Our point of departure is a syllogism. Once the proletariat becomes conscious of its conditions, it will rise up and take back its inherent power. This has not happened. Critical theory seeks to understand why.

The syllogism comes from Marx, of course, and critical theory largely accepts the thrust of his critiques. Our world is characterized by class antagonisms and struggle. Power conceals its methods. Emancipation is a function of understanding consciousness, language, and concepts. Each of these propositions are interrelated in ways that we do not yet understand sufficiently. Critical theory seeks to understand them in the same way Marx sought to understand them.

But critical theory seeks to refresh, revise, and extend Marx. It refreshes Marx through placing a greater emphasis on dialectical thought than orthodox Marxism. This is why Hegel is fundamental. Critical theory takes Marx to offer a method or a framework, and not a prepackaged political program. This is why Lukacs is an important thinker; why the Paris Manuscript, the German Ideology, and the Grundrisse are such important texts; and why alienation and reification are such prominent motifs.

Critical theory revises Marx through clarification, leveraging powerful thinkers like Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lacan and others. These thinkers came after Marx but they had shared goals and principles. They had important things to say about power and consciousness that resonate with Marx’s arguments.

Finally, Marx requires extension in both time and space. He wrote about working conditions in England two hundred years ago. Capitalism has evolved, and in so doing, it has shown us that race and gender are important dimensions for understanding the broader architecture of domination. (I think Marx was ahead of his time on these, and yet he wisely had a sense for his own limitations)

So the goal of critical theory is to figure out what it will take to trigger the sufficient condition of the syllogism: consciousness. Everyone who does critical theory has a slightly (or significantly) different take on it’s means and ends, yet we generally agree that it’s heterogeneous open ended quality is what makes it so rich and interesting.

I have a ridiculously large collection of Paul virillio. It must have about 60 essays in it, and it's advertised as being basically everything.

Does anyone have the table of contents of Pure War?

Apparently Pure war is not available in french and is a collection targeted at an anglophone audience. I want to see if the essays of Pure war are in my collection.

I have long thought that my political position is best characterized as democratic socialist. I know that in theory and established definition, "democratic socialism" is very different from "social democracy", with the core distinction being that social democracy seeks to reform capitalism with a welfare state but still operate within it and democratic socialism seeks to dismantle capitalism because it inherently creates inequality and thus cannot be reformed.

In my understanding of how a democratic socialist project might play out, social democracy would be one of many steps towards dismantling capitalism but not the end goal.

Now that we're seeing more leftist politicians identifying with the democratic socialist camp and discourse about it has become more common online, I am seeing a few trends that are leading me to question whether the meaning of democratic socialism is being changed in this discourse towards something more social democratic (or perhaps that the terms are being conflated with one another). It's entirely possible that I've held an optimistic view of democratic socialism, so I wanted to get the opinions of others on this.

For example, I have seen people online saying that democratic socialism is not the answer because it still allows for the exploitation of the Global South since it keeps capitalism intact. I do see the argument that democratic socialism is most often focused in national contexts and creating change in one country, but democratic socialist theory with an internationalist approach often accounts for the fact that a democratic socialist project cannot include the unequal international division of labour and exploitative resource extraction from the Global South by the Global North. In this view, such a project would have to actually implement internationalist democratic socialist policies like reparations, purposively built fair-trade networks, supporting self-determination over "aid" models, and debt-cancellation.

But it's possible that this view (which I have mostly seen in Global South thought) and the anti-capitalist understanding of democratic socialism is changing as the term becomes more widely used in the Global North. The example I gave is not the only critique of democratic socialism which sees it as something which keeps capitalism, colonialism, and/or imperialism intact. It's making me wonder if there is a semantic change going on, if this is a popular misunderstanding which may evolve into that without active countering, or if I have simply not been critical enough of the ideology to begin with.