9 December 2020 — Internationalist 360°
Revered as the Father of Socialism, in popular conception Karl Marx (1818–1883) is the originator of socialist theory, the creator of a plan implemented thereafter by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other socialist nations. He remains one of the most cited authors of all time, and his writings are endlessly scrutinized and analyzed. Was he standing on the shoulders of giants?
23 November 2020 — History Workshop
28 November 2020 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Friedrich Engels. The German revolutionary philosopher made pathbreaking and profound contributions to modern social and political theory, playing a critical role in the forging and development of classical Marxism. The renewed relevance of many of his ideas in our crisis-ridden world of late capitalism, where profits come before people and the planet, are rightly foregrounded by those marking the #Engels200 commemoration.
9 October 2020 — FAIR
Socialism is more popular among people of color, younger people, people with more education and people with less money (Pew, 6/25/19). Continue reading
16 August 2020 — Internationalist 360°
Editor’s note: The following is the first of a two-part article based on a talk the author gave at the People’s Forum in July 2020. This first part focuses on Kollontai’s struggle for proletarian feminism against bourgeois feminism as well as her struggle to center gender equality within the party’s platform. Part two, which we will release next week, focuses on her work articulating intimacy, solidarity, and love as crucial components of the communist movement.
30 July 2020 — MRonline
Originally published: Granma English by Karima Oliva Bello (July 23, 2020)
Just recently, the 59th anniversary of Fidel’s quintessential words to Cuban intellectuals was commemorated. One passage in the speech is particularly noteworthy. Fidel said, and I quote:
The Revolution… must act in such a way that the entire gamut of artists and intellectuals who are not genuinely revolutionary, find that within the Revolution they have an arena in which to work and to create; and that their creative spirit, even if they are not revolutionary writers or artists, has the opportunity and freedom to be expressed. That is, within the Revolution.
A rooftop mural in Naples, Italy, depicting Lenin, Martin Luther King, George Floyd, Malcolm X and Angela Davis. Photograph: Alessandro Pone/AP
28 May 2020 — MROnline
by Víctor Castillo, Guillermo Murcia, and Maxi Nieto
The current ecological and social crisis, a crisis which has seen its effects increased by a public health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is a crisis that raises serious concerns over environmental sustainability and social polarization. It has a fundamental cause: the blind logic pursued by our economic system, where everything is secondary to profits. The seriousness and urgency of the situation faced by humankind once again brings to the fore a discussion of alternatives to the capitalist mode of production and, in particular, the feasibility of economic planning given our current technological conditions.
Continue reading
20 May 2020 — Monthly Review Press
$23.00 – $35.00
Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that will help us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies.
24 February 2020 — Indian Punchline
The race for Democratic Nomination in the upcoming US presidential election in November has electrified with the huge victory by Bernie Sanders in the Nevada primary on Saturday. The race has crossed a critical milestone. The primaries so far gave us a sampling of the trend in two regions of America — the American heartland (Iowa) and the Northeast (New Hampshire) — that Sanders is at the top of the heap of Democratic contenders.
16 February, 2020 — MROnline
Introducing an important book series on Democratic Marxism in Africa, Vishwas Satgar explains that the project is premised on a rejection of the authoritarianism of vanguardist politics and the need to learn critical lessons from all the left projects of the 20th century. There is a rich inheritance of emancipatory Marxism in Africa, which includes Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Harold Wolpe and many others. Today, Satgar argues, the challenge is to defeat carbon capitalism accelerating the climate crisis and fomenting exclusionary nationalisms and for this there has to be a return to Marx.
7 February 2020 — Internationalist 360°
For over three months, since October 18, 2020, the Chilean people have been resisting. Will Chile be able to realize a revolution with a change of paradigm, which will take it to that so longed for new society?
For more than three months since October 18, 2020, the Chilean people have been resisting and the government of Chile has been ignoring their demands: a decent salary, beyond the crumbs it has given them, the end of the AFP, free and dignified health care for the people, free education for all young people, free transportation to work, and so forth.
