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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought

@highestmarx.bsky.social

827 followers 602 following 5K posts

Political theorist and anonymous academic, planting seeds beneath the snow.

Posts Replies Media

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

What a sentence

Folsom was unable to attend Cleveland's presidential inauguration as it conflicted with her final exams, but she visited him at the White House during spring break some weeks later.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Having a genuinely hard time parsing this one

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

You might try reading his Second Inaugural:

ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that his mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

The Onion Sickos meme but it’s Thaddeus Stevens

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Uncanny resemblance

Goebbels as a little rat faced freak, closely resembling Nathan Cofnas

Text reads:
WHAT IS AN "ARYAN"?
He Is HANDSOME
AS GOEBBELS
REPROOUCED FROM SOVIET WAR POSTER 1941

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Hey bro Allied propagandists had your number 80 years ago

Goebbels as a little rat faced freak, looking at lot like Cofnas, the pasty Nazi bitch

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

C’mon, man

Ukrainian drones were doing this so quickly with U.S. vehicles that they had to be sent back into the exercises as new units, or "re-spawned," to keep the exercise going, a U.S. official briefed on the drill said.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Oh my GOD

Reality check: Al is working from its training data, not the actual text. The vibes can be right while the details are wrong.
• After I read James Jones' "The Thin Red Line," AI confused Captain Stein with Captain Staros, the corresponding character in the movie adaptation.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Seems like this is the story guys like Chait still want to tell but they can’t and it’s driving them mad(der)

Infamous 1996 cover of The New Republic. Banner reads “Day of Reckoning” above a photo of a black mother smoking a cigarette while holding her baby. Below this is the headline “Sign The Welfare Bill Now”

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

JD’s primal trauma

Mr Burns using calipers on Smithers. Mr Burns says “YOU HAVE THE BRAINPAN OF A STAGECOACH TILTER.”

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

He can still do the ole’ razzle dazzle

"I said to somebody, 'Wait a minute, you don't understand, I won,'" Trump said, referencing his 2024 presidential election victory. "I'm not campaigning."

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Only asked because my phone showed me this. Plus the wrecker attitude suggests a lack of skin in the game, so to speak.

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Now that classicists are getting popular attention it’s time for Jane Campion to direct Sarah Ruden’s Lysistrata translation

WOMEN'S CHORUS LEADER:
Girls, put your pitchers down, out of the way, So if they lift a hand, we'll be prepared.
MEN'S CHORUS LEADER:
If somebody had done a proper job
Of slapping them, they'd keep their yappers shut.
WOMEN'S CHORUS LEADER:
Fine. Try it. Here's a cheek for you to smack.
And then I'll tear your balls off like a bitch.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Ok hear me out

JOHN
BROWN'S BODY

By
STEPHEN VINCENT
BENET

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Walter Benjamin, Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”

The existence of the classless society cannot be thought at the same time that the struggle for it is thought. But the concept of the present, in its binding sense for the historian, is necessarily defined by these two temporal or-ders. Without some sort of assay of the classless society, there is only a historical accumulation of the past. To this extent, every concept of the present participates in the concept of Judgment Day.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

That doesn’t make any sense. Look at what you posted. You think a person called Thulean Sorcerer who says Christians are “Jew Worshippers” isn’t an anti semite? Can you explain your reasoning?

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Umberto Eco laser eyes

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Gareth Dale has a very good biography of Polanyi that’s worth a read

Karl Polanyi
A LIFE ON THE LEFT
GARETH DALE

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

That’s Thalheimer essay Ganz mentions, along with Trotsky’s work, is still very relevant. Lots of what’s worth knowing about Bonapartism as a conceptual frame is in this book.

Marxists IN THE FACE OF FRSCISM
WRITINGS BY MARXISTS ON FASCISM FROM THE INTER-WAR PERIOD
EDITED BY DAVID BEETHAM

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Talk to me about the commodity form or stfu, honestly

Karl Marx seated at his desk among his books, looking peeved. Text reads: Bro, you didn’t read the book, I can tell

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Unlimited arms to the Titoist Liberation Army of Liberland.

The person showing it to me is Vít Jedlicka, Liberland's presicent. He founded the micronation on a disputed bit of territory between Serbia and Croatia with the goal of making a truly libertarian, digital country that runs on the same technology as cryptocurrencies.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Ruff ruff, I’m Poochie the Rockin’ Pundit

Poochie the Rockin Dog. He died on the way back to his home planet

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

John C. Woods, the American hangman at the Nuremberg Trials, holding up an example of his work.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Bart and Lisa Simpson sitting in the couch looking angry. Bart has his armed crossed and says “WE NEED ANOTHER VIETNAM TO THIN OUT THEIR RANKS A LITTLE”

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

The sickos meme but the sicko is Marxist medievalist Rodney Hilton

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Anyway this is my policy proposal

Juan Rico looking at the camera: “I’m from rural America and I say urbanize them all”

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Embrace Nancy Bermeo Thought

Cover of Bermeo's "Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy"

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

If you find the jocularity about Lindsay Graham’s death distasteful you’d have simply not made it in Jacksonian America. From Fanny Trollope’s “Domestic Manners of the Americans”

*There was not a hulking boy from a keel-boat who was not introduced to the President, unless, indeed, as was the case with some, they introduced themselves: for instance, I was at his elbow when a greasy fellow accosted him thus:-
"General Jackson, I guess?"
"The General bowed assent.
"Why they told me you was dead."
"No! Providence has hitherto preserved my life."
"And is your wife alive too?"
*The General, apparently much hurt, signified the contrary, upon which the courtier concluded his harangue, by saying,
"Aye, I thought it was the one or the t' other of ye."

