Subjects Archives: Literature

During the 1960s and 1970s, it was an oft-repeated quip that the European left was long on theory and short on practice, while the North American left was strong on action, but allergic to theory.

IT IS RARE that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as “Wedges,” published 22 years ago by researchers at Princeton University, told an irresistible story. 

When Texas Governor Greg Abbott was promoting vouchers, he usually accused the public schools of “indoctrinating” students.

Chris Smalls and his best friend, Derrick Palmer, led the first successful drive to unionize an Amazon warehouse. He believes that labor must decouple from the Democratic Party, as he explains in his new book.

If Marx in Capital lays bare the “hidden” abode of capitalist production, Joyce, in Ulysses, lays bare the hidden (yet all-too-visible) abode of modern reproduction, the arena that’s both the starting and end point of progressive politics, decreeing its victory or defeat.

Why understanding a book means understanding the world that produced it.

The ‘Wages of Dreamwork’ is an ambitious and timely contribution to debates on labour, culture and social reproduction under contemporary capitalism. Drawing from autonomist Marxism, feminist theory, critical management studies and the history of avant-garde artistic practice, Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel examine how creativity, desire and the search for meaningful activity have become increasingly central to capitalist accumulation.

Anybody who’s ever leafed through Finnegans Wake will quickly recognize that we’re not dealing here with a standard novel, just as anybody leafing through Marx’s Capital will know we’re not dealing with standard economics.

Engels’ essay on our origins and distinctiveness built on Darwin’s own exploration of human evolution and has provided a framework for exploration and research which has stood the test of time, declares the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School.

Christoph Schuringa’s analysis of the dominant tradition in Anglosphere philosophy provides valuable insights, finds Sean Ledwith.

We live in times of a deepening interconnected global crises: rising inequality, authoritarianism, fascism, and inter-imperialist rivalry conditioned by climate and ecological catastrophes that threaten life as we know it on planet Earth.

Lars Cornelissen offers an extract from his recent book “Neoliberalism and Race”, which argues that race functions as an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Drawing on intellectual history and critical race studies, he traces both explicit and coded racial constructs within neoliberal thought from the interwar period to the present. The book shows that racial themes have consistently shaped neoliberalism, to the extent that its racial motifs cannot be removed without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent.

If they had accused Yves of being too progressive, too bold, too blunt, I would understand, but the reasons they give make me suspect that they haven’t read his books and articles.

In the current era in which anti-science ideology, disinformation and ‘the destruction of reason’ are again increasingly being utilized as key components of a broader anti-materialism which reinforces a transition from neoliberalism to neofascism in response to crises of capitalism, Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’: The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay is timely.

Prison mirrors society in its hierarchies. Its walls replicate the structures of caste, class, and privilege with cruel precision. This book joins a growing canon of India’s prison literature.

Contract negotiations at five Pacific Northwest newspapers are putting a spotlight on AI, clickbait, and the pressures on local journalists.

We speak with Caroline Levine, Ryan Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, about her important book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023). Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Levine’s The Activist Humanist redirects the critical capacities of formalist literary study to discover and mobilize the democratic potential of political forms thought by many on the left to be irredeemably exclusive, violent, and anti-democratic.

The 2025 Belt and Road Journalists Forum in China was an opportunity for Black Agenda Report to join an international group of journalists working to promote meaningful dialogue on world issues.

Censorship in Defense Department K-12 schools violates the First Amendment.

The relevance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous work today on its centennial.