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How capitalism was born in ‘robbery, violence and fraud’ (The War Against the Commons reviewed by ‘Socialist Worker’)

February 20, 2024

As Marx wrote, the common rights “were simply redefined as crimes: poaching, wood-theft, trespass”. The war against the commons removed the rights for people to hunt, forage, collect firewood and more. Game laws put restrictions on the poor, where you were criminalised even “if you took one hare when your family was starving”. The rich enclosed lands to hunt for sport, while the poor could be sentenced to death for hunting deer...

NEW! The War Against the Commons by Ian Angus (Excerpts)

NEW! The War Against the Commons by Ian Angus (Excerpts)

February 20, 2024

The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism
by Ian Angus
$26.00 / 246 pages / 978-1-68590-016-8

FOR ALMOST ALL OF HUMAN existence, almost all of us were self-provisioning. Together with our neighbors, we lived and worked on the land, obtained and prepared our own food, and made our own homes, tools and clothing. After our ancestors invented agriculture, most of us lived in small communities where the land was held and farmed in common, and most production was consumed locally.

Today, almost all of us have to work for others.

Our lives depend on, and are largely defined by, our jobs. All the productive wealth is owned by a tiny minority of individuals and corporations, and most of us cannot eat unless we sell them our ability to work.

That’s how capitalism works, and we are so used to it that it seems natural and obvious....

Novel as biography (Radek reviewed in ‘Against the Current’)

February 20, 2024

In his 1995 novel Radek, published in English translation for the first time last year by Monthly Review Press, Stefan Heym portrays Karl Radek as not only a man of the world but a perpetual outsider — a socially awkward contrarian with stereotypically Jewish features, thick glasses and a big mouth. In this, Heym likely saw in Karl Radek something of a kindred spirit.

A history which is far from over (The War Against the Commons reviewed in ‘Counterfire’)

February 20, 2024

Capital’s war against the commons continues today in the Global South, as does resistance to it. The removal of the people from the land to work in industrial cities is also part of the mechanism which creates the metabolic rift, one of the reasons for capitalism’s inherent environmental destructiveness. The route to overcoming this does not lie in individuals or communities returning to an idealised communal past. As Angus says, this has been the expectation of utopian communal groups since the Diggers established themselves on St George’s Hill in 1649...

NEW! Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project by Chris Gilbert (Excerpts)

NEW! Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project by Chris Gilbert (Excerpts)

February 20, 2024

Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project
by Chris Gilbert
$23.00 / 208 pages / 978-1-68590-023-6

Author's Note

Karl Marx wrote that theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses. He should have added that theory usually grips the masses because it connects with ideas, projects, and dreams they have developed themselves. This is what generally happens in revolutions, and it is certainly the case for the idea of the communal project in Venezuela.

In 2009, ten years after the Bolivarian Process began, Hugo Chávez proposed the communal path to socialism in a historic television program. That project had solid bases in the thought of Marx and István Mészáros, yet it would have been dead in the water if the idea of replacing a society dominated by the logic of capital with one based on communal relations had not connected with aspirations and values already alive and operating in Venezuelan society.

As it turned out, self-organized communities around the country seized on the communal project, which resonated both with values shaped over the longue durée in Venezuela—through its enduring campesino, Indigenous, and Afro-Venezuelan traditions of self-governance

Contradictions of the contemporary accumulation regime (Socialist Register 2023 reviewed in ‘Counterfire’)

February 20, 2024

as Marx showed, while accumulation creates an ever greater mass of means of production, this in itself begins to throw up barriers to the profitable reproduction of such great quantities of capital. This contradiction results in the intensification of competition between capitals over labour, raw materials and markets, not the least consequence of which is imperialist tension and war...

“No mere cheerleader for Marx” (How to Read Marx’s Capital reviewed in ‘Socialism and Democracy’)

February 20, 2024

Heinrich’s reading guide is the best that I have ever come across for volume 1 of Capital and I am certain it is a necessary edition for any person who takes their study of Marx’s 'Capital' seriously. Heinrich explains that “Capital provides crucial elements of the basic knowledge that is needed to fundamentally change social structures”. As such this volume, read in conjunction with Marx’s work, should prove valuable to anyone, inside or outside the academy, who is interested and invested in transforming capitalist social structures into something more beneficial to all.

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