February 20, 2024
Why read yet another biography of Marx or start with this one? Unlike others, Heinrich checks facts meticulously and embeds Marx and his writings in the economic and social circumstances, personal and political relationships, political ideas and polemics of Marx’s life. Conjecture is rare and clearly marked….
February 20, 2024
Ever since he died fighting for the Republican cause in Spain in February 1937, there has been a recurring critical debate about the work of Christopher Caudwell. Indeed, between 1950 and 1951 there was what came to be known as ‘the Caudwell controversy’ where leading members of the British Communist Party, of which Caudwell was a member, debated in the pages of The Modern Quarterly whether Caudwell was really an orthodox Marxist or just a bourgeois idealist....
February 20, 2024
Zillah Eisenstein, professor emerita of political theory at Ithaca College and author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, recently talked with Tish Perlman, host of Out of Bounds, a weekly radio show focusing on people living, working, and thinking outside the mainstream. In this interview, Zillah discusses the necessity to abolish pervasive white supremacy, her Communist upbringing, and how we should all just shut up about Trump...
February 20, 2024
“A state, to be a state, has to punish … bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” ¶ Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Pem Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites....
February 20, 2024
This Nov. 9, the world’s imperialists and big capitalists will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They will fill the media, all too available to them, with lies claiming this event was a victory for democracy and freedom. They will be slandering the German Democratic Republic and all the good and progressive acts of the once-socialist part of Germany…
February 20, 2024
A Redder Shade of Green is one of the more grounded books I have encountered this year. Ian Angus’s concerns are earthly, practical, and immediate, all of which are virtues given how his eco-socialism stands in stark contra-distinction to neoliberal ecological reasoning...
February 20, 2024
Berlin — Media jubilation reaches a climax on November 9th, thirty years after the bumbling, perhaps even misunderstood decision to open the gate for all East Germans to stream through, hasten to the nearest West Berlin bank for their ‘welcome present’ of 100 prized West German marks, and taste the joys of the western free market system....
February 20, 2024
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….
February 20, 2024
Ukraine’s newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a “first step” in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000 civilians…
February 20, 2024
From Commune to Capitalism disputes the long-established claim that the decollectivization of Maoist-era peasant communes was better for the economy and an initiative wholly championed by the peasantry...
