Subjects Archives: Literature

The Palestinian journalists covering the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and the suffering of the Palestinian people are rewarded with the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom prize.

Journalism funded by foundations could deliver a dystopian info-hellscape of pink slime and dark money.

Objective dialectics, i.e., the dialectical materialist ontology, first and foremost holds that the world is dominated by change and interconnection, “nothing is eternal but eternally changing.”

The READER Act would have required vendors to rate books on “explicitness” before selling to schools—and blacklisted those that didn’t comply.

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, is one of history’s most well-known figures, and one of its most maligned. Mainstream culture vilifies him as a despot. 

In 2011, a Wall Street hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, started buying up chains of newspapers nationwide. Alden found a way to profit from distressed industries, but the effects on the newspapers’ journalism were disastrous.

​”From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. But for ordinary usage such definitions are very convenient and in places cannot well be dispensed with; moreover, they can do no harm, provided their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten.” – Friedrich Engels

For many continental philosophers, the first two decades of the new millennium were a time of vibrant matter, hyperobjects, and a weird fixation with intestinal microbes. The late Bruno Latour saw this ‘new materialist’ doctrine–which decentred the human subject in favour of the world of ‘things’, believed to have agency of their own–as a useful resource in his career-long polemic against Marxism.

Socialists across the globe in countries such as India, Brazil, and the United States celebrate the Manifesto and all “Red Books” that shaped the world.

“Without the press, Fidel Castro would be no more than an outlaw… isolated and ineffective,” said Herbert Matthews, who, as a profound connoisseur of Cuban and Latin American affairs, suspected that behind the iron censorship ordered by Batista in Cuba, there was a well-kept secret that was waiting to be told.

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.

Written by Marxist philosopher George Novack (1905-1992) and published in 1975 by Pathfinder Press, “Pragmatism versus Marxism: An appraisal of John Dewey’s Philosophy” sought to explain the origins, emergence, class basis, and norms of pragmatism, which has been the predominant mode of thought in U.S. intellectual and political life.

As in Lenin’s time, the conclusion is that socialist revolution will end imperialist war, enabling workers to meet their own needs.

In exploring the notion of critical media literacy, the Marxist concepts of base and superstructure and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony provide an essential framework for understanding the complex dynamics of media, power, and ideology.

Pasquinelli’s “Eye of the Master” provides a materialist analysis of AI and technology, which Kevin Crane finds to be an excellent antidote to all the nonsense and hype spouted about AI.

The theoretical position informing “Imperialism” extended Marxism in at least five major ways.

Last year, for the first time on roape.net, members of ROAPE’s Editorial Group offered some of our favourite radical reads from 2022, new and old, fiction and non-fiction.

As the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s death approaches, here are ten books to help renew the Leninist tradition for the crises ahead, compiled by Dominic Alexander.

During the past three years, the country has seen a dramatic increase in book bans at public and K-12 school libraries and in rightwing pro-censorship activism, usually targeting books that address race, gender identity, or sexuality.

A review of Robert Cherny’s “Harry Bridges Labor Radical, Labor Legend”, University of Illinois Press 2023.