Tag: Marx

An essential summer reading list courtesy Climate & Capitalism

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29 June 2016 — Climate & Capitalism

John Bellamy Foster
Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature
Monthly Review Press, 2000

This is a classic, the one book you absolutely must read if you want to understand what Marx actually thought and wrote about humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature. Foster demonstrates that Marx’s work is deeply relevant in this age of environmental crisis. It’s not an easy read-on-the-beach book by any means, but it is truly essential. If you have read it before, read it again: I learn more each time I open it.

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Study Guide For those applying to the School of Anti-Economics By S. Artesian

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13 February 2015 — The Wolf Report:Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investor

Rumor has it that our GameBoy, Yanis Varoufakis, Minister of Finance and VIB (very important blogger)  somewhere said something like: 

” Marx’s first error, the one that I suggest was due to omission, was that he was insufficiently dialectical, insufficiently reflexive. He failed to give sufficient thought, and kept a judicious silence, over the impact of his own theorizing on the world that he was theorizing about. His theory is discursively exceptionally powerful, and Marx had got whiff of its power. How come he showed no concern that his disciples, people with a better grasp of these powerful ideas than the average worker, might use the power bestowed upon them, via Marx’s own ideas, in order to abuse other comrades, to build their own power base, to gain positions of influence, to bed impressionable students etc.?

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On the environmental question, Sam Gindin has got it wrong By Brad Hornick

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4 July 2014 — rabble.ca

[This is a response By Brad Hornick to Sam Gindin’s Unmaking Global Capitalism. WB]

Sam Gindin’s recent contributions to the The Bullet  and Jacobin explore the lost potential of the working class in revolutionary politics. On the economic and ecological fronts, he argues, working-class politics has been incapable of catalyzing widespread and consequential societal mobilization, or becoming vital sites of theoretical and practical struggle.

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Unmaking Global Capitalism By Sam Grindin

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4 July 2014 — The Jacobin

[Two articles; this, the original essay and a response by By Brad Hornick On the environmental question, Sam Gindin has got it wrong. WB]

When Marx famously declared that while the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it, he was asserting that it was not enough to dream of another world nor to understand the dynamics of the present. It was critical above all to address the question of agency in carrying out transformative change. For Marx, that agent was the working class. The gap between workers’ needs and their actual lives — between desire and reality — gave workers an interest in radical change, while their place in production gave them the leverage to act.

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Climate Change and Socialism: An interview with John Bellamy Foster By Steve da Silva

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19 December 2013 — MRZine

Steve da Silva (SD): Over the last decade you have emerged as a leading thinker in synthesizing radical ecology with the Marxist tradition.  From Marx’s Ecology (2000) to The Ecological Rift (2010) and everything in between, you’ve carried out the much needed intellectual work of recovering the overlooked ecological content of Marx’s original thought, presenting us with a side of Marx that many Marxists may not have been aware of.   Continue reading →

Alienation in Karl Marx’s early writing By Daniel Lopez

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October 15, 2013 — Links international Journal of Socialist Renewal

Marx 3

Young Marx

As Karl Korsh noted in Marxism and Philosophy, the philosophical foundation of Marx’s works has often been neglected. The Second International had, in Korsch’s view, pushed aside philosophy as an ideology, preferring “science”. This, he charged, tended to reduce Marxism to a positivistic sociology, and in so doing, it internalised and replicated the theoretical logic of capitalism. [1] In place of this, Korsch called for a revitalisation of Marxism that would view philosophy not simply as false consciousness but as a necessary part of the social totality.[2]

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Video: The Impact of Robots: Abundance and the Need for Radical Structural Reform

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1 September 2013 — Solidarity Economy

Marx anticipated the problem as capitalism’s systemic crisis, the growth in the ‘organic composition of capital’ (machines) in an inverse relation to ‘living labor’ (jobs). The way out, in the shorter run, is a social wage combined with shorter hours, and in the longer run, socialism on the path to a classless society. McAfee here sees the problem, if not the full solution. – Carl Davidson

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Reading Marx in Cairo By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

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29 July 2013 — Asia Times

“Every giant presupposes a dwarf … Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus.” – Karl Marx

When Egypt’s new strongman, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, called on his supporters to show their solidarity with the army on Friday (July 26), the 57th anniversary of nationalization of the Suez Canal by the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, this author’s instinct reaction was to re-read Karl Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon for the sake of historical analogy. [1] 

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Book Review: One Eye on the Red Horizon – The Condition of Communism By Joseph G. Ramsey

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22 July 2013 — Dissident Voice

comhorizon_DV

The eye-grabbing cover of Jodi Dean’s The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2012) depicts what could be the dawn of a new day. A red sun, half in view, arcs across the volume’s bottom edge. From this solid red spot, dozens of thin but widening beams fan out; crossing the background, the sunlight splits the sky itself into stripes of red and white.

