Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

David Joravsky - The Lysenko Affair

The Lysenko affair was perhaps the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science. For thirty years, until 1965, Soviet genetics was dominated by a fanatical agronomist who achieved dictatorial power over genetics and plant science as well as agronomy.

Jake Orbison - Adorno’s Marx and philosophical terminology

The students of Adorno and Horkheimer, by contrast,
read Capital as a critique of political economy, rather
than a prescription for alterative systems of social relations. Peter Hudis usefully describes the German New Reading as a kind of ‘objectivist Marxism … best understood as an analysis of objective forms that assume complete self-determination and automaticity’, in opposition to the ‘subjectivist Marxisms’ coming out of
France and Italy. The New German Reading, in short,
centred Marx’s theory of value and its determination of social forms. All European New Left readings of Marx reapproach Capital through the Grundrisse, but as Moishe Postone and Helmut Reinecke note in their introduction to the Grundrisse’s first English edition, ‘Marx repeatedly points out in the Grundriss[e] that the origins
and grounds of class relationships are to be searched for in the germ-form of the commodity’. This reading uniquely insists on the unity of all political and economic forms, as proceeding from the commodity form. In that way, as Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva
note in their guide to the Neue Marx-Lektüre in the pages of this journal, NML can also be seen as ‘a long footnote’ to Adorno’s aphorism, its own inversion of Hegel, ‘The whole is the false’. The critique of political economy finds ideology everywhere and its self-image ‘nowhere’.

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/rp221_orbison.pdf

Ethan Pollock - Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars

Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin carved out time to study scientific disputes and dictate academic solutions. He spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Ethan Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was in fact determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another. Socialism was supposed to be scientific, and science ideologically correct, and Stalin ostensibly embodied the perfect symbiosis between power and knowledge. Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this elegantly written book shows that Stalin's forays into scholarship can be understood only within the context of international tensions, institutional conflicts, and the growing uncertainty about the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and Party-dictated truths. The nature of Stalin's interventions makes clear that more was at stake than high politics: these science wars were about asserting that the Party was rational and modern, and about codifying the Soviet worldview in a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the globe during the early Cold War. Ultimately, however, the effort to develop a scientific basis for Soviet ideology undermined the system's legitimacy.

Alex Skopic - “AI-Powered” Surveillance Networks are Worse Than You Know

In the first place, the idea that surveillance is a silver bullet for stopping crime is questionable at best. There may be individual cases where it really does work as advertised: someone may notice they’re on camera and decide not to try breaking into a car, or someone who’s committed several assaults may get caught, preventing the next act of violence. But at best, this is a Band-Aid solution for a deeper problem. Surveillance only allows police to observe and punish crime after it’s been committed. It does nothing to address the basic conditions that cause crime: foremost among them, poverty and the desperation that comes with it. (For example, an eye-opening study in Chicago recently found that there’s a direct link between getting evicted and being more likely to commit a gun crime.) Punitive measures are like noticing that your kitchen is flooding, and responding by shoving more and more towels at the problem, rather than turning off the water at the source. And even if surveillance did lower crime rates, it wouldn’t justify casting a dragnet of cameras, drones, databases, and AI over an entire city, because the potential for abuse is truly terrifying.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-powered-surveillance-networks-are-worse-than-you-know

Hélène Béatrice Han - Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical

This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault's work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental. Given Foucault's constant focus on the (Kantian) question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be understood as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism or of materialism. The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault's work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the "anthropological sleep" various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault's work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them.