Miscellanea

things i like

“All that is solid melts into air.”
— karl marx and friedrich engels, the communist manifesto

“pictured reading karl marx beside his parents' pool / facing ridicule he pleaded / ‘that doesn't make me rich, no way / it's only outdoor and it isn't heated’”
— los campesinos!, renato dall'ara

marx is interesting to me partly because he provides a way of making apparently ordinary social arrangements strange again. wage labor and private property are so thoroughly incorporated into everyday life that they can begin to look less like historically produced institutions than properties of reality itself. marx's method repeatedly reverses this. what appears natural acquires a history, and what appears to concern isolated individuals becomes intelligible only through the social relations in which those individuals participate.

“marxism” is already a more difficult object than marx. it is tempting to treat an intellectual tradition as the gradual elaboration of a set of ideas established by its founder, but a tradition that survives for long enough becomes a historical object in its own right. marxism developed under circumstances quite different from those in which marx wrote, and its subsequent forms cannot be understood merely as interpretations of an original doctrine. indeed, the disagreement over what constitutes marxism is itself part of the history of marxism. i daresay a tradition capable of containing both gramsci and analytical marxism has already made the search for a single doctrinal essence somewhat unrewarding. (this is probably true of most intellectual traditions worth reading.)

alienation is probably the part of marx i return to most easily. in the 1844 manuscripts, alienated labor is not merely labor that is difficult or badly paid. marx is making a much more ambitious argument about the relationship between human beings and what they produce. under capitalist social relations, productive activity can confront the person performing it as something external: the product belongs elsewhere and the activity occurs under conditions the worker does not determine. something that could constitute meaningful human activity instead becomes principally a means of remaining alive.

i like this considerably more than the ordinary complaint that capitalism makes people work too much. there is something much stranger about spending most of one's waking life engaged in activity whose conditions are determined elsewhere because access to the ordinary requirements of life depends upon continuing to do so. capitalism is particularly successful at making historically specific arrangements appear as practical necessities. marx's analysis restores their contingency. the economy ceases to resemble a force external to social life and becomes something constituted through social relations which have histories and therefore, at least in principle, alternatives.

historical materialism interests me for a similar reason, although less as a general law of historical development than as a method of refusing explanations which begin and end with ideas. people encounter the world through concepts, but the conditions under which those concepts become plausible are themselves historical. in the german ideology, marx and engels begin from human beings who must produce the conditions of their existence. this shifts the question from whether a society's account of itself is correct to how that account became possible within a particular form of social organization.

the stronger versions of historical materialism become considerably less convincing to me when this turns into a claim that history has a discoverable direction. material circumstances can constrain what is possible without secretly writing the ending in advance. (history has been rather inconsiderate about following theories of history.) an explanation which can accommodate every possible outcome as historically necessary has acquired its explanatory power a little too cheaply.

ideology becomes interesting in roughly the same place. social arrangements do not reproduce themselves only because somebody consciously chooses them every morning. institutions acquire ways of being understood which make their continued existence seem ordinary, and sometimes inevitable. the interesting version of ideology is therefore not that everyone who disagrees with marx has been tricked. it is that historically contingent arrangements can become difficult to recognize as arrangements once the concepts used to understand social life have developed alongside them.

my political sympathies are probably relevant here too: i like bernie sanders, although this obviously does not commit me to treating marxism as a political inheritance that has to be accepted whole. if anything, the internal disagreements are part of what keeps the tradition interesting to me. marx is much more useful as somebody to think with than as an authority to whom every subsequent political question can be referred. (he is also, inconveniently, dead, and so cannot be asked for updates.)

there is a tendency when discussing marx to collapse two rather different questions: whether his particular theories were correct and whether the questions he taught people to ask remain useful. i am much more interested in the latter. once property and wage labor acquire histories, they become available for explanation in a way that institutions mistaken for natural facts are not. one can ask why they have their present form, how that form reproduces itself, and under what circumstances it might change. even where marx's answers are inadequate, the estrangement from the apparently obvious is useful.

this is perhaps the part of marxism that appeals most to me sociologically. social life is full of arrangements which become invisible through familiarity. one of the useful functions of theory is to make them visible again, not by discovering that everything ordinary is secretly sinister, but by reminding us that ordinary things still require explanation. “this is simply how the economy works” is itself an interesting social statement. economies do not exist independently of the people and institutions continually reproducing them.

to read

karl marx, economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844
especially the writing on alienated labor. early marx, and probably the marx i am most immediately attracted to: productive activity as something that should belong meaningfully to human life rather than merely sustain it.

karl marx, capital, volume i
commodities, value, exploitation, accumulation, and the organization of capitalist production. i particularly want to understand commodity fetishism beyond the considerably less interesting internet meaning of “people really like buying things.” (eventually i will actually have to read the enormous book.)

antonio gramsci, selections from the prison notebooks
hegemony and the problem of how a social order maintains itself without depending entirely upon coercion. probably especially relevant to what interests me about the reproduction of institutions and common sense.

