Subjects Archives: Literature

In all, Sanyal’s work is engaging, remarkable in its cross-disciplinarity, and fresh. Though its influence has been concentrated in Indian academia, I urge my colleagues elsewhere to give it a read. It will definitely make you think.

If you are reading this, you probably already know a lot about climate change. But what images come to mind if I asked you to visualize climate change?

COVID-19 is having a disproportionate effect among vulnerable populations. When the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.

Raza Naeem sat down with one of the most influential leftists of our world today to discuss politics, history and his new book

Raza Naeem sat down with one of the most influential leftists of our world today to discuss politics, history and his 2017 book

Columbia University PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature Tiana Reid finds that her students benefit from reading volume one of Karl Marx’s “Capital.” “There are so many literary wsys to read it, which I don’t think blunt the more radical political reading,” said Reid, who conducts research in Black Studies, Marxism and feminism. 

As Naomi Klein laid out in her bestseller “Shock Doctrine,” the wealthy elite use the confusion caused by economic and other disasters to quickly force through pro-free-market legislation.

In her recent volume Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2019), Silvia Federici fruitfully brings together feminist reflections with discussions of the commons as a possible way of overcoming capitalism.

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique on 25 July 1925. He died in the United States, from leukaemia, on 6 December 1961. He was thirty-six years old.

On the night before Red Books Day, on 21 February 2020, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, N. Sankaraiah–one of the thirty-two founders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)–read from M. Sivalingam’s new translation into Tamil of the Communist Manifesto. Comrade Sankaraiah, age 98, said that he had first read the Manifesto at age 18. Over the years, he returns to the book because each time he reads it the brazing prose teaches him something new. And something that–sadly–seems ageless.

Tens of thousands of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America publicly read the Communist Manifesto to commemorate the 172nd year since its first publication in 1848.

The question why Marx’s Capital remained unfinished has occupied many for more than a century.

As well as being significant in terms of Shakespeare’ s own aesthetic output, The Tempest provides a vivid window into the tumultuous historical currents and contradictions of the epoch in which the great playwright lived, syphoning them into its ethereal and haunting poetry. Helen C. Scott’s excellent and timely study of the play is a book of two parts

Sociologist John Bellamy Foster on the modern divide between humanity and nature and his book “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift” from Monthly Review.

On February 16, 2015, Govind and Uma Pansare went for a morning walk near their home in Pune (Maharashtra, India). Two men on a motorcycle stopped near them and asked for directions, but the Pansares could not help them; one of the men laughed, removed a gun, and shot the two. Uma survived the attack but Govind died in a hospital on February 20, 2015.

A made-up rape allegation and fabricated evidence in Sweden, pressure from the UK not to drop the case, a biased judge, detention in a maximum security prison, psychological torture–and soon extradition to the U.S., where he could face up to 175 years in prison for exposing war crimes. For the first time, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, speaks in detail about the explosive findings of his investigation into the case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

According to McCarthy, Marx rejects the view of justice in liberalism, which is limited to individual rights and fair distribution and provides a new one based on Aristotle’s definition of social justice grounded in ethics and politics.

After deposing Evo Morales in a U.S.-backed coup November 11, Bolivia’s military selected Jeanine Añez as president. Añez immediately signed a decree pre-exonerating security forces of all crimes during their “re-establishment of order,” understood by all sides as a license to kill. Those same forces have now conducted massacres of Morales supporters near the cities of Cochabamba and La Paz.

This December, we bring you a special Christmas episode of our program, featuring the enigmatic operator behind the increasingly popular Twitter account known as “Neoclassical Marxism,” or @NMarxism. @NMarxism is a deeply satirical Twitter project, which deploys Modern Monetary Theory and some very dark humor to critique the neoclassical economics and neoliberal assumptions that unconsciously […]

In this special live episode of Money on the Left, artist and researcher Vienne Chan joins us to talk art, politics, and money—and how Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) reconfigures the boundaries between all three. Recorded at the Third Annual International Conference on Modern Monetary Theory held at Stony Brook University, our conversation focuses specifically on […]