October 1, 2025
"Why," Helena Sheehan asks, "have Marxists…put so much emphasis on the history of philosophy?" She adds: "Is the current G. W. F. Hegel revival conductive to coming to terms with the current conjuncture?" In answering these questions, Sheehan elucidates deep truths about the core of Marxist philosophy and practice, and the importance of remaining deeply rooted in the real world.
October 1, 2025
Oscar R. Ralda reviews Vanessa Christina Wills's Marx's Ethical Vision (2024). Wills's text, Ralda notes, demonstrates a "facility with which [she] deals with Marx's works, as well as a "strong philosophical case…for the ongoing relevance of a coherent Marxian moral theory." The latter, Rada notes, sheds light on the moral imperative to work toward socialist liberation from a foundation of resolute Marxian values.
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.
April 1, 2025
What is ecological civilization? In this article, Chen Yiwen presents a dialectical analysis that illuminates the theoretical and practical elements of ecological civilization, particularly as it develops in the context of China. In China, she notes, significant progress has been made, but there remain outstanding questions that must be resolved during the transition to an ecologically harmonious society that promotes global equality and human flourishing.
March 1, 2025
John Bellamy Foster and Gabriel Rockhill assess the history and influence of Western Marxism, defined not geographically, but by a rejection of the Marxism developed in the Soviet Union, in the Global South, and even in classical Marxism. This strain of Marxist thought, birthed in the imperial core, represents a concession to the dominance of U.S. ideology, rather than to correct the pressing issues confronting society today.
March 1, 2025
In this excerpt from Ellen Meiksins Wood's In Defense of History, Wood appraises the state of postmodern thought in the late twentieth century. "Today's postmodernism," Wood writes, "for all of its apparently defeatist pessimism, is still rooted in the 'Golden Age of Capitalism.' It's time to leave that legacy behind and face today's realities."
March 1, 2025
Torkil Lauesen delves into the legacy of celebrated Arghiri Emmanuel, whose theory of unequal exchange resonates well into the twenty-first century. Introduced in 1962, Emmanuel's critique of Ricardian and neoliberal capitalism further illuminated the Marxist concept value as it relates to global exchange and the ongoing exploitation of the Global South by the Global North.
June 1, 2024
Brian M. Napoletano considers the implications of recent work by Kohei Saito, in which Saito argues that Marx's thought progressed from early productivism to middle-stage ecosocialism, and finally to degrowth communism. Napoletano concludes, that in arguing for an artificially contrived "epistemological break" between Marx's supposed early growth-oriented perspective and his later purported "degrowth communism," Saito fails to recognize Marx’s actual consistent emphasis throughout his work on a dialectically conceived process of sustainable human development, requiring a true social and ecological revolution.
April 1, 2024
Matthew Sharpe discusses Aymeric Monville's Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche (The Misery of Left Nietzscheanism), an exploration of how Nietzsche's popularity on the left co-opts truly radical energy in favor of authoritarianism and elitism. "If Monville is right," Sharpe concludes, "Nietzcheanism has acted as a kind of ideological 'useful idiot.'"
March 1, 2024
"It is surprising," Marnie Holborow writes, "how often in Marxist accounts of women's oppression Frederick Engels is overlooked." In responding to this gap in analysis, Holborow examines his influential work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, finding his observations on gender roles and social reproduction under capitalism—and their expressions based on class—are not only astute for Engels's time, but very much for ours as well.
