Rafael Khachaturian
@rafkhach
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Political and social theory. Lecturer @Penn . Associate Faculty @BklynInstitute . Member @aaup_penn @HigherEdLabor . Knicks fan in 76ers country. Views mine.
Joined October 2009
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1. I just received my contributor copy of the new Handbook on the History of Political Thought, edited by Cary Nederman and
@gbogiaris
!
My chapter attempts to sketch out a historical materialist approach to the study of the history of political thought.
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There is a one letter difference between the Russian words for cat (кот) and whale (кит). A Soviet children's book from the '80s imagined what it would be like if they switched places:
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Your mid 30s are for realizing IPAs actually aren't good.
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The Kant discourse here pales in comparison to Russia's
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What James Scott (RIP) had to say about scholarly reading practices deeply affected how I think about academia to this day:
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Aimee Terese somehow becoming a factor in the Presidential race is like that Borges story where an elaborate and obscure fictional world begins to bleed over into the real one, with disastrous consequences for all.
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W.E.B. Du Bois' class assignments from his 1933 Karl Marx and the Negro Problem course, including rewriting the main argument of Capital "in terms which a colored man of average intelligence could understand...and with application to the Negro problem in the US"
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@edburmila
The lengths some people will go to to fully internalize and justify market discipline *on themselves* as a morality play never ceases to amaze me.
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Campuses are rapidly becoming sites of class struggle because so many of the contradictions of American capitalism that were displaced into higher education in recent decades are finally fusing.
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Human chess match, Leningrad, 1924. The Red Army is black, the Navy is white.
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Democrats will kneel and wear sashes and then approve prison expansion and military weapons for cops.
Here are the most senior Democrats in government kneeling in the Capitol, minutes before introducing sweeping police reform bill
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These protests are organic uprisings against a capitalist state whose representative institutions are increasingly failing to provide it with democratic legitimacy, leaving it to maintain a semblance of order by relying on violence in defense of property.
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What if I told you higher education does more to reproduce class differences than level them?
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Carl Schmitt on the Night of the Long Knives, as reported in the Times, July 28, 1934:
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The most unnerving thought is that the US is simultaneously bears ultimate responsibility for this situation and is also the one entity that can deescalate it almost at will.
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Two famous definitions of the modern state—the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" and "a machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another”—were both given at lectures in summer 1919.
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I really like that Warren and Sanders are involved in a nuclear arms race of progressive policy proposals.
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This thread makes it sound like the USSR tokenized a few prominent African Americans, instead of having a program where HBCU-educated scientists and technicians willingly immigrated to the country.
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it's now hip to trash the MER, but it's an underappreciated workhorse for introducing countless undergrads to the basics.
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Wanna feel old? This is what Trent Reznor and Billy Corgan look like now
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Thinking it's kind of wild that these two incidents both happened in Russia
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Gabriel Boric is a confidence boost and inspiration for 35 year old bearded leftist dudes around the world.
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Marx's lifetime overlapped with both Napoleon's and FDR's.
What is a fact that sounds like a shitpost but is 100 percent real?
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Fixed it.
Psychology textbook diagrams never cease to amaze me
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20 years ago a liberal meme culture arose based entirely on how dumb this guy was.
Oh god ... truly disorientating to watch this. He speaks in full sentences. Knows some history and presumes his audience does too. Is fully in command of himself. And makes sense. ... compared to either of the candidates today ... !?
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Ron Suny's point that Stalinism was simultaneously a revolutionary regime (collectivization, social mobility, industrialization) and a reactionary one (statism, patriotism, Russification) is the correct position in a debate where one of these poles is assumed to exclude the other
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Yet today's 20 year olds are akin to the Klan. Funny how that works.
Asked Gov. Shapiro about the Philly Inquirer/
@anna_orso
report on a 1993 college op-ed where he expressed skepticisim about a two-state solution
"Something I wrote about when I was 20? ... I was 20"
"I have said for years, long before Oct. 7, that I favor a two state solution"
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The American right is careening straight toward fascism while the center embraces the national security state apparatus and blames the left for its failures. And we're here watching it unfold like a train wreck in slow motion.
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When people talk about collapse, we think of extreme state failure. What we'd likely see instead is an acceleration in the decay in our institutions and social fabric, marked by ever growing divergence of outcomes. The state will still work, but for an increasingly smaller group.
