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.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a group of remarkably talented left-wing intellectuals (almost all men) emerged in Britain, focusing both upon the radical interpretation and development of the core disciplines of the humanities: literature and history, and to a lesser extent, politics and philosophy; and also upon socialist political activism.

The tradition of concise introductions to Marxist theory is a long one, stretching back perhaps to Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Alienation, Spectacle and Revolution enters stridently into this tradition with an acerbic, tremendously illuminating, and urgent style.

Lucidly argued and touching in its appeal, Corine Pelluchon’s latest book ‘Les Lumières à l’âge du vivant’ will be a theoretical source both for ‘green’ and ‘red’ movements alike.

Despite its title, Andreas Malm’s recent book ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ contains no concrete instructions on how to accomplish that particular deed.

One reason why this review came to be decades after said book’s publication involves the loss of Richard Lewontin, the great American geneticist and evolutionary biologist, who passed away last July at his home in Cambridge at the age of 92.

‘Revolutions’ is a major contribution to our understanding of the principal social movements which shape our modern world.

Smith begins with Friedrich Pollock’s definition of automation as a ‘technique of industrial production [in which] the machines are “controlled” by machines’, and shows that this trend of automation, while increasing labor productivity in the industrial and manufacturing sector, is also the reason for a lack of automation in the service sector.

Sometimes, the greatest theoretical works come to us in the form of lectures rather than systemic books. This is the case with Karl Radek, whose lectures on the Chinese Revolution have recently been published by the Historical Materialism book series.

As the title reveals, Chukhrov is particularly interested in two aspects of Soviet socialism: desire and boredom. For a libidinally conditioned capitalist subject, socialism as a non-libidinal economy appears boring and unsexy.

Upon reading Sohn-Rethel it becomes clear that his work is important for contemporary debates on ecology, the Marxist critique of science and debates on post-revolutionary societies such as the former Soviet Union.

More than 100 years after her murder by counterrevolutionary soldiers during the German Revolution of 1918-1919, Rosa Luxemburg continues to demand attention.