Subjects Archives: Literature

COVID has upended urban life as we once knew it. But it intensified already existing pathologies, those contaminating “normal,” pre-pandemic life. Our present urban reality is one of the de-encounter, a thinning down rather than thickening up, the dispersion and dilution of city life, its fear and loathing.

In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty has gathered his data meticulously and provided a useful analysis of the unequal distribution of wealth and income, yet some of his definitions are somewhat confusing and even questionable.

Recent cases of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, such as what happened in Bolivia, can serve as a striking example. International trade and financial institutions such as the Unholy Trinity (largely controlled by the North) also still play a major role in perpetuating imperialist relations between the South and the North.

In 1911, a young Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) arrived in France, which had colonised his homeland of Vietnam. Though he had been raised with a patriotic spirit committed to anti-colonialism, Ho Chi Minh’s temperament did not allow him to retreat into a backward-looking romanticism.

Join us for this discussion with David McNally (author, editor of Spectre Journal, Professor of History at University of Houston), joined by Maia Pal (HM editorial board) & Tithi Bhattacharya.

Released in 2019 on the 100^th anniversary of Paul Robeson’s graduation from Rutgers University, Ballad of an American, brings Robeson’s creative and powerful historical presence to life through a striking graphic text and excellent afterword.

Fifty years after it was published, The State in Capitalist Society remains indispensable for any socialist movement with ambitions of government.

“We do not tell the people: believe. We say: read,” a statement not made casually, but rather a public expression of a deep conviction, spoken by Fidel in 1961.

The third major influence on Marx’s critique of political economy (in addition to and combined with classical economics and Hegel’s philosophy) was utopian socialism.

In the course of an undergraduate education here at the University of Michigan, there are just some things one is bound to encounter at some point or another. The Big House, the Shapiro Undergraduate Library, the block ‘M’; not to mention Zingerman’s, Hatcher Graduate Library and Angell Hall; these are the perennial names, spaces and places that make the U-experience what it is today.

The collection begins with the essay, ‘Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)’, that more broadly reviews Luxemburg’s theoretical contributions and political interventions from 1871 to 1919.

Katherine Connelly interviews Dana Mills, author of a new biography on Rosa Luxemburg, on her crucial contribution to revolutionary thought.

He constantly experimented with and thought about how to connect learning and teaching among the poor and oppressed with the radical transformation of society.

A rumour has reached us that while there were doubts as to the sauce to be used in the serving up, slow stewing was settled on as the least revolutionary form of cookery.

The tragedy being the suffering Latin America has borne, the optimism being in the recognition that this is not the region’s natural or inevitable destiny, but has been imposed on it through its subjugation to the capitalist system, and is therefore capable of being changed.

Funded by a billionaire oligarch and increasingly seen as a mouthpiece for the neoliberal establishment, The Intercept suffered its biggest blow yet with the very public departure of Greenwald.

A historian of science himself, Conner is fully cognizant of the accomplishments of American science and technology. In an earlier book, A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanicks” (2005), he demonstrated the contributions of ordinary citizens to science, but he also warned of the corruptive potential of corporate money and military power.

Marxian economists have been quite critical of contemporary mainstream economics. As we saw in Chapter 1, and will continue to explore in the remainder of this book, Marxian economists have challenged the general approach as well as all of the major conclusions of both neoclassical and Keynesian economics.

Working people are forever kept on the brink of going broke. More than higher wages and better job security, a just economy requires giving them the power to choose and create their own futures.

2020 is the birthday year of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, whom most of us know as Lenin. If still alive, he would be 150 years old.