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Review: Vivek Chibber – “The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn”
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.
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Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò – “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)”
The culture wars are back with a vengeance, if they ever actually left us.
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Review: Richard Wolin – “Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology”
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.
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Sven-Eric Liedman – ‘The Game of Contradictions: The Philosophy of Friedrich Engels and Nineteenth Century Science’
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.
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Levy del Águila Marchena: ‘Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx’
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.
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Review: ‘I Know Who Caused COVID-19’: Pandemics and Xenophobia
A critical review of a Lacanian individualist approach by a fan of Rob Wallace, and chief of infectious disease at Mount Sinai in NY.
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David Vine- “United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State”
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.
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Review: Enrique S Rivera – “The Untold Story of Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation and the Anti-Slavery Revolution”
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.
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Kohei Saito: ‘Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’
In 2017, Japanese Marx scholar Kohei Saito published ‘Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism’, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize the following year.
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Review of “Organising Responses to Climate Change: The Politics of Mitigation, Adaptation and Suffering”
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.
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Review of “Critique of the Gotha Program,” by Karl Marx
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.
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“The Conformist Rebellion: Marxist Critiques of the Contemporary Left”
Already a century ago, political thinkers and philosophers were confronted with an apparent paradox: the failure of revolution.
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‘Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law’ review
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.
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Ian H Angus – “Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World”
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.
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Ian Menter Raymond Williams and Education: History, Culture, Democracy
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.
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Neil Faulkner – ‘Alienation, Spectacle, and Revolution: A Critical Marxist Essay’
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.
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Corine Pelluchon, “Das Zeitalter des Lebendigen. Eine neue Philosophie der Aufklärung” [“The Age of the Living. A new philosophy of the Enlightenment”]
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.
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Andreas Malm ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire’
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.
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Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin: ‘The Dialectical Biologist’
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.
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Michael Löwy: ‘Revolutions’
‘Revolutions’ is a major contribution to our understanding of the principal social movements which shape our modern world.