Composing a history of Detroit is an exercise in tying together many economic and social trends within a microcosm of class, race, and fraught politics. Mark Jay and Philip Conklin’s work discusses the 20th-century history of the city to offer a documentation of class struggle seen through the industrialization of the city in the early 20th century, the racial tensions of the post-World War II period, and, finally, the simultaneous processes of decay and development in the last three decades.

Belle and Beauvoir proves to be a much needed contribution on a neglected topic. Importantly, it comes at a time when theorists are calling for both greater conceptual clarity on how systems like capitalism and racism interact as well a return to the thought of Black women Marxists and communists.

Capitalist crises cannot only be measured by its catastrophic effects on society, but also by the reception of their most staunchest critique: Karl Marx’s Capital.

Archeology has always been a political science. Since its inception the field has attempted to trace our lineage as a species along the lines of identity, territory and culture. Though often portrayed as a discipline slightly closer to the hard sciences than historiography, it is much closer to its distant cousin in the social sciences than towards anything resembling an empirical practice.

Since the global financial crisis, big banks have taken a backseat, and asset managers have become the—often self-appointed—new experts and administrators of capitalism.

Some of Ernest Mandel’s finest work on Marxist theory and revolutionary politics appeared in the form of short articles. “Hope and Marxism” collects eleven of Mandel’s most significant articles and provides an excellent introduction to his thought.

The Class Matrix concisely and systematically argues the case for the continued importance of class for the radical left today. Vivek Chibber rigorously debunks various long held understandings that characterise radical left thought since the cultural turn.

The culture wars are back with a vengeance, if they ever actually left us.

The philosophical community knows by now that philosopher Martin Heidegger was fiercely antisemitic and personally drew connections between his philosophy and his support for Nazi ideology.

Liedman portrays Engels’ alternative picture of science as a ‘non-reductive materialism’ characterised by a deep confidence in the unity of knowledge and by an equally deep resistance to treating any level of reality as totally determined by another. Engels’ account of scientificity—of what shape a legitimate theory can take—was modelled both on Marx’s theory of capitalism and on Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Marx diagnosed the oppression of the working class, the alienation of workers from their labor, as well as the alienation of all human beings living within capitalism from their own authentic selves, and proposed that it was objectively possible that emancipation, true liberation, would come one day.

A critical review of a Lacanian individualist approach by a fan of Rob Wallace, and chief of infectious disease at Mount Sinai in NY.

With World War III looming on the horizon as a very real possibility, now is a more critical time than ever to understand the history and motives of the United States, the world’s greatest hegemon.

Every May 10th marks Afro-Venezuelan Day and commemorates the 1795 Coro Rebellion. The May 1795 revolutionary events are the centerpiece of Enrique S. Rivera’s The Untold History of Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation and the Anti-Slavery Revolution.

In 2017, Japanese Marx scholar Kohei Saito published ‘Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism’, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize the following year.

Much has been written about climate change or, to use a more truthful term, global warming. But not much has been written about “Organising Responses to Climate Change,” which is the title of Daniel Nyberg, Christopher Wright and Vanessa Bowden’s new book.

This new edition of Marx’s 1875 ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’ comes with a few surprises in translation for Marxists who have previously interpreted it as justification for the continuation of wage-labour and commodity production, under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the ‘first phase’ of socialism/communism.

Already a century ago, political thinkers and philosophers were confronted with an apparent paradox: the failure of revolution.

Readers of the first volume of Capital sometimes mistakenly conceptualize capitalism in terms of a relationship between workers and a single capitalist. In doing so they fail to notice that for Marx capitalist society is not one big capitalist enterprise.

There is much more here than can be covered in a brief review, including interesting discussions of language, laughter, neo-mercantile capitalism, digital information and abstract nature, a correlate to abstract labor.