Archive | Review

  • Das Kapital Karl Marx

    Soft shell, hard core: on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1

    In bourgeois economic theory, competition, commodity production, profit seeking, and growth express something like the human essence. They are ahistorical constants, not the results of specifically capitalist relations that have historically emerged and can therefore be overcome. This is exactly what makes Marx’s critique of economics highly topical.

  • Footage from Smithfield Meats Circle Four Farms

    Animal liberation, human liberation

    The Left must endeavor to make visible the political valence of meat, let alone other industrial uses of animals. This act of acute empathy reveals the extent of one’s political imagination.

  • William Pelz - "A People's History of Modern Europe" | Seminary Co-op Bookstores

    Making their own history

    More than half a century ago, E. P. Thompson pioneered a new approach to labor history in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson was dismayed with the bourgeois idea that history is made by great men, and the occasional princess or queen, but also frustrated with socialist histories that replace statesmen and business moguls with wise, if not infallible, party leaders and union bosses allegedly executing the iron laws of history.

  • Herbert Marcuse

    Herbert Marcuse remembered

    We are, the 1960s radical generation, now once more marching, marching, sometimes it seems mostly with the Millennials by our side. And here comes the ghost of Herbert Marcuse, who was so much with us the first time around.

  • Chirlane McCray and Bill de Blasio

    A tale of many cities: potholes in the road to municipal reform

    As a growing number of groups on the left have begun dabbling in local electoral politics—most notably via the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA-backed candidacies)—we would do well to heed the warning of Juan Gonzalez about the “consultant class” (currently in the employ of Mayor de Blasio). The allure of corner-cutting political consultants, corporate cash, and the always pernicious influence of pay-to-play after any election day success by would-be reformers are pitfalls that left electoral efforts must avoid at all cost.

  • Fascist torch march in Charlottesville (8/11/2017)

    Mobilizing against the fascist creep

    When economic crisis grips a nation, when contradictions within the ruling class and the state create instability and social upheaval, fascists act as the foot soldiers of capitalism. Their function is to disrupt and destroy efforts on the part of the working-class and oppressed masses to organize against their miserable conditions.

  • Guy Standing

    Book of the day: The Corruption of Capitalism by Guy Standing

    I recommend this book, along with the rest of Standing’s body of work, as an example of the kind of outside-the-box thinking the Left needs in place of the dinosaur Old Left’s organization and policy models if it is to be relevant to the new economy.

  • Identity Politics

    The politics of everybody

    Class is primary—not in the sense of more important, but in the sense of being the limit, the foundation, the point where profit is extracted and the point where it can be challenged. The centrality of class is tactical, not moral.

  • W. E. B. Du Bois mural in Philadelphia, 2011. Photograph by Laurenellen McCann / Flickr

    W. E. B. Du Bois’s revolutions

    “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” With this sober stroke of his insurgent pen, the 93-year-old scholar joined the Communist Party.

  • The continental revolution

    Between the end of the Civil War and the early 20th century, the United States underwent one of the most profound economic transformations that any country has ever experienced. In 1865, the United States lagged far behind Britain in manufacturing output; by 1900, it would surpass the totals of Britain, France, and Germany combined.

  • A Theory of Imperialism

    New Perception of Imperialism

    If accumulating wealth is the basic objective of capitalism, organising production using wage labour is only one of the ways it can be achieved. What finance does is to open an alternative route to reach the same objective, that is via transaction.

  • E.P. Thompson

    E.P. Thompson: A Giant Remembered

    It is surely difficult now to grasp, for young people in the UK let alone the US and elsewhere, that thirty years or so ago, radical historian-activist Edward Thompson was by opinion polls intermittently the second or third most popular Englishman or Englishwoman, shortly after the Queen Mother. After all, the British establishment, to say nothing of American Cold Warriors (liberal or conservative) had slandered him for decades and why not?

  • Marta Harnecker on New Paths Toward 21st Century Socialism

    Introduction by Richard Fidler Among the many panels and plenaries at the Conference of the Society for Socialist Studies, which met in Ottawa June 2-5, was a Book Launch for Marta Harnecker’s latest English-language book, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (translated by Federico Fuentes), Monthly Review Press. The featured speaker […]

  • Remembering Robert Weil: Intellectual and Political Activist

      Robert Weil, author of the powerful critique of Deng Xiaoping’s “reforms” entitled Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of Market Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996, republished in India by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur), quietly passed away in California on 12 March 2014.  Almost a year after, on 15 February 2015 a […]

  • “I Have No Real Politics”: Susie Day Talking Trash

      “[S]urviving evil doesn’t make you a good person: Surviving evil and not passing it on does,” writes Susie Day in her recent book Snidelines: Talking Trash to Power.  One possible way to not pass on evil is to laugh about it.  Day, through her comedic ability and shrewd observations reveals (with a giant spotlight) […]

  • Campaigning for Union Office: An Excerpt from How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers

    It’s one of the universals of organizing — first you make a list.

    Elementary teacher Alix Gonzalez Guevara remembers staying up late transferring data about each school from a district-published book into an Excel spreadsheet: region, address, how many teachers, how many students.

    This became a Google document, an online spreadsheet available to everyone working on the campaign. The schools were grouped by regions. Within each, a couple of lead activists took responsibility to find people to do outreach at each school.

  • Tadeusz Kowalik, 1926-2012

      Professor Tadeusz Kowalik (1926-2012) was a noted Polish economist who played a major role in Polish economic debates for more than a half century.  A graduate of the University of Warsaw, Kowalik was a student of the distinguished Polish Marxist economist Oskar Lange and like his teacher, was a prominent advocate of market socialism […]

  • Amazon’s Assault on Intellectual Freedom

      There is an undeclared war going on in the United States that threatens the lynchpins of American intellectual freedom.  In a statement worthy of Cassandra, Noah Davis wrote in Business Insider last October,  “Amazon is coming for the book publishing industry.  And not just the e-book world, either.”  When titans battle, it is tempting […]

  • Interview with Salim Lamrani: “The Economic Sanctions against Cuba Constitute the Principal Obstacle to the Development of the Country”

      Salim Lamrani.  État de siège; les sanctions économiques des États-Unis contre Cuba(State of Siege: The United States’ economic sanctions against Cuba).  Prologue by Wayne S. Smith.  Preface by Paul Estrade.  Paris, Editions Estrella, 2011.  15 euros. CSF: You’ve just published a new book under the title État de siège.  What exactly do you cover […]

  • Remembering and Representing: Vietnam, East Germany, and Daphne Berdahl

      Daphne Berdahl.  On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany.  Edited by Matti Bunzl.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.  xx + 166 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35434-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22170-4. On the Social Life of Postsocialism; Memory, Consumption, Germany is a posthumous collection of Daphne Berdahl’s essays, written over the course of […]