"The proletariat must acquire the qualities of a great conquering army." I've not read Georges Sorel since I was a young man developing an understanding of the revolutionary syndicalist tradition I sought to revitalize. At the time, while critical of Sorel's revisionist abandonment of value theory and materialist dialectics, I was nonetheless sympathetic to some of the Bergsonian components of his thinking. I have since rejected much of the non-rational and voluntarist presup

I started Common Ruin after leaving college as a means of working through the economic and philosophical theories which animated me as a young man, and that remain of ongoing relevance to my research. Aside from a platform for sharing my papers and book reviews, I also used the blog as a medium to write commentary on controversies and developments in the contemporary left. I stand by much of what I wrote but will concede that some of my thinking at the time was muddleheaded a