About Markar Melkonian
Melkonian is a Teacher, student of philosophy, and nonfiction author who writes about imperialism in the South Caucasus and Southwest Asia, as well as class, political power, ideology, and social science.
Photo by Sara Anjargoliank, © 2009. Grigor, 29, combs through a garbage dump outside Yerevan, in search of recyclables to sell and shoes to burn for fuel. When the photo was taken in the first decade of the 2000s, he lived with his wife, three young children, and mother in a shack near the dump.
Notes on these Writings
Reflections on philosophy, politics, history, and the reasons behind the work collected throughout this archive.
I write because I think there’s something that needs to be said, or that hasn’t been said enough, or put in the right way, or put together properly.
Here I explain what I mean by “lean, mean Marxism.” The site is organized topically. Topics include the post-Soviet Republic of Armenia, the philosophy of social science, philosophy of death, and philosophy and common sense. There are also discussions of state power, imperialism in the Middle East, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union,.
There is no attempt here to repeat sanctioned pieties about free markets, war, the modern state, or modern common sense. Unlike our celebrated “innovators” and “disruptors,” I have no “passion” to join the drone of sanctioned certainties.
My books include Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (1996) and Richard Rorty’s Politics: Liberalism at the End of the American Century (1999). The reader should forthwith purchase multiple copies of these books.
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