“It’s very funny how scared they used to be of unions.” —Robert Evans, “Part 2: How the John Birch Society Invented the Modern Far Right”, Behind the Bastards (podcast, Dec. 17, 2020) “A sect presents itself as the embodiment of the socialist movement, though it is a membership organization whose boundary is set more or […]
by Casey Purser This essay was read aloud at a community healing circle held on Jul. 13, 2025 in memory of Casey, our beloved comrade. Let this be official notice to the world that as Israel and the United States call on their citizens to support materially an open genocide, my fellow comrades and I […]
This document represents my personal opinions at the time of writing, and not the official position of any organization to which I belong. What is a labor union? A labor union is “the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition between workers” (Engels 1845, Condition of the Working Class in England). This means: 1) […]
By Casey Purser and Julie Carmine LaCorte, PhD For anyone who has seen Severance, the show about creating a new personality for your work life separated from your personal life, you may have noticed that the evil corporation Lumen is increasingly seeming like a cult centered around their godlike founder Kier. You’d need to watch […]
In his principal doctoral thesis, Gilles Deleuze wrote: “Philosophy […] must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls. But the name of Marx suffices to save it from this danger.” Difference and Repetition (1968, Eng. trans. 1994) At this moment in history, as the end of the first quarter-century of the new […]
“Have you ever wondered why sociologists still study Marx if he was wrong?” (Erik Olin Wright, “Analytical Marxism”) This fragment grew into a series of YouTube videos: Rationalism and Socialism The time has come for socialists to reconsider Spinoza. As Macherey put it in his 1979 book Hegel or Spinoza, “the entire problem is that […]
Presentation on stateless socialism based on Kropotkin’s 1927 essay. LINK: https://jlacorte.edublogs.org/files/2022/04/kropotkin-notes.pdf
First publication. The degree of one’s affinity for dominant roleplay is shown to be independent from their affinity for submissive roleplay, based on an analysis of 250,000 Internet survey results. A geometric typology of polar vs. nonpolar roleplay profiles is presented.
The linked PDF is a Workbook for a semester-long course using Tannenbaum’s Excursions in Modern Mathematics. I used them as lecture notes at Austin Community College. The general approach is that of “discovery learning”. I’m a recovering fan of the Moore method (see rant below). Topics: Voting theory/Arrow’s Theorem (1 chapter) Fair division (1 chapter) […]
You absorb more philosophy than you realize when you study math. Choices, commitments to specific philosophical doctrines, were collectively made long before our modern textbooks were written. I feel I should revisit some of these choices. This document is a repository for reflections—basically diary entries—undertaken for the ultimate purpose of articulating a logic and an […]