Last week (June 8-10) there were two summits in Los Angeles, California: the Summit of the Americas hosted by the U.S. State Department and the Peoples Summit hosted by U.S. and international activist organizations. The two summits were held in the same city at the same time but could not be otherwise more different. ​

​The U.S. social democratic journal Jacobin recently published an article by Ben Burgis that was a half hearted defence of Marx’s theory of exploitation.

Marcello Musto’s anthology of ‘Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation’ is both comprehensive and concise, containing within the span of 100 pages the three decades long development of the theory through more than a dozen published works and posthumously published manuscripts.

America made a neoliberal deal with the devil when it began to whittle away New Deal protections for the vulnerable.

I was asked by a few comrades to explain Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities, and with that, the main ways it has been misunderstood by both mainstream bourgeois academia and by well-meaning Marxists. The following short reflection attempts to do just that.

After the most titanic, nightmarish war in modern history, after rivers of blood shed from Kiev to Moscow, from Stalingrad to Kursk, the workers and farmers of the Soviet Union had vanquished the most vile killing machine the world had yet seen.

Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”.

Martin Heidegger isn’t a philosopher that progressives are likely to consider worthwhile reading. After all, he was an anti-Semite, a follower of Hitler, and most hideous of all, someone who likened the mass extermination of human beings to the excesses of factory farming.

Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature has been arguably the most polemic ‘book’ within the corpus of classical Marxist literature.

This is an indispensable book for all those on the left interested in understanding how the science of cultural (social) anthropology developed over the last three centuries and how it is used to understand (and sometimes control) non-Western societies, especially those  that have not developed complex state structures.

The death of communism has been pronounced time and time again, but every day it is still fought against without respite or pity. There is no popular act or uprising which the bourgeoise does not see as a sign of communism, no nationalist or progressive opinion which is not branded as communist.

Marx and Engels were witnesses to and keen analysts of the environmental problems inherent in nineteenth-century capitalism. They wrote about the depletion of coal reserves, the destruction of forests, and, especially, about diminishing soil fertility, which Foster recognizes was the most pressing issue of the day.