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The mega project and the end of marxism

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13 May 2013 —  Left Streamed

The MEGA project and the end of Marxism

Editing the Classics – the unknown Marx and Engels MEGA – what’s in an acronym: Marx / Engels Complete Works. A Mega-Project – the largest historical critical edition project in the social sciences, more than a hundred scholars collaborating in 8 countries on 4 continents, a long-lasting project: started in the 1960s, will continue (after the recent evaluation) for at least another 10 years output: 164 volumes according to the original plan, still 114 volumes according to the revised plan of 1992. Continue reading →

Video: Michael Lebowitz: 'Spectres and struggles': a new vision for socialism in the 21st century

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3 May, 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

This talk was presented in Zagreb, Croatia.

A spectre is haunting the working class of Europe (both east and west) and the working class of developed capitalism in general. That spectre is the spectre of communism. For the working class, that frightful hobgoblin is a society of little freedom, a society of workers without power (in the workplace or community) and a society where decisions are made at the top by a vanguard party which views itself as the sole repository of truth. Of course, this was not what communism meant for Karl Marx and Frederick Engels nor, indeed, for Lenin.

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Racism, Drugs and Crime By Patricia Murphy-Robinson

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16 April 2013

Today, I learned with great sorrow of the death of a woman who had a very profound affect on my life. Born I think, on exactly the same month, day and year as Fidel Castro, Patricia Murphy-Robinson died on 11 April 2013. I knew that she’d been ill having spoken to her a few months ago in Jacksonville Fla, where she lived, but just how ill she had been, she kept hidden from me and wasn’t until I got an email from someone who knew her, that I found out.

This is not the place to go into Patricia’s long and eventful life and about which I have only the sketchiest idea, nor how I came to know her. Instead, here’s an essay she sent me that I published in an earlier version of InI and on rereading it after so many years (I think it was penned sometime in the  1990s), it seems right on the money for our situation today and a fitting testament to Patricia’s lifelong struggle for justice.

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A Return to Marx’s Ecological Critique By Simon Butler

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9 April 2013 — Green Left Weekly

Karl_Marx_posing1.jpg

Do oil spills make good economic sense? A witness called by Canadian firm Enbridge Inc. – which wants approval to build a $6.5-billion pipeline linking Alberta’s tar sands with the Pacific coast – told a recent hearing in British Columbia (BC) that the answer is yes. He said oil spills could benefit the economy, giving business new opportunities to make money cleaning it up. He told Fishers Union representatives that an oil spill in BC might indeed kill the local fishing industry, but their lost income would be replaced by compensation payouts and new career prospects, such as working for oil cleanup crews.

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Non-market socialism: Life Without Money – An Interview with Anitra Nelson

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30 December 2012 — 

Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (Pluto Press, London, 2011) that Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman have edited is a remarkable collection on the praxis of non-market socialism. For the contributors of the volume, socialism/communism is not just a state or goal which we have to achieve in some distant future; rather, it is built through immediate practices that reject capitalism and its key institutions – market and money. Continue reading →

Michael Lebowitz: Socialism for the 21st century — re-inventing and renewing the struggle

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9 January 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

<img class=”alignleft” style=”margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; border: 0px none;” alt=”Socialist alternative” src=”https://williambowles.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/socialist_alternative.jpg&#8221; width=”168″ height=”252″ border=”0″ hspace=”10″ />

[The following presentation was delivered to launch La Alternativa Socialista, the Chilean edition of The Socialist Alternative, in Concepcion, Santiago and Valparaiso, November 2012.]

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Every <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>socialist in the 21st century should try to answer two questions.

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Books: Transitional Demands from 1695 By Carl Rowlands

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20 November 2012 — New Left Project

John Bellers, 1654 to 1725, ed. George Clarke. Sessions Book Trust, 1993.

Despite being described by Karl Marx as a ‘phenomenon of political economy’ and regarded by Robert Owen as the forefather of his own co-operative socialist experiments, John Bellers has often been disregarded as a social reformer and theorist. I would argue, however, that contemporary readers may draw value from his work, which had to wait hundreds of years to be properly and sympathetically collated, albeit only through a fairly limited print run in 1993. 

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