The coup against the Bolivian government under Evo Morales came straight out of the latest political-military manuals of the U.S. imperial state. These manuals provide instructions on how systematically to undermine the reputation of a popular, elected leader with accusations of dictatorship, corruption, and various other forms of character assassination in order to soften support on the left. Moreover, these manuals provide step-by-step instructions on how to prepare the political and military bases of a coup. | more…
There is an unresolved tension at the heart of Marxist explanations for women’s oppression under capitalism. Although there is general agreement that the bourgeois family, as the dominant kinship unit, has something to do with generating and reproducing that oppression, the exact role of the family varies among Marxists. In this respect, Margaret Benston’s proposal to situate domestic labor within capitalist production was truly pioneering. Rather than record and describe domestic work, Benston theorized this labor and laid the basis for later feminists to apprehend the production of commodities and the reproduction of labor power within a unitary framework. | more…
Vesa Oittinen interviews Andrey Maidansky about Soviet philosophy and the well-known and controversial Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov (1924–79). | more…
In this reprint of “On the Coincidence of Logic with Dialectics and the Theory of Knowledge of Materialism,” Evald Ilyenkov discusses the idea of the coincidence of dialectics, logics, and theory of knowledge—one of the hallmarks of the Ilyenkovian current in post-Stalin Soviet philosophy. Ilyenkov was a renowned and controversial Soviet Marxist philosopher who contributed substantially to the Marx Renaissance that emerged in the so-called Thaw Period, aiming to reconstruct Marx’s original methodology. He was known as an ardent critic of technocratic tendencies in the Soviet Union and stressed that socialist society should express humanist values and not merely be an engineering project. | more…
In The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War, John H. Flores illustrates the growth of the Mexican population in 1920s Chicago and how migrant communities situated and organized themselves politically in an often-hostile social environment. Drawing from political experiences in Mexico, Flores identifies and explores the evolution of a Mexican population whose identities and loyalties were shaped and divided by the Mexican revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes in la patria (the homeland). | more…
As part of a deconstruction of national identity, Jennifer Jolly, in her Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas, analyzes the tourist town of Pátzcuaro in the west-central Mexican state of Michoacán as a microcosm of cultural power in which tourism, art, history, and ethnicity were woven together under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934–40). | more…
Victor Grossman’s A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee is at once an exciting adventure story, an engaging autobiography of a radical opponent of U.S. imperialism, and a clear-headed assessment of the successes and failures of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) at the onset of the Cold War until 1990, when its citizens voted to merge with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany). Most poignantly, Grossman compares the benefits workers gained in the GDR, the FRG, and even the United States during the Cold War. | more…
