Navigating the Brexit Strait
October 1, 2019
In this continuation of the exchange on the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the left, Andy Storey engages with Costas Lapavitsas's arguments in The Left Case Against the EU.
Article Subjects and Geography: Europe
Learning from Brexit: A Socialist Stance Toward the European Union
October 1, 2019
As part of the exchange on the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the left, Costas Lapavitsas provides an extensive response to Neil Davidson's and Andy Storey's contributions.
Beyond Boundaries
September 1, 2019
In 1952, Selma James wrote the classic pamphlet A Woman's Place and, in 1972, she and Mariarosa Dalla Costa published their groundbreaking The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which discussed how women's unpaid housework and care work is crucial to the production of the working class and, thus, the economy as a whole, launching the domestic labor debate inside the women's movement. That same year, the International Wages for Housework Campaign was formed. In an interview with Ron Augustin at her home in London, James spoke of her political activities and years with C. L. R. James, whom she was with for more than twenty-five years, each with their own political activities but also sharing important struggles.
The Yellow Vests in France: People or Proletariat?
June 1, 2019
The Yellow Vests (gilets jaunes) movement first appeared in October 2018 and is active everywhere in France. As this article was written, the spontaneous mobilization was in its twenty-first week. The demonstrations are mainly organized around traffic circles, where protesters block transportation lines. While their concrete demands are about wages, these demands are not presented by workers' actions aimed at defending the value of labor power, but rather as part of a citizens' movement, as referred to by the media and many of the demonstrators. In this way, the site of political confrontation has been shifted.
Searching for Alternatives in Eastern Europe: Tamás Krausz Interviewed by Róbert Nárai
- Issue:
- Vol. 70, No. 11 (April 2019)
April 1, 2019
In the 1960s, Georg Lukács—under the slogan Back to Marx!—called for a "renaissance" of Marxism within Eastern Europe. To understand the nature of this renaissance, we have to understand the many important questions that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 raised for the anti-Stalinist left inside Hungary and Eastern Europe more broadly. This interview looks at efforts to rethink the future of socialism from the Eastern European situation in the second half of the twentieth century, including the political lessons of 1968, the internal fight within the Hungarian Socialist Party, and the continued relevance of V. I. Lenin's Marxism.
Germany’s Hidden Social Crisis
- Issue:
- Vol. 70, No. 11 (April 2019)
April 1, 2019
Germany is commonly perceived as a strong, dependable island amid a sea of gyrating European uncertainties, a down-to-earth, dependable ally in attempts by the better U.S. presidents to move the world forward as steadily as possible. For the past thirteen years, this view has been personified in the clear, undramatic words and deeds of Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany since 2005. Considerable doubts in this appraisal, with evidence that Germany, like every other country, has never been a monolith free of class conflict and other contradictions, are addressed in Oliver Nachtwey's Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe, out now from Verso Books. In describing West German, then all-German, developments from the end of the Second World War until the present, Nachtwey analyzes from the left, unafraid to utilize the ideas of Karl Marx as well as a host of more recent analysts of many shades.
Capitalism and Mental Health
January 1, 2019
The psychoanalytical framework developed by Marxist Erich Fromm strongly challenges the dominant biological and individualistic explanations of the mental-health crisis that is now sweeping the globe. Fromm emphasized that all humans have certain needs that must be fulfilled in order to ensure optimal mental health. It follows that capitalism is crucial to determining the experience and prevalence of mental well-being, as its operations are incompatible with true human need.
The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Metabolic Rift
July 1, 2018
Marx's notion of "the robbery of the soil" is intrinsically connected to the rift in the metabolism between human beings and the earth. To get at the complexities of his metabolic rift theory, it is useful to look separately at the issues of the robbery and the rift, seen as separate moments in a single development.
Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder: Environmental Crisis and Metabolic Rift in Nineteenth-Century London
July 1, 2018
The accumulation of human excrement in nineteenth-century cities, particularly London, precipitated a historic environmental crisis—an aspect of the metabolic rift mostly overlooked in ecosocialist analysis. The solution that was finally adopted only shifted the problem out of sight, setting the stage for even greater crises in our time.
On English Farming and Sewers
July 1, 2018
If the British people do not take the pains to secure the natural conditions of the permanent fertility of their land, if they allow these conditions as hitherto to be squandered, their fields will at no distant day cease to yield their returns of corn and meat.