Subjects Archives: Marxism

In the five essays presented in October 1917, renowned radical political economist, Samir Amin, pushes far beyond the immediate necessity of emphasizing the historical weight of October, and launches, into an ambitiously broad analysis of the trajectory of twenty first-century socialism.

In the last month there has been a deliberate, determined attempt to turn the clock back on the general election result on 8th June 2017, to back when the left could be dismissed as irrational deluded cultists who mostly existed on social media.

The VIII Summit of the Americas was held this year in Lima, Peru from April 13-14 and as always, was marked by controversies and managed to be the material expression of the deep contradictions of the U.S.-supported bloc in the Americas.

In Chávez The Radical XIV, Chávez reflects on the contradictions of public planning and the transition to a socialist economy, within a system that remains dominated by capitalism.

The evidence — or lack thereof — of chemical weapons use by Syria is eerily similar to the events that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was justified using baseless humanitarian accusations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In Rheinland-Pfalz, Marx’s 200th birthday bash is bringing in a lot of capital. Whether the communist philosopher would have been down with this commerce is hard to say.

Water is a class issue. Its distribution has never been equitable. What the residents of Cape Town will struggle with is what more than one billion residents of informal settlements across the planet deal with each day.

“Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them.”

Eleanor Marx changed the world. Foremother of socialist-feminism, trade unionist, internationalist, her father’s first biographer and editor of his key works, she had left a colossal heritage in many spheres of life.

When the academy was the exclusive playground of white men, it produced the theories of race, gender, and Western cultural superiority that underwrote imperialism abroad and inequality at home. In recent decades, women and people of color have been critical to producing new knowledge breaking down those long-dominant narratives. Sociological research confirms that greater diversity improves scholarship.

In late 1965 the rumblings of the Cultural Revolution had begun, due to grumblings over corruption, revisionism (“taking the capitalist road,” selling out socialism, etc.) and the snooty technocratism of urbanites. The party, led by Mao, saw these trends as threats to the common good, the revolution, and the Party’s “Heavenly Mandate” – the millennia-old concept that China’s rulers are chosen by Heaven to rule, and that they must actually display this divinity via perfectly moral conduct and leadership…or else revolt is justified.

If we don’t start challenging neoliberal hegemony soon, the non-West will eventually have little choice but to challenge it for themselves.

Extreme rates of exploitation in the Global South is a palpable, directly observable fact. We don’t need a theory to know this but we do need a theory if we are to understand what we can see and work out the consequences that flow from it.

A short obituary for two dear comrades: Theotonio dos Santos (Carangola, 1936 – Rio de Janeiro, 2018) and Marielle Franco (Rio de Janeiro, 1979 – Rio de Janeiro 2018).

In 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) downgraded the U.S.  democratic system. The EIU has an annual Democracy index that provides a snapshot of global democracy by rating countries on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. They are then classified into four types of governments: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime.

In the U.S., any policy change with little support from the upper class has about a one in five chance of becoming law, while those backed by the elites triumph in about half of occasions, even when they go against majority opinion.

There can be no denying that the content of News from Nowhere, the utopian romance penned by painter, poet and designer William Morris, was heavily indebted to the writings of Karl Marx. Morris was exploring these from the spring of 1882, the year before Marx died and the year of his own 48th birthday. He continued to read Marx, especially Capital, in its French edition, the first English edition being still a few years away.

A rational solution is possible for Syria, if the US wants to be rational. But with Kushner in the White House Palestine faces a grim future.

The 2016 presidential exit polls “substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters…and overestimated the white college-educated Democratic electorate,” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (3/29/18) writes.

Using Marx’s critique of political economy, it’s possible for workers employed in a variety of industries to calculate the value of their work and how this value is divided between employer and employee. It becomes possible to calculate the socially necessary labor time and surplus labor time, worker wages and employer profits in their particular workplace.