What is remarkable about China’s agrarian reforms is that, despite their pivotal role in ending socialist production, some on the left have offered quite positive evaluations. ¶ Zhun Xu is a skeptic of these accounts…. | more…
In a short appendix to this first of what is to be a multi-volume biography of Karl Marx — which is bound to become a referential touchstone for any subsequent treatment of his life and works — Michael Heinrich examines how biographical writing is possible today and the reader should start with this essay in order to recognise the intentions and detailed scope of his treatment of Marx through his childhood and youth from 1818 to 1841… | more…
Many people have always doubted the starkness of the good West, evil East narrative. Perhaps as a result, since the collapse of the Stalinist states of eastern Europe, a concerted effort has been made to reinforce the notion that the East German state, the German Democratic Republic (DDR), in particular, was a dystopian police state morally equivalent to the Nazi regime… | more…
Shell promised wonderful things…. But when the citizens of County Mayo realized what Shell actually intended to do, they rose up. Shamrocks & Oil Slicks tells the story of County Mayo—the fishermen, farmers, teachers, business people—who, motivated by love for their environment, their community, and their country, fought one of the planet’s most powerful destroyers to a standstill. | more…
Autobiographies are tricky things. The memoir can ground the writer in external events or situations and provide an objective rationale. The autobiography places oneself at the centre of the narrative and is an act of whopping self-regard that demands a weighty justification… | more…
‘The only conceivable answer today to cascading planetary catastrophe is a broad-based ecological and social revolution, in which the population mobilizes to protect the future of humanity: a revolutionary war for the planet’… | more…
Neoliberals love to quote the World Bank’s rosy statistics about capitalism lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Unfortunately, those statistics are skewed and manipulated to the point of outright prevarication, as Seth Donnelly demonstrates in his book, The Lie of Global Prosperity. He quotes a breathless World Bank press release, ‘soon 90 percent of the world’s population will live on $1.90 a day or more’… | more…
Samir Amin participated in many of the debates among Marxists about how to best understand capitalism that took place over the course of his lifetime. This book touches on many of those, including for example the issues of monopoly capitalism and finance capitalism…. | more…
“No artist is able to overcome, through his own individual resources, the contradiction of enchained art within an enchained society. The most which we can hope to accomplish is the contradiction of such a society through emancipated art, and even in this attempt he might well be the victim of despair.”—Theodor Adorno | more…
Michael Heinrich has raised the standards of biographical writing with Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society. In content and scope, it is an unparalleled work of scholarship. It makes Marx relevant to our understanding of capitalist society, while cutting down the overgrown myths about him…. | more…
“The idea of biofuels was only given serious attention because it was a way for agribusiness to manipulate the market….” | more…
“One thing that can turn this situation around,” writes Wilson, “is militant activism of the sort that confronted the Muslim ban and the family separation policy”… | more…
Given the renewed attention to Karl Marx since the financial crisis of 2008, this biography will help us understand how his life and thought evolved…. | more…