Subjects Archives: Literature

Luke Charnley reports on the new publishing houses getting working-class writers onto the printed page.

More than 100 years after her murder by counterrevolutionary soldiers during the German Revolution of 1918-1919, Rosa Luxemburg continues to demand attention.

The author explores various social, political, and cultural sites that explore and highlight the Black pastoral experience.

His stance on free press stands in sharp contrast to the status of the press–being totally subservient to the state–in the communist countries of the 20th century.

As the global challenge of climate change mounts and the coronavirus pandemic magnifies economic inequalities, Karl Marx, who pointed to the contradictions and limitations of capitalism, is gaining new admirers in Japan, particularly among the young.

Freedman notes that Guardian editor, Kath Viner, promised that her newspaper would ‘challenge the economic assumptions of the last three decades’, ‘challenge the powerful’ and ‘use clarity and imagination to build hope’.

Scott McLemee reviews The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel by Richard Wright.

Reviewing two recent books on care in the 21st century, Emily Kenway suggests the only solution to the current crisis lies in a full-scale reorganization of our political economy.

Katherine Angel’s intervention into post-feminist discourse fits the script of recent events and sits at what’s hopefully the tail end of post-feminist discourse, otherwise known as ‘the sex wars’.

Her understanding of oppression was bolstered by personal circumstances: female in an overwhelmingly male public sphere, Jewish in a climate of vicious antisemitism, Polish at a time when Poles suffered national oppression, and an individual who lived with a disability.

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson joins Money on the Left to discuss his Modern Monetary Theory-inspired “cli-fi” novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020).

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.