Of the three magazines that brandish “Review of Books” in their title,
Los Angeles’s (http://lareviewofbooks.org/) leads the pack, at least
from the standpoint of serving as a critic of capitalist society. In an
epoch of imperial decay, that’s the most important criterion after all.
At the bottom of the pile is New York’s (http://www.nybooks.com/), a
publication that was pretty edgy in its early days, to the point of
publishing Noam Chomsky and putting a David Levine drawing of a Molotov
cocktail on the front page. Nowadays it is a snoozefest for elderly
professionals, the print counterpart to PBS. In the center of the pack
is the London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/), a journal that
was distinguished by a takedown of Christopher Hitchens that was both
laugh out loud and politically cogent. While it still is a source of
trenchant social criticism, the LRB has a blind spot on Syria, offering
its readers Seymour Hersh’s conspiracy theories about rebels gassing
their families. It was up to the good people at the LARB to publish
Muhammad Idrees Ahmed’s devastating critique of Hersh, a sign that it
was not in thrall to pack journalism.
In the most recent issue of LARB, there’s an article by Jedediah Purdy
titled “Killing It” that is accompanied by a drawing of an aproned Karl
Marx holding up a bleeding chicken in one hand and a butcher’s knife in
the other. With such an image, it is no surprise that the article claims:
Writing 20 years before the first volume of Das Kapital appeared, Marx
imagined desultory killing as one of the joys of human liberation. In a
passage that became a touchstone for parts of the 1960’s New Left, he
urged that a free person should be able to “hunt in the morning, fish in
the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner […]
without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” This was
the ideal of unalienated labor, spontaneous and expressive, exercising
all human powers without ever turning the worker into the tool of her task.
To start with, I am not sure how much of a grasp that Purdy has of the
1960s New Left since he was born in 1974. In fact the New Left—strictly
speaking—was much more into Marcuse than Marx.
full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/09/15/karl-marx-and-hunting-animals/
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