Tag: marxism

Africa was at the centre of Lenin’s work

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27 January 2022 — Review of African Political Economy

Marxism, we are told, is Eurocentric and has lost much of its appeal in the eyes of many scholars and activists. Some have even denounced Marxism as a racist theory, irrelevant to the study of Africa. Vladimir Lenin is implicated in this critique. In a far-reaching study of Lenin’s ideas, Joe Pateman argues Lenin placed Africa at the centre of his analysis of imperialism and contemporary capitalism. Here, the author reflects on the key aspects of his analysis. Following this, Pateman’s full article in the ROAPE journal can be accessed for free.

By Joe Pateman

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Mike Healy: ‘Marx and Digital Machines: Alienation, Technology, Capitalism’

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8 October 2021 — Marx and Philosophy

by Thomas Klikauer (October 12, 2021 ) |

Ever since German philosopher Hegel discussed alienation and Karl Marx converted it into the sensible framework of the economics of capitalism, alienation isn’t really a new subject–many might even think all has been said. Yet, Healy’s exquisite book applies several recent frameworks of alienation to two groups of workers–IT workers and academics. His book delivers surprising insights and results. Healy has divided his book into eight short and very readable chapters starting with a conceptual chapter on “alienation”. The book’s key empirical chapters are on IT professionals.

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Marx on technology

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7 May 2021 — MROnline

Originally published: Andy Merrifield Blog (September 29, 2019)

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The longest chapter in Capital is the fifteenth, on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry.” At almost 150-pages, it’s really a book in itself, a staggeringly dense and expansive discussion that could easily standalone—not only as a brilliant exegesis of capitalist machinery, but also as a sweeping social history of technology. At its broadest reach, the chapter is a vivid demonstration of historical materialism in action, of Marx’s method put through its dialectical paces. As ever with Marx, his footnotes aren’t to be passed over glibly: they’re worth studying, pondering over for the nuggets of insight they contain.

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Academic Marxism will never provide the answers needed to free workers

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17 April 2021 — theplanningmotivedotcom

This article was inspired by a debate on the Academia website around a conciliatory piece by Fred Mosely. This piece and most of the comments show that Academic Marxism plays the same role as the Young Hegelians did in Marx’s day. They treat Marxism as a theoretical science not a practical science geared towards action. As capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis they are content to debate each other and render Marx more profound, and through so doing, all they reveal is their irrelevance.

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ASSA 2021: part two – the radical answers

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8 January 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog

by michael roberts

At the annual conference of the American Economics Association (ASSA), there are sessions hosted by the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) for Marxist and other heterodox economists to present papers.

At this year’s ASSA 2021, many of the URPE sessions were concerned with the economic impact of COVID-19 and climate change, as did the mainstream sessions, but, of course, from a different perspective. But before I look at those sessions, let me start with the annual David Gordon lecture presented by a different radical economist each year.

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Marx Didn’t Invent Socialism, Nor Did He Discover It

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9 December 2020 — Internationalist 360°

Steve Lalla

https://libya360.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/31cd2-1cu8zmelqf3xeiu9iavpxnw.jpeg

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?

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Friedrich Engels at 200: A Revolutionary Historian

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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.

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Silvia Federici: The exploitation of women and the development of capitalism

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10 November, 2020 — Liberation School

By Jodi Dean

Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is a classic work of anti-capitalist feminism. The book examines capitalism’s investment in sexism and racism, showing how the consolidation of the capitalist system depended on the subjugation of women, the enslavement of black and indigenous people, and the exploitation of the colonies. Federici demonstrates that unpaid labor–especially that of women confined to the domestic sphere and of enslaved workers–is a necessary support for waged labor.

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Catastrophe capitalism: climate change, COVID-19, and economic crisis

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1 April 2020 — MROnline

An interview of John Bellamy Foster

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In the backdrop of the ravaging coronavirus pandemic, John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, the famous socialist magazine, discusses the pandemic in relation to the present condition of capitalism and economic crisis in the following interview conducted by Farooque Chowdhury in late-March, 2020. Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, and author of numerous books on political, economic, and ecological issues, relates the pandemic to the capitalist economy, its crisis and climate change.

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Marxism and the Climate Crisis: African Eco-Socialist Alternatives

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16 February, 2020 — MROnline

Originally published: ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy) by Vishwas Satgar (February 14, 2020)   |

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.

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Understanding socialism

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6 December 2019 — Michael Roberts Blog

by michael roberts

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.

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Could this be the most Marxist film ever made?

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14 May 2019 — MROnline – The Public Autonomy Project by Steve Darcy (May 8, 2019)

Boots Riley’s masterpiece of socialist cinema — Sorry to Bother You — may be the most self-consciously marxist film ever made. It is an exhortation to rebel, but to do so with our eyes open, with ‘sober senses,’ so we don’t replicate uncritically the logics that we aspire to contest.

[Note: this contains some plot spoilers.]

Those who avoided reading Karl Marx’s three-volume, 2,500 page magnum opus, Capital, in the improbable expectation that someday a movie version would come out, have finally got their wish. Boots Riley’s film, Sorry to Bother You, may indeed be the most marxist film ever made.

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The Validity of Socialism By Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez

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15 March 2019 — Internationalist 360°

It would be enough to listen to the hatred that the bourgeoisie injects into its denouncements against Socialism to deduce that there is something very good for human beings that implies ending the hierarchy of oppressors in order to proceed to a Socialist system capable of eradicating the interests of capital over the human being, as well as eradicating the entire individualist, racist, exclusionary and oppressive burden that has made our existence bitter for too long. To establish as a priority society itself, has been a struggle that is increasingly valid according to the ecological and humanistic ravages that capitalism has caused throughout its history. Realism reaffirms the validity of Socialism.

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István Mészáros: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction

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2 October 2017 — Climate & Capitalism

In Memoriam

István Mészáros, Dec. 19, 1930 – Oct. 1, 2017

“István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness — a systematic critique of the prevailing forms of thought — is unequaled in our time. No less a historical figure than Hugo Chavez referred to him as the ‘pathfinder’ of twenty-first century socialism.” —John Bellamy Foster

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150, 100…Zero

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17 June 2017 — Anti-Capital

1. One hundred and fifty years ago,  Marx’s Capital (volume 1) was published.  Nobody, OK, almost nobody thought it was a big deal.

One hundred years ago, the event voted “least likely to succeed” by the senior class attending the Second International’s Karl Kautsky Gymnasium, occurred.  Everybody, everywhere knew the Russian Revolution was a really big deal.

And that’s OK.  Marx was first, foremost, last, and always a revolutionist.  “Economics” is, in his own word, shit. 

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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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Book Review: Marxism and ecological economics By Martin Empson

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9 January 2014 — Resolute Reader

“Marxist class analysis can help answer many of the questions raised by ecological economists, at the same time that the substantive agenda of ecological economics can enrich the materialist dimension of Marxism”

Burkett-Ecological-EconomicsPaul Burkett
Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy
Haymarket Books, 2009

Reviewed by Martin Empson

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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 →