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Logo of the Union of Agricultural Workers of Korea

Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea

According to most Western commentators, North Korea is an “enigma” plagued by “irrational” leadership, poverty, and pervasive food shortages. Zhun Xu charts the evolution of North Korean industrial agriculture and the country’s efforts to feed its population from the Soviet era up until today. What, Xu asks, can we learn from the country’s efforts to industrialize its agricultural sector, and what do they tell us about the future of agriculture under socialism? | more…

Notes by Marx on Italian grammar

Marx and Engels as Polyglots

Drawing on writings, historical accounts, and personal letters, Kaan Kangal surveys the considerable extent of Marx and Engels’s interest in language and capabilities as polyglots. This interest, he argues, was part and parcel of their political commitment to building worldwide socialism. | more…

New! The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis: McCarthyism, Communism, and the Myth of Academic Freedom

The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis tells the true tale of a mathematician who found himself taking an involuntary break from chalking equations to sit opposite a row of self-righteous anti-Communist congressmen at the height of the McCarthy era. Courageously asserting the First Amendment to confront a system rapidly descending into fascism, Davis testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He became one of a small number of left wingers who served time for contempt of Congress. | more…

Shipping containers in Montreal, Canada (May 16, 2017)

Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism

The popular narrative that capitalism has led to a general improvement in human well-being over the last two hundred years is, historical data show, not supported by evidence. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan enumerate the empirical and methodological problems on which this narrative is built and explore the potential benchmarks for truly understanding human welfare. | more…

Ferdinand Smith and Earl Dickerson meeting with Donald Nelson to promote African-American man-power in war production (circa 1945)

Planning an Ecologically Sustainable and Democratic Economy: Challenges and Tasks

As the impending planetary crisis looms ever-closer, Martin Hart-Landsberg proposes a new focus on the Second World War industrial conversion experience, in which production and consumption were guided by central planning agencies. These successes and pitfalls of this period provide many useful lessons for activists and organizers working toward planned degrowth. | more…

Construction workers complete electrical connections on phase 2 of a solar microgrid project at Fort Hunter Liggett, CA (March 12, 2013)

Planning and the Ecosocialist Mode of Cooperation

Economic planning, Nicolas Graham writes, was not, perhaps a major theme in Capital. However, Marx’s understanding of such planning—as yet unrealized societal capability—yields great insight into how we might reorient modes of production toward cooperation and coordination. “Despite bourgeois and neoliberal ideology,” he writes, “planning is both an urgent necessity and a liberatory potentiality.” | more…

Demonstration against the EPR, Lyon, March 17, 2007, Place Bellecour

Democratic Planning for Degrowth

Degrowth promises to liberate society from the imperative of capital accumulation. “So how,” Matthas Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth wonder, “might planning beyond growth look?” It is not, they write, only a proposal for a postcapitalist society, but for a radical transformation of our institutions and social relations to create a more sustainable and just world. | more…