Subjects Archives: Marxism

Ashok Mitra who passed away on May1, 2018, was the doyen among Left intellectuals in the country, held in the highest esteem by one and all for his absolute integrity, his outstanding intellect and his commitment to the cause of the working people.

In the first of a series of five short films, British journalist and filmmaker Paul Mason searches for the roots of Marx’s thinking in Berlin, where he began his university studies in 1836.

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has turned in her campaign materials to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and warns that Russiagate is being used to silent dissent.

Given the clearly right-wing nature of the ruling parties in the countries that withdrew from UNASUR, the move can be seen as the latest blow against a fading trend of left-wing governments in the region and a result of the increasingly bitter inter-state debate swirling around Venezuela’s political future.

What does Engels say about the root of women’s oppression? Is there validity to his argument today?

The Algerian journalist Mohsen Abdelmoumen interviewed Mike Davis recently. This is a fascinating interview that ranges from the question of Marxism today to the politics of Middle East to the necessity of socialism.

Two hundred years have passed since the birth of Karl Marx. Few historical figures of any kind have been so influential ‑ surely no thinker has. Yet many now would dismiss his ideas as outdated, as flawed, as tending towards totalitarianism. Why should we remember him?  What can we possibly learn from him now?

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.