Marxism

Whose labour is the machine absorbing? A call for labour process theory in HCI

A paper accepted for CHI 2026 argues that human-computer interaction has settled for studying artificial intelligence as a 'tool', and puts labour process theory, from Marx to Braverman, back on the table. The question is not a technical one: whose skill is the machine absorbing?

Reading Marx today: alienation, commodity fetishism and who owns the machine

The twentieth century turned Marx into the name of a political programme. The twenty-first is reading him again as an analyst: alienation, commodity fetishism, ecology, republican freedom. The question 'who owns artificial intelligence?' is that reading's examination paper.

Mouffe: democracy is not the art of agreement but of taming conflict

For forty years she has pressed one thesis: people cannot agree on fundamental values, and this is no defect. Democracy's job, for Mouffe, is not to bring everyone round to a single view but to turn the enemy into an adversary. Empty the political stage and the passions remain — someone else fills it.

Raymond Geuss's Tracks in Chaos: in praise of philosophy without a map

The philosopher who has pressed the most persistent objection to the moralising of political philosophy returns to the problem of orientation in a new collection from Polity. The title alludes to Heidegger's image of the forest path: most of them lead nowhere, but they become paths by being walked.

Hannah Arendt Prize goes to Lea Ypi: from totalitarian experience to political philosophy

The Albanian-born philosopher has been awarded this year's Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. The jury singled out the way she turns a childhood spent in socialist Albania into philosophical analysis, and the fresh urgency her account of freedom acquires as authoritarianism rises.

This Day in Philosophy — 27 August: the birth of Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770, 256 years ago today. The system that read history as the unfolding of reason has spent two centuries being both the most closely followed and the most flatly rejected philosophy there is.

Two books from Žižek: 'Liberal Fascism' is out, 'Signs from the Future' in October

The Slovenian philosopher's collection of essays on authoritarianism packaged in the language of the free market has been published. The second book arrives on 29 October 2026.

Slavoj Žižek

This Day in Philosophy — 14 August: the death of Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht, the founder of epic theatre, died on 14 August 1956. His 'alienation effect' opened an argument, still unsettled, about whether art can make an audience think.

This Day in Philosophy — 5 August: the death of Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels died in London on 5 August 1895. Marx's close collaborator was decisive in the spread of historical materialism.