Esoteric Brezhnevism

There was another plumbing apocalypse in my apartment. Wednesday night, after I’d gone to bed, I started hearing loud gurgling noises out of both of my toilets. Getting up, I saw occasional bubbles surfacing in one of the bowls, but it didn’t seem like a very serious problem. The following morning, not only were both toilets backed up, but a splatter of black goop had spewed up into my bathtub from the drain. I reported it to the management and went to work. When I got home, a harried plumber was at work on what turned out to be a hard-to-get blockage under my building. In the meantime, a large quantity of standing black water had collected in my shower and both toilets were caked with thick sludge from the depths. The plumber gave up for the time being and said he’d come back the following day. I decided to get a motel room for the night so I would at least have access to a working toilet without having to drive to a gas station every hour to take a piss. Dotted along one of the mai...

Launched in 2021 by energetic and superficially likable commentators Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Breaking Points is today among the top political programs on YouTube. Joined the following year by Emily Jashinsky and Ryan Grim, the popular show, as its Wikipedia entry uncritically accepts the format, “includes one left-wing populist anchor (Ball) and one right-wing populist anchor (Enjeti), who provide news and commentary from an independent platform, separate from the mainstream media” [1]. The quartet’s putative independence warrants scrutiny, however, their mouthing of economic populism and ostensible anti-Zionism notwithstanding. Ball, previously a Democratic congressional candidate and contributor to MSNBC and HuffPost , was in 2017 and 2018 the treasurer of the People’s House Project PAC, which raised funds for Democratic candidates but came under fire for allocating, according to Open Secrets, 69.74% of its money to People’s House Project staff salaries and another 12.82% ...

  Radically as Marxism and Zionism would part ways in the twentieth century, it is interesting to observe that the two ideologies’ early histories are intertwined in the person of Moses Hess (1812-1875), a Jewish radical Hegelian thinker and contemporary of Marx whose 1862 Zionist manifesto, Rome and Jerusalem , predates Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State by more than three decades. Hess, like Marx, was born in Germany’s Rhineland to a merchant father who intended for his son to pursue a life of religious study. As Hess recorded in his diary, however, “the Talmud utterly repelled me” [1]. His adolescent intellectual awakening saw him drawn to French socialism and to the works of Baruch Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel, whose thought would in different ways shape the course of Hess’s philosophical and political development. Under the influence of Hegel, Hess would in his early years stand out as a “dialectical Idealist” as opposed to a dialectical materialist, as his fellow left Hegelian Mar...