Articles

A Commune Called ‘Che’: A Socialist Holdout in the Venezuelan Andes

A Commune Called ‘Che’: A Socialist Holdout in the Venezuelan Andes

by Chris Gilbert

March 1, 2022

The Che Guevara Commune is far removed from the bustle of Venezuela's huge coastal cities. You reach it by following a steep winding road from the shores of Lake Maracaibo into La Culata National Park. Lush vegetation and tall bucare trees provide good shade for coffee and cacao, which has only begun to be farmed in recent decades in this region, due to the migration triggered by the construction of the Pan-American Highway along the lake's perimeter in the 1950s.

Revisiting Marx on Race, Capitalism, and Revolution

by Kevin B. Anderson

March 1, 2022

Did Karl Marx have a theory of race and capitalism? Not exactly, but he theorized on these issues over four decades and much of what he wrote still speaks to us today. At a time of global and U.S. struggles for liberation in the face of a deeply racialized fascist threat, these writings are worth revisiting.

What 1930s Radicals Totally Knew: Scott Borchert on the Federal Writers’ Project

What 1930s Radicals Totally Knew: Scott Borchert on the Federal Writers’ Project

by Scott Borchert and Susie Day

March 1, 2022

The Great Depression is almost one century old. Today in the United States we remember this international economic collapse, and the suffering it engendered, by reading novels and essays about it, watching plays, viewing paintings—often forgetting that the U.S. government of that time encouraged and financially supported much of this art. Not only art: the Depression was one of the few times that the federal government ever stepped in to help ordinary people get on their feet.

‘Bury Class Society Before It Buries Us All’: Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Vision for a Marxist Feminist Anthropology

‘Bury Class Society Before It Buries Us All’: Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Vision for a Marxist Feminist Anthropology

by Ahmed Kanna

February 1, 2022

Eleanor Burke Leacock taught that transhistorical, universal male dominance is a myth, not a fact. Writing during the grimmest period of Cold War reaction, Leacock put forward a critique of the mainstream U.S. ideology, which took for granted the idea that there were only two genders, in binary opposition to each other, and that these were the direct product of so-called male and female nature.

Magic, Necromancy, and the Nonhuman Turn

Magic, Necromancy, and the Nonhuman Turn

by SunYoung Ahn

February 1, 2022

Across the humanities and the social sciences, critical attention is being given to the nonhuman as an ecological, philosophical, and political problem—the nonhuman here meaning anything from animals and plants to manufactured objects. Going under names as various as new materialism, political ecology, and object-oriented ontology, these studies comprise a movement that is largely described as the nonhuman turn.

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