g. a. cohen, karl marx's theory of history: a defence
an unusually systematic reconstruction of historical materialism and one of the foundational texts of analytical marxism. i suspect the parts i disagree with will be at least as useful as the parts i don't.

leszek kołakowski, main currents of marxism
a very large intellectual history of marxism. particularly interested in this because it treats marxism as a tradition with a history rather than beginning from the assumption that the purpose of reading its history is to discover the correct marxism.

c. wright mills, the marxists
marxism approached by a sociologist already concerned with class and power. i am interested in the attempt to separate what remains intellectually useful in the tradition from what became doctrine. (also: mills!!!!)

last edited: 16 september 2026

last edited: 16 september 2026

when i was in middle school and watching endless amounts of anime, i stumbled across what became my favorite anime and, somehow, continues to be my favorite to this day: future diary. might be dangerous to rewatch it now. there were pieces of it that already fell short for me in middle school, specifically that it was very obviously tailored to a male audience and could be weirdly predatory about its female characters. there are sexualized shots of characters who are supposed to be fourteen, among other things that i remember bothering me even when i was around the same age as the characters myself. i am less innocent now and much more aware of why that kind of thing frustrates me, so there is a decent chance i would feel frustrated watching it.

still, what made future diary so good to me was that the characters were deeply interesting and the story was intricate in a way that completely consumed me. what was EXTREMELY frustrating was going on the internet after watching it and reading what other people thought about yuno. it seemed like everybody either hated her because she was “crazy,” or loved her for basically the same reason: ohhhh she's so crazy she's my yandere waifu!!!! i hate both of these interpretations. one person is frightened by the archetype and the other wants to put it on a body pillow. i think anyone who either a. hates yuno because she is crazy or b. loves her because she is their crazy waifu has managed to misunderstand one of the most important parts of the show.

also, i have never watched future diary: redial, the ova that continues the ending, nor do i particularly plan to. it seems lame from what i have seen of it and i think the ending of future diary is fine as it is. everything i am writing here takes into account the fact that i have not seen it. major spoilers obviously.....

the show opens with this strange little sequence that does not make much sense yet. yuno is desperately trying to wake an unresponsive yuki, there are pills beside him, and we see another confusing image involving a girl in a cage. then the show moves on and, for a majority of the series, doesn't explain what that was. we meet yuki, who spends most of his life observing people rather than interacting with them and compulsively records what happens around him in a diary on his phone. he also talks to deus ex machina, the god of time and space, although at this point yuki thinks deus is an imaginary friend he created in his head. yuno is this very popular girl in his class who has seemingly never paid much attention to him before. then suddenly she is paying a LOT of attention to him. she knows things about him she should not know. she knows where he is going to be. she follows him around. she seems completely obsessed with him.

then they find out about the game. deus is actually real, and there are twelve diary holders, all of whom already had some unusually specific way of recording their lives. their diaries now predict the future, and what they predict depends on what kind of diary that person kept in the first place. yuki's phone tells him what will happen around him. yuno's phone is entirely about yuki. one of the children has his future diary in the form of a coloring/picture diary. the diaries can also warn their owners when something is going to happen to them, including a “dead end” when the future currently predicts their death. deus tells them that they are in a survival game and basically have to kill one another until there is only one diary holder left, who will replace him as god.

(thought i had: does yuno's diary being about yuki imply that she already had a crush on him before the game? EDIT: could not remember, so i googled it. YES. before the game, yuki tells yuno that he wants to go stargazing with his family someday. yuno points out that he doesn't have a bride yet and asks if she can become his bride and go stargazing with him. yuki agrees without taking it particularly seriously, but yuno does. she starts keeping her diary about him because she already likes him.)

yuno immediately teams up with yuki. their diaries are actually extremely useful together because his tells him about everything around him while hers tells her about him. she is also immediately willing to do basically anything necessary to keep him alive. the weird part is still that nobody, including yuki, understands why she cares about him this much. a little crush and a promise to look at the stars together is one thing; whatever is happening with yuno is something else entirely, especially given that she had paid basically zero attention to him before that random day in class.

yuki, however, increasingly thinks yuno is crazy. from his perspective she is suddenly extremely attached to him, incredibly violent, and willing to kill basically anybody she needs to during the game. she is a character who is still easy to empathize with throughout a lot of this given they are in a game where everyone is trying to kill each other. there is also a point where she is captured by tsubaki's followers and threatened with being raped and killed, with the threat being used to lure yuki back. yuki reaches her before it happens, but watching yuno terrified and trapped while all of this is happening makes her desperation afterward easy to understand.

