İbrahim Berkan Karataş
@lesociologuex
Streetwise sociologist, grassroots activist, enthusiastic researcher. Substack account:
I find Jameson’s reading of Deleuze in this piece particularly insightful, mostly because he refuses to turn the disagreement into a loyalty test.
Two books on Marx and human nature, worth reading together (ofc these names read each other, less warmly).
Forgacs puts the pre-prison journalism next to the notebooks, which lets you see the Gramscian concepts forming. I feel there’s a glossary, which you need more than you’d expect.
A text by Gilles Deleuze that only seems to grow more important with each passing day. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
This piece goes after capitalism on different ground than most philosophy does. The wrong isn’t unfairness and it isn’t harm. It’s one person’s will running another’s.
Hall’s essay on ideology has been still useful to me in a way few things are.
More than forty years on, I still think Anderson’s critique has aged remarkably well.
Traverso turns the left’s history of defeat into something more than nostalgia: a critical memory from which new struggles might still begin. An essential read.
I keep coming back to the Gulbenkian Commission report, Open the Social Sciences, edited by Wallerstein in 1996. I think it still explains the shape of the academy better than most things written since.
This book is essential if you want to understand postmodernism both as an artistic style and as the cultural expression of a new phase of capitalism.
I’d recommend Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism. It’s clear and cuts through the “sharing economy” gloss, delineating how platforms turn data, network effects, and monopoly power into business models. One of the solid entry points into digital capitalism.
This piece, I feel, is a game-changer. It decodes the ‘perceptual physics’ of Marx’s Capital III to show how surplus-value vanishes into surface forms. From digital ‘mining’ to to financial sharks, it reveals the hidden portals to a world beyond capital.
Strongly recommend Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Its singular force is lodged in recasting underdevelopment as a coeval historical relation.
This piece deserves far more attention than it gets. It is usually remembered for “real abstraction,” but its more neglected argument concerns the separation of conception from execution, and the way workers’ knowledge is transferred to management, machinery, and systems of control.
The Limits to Capital would be one of my picks. It is one of the most ambitious attempts to extend Marx’s analysis of capital into crisis, finance, rent, geography, and uneven development.
This piece discusses artificial intelligence and robotic labor through Marx’s critique of political economy. Will robots simply become machines that replace human workers, or will they come to occupy a new form of labor power within capitalist production? Highly recommended.
The book is intellectually ambitious, interdisciplinary, and full of surprising connections. It offers a refreshing alternative to more technical or futuristic books on AI.
I highly recommend Marshall Sahlins’ The Western Illusion of Human Nature. It is a powerful anthropological critique of the Western idea that humans are naturally selfish, competitive, and antisocial.
I highly recommend this piece because it brilliantly connects Hegel, Marx, and Vygotsky to create a unified « philosophy of praxis » that finally links individual psychology with social theory.
Book Recommendation: This piece gives Hegel his due and redraws the map around him. It reads the master-slave dialectic alongside the Haitian Revolution and asks why Europe’s “universal” story kept that event off the page. Sharp, political, and genuinely eye-opening.
Book recommendation: If you’re into left politics but tired of pure “resistance” aesthetics, this is a sharp, readable case for building a post-work agenda around automation, shorter working hours and universal basic income, plus a strategy for actually winning hegemony instead of just protesting.
Günümüz sosyal ve beşeri bilimlerin en popüler isimlerinden Byung-Chul Han’ı sistematik ve bütüncül bir şekilde eleştiren makalem açık erişim olarak yayımlandı. Üç yıllık bir düşünsel emeğin sonucu. İstifade edeni bol olsun. Tamamı için PDF Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Welcome to the desert of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism isn’t just economic; it’s a mindset. It shapes how we live, feel, and relate. No solidarity, no vision. Just competition, precarity, empty promises. A desert: all surface, no substance.
“Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.” Edward W. Said
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Jean Baudrillard
“The aim of theory is not to be boringly right but brilliantly wrong.” Michael Burawoy
“Violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch.” Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force