You cannot threaten me with “the United States will collapse if you don’t vote for Biden.” I’m fine with that. This is a bad country that brings nothing but pain and suffering to not just most of the world, but to its own people too. Let it end.
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Today I learned that DuBois wrote Black Reconstruction while teaching a graduate seminar on Capital.
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My dad passed away last night. His health had been failing in recent years, but you still never think now is the time. The grief hasn't fully hit me, and I might say more later. I'm glad he was able to meet his grandkid. We talked almost every day. I already miss him terribly.
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Working class "high culture" in the Brezhnev-era USSR was fairly in line with that of the average humanities or social sciences grad student in the West today:
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The only appropriate emotion right now is rage.
Outraged neighbors are beginning to gather in the Russell neighborhood of Louisville after waking up to news that David "Yaya" McAtee was murdered by the LMPD and National Guard last night outside of his beloved BBQ stand.
#DavidMcAtee
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What forms can left solidarity in the West take?
- Pushing for an open door refugee policy, not just from Ukraine but all conflict zones
- Forgiving Ukrainian debt
- Pushing for de-nuclearization
- Establishing ties with leftists and dissidents in both Ukraine and Russia
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Hear me out: a course on the Eighteenth Brumaire, where we read the entire text, followed by twentieth century interpretations (Trotsky, Gramsci, Poulantzas, etc), followed by a discussion of Bonapartism as it applies to historical and contemporary regimes.
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Now that capitalism is failing at mass commodity production and circulation—the one thing it was superior at, which was also drummed into our heads as the most we could expect from Society—it turns out the problem the whole time was our heightened expectations.
Opinion: Don’t rant about short-staffed stores and supply chain woes. Try to lower expectations.
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Academia not only makes you live with the constant prospect of uprooting your life, but even once you have settled someplace, it can still uproot the lives of your friends.
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I've become a wife guy. 🙂
Some good news for 2020!
We got married! Here’s to many more year with this wonderful man (
@rafkhach
) and to celebrating in person with everyone next year.
😍👰🏻🤵🏻🍾
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Liberal hagiography.
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putting in the important work
It’s not only
@Harvard
.
I have reviewed the Twitter and Instagram accounts of
@Yale
,
@Princeton
,
@Columbia
,
@Stanford
,
@Dartmouth
and
@JohnsHopkins
.
Not a single one of them has issued a statement about the atrocities committed by Hamas.
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No matter how important you think your research project is, it does not justify crossing an academic picket line.
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How Americans think Soviets played chess in the 70s vs How Soviets think they played chess in the 70s
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Ralph Miliband on the US circa 1969 (!):
"It is probably the case that never before in any capitalist country, save in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, has such a large proportion of people been employed on police and repressive duties of one kind of another"
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What did Marx bring with him for a day at the British Library? Like, did he have a briefcase or a knapsack full of stuff? What did he do for a midday snack?
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Lede buries the point: indicted for shooting into neighboring apartments, potentially hurting others. Not for killing a person.
Breaking News: A grand jury in Kentucky indicted a former Louisville police officer for his role in a botched drug raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor in March. No charges were announced against the other two officers who fired shots.
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Russian leftists—comrades in organizations like the Russian Socialist Movement who self-consciously follow in the footsteps of Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Gramsci—have been systematically detained, repressed, and silenced by Putin's regime over the last ten years.
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Has there been a book yet tying together Trump, the mafia, the construction boom of the 1980s, Giuliani and the neoliberalization of NYC? Because that seems very much like a story worth telling.
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Neoliberalism is Kamala's sister calling to get a WPA mural by a Communist artist taken down in San Francisco:
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Whether you call it fascism or not, this is the repressive and ideological backbone of the American authoritarian state.
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You could use Wisconsin to write a history of the past decade of American politics from Scott Walker and the statehouse occupation in 2011 to the Rittenhouse trial in 2021.
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Luxemburg and Gramsci are not more wholesome and democratic alternatives to Lenin.
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A
#MayDay
reminder that the Paris Commune—what Engels considered an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat—coexisted alongside the Reconstruction of the US south—what Du Bois considered a literal "dictatorship of labor." The histories of these two events are entwined.
