Subjects Archives: Literature

Lindsey German’s Marxist holiday reading list

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.

“Decolonization implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation.”

This April, the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a ban on charities, family members, and other outside parties donating books to prisoners.

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.

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.

The IIRE has released the first volume of the Selected Writings by Ernest Mandel (1923-1995).

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.

John Bellamy Foster – Deutscher Memorial Lecture

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.”

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.

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

‘The increased atomization of society and associated political economy of capitalism justifies the logic of reductionism’. – Richard Lewontin

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.

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.

Glen Ford spent more than four decades delivering the news from a Black perspective on a national scale.

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.

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….

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.

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.