capitalist relations of production [2]. This twisting, and subsequent alienation, is what we here when the mainstream parrot: “Musk invented the electric car”. Worker’s natural drive to creatively transform nature an...

Astute stalkers amongst you may remember some 14 years ago I made a YouTube video by the same title. Let’s not go there. I want to talk with you today about cognitive bias and attribute substitution, in, of course, our favourite context: politics. These are interesting tools of hegemonic enforcement at the nexus of human behaviour and psychology. This, you might suppose, is part of a series on “methods” for our collective toolbelt with which to understand how hegemony maintains its stranglehold on culture, and how capitalist realism (or capitalist fatalism as I’m now borrowing) comes to be the *linga franca* of the entire globalised capitalist state. Sheesh – heavy stuff for a Wednesday morning, but when isn’t it. Let’s start, confusingly, in reverse order. Attribute substitution is an important part of the puzzle of understanding how our physical (and financial) realities are shaped. This is because it represents a key...