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Surely there is a middle ground between "NATO made them do it" and "the Russian Soul made them do it"
My first boss, David Remnick, interviews Stephen Kotkin, the king of Soviet history and the reason I went into this whole Russia business, and the result does not disappoint. Holy shit.
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The Snyderization of EE history.
with june 6th coming up the world needs to relook at the soviet actions in WWII and let everyone see what a monster the soviets were, they in many regards were no better than the germans, in some ways far worse.
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Earlier today, I was officially promoted to the position of Lecturer in Critical Writing (NTT).
I will probably never get the chance to make the big tenure announcement. But after three years of semi-contingent employment, it is a relief to have some additional stability.
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That's completely not how nationality policy worked in the USSR.
this politics of amnesia transformed people into rootless biological / physical units in whom identity and culture should be erased. This was the nature of the "Soviet people" in the USSR. But "Russian people" is also an imperial construct based upon this forced amnesia 4/10
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👋 my chapter in our forthcoming volume argues that the statist turn toward "social protectivism" during covid was always constrained by the structural limits of the capitalist state, and that the pandemic exacerbated a crisis of social reproduction and political legitimation.
It's been genuinely remarkable to watch as the covid safety net expansions get taken apart bit by bit by bit by bit
Unemployment insurance, rental aid/moratorium, then the student debt freeze ... now soon 2 be $ for 6M poor mothers on WIC, per
@TonyRomm
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1917: Lenin takes train to Russia, changes course of history
2017:
@DemSocialists
delegates fly to Chicago, get delayed indefinitely
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Hoping against hope that this is a "contained," face-saving response and not the complete breakdown of regional order.
BREAKING: Iran's attack includes cruise missiles, according to Israeli sources.
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In 2008, Charles Tilly uploaded a 32 page CV written entirely in what looks to be comic sans. And it's still online.
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one of my core beliefs, from Lived Experience, is that postwar Communist-era apartments captured a certain phenomenology of dwelling that no other form of housing has been able to replicate.
The absolute horrors of communism, how could people live in a cookie-cutter apartment that does even have black and gray furniture and condo fees?
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Teaser from our running translation project: Three articles by Pashukanis, on Hegel (1931), Kelsen (1923), and Laski (1925).
All are appearing in English for the first time.
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In 1927, von Mises wrote that fascism was "full of the best intentions and that its intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history."
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Holy shit. This is from the Deepwater Horizon cleanup 10 years ago.
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Gramsci will be our political contemporary as long as fascism and incarceration remain the outer limits of a non-exceptional political order.
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not a coincidence that California was the center of the postwar welfare-warfare state: the military-industrial complex and the most developed public university system in the country.
Good case to be made that a specifically Californian school of Marxism is the most influential school of communism in the world from the 1980s onward. Great project would be a global history of California Marxism
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Adorno: Astrology is mass ideology perpetuated by capitalism and a sublimated desire to be ruled by forces beyond one's control.
DSA person: Wow. Sure sounds like *someone's* mercury is in retrograde right now.
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There is a continuity from the latent fascism of 1960s anti-student cultural politics to whatever this is.
ut austin, where texas state troopers are barring students from accessing the other side of the campus. please look at this, i have never seen anything like this
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Very excited to make this public!
It was a labor of love for
@selfactingmule
,
@enanopoulos
, and me to bring together so many distinct new voices and conversations that have been happening over the past few years, at
@form_legal
, in print, and even here.
This exciting volume on state theory comes out later this year! It includes essays by
@rafkhach
, R. Hunter,
@enanopoulos
,
@n_hold
,
@alybatt
, J. Chorley Foster,
@SteveMaher18
,
@smaquanno
,
@chrisokane_nyc
,
@kmunro_econ
, and one by myself on conjunctural state theory.
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Syllabus writing for my upcoming
@BklynInstitute
course on state theory. Starts on April 10th—still a few spots left! (Link below).
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Gramsci is good, sorry. Will not be entertaining takes that suggest otherwise at this time.
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I rarely get personal on here, but I lost two people very dear to me over the last few weeks. On January 13 my uncle Ruben died from a stroke. On February 3, my aunt Svetlana died after fighting covid since the new year. Both were too far away. I'll miss them very much.
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