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…
There is hardly any theme in Karl Marx’s theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fetishism in Capital, young Marx’s initial exploration of the term has rarely enjoyed critical attention. | more…
In grasping emergent qualities and laws on various levels of organization of matter, dialectical theory employs its own conceptual structure, scientific language, and investigation method, and takes a categorially open-ended shape. In this context, Engels provides a remarkable illustration that not only argues for the interconnection and interpenetration of distinct spheres such as chemistry and biology, but also draws on a generative feature of self-organizing systems. | more…