Subjects Archives: Literature

Joachim Mwami on translating Marx—and Marxism—into the vocabulary of East Africa

Mike Taber has edited for the first time the resolutions adopted between 1889 and 1912 by the nine congresses celebrated by the Socialist International, which is also known as the Second International.

The missing chapter in Malcolm X’s biography must be fervently resurrected.

Working for the ‘New York Daily Tribune’, Marx excoriated the British empire’s opium trade that brought China under its influence with a staggering human cost, writes NICK MATTHEWS.

San Francisco State University professor Daniel Langton has called Frederick Pollack’s poems “necessary” because “do what poetry should do—grapple with the important.”

‘Revolutions’ is a major contribution to our understanding of the principal social movements which shape our modern world.

The two books we will analyze in this essay, Bread and Beauty: The Cultural Politics of José Carlos Mariátegui by Juan E. De Castro, and Alan McPherson’s Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice, are very different in subject matter, discipline, and style.

The death of communism has been pronounced time and time again, but every day it is still fought against without respite or pity. There is no popular act or uprising which the bourgeoise does not see as a sign of communism, no nationalist or progressive opinion which is not branded as communist.

Hank Kennedy reminds us of a period of all-sided culture war against comic books, pointing at its lessons and aftermath today.

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.