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Ten Marxist classics for Xmas
Lindsey German’s Marxist holiday reading list
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‘Why are you acting the Marxist?’ Frédéric Lordon on Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital and Ideology’
On 31 January, at the Bourse du travail in Paris, Frédéric Lordon debated with Thomas Piketty on his book ‘Capital and Ideology’, at the invitation of Les Amis de L’Humanité. The following text is Frédéric Lordon’s opening speech, with minimal revisions.
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Cornel West on Frantz Fanon, one of the great revolutionary intellectuals of the 20th century
“Decolonization implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation.”
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The American prison system’s war on reading
This April, the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a ban on charities, family members, and other outside parties donating books to prisoners.
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The Local Journalism Initiative: a proposal to protect and extend democracy
What remains less appreciated is that the founders of the United States regarded creating a free press a policy issue of the greatest possible importance.
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‘Karl Radek on China: Documents from the Former Secret Soviet Archives’ – a review
Sometimes, the greatest theoretical works come to us in the form of lectures rather than systemic books. This is the case with Karl Radek, whose lectures on the Chinese Revolution have recently been published by the Historical Materialism book series.
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Ernest Mandel – Selected Writings I
The IIRE has released the first volume of the Selected Writings by Ernest Mandel (1923-1995).
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Thirteen theses of Marxism-Feminism
The theses are a working tool and an insurance at the same time of what we are and where we want to go to, while both the path and the goal are open for joint discussion and thus for change.
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‘The Return of the Dialectics of Nature’: 2020 Deutscher Prize Lecture by John Bellamy Foster
John Bellamy Foster – Deutscher Memorial Lecture
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Cages of Whiteness in the Shadow of Haiti: Guy Endore’s ‘Babouk’ and the Critique of Race-Class Alienation
Re-reading Guy Endore’s “forgotten masterpiece” it is striking how this novel from 1934, long-noted for its shocking and sophisticated account of slavery and resistance in the lead-up to the Haitian Revolution, is also a penetrating account of the ethical and political deformity and alienation perpetuated by the ideology of “whiteness.”
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Abstractions also Liberate with Anna Kornbluh
Anna Kornbluh joins Money on the Left to discuss the politics of form and literary realism as theorized in her provocative book, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press, 2019). In The Order of Forms, Kornbluh lays bare the problematic “anarcho-vitalist” underpinnings of neoliberal discourse which, she argues, also inform much critical theory and left critique.
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My friend Michael Ratner
I met Michael back in the 1980s. He had just been elected president of the National Lawyers Guild. We lived around the corner from each other in Greenwich Village. He walked over one evening and asked me if I’d serve on the board that edited the Guild magazine, Guild Notes. “Sure,” I said. That began a political collaboration and a dear friendship that lasted until he died five years ago. – Michael Steven Smith
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Biology as Ideology at 30
‘The increased atomization of society and associated political economy of capitalism justifies the logic of reductionism’. – Richard Lewontin
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Walter Scott and the historical novel
On his 250th anniversary, Jenny Farrell writes about Walter Scott and his historical novels, uncovering themes of class conflict, ethnic and nationalist struggles, and how the personal experiences of his characters link with broader historical upheavals.
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Review of Keti Chukhrov – ‘Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism’
As the title reveals, Chukhrov is particularly interested in two aspects of Soviet socialism: desire and boredom. For a libidinally conditioned capitalist subject, socialism as a non-libidinal economy appears boring and unsexy.
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Glen Ford, veteran journalist and founder of Black Agenda Report, dies at 71
Glen Ford spent more than four decades delivering the news from a Black perspective on a national scale.
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People’s lawyer P. A. Sebastian and the Socialist Project
Sebastian, in his writings in The Fight to Win Rights, is direct, and honest, unafraid to state unpalatable facts. Blunt and matter-of-fact, his words seem to be deliberately chosen to appeal to the conscience of people, his mode of expression reflecting his commitment to justice and the truth.
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Mikhail Bulgakov, “Master and Margarita” and the anti-Russian hysteria in the United States
You cannot argue with mass hypnosis. You can keep a diary, write a chronicle that reveals the falseness of the spirit of the age to hopefully enlighten future readers, because, as we hear in another of the main points of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, “manuscripts do not burn.” That is what I do….
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York professor expands global understanding of Karl Marx and Marxism with seven books in three years
Driven and passionate about the significance of Marx’s contributions in politics, sociology, the critique of political economy and philosophy, Musto has delivered seven books within the last three years.
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Rethinking Japan’s Red Years
The New Left is generally seen globally as emerging from the aftermath of the “revelations” about Stalin in Khrushchev’s “secret speech”’ at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in early 1956, and the reaction to the Soviet invasion of Hungary later that same year.