July 1, 2025
Chris Gilbert proposes to answer the question: When is a socialist commune anti-imperialist? His response follows Karl Marx's line of thought, looking at the latter's approach to the commune from the
Grundrisse through his late notes and letters on rural communes. After reconstructing the Marxist communal strategy, Gilbert argues that real-world projects in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Brazil in recent times conform to this overall Marxist approach, combining communal construction with an anti-imperialist drive for national liberation.
July 1, 2025
Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik consider the historical views of the relationship between the proletariat and peasantry during the revolutionary transition to socialism and struggle against imperialism. While other thinkers have suggested that alliances between the two groups must be shed in order to complete the revolution, the Patnaiks propose a framework of voluntary cooperatization benefiting all.
July 1, 2025
In this innovative study, John Bellamy Foster gets to the heart of Marx's writing on communal societies—an aspect of Marx's work that is often overlooked, despite its importance to the socialist project. Tying together Marx's studies of anthropology, history, and ethnology, Foster illuminates the centrality of communalism to Marx's overall critique of class-based societies.
July 1, 2025
João Pedro Stedile, founder and spokesperson of Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST), reflects on the movement's efforts to build a socialist alternative through land occupations, cooperative production, and political education. He highlights the importance of collective struggle and the MST's deepening ties with Venezuela's communal movement as part of a broader project to construct a just and solidarious society.
July 1, 2025
Through a detailed exploration of the impacts of collective farming on local soils, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro engages in key questions around the past and present of communal agricultural production. These insights shed light on not only specific projects, but future considerations for communal farming, framed by the dialectical relationship of nature and society.
July 1, 2025
Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson outlines the ongoing projects and objectives of the Mississippi-based collective Cooperation Jackson. Akuno enumerates the many ways Cooperation Jackson has worked toward improving material conditions and building dual power in support of the Black working and peasant classes in the Mississippi Delta region.
July 1, 2025
Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi elucidate the history of China's People's Communes as told through the lens of three present-day rural villages. In these villages, they observe the effects of the project's dismantling and diminishing collective ownership and land management, with the conclusion that a return to collectivism is vital for carrying forward the socialist project.
July 1, 2025
Inside a People's Commune is a short 1974 book documenting life in the Chiliying Commune, one of the earliest in revolutionary China. The text explores the commune's organization, challenges, achievements, and mass-based character. Hugo Chávez later drew inspiration from the book, citing it when launching Venezuela's communal project. Today, it continues to serve as a pedagogical tool for Venezuelan communards working to build a unified system of socialist self-government.
February 1, 2025
Since the 1980s, writes Lu Xinyu, a division between industrial and agricultural labor has grown in China, reflected in the fractured relationship between urban and rural areas. China's successful navigation of the issue, Lu concludes, relies on creating a vigorous alliance between the rural peasantry and urban workers that aids in the ultimate delinking of China from the imperialist, world system. Chinese-style modernization, Lu concludes, represents a path that, while developed in a Chinese context, "represents the aspirations of the Global South to break free from worldwide Western hegemony."
June 1, 2024
In a vividly drawn account of El Maizal Commune, Chris Gilbert provides readers with a window into the inner workings of a community being refounded with an eye toward building a new "alternative communal economy." The task, Gilbert finds, is one that is not only revolutionary, but liberating and creative, having the potential to collectively reimagine the social relations of a community.