6 December 2019 — Michael Roberts Blog
The New York Times magazine has described Richard Wolff as “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist”. And that is probably not an exaggeration as a description of this emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and visiting professor at the New School University in New York.
25 October 2019 — MROnline
Originally published: Verso by McKenzie Wark (October 18, 2019)
Many of my friends disliked it, and not without reason. And yet Raoul Peck’s film The Young Karl Marx seemed to me to get the essential thing right.1 I saw it as a film about the struggle to live in the present. As such, it’s a film that can help us do exactly that. The Young Karl Marx is fiction, but like all good fiction is more real than the documentary evidence on which it is based. It tells us not what actually happened, but a version of what happened with which to think what is happening now. In that sense, it is a species of realism.2 And in another sense too. It is a work of cinema. It is in Pasolini’s terms (and Barad’s also) cut from the real itself.
1 September 2019 — Off Guardian
It is an age-old question as to the extent art reflects the world we live in. Bertolt Brecht allegedly said to the contrary that art was “not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”
29 August 2019 — The Bullet
Global capitalist crisis, impending ecological disaster, and new responses by popular movements in some regions, particularly in Latin America, inspire radical thinking about the need to go “beyond capital.” But how to attain the desired “system change” – today, an ecosocialist regime in place of capitalist rule – continues to be a matter for debate and experimentation.
18 August 2019 — Climate & Capitalism
Finally published in full, Marx’s notebooks from the 1860s provide important insights into his views on ecology and capital’s destruction of nature.
Teinosuke Otani, Kohei Saito, Timm Graßmann (eds)
MARX-ENGELS-GESAMTAUSGABE, IV, 18
Exzerpte und Notizen. Februar 1864 bis August 1868 (de Gruyter, 2019)
[Marx-Engels Complete Works, Part IV, Volume 18
Excerpts and Notes, February 1864 to August 1868]
6 July 2019 — Counter Currents
Win the battle of democracy
Do away with private property
Abolish the wages system altogether`
End employment to end unemployment
Achieve abundance for all and inscribe on the banners:
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!
An association, in which the free development of each is the condition of free development of all“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”
― Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism, 1844
12 June 2019 — The Believer
“LIKE THE WELFARE WOMEN SAID: EVERY WOMAN, EVERY MOTHER, IS A WORKING MOTHER.”
What memory can do:
Re-signify the earth
Re-signify the local
Make the struggle visible
Read Silvia Federici and she will revolutionize the way you understand the world. She will turn it upside down and radicalize it. Part of a group of feminist thinkers who have reinvented and expanded Marxism, Federici has helped put women’s work, long banished to the margins of anti-capitalist analysis, at the center. Reproduction, the typically unpaid work of caring for others and sustaining common life, is as important as production, the waged work left-wing political economists have traditionally emphasized.
11 June 2019 — Novara Media
A different kind of politics for a new kind of society—beyond work, scarcity and capitalism. In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history. On the day of his book launch he’ll be joining Michael to discuss the key themes of his book. Q&A at the end!
5 June 2019 — Global Research
By Eric Toussaint and Wilder Pérez Varona
Wilder Pérez Varona (WPV): My first question to you is about the issue of bureaucracy.
Before 1917 the issue of the socialist transition is one thing. The 1848 Revolution, the Paris Commune (which is a crucial episode, but of a momentary nature) were always limited to matters of theory, principles, projections (we know that Marx and Engels were reluctant to be very detailed about these projections). The Revolution of 1917 placed this problem of transition in another way, on to a different level; a level that involved essentially practical elements. One of them involved the issue of bureaucracy, which gradually appeared throughout the 1920s. On the issue of bureaucracy as it was being developed in those circumstances, how do you define the function of bureaucracy by according it an autonomous role of such a relevant actor at the level of the class triad: the working class / peasantry and the bourgeoisie? Why this important place? I would also like you to say something on the distinctness of “class”. You are cautious to talk about the bureaucracy as a class; however, other authors do.
The New Dark Age 