Contradictions of Capitalist Society and Culture

Dialectics of Love and Lying

Author: Raju J. Das Series: Studies in Critical Social Sciences

Contradictions of Capitalist Society and Culture

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Summary

•Email campaign to Haymarket's growing number of mailing list subscribers

•Promotion to the subscribers and supporters of the journal from which the book series derives

•Academic marketing campaign to scholars in relevant fields, aiming to specifically target professors likely to assign the book to students

•Reviews in relevant academic and left journals and periodicals

•Virtual launch events bringing together authors and contributors from across the globe to the 35k subscribers to Haymarket's YouTube channel

•Display and promotion at relevant academic and left conferences and events

Description

In this sociological examination of love, truth, and hate, Raju J. Das argues that if we are to defeat the hate-politics and post-truth politics, then we must fight for a post-capitalist world that is truthful and caring.

Love and truth are important aspects of culture. Signifying the crisis of capitalist culture in the contemporary world are their opposites, i.e. hate and lying, respectively. There is rampant lying for ideological/political purposes. There is also an increasing absence of genuine love, i.e., love as caring and solidarity, which, under certain conditions, takes romantic forms.

Ideological-political lying is connected to the corruption of love, with its confinement to the private sphere of individuals and consequent isolation from the wider unequal society. This connection is via capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism resorts to ideological-political lying to cover up its contradictions that cause alienation/suffering of the masses. Lying and alienation/suffering are not conducive to genuine love in society. On the other hand, a crisis-ridden capitalism produces the right-wing politics of lying ('post-truth' politics). This is also a politics of hatred (or, 'post-love, or, anti-love') against minorities, democrats and socialists, a politics that is justified by lies about these subjects.

About the Author

Raju J Das is Professor at York University, Toronto. His research interests include Marxist political economy and social theory. His recent books are Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World, and Marx's Capital, Capitalism, and Limits to the State.