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

A cartoon of two eagles, sitting in easy chairs, one reading a newspaper and one drinking a cup of tea. They are chatting:

DO YOU THINK THE OWL IS A PREDATOR?

OF COURSE NOT. HE'S NEVER BOTHERED ME.

EXACTLY.

NO IDEA WHAT
MR. MOUSE WAS
GOING ON ABOUT.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Picture of Karl Polanyi with laser eyes. An inset image of a news headline reads: “Why Both Left and Right Have Rejected Free Markets”

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Read theory

Cover of Alexei Yurchak’s book “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Batman looking up at the bat signal, which has been replaced by an image of Sigmund Freud

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

American political parties are the Bluth’s stair car. You will get hop-ons.

The Bluth’s stair car

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

You may be aware of this book but if you’re not it’s a wild read

THE
REFINERS FIRE
The making of
MORMON COSMOLOGY, 1644-1844

By John L. Brooke

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Battle Royale theatrical poster

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

“Ode for the American Dead in Asia” By Thomas McGrath

Ode for the American Dead in
Asia
BY THOMAS MCGRATH
God love you now, if no one else will ever, Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill In the fine and ruinous summer of a war You never wanted. All your false flags were Of bravery and ignorance, like grade school maps:
Colors of countries you would never see—
Until that weekend in eternity
When, laughing, well armed, perfectly ready to kill The world and your brother, the safe commanders
sent
You into your future. Oh, dead on a hill, Dead in a paddy, leeched and tumbled to A tomb of footnotes. We mourn a changeling: you:
Handselled to poverty and drummed to war By distinguished masters whom you never knew.

2.
The bee that spins his metal from the sun, The shy mole drifting like a miner ghost Through midnight earth—all happy creatures run
As strict as trains on rails the circuits of Blind instinct. Happy in your summer follies, You mined a culture that was mined for war:
The state to mold you, church to bless, and always The elders to confirm you in your ignorance.
No scholar put your thinking cap on nor Warned that in dead seas fishes died in schools
Before inventing legs to walk the land.
The rulers stuck a tennis racket in your hand, An Ark against the flood. In time of change Courage is not enough: the blind mole dies, And you on your hill, who did not know the rules.

Wet in the windy counties of the dawn
The lone crow skirls his draggled passage home:
And God (whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze, Like grace or confetti blinks and he is gone, And you are gone. Your scarecrow valor grows And rusts like early lilac while the rose Blooms in Dakota and the stock exchange Flowers. Roses, rents, all things conspire
To crown your death with wreaths of living fire.
And the public mourners come: the politic tear Is cast in the Forum. But, in another year, We will mourn you, whose fossil courage fills The limestone histories: brave: ignorant: amazed:
Dead in the rice paddies, dead on the nameless hills.

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

“Carentan O Carentan” by Louis Simpson

Trees in the old days used to stand
And shape a shady lane
Where lovers wandered hand in hand
Who came from Carentan.
This was the shining green canal
Where we came two by two
Walking at combat-interval.
Such trees we never knew.
The day was early June, the ground Was soft and bright with dew.
Far away the guns did sound, But here the sky was blue.
The sky was blue, but there a smoke
Hung still above the sea
Where the ships together spoke
To towns we could not see.
Could you have seen us through a glass
You would have said a walk
Of farmers out to turn the grass, Each with his own hay-fork.

The watchers in their leopard suits
Waited till it was time,
And aimed between the belt and boot
And let the barrel climb.
I must lie down at once, there is A hammer at my knee.
And call it death or cowardice,
Don't count again on me.
Everything's all right, Mother,
Everyone gets the same At one time or another.
It's all in the game.
I never strolled, nor ever shall,
Down such a leafy lane.
I never drank in a canal,
Nor ever shall again.
There is a whistling in the leaves And it is not the wind,
The twigs are falling from the knives
That cut men to the ground.

Tell me, Master-Sergeant, The way to turn and shoot.
But the Sergeant's silent
That taught me how to do it.
O Captain, show us quickly
Our place upon the map.
But the Captain's sickly And taking a long nap.
Lieutenant, what's my duty, My place in the platoon?
He too's a sleeping beauty,
Charmed by that strange tune.
Carentan O Carentan
Before we met with you
We never yet had lost a man Or known what death could do.

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

“For The Union Dead” by Robert Lowell

For the Union Dead
"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the citys throat.
Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die-. when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year--wasp-waisted, they doze over on muskets and muse through their sideburns...

Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble, he waits
for the blessed break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Read theory

LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS: EL NIÑO FAMINES AND THE MAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD

By Mike Davis

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Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

This is stealing Island of Doctor Moreau (1996) valor

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Thinking of one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing for no reason at all

WE KILLED YAMAMOTO

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Your publicists are dead

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

A brightly grinning cartoon boy. Text reads “internal screaming”

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Proof of concept

Martin Prince in a cage suspended above Mrs Krabappel’s classroom. He’s holding a water dish and says “my water dish is empty”

Uphold Karl Polanyi Thought @highestmarx.bsky.social · 11/05/2026