there are obviously moments where empathizing with her is harder. the one i had been remembering was the whole thing with yuki's mom. yuki is initially horrified about yuno meeting her, which is actually kind of funny because his mom ends up really liking yuno and approving of her as his girlfriend. later, when reisuke is staying with them, yuno tries to kill him with a hammer and accidentally hits yuki's mom instead, knocking her unconscious. looking back, i still don't think this is that bad given it was an accident. when i believed she had killed yuki's mom, i saw this as a potentially irredeemable part of her character which is later explained by her backstory. she doesn't actually kill her, though; yuki's father does later.

we eventually get yuno's backstory and learn that she was horribly abused by her parents. her parents would starve her and lock her in a cage. eventually yuno turned the cage back on them and locked them inside it, where they died. suddenly the fact that she is capable of being frighteningly controlling herself makes considerably more sense. she learned incredibly young that love and control and confinement could all exist in the same place. but this still doesn't explain why the little crush she had on yuki before the game has apparently become the single most important thing in her life. and then we find out yuno has already played the game before.

in the first world, yuno and yuki were both diary holders. they went through the entire game together, became lovers, and eventually ended up as the final two people standing. neither of them wanted to kill the other, so they decided that they would die together instead. they would take pills and go to sleep beside each other. yuki died. yuno didn't. she had only pretended to take the pills because she believed that if she became god, she could bring yuki back to life afterward. she could win the game, resurrect him, and finally they could just be together without anybody forcing one of them to kill the other. except becoming god did not let her do that. she could restore his body, but she could not restore his soul. yuki was actually gone.

so yuno went back in time. she entered another version of the world where another yuno and another yuki existed. she killed the yuno who belonged to that world, took her place, and started the game again. the yuno we have been watching for almost the entire show is not meeting yuki for the first time. he is meeting her for the first time. she has already known him. she has already fallen in love with him. they have already survived the game together. they have already planned to die together. she has already watched him die, become god because she thought she could bring him back, discovered that even becoming god could not give him back to her, and then literally torn open another timeline because she wanted to be with him again. yuki thinks that their relationship is beginning because he does not remember the first world. we think that it is beginning because we are following yuki. yuno is the only person in their relationship who knows that they have already had an entire life together.

honestly, even if i had remembered correctly and yuno really had killed yuki's mom, i think i might have still empathized with her after learning everything else. by this point, yuno's attitude toward the world seems to be that almost nothing matters beyond preserving as much time with yuki as possible. she has already learned that time can be turned backward and an entire world can be replaced by another one, so even something as permanent as killing someone does not necessarily seem permanent to her. if something goes horribly wrong, she can go back and make it so that it never happened.

this also explains why she seems so indifferent to the world around them. she has already learned that this is not the only version of reality. there was a first world. now there is a second. if the second one fails, she can do it again. another yuki exists. another yuno exists. another game can happen. from her perspective, everything around them has already demonstrated that it can be reset. even killing the second yuno makes sense within this. she isn't trying to create a life with some random boy she has decided belongs to her. she is trying to get back to the person she already lost. every time the world separates them, she finds another version of the world.

yuno says something along the lines of, “i'm crazy? what's crazy is this world that refuses to let me be with you.” everyone uses this as crazy yandere yuno evidence and i feel like i am going insane because she is literally describing the plot. the world actually will not let her be with him. the rules of the first game force one of them to die. she tries to beat that by becoming god. godhood cannot resurrect him. she tries to beat that by going backward in time. now she is living beside another version of the person she loved while being the only one who remembers what happened between them.

i don't think yuno is “crazy.” SORRY!!!!!!! i don't. i think she is behaving according to a reality that nobody else in the story understands until very late in the series. she knows that the world can restart. she knows that people can have duplicates. she knows that death can be escaped in one sense but horrifyingly not escaped in another. most importantly, she knows that she has already lost yuki once. she is just taking all of the time with him that she can get.

eventually the second world starts falling apart too, and yuno is prepared to do the same thing again. go backward. find another world. kill another yuno. find another yuki. start over. if the universe keeps producing versions of the person she loves, why would she accept the one reality in which she has to live without him? but at the end she finally doesn't. yuki is willing to let her kill him. he encourages her to do it so that she can survive, become god, and presumably find him again. this is the exact opportunity yuno has spent the entire series trying to preserve: another chance, another world, another yuki. instead, she kills herself.

i love the ending.. i think it is incredibly melancholic and incredibly sweet. yuno has spent more than one lifetime refusing to accept a universe in which she cannot be with yuki, and when she is finally given the choice to sacrifice him again for another chance, she chooses him instead of the chance. she lets herself be the one who disappears. yuki becomes god and goes back to a world without her. he spends 10,000 years there grieving her, and then, at the very end of the series, his future diary changes. where it had recorded yuno's death, it suddenly says that yuno has come to see him, and we hear her calling for him. that's it. redial apparently explains how she gets there, but i have never watched it and don't really want to. i like that the original ending doesn't explain it. after everything yuno has already done to get back to yuki, we just find out that somehow she did it again.

this might be my most annoying post yet. sorry if it's embarrassing. whatever. it's my website.

last edited: 16 september 2026