February 20, 2024
“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
February 20, 2024
The first book I wrote was published in East Berlin and talked about my life in the United States right up until the first days of my defection to the GDR in 1952. It was called The Way Across the Border. The funny thing is, some people in the GDR bought it thinking that I was talking about going in the other direction—they thought it would help them jump the Wall from East to West...
February 20, 2024
"The idea of biofuels was only given serious attention because it was a way for agribusiness to manipulate the market...."
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
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’…
February 20, 2024
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....
February 20, 2024
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....
February 20, 2024
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...
February 20, 2024
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...
February 20, 2024
‘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’...
