Subjects Archives: Marxism

  • Uptopian socialism

    Utopian socialism

    Just nine years ago, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, Newsweek declared that “we are all socialists now.”

  • February Revolution (1917)

    Russian debt repudiation, 100 years on

    One achievement of the Russian revolution that is often ignored is the fulfillment of a promise made by the Russian revolutionaries in 1905: that all debts contracted by the Tsarist regime that had been overthrown some eleven months earlier were cancelled.

  • Still from "Marx Reloaded"

    From Marx Reloaded to Marx Returns

    You made Marx Reloaded in 2011, after the financial crisis and a return of Marx in particular and of the critique of capitalism in general. What do you think today, 10 years after the crisis, is the outcome of this return?

  • Palestinians watch Israeli soldiers patrol near the West Bank City of Hebron yesterday, close to where the teenagers were last seen. | Photo: Reuters

    New book reveals Israel’s covert operations, including nearly 2,700 assassinations

    A new book unveiled this month sheds light on Israel’s covert operations of state-sponsored killings.

  • The Young Karl Marx film screening @ 290 Danforth Ave, Toronto, ON M4K 1N6, Canada, Toronto [11 January]

    Review of ‘The Young Marx’

    Scott McLemee reviews The Young Karl Marx, which, on the eve of 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, contains themes of economic crises and inequalities that remain relevant today.

  • David Harvey

    Marx for the 21st century with David Harvey

    Marx’s ‘Capital’ is one of the most important texts of the modern era and continues to resonate today. Professor David Harvey, the world’s leading expert on Karl Marx, explains the continued importance of Marx’s analysis and how we can apply it to today’s economy and society.

  • NYT Joins Campaign to Purge the Term, “White Monopoly Capital in South Africa”

    NYT joins campaign to purge the term, “white monopoly capital” in South Africa

    The New York Times, the world’s premier journalistic purveyor of a “fake,” imperial, and profoundly white capitalist world view — masquerading as all the news that’s fit to print — wants us to believe that a now-bankrupt London-based public relations firm is behind South Africa’s regime-shaking debate over the rule of “white monopoly capital.”

  • Printed money

    Trump’s new dark money man takes over

    During her last news conference in December, Janet Yellen stood firm on her record stating, “The global economy is doing well. We’re in a synchronized expansion. This is the first time in many years that we’ve seen this.”

  • US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (R) with his Argentine counterpart, Jorge Faurie, on Sunday. (Argentine Foreign Ministry)

    U.S. and Argentina threaten to ban Venezuelan oil

    U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is threatening to ban the import and export of oil and crude products from Venezuela into the U.S. to pressure President Nicolas Maduro to “return to the constitution.”

  • Tiki Torch March

    DC school board member: ‘Feminists need rape’

    The Washington, DC Public Charter School Board oversees some 120 public charter schools in the nation’s capitol, serving more than 43,000 students. And one member of that school board, John Goldman, is an MRA with clear white supremacist leanings. He has admitted to having an alter ego, “Jack Murphy,” under which he posted to websites and participated in debates.

  • Collusion

    Tomgram: Nomi Prins, how to set the economy on fire

    There’s no way to measure just how cheery this period really is — not if you’re the CEO of a major company. Just as the World Economic Summit was opening in Davos, Switzerland, and President Donald Trump was flying in to put his mark on the moment, PwS, a global consulting firm, released its annual survey of 1,300 CEOs.

  • Meet The Press

    Thomas Friedman justifies slaughter of Arab civilians by ‘crazy’ Israel

    Thomas Friedman had a column in the New York Times yesterday justifying the Israeli slaughter of Arab civilians. Israel needs to go “crazy” in its confrontation with Hezbollah and Iran in Lebanon and Syria because, “This is not Scandinavia.”

  • Image: OnceAndFutureLaura/Flickr

    A farewell to Omelas: remembering Ursula Le Guin

    I had a friend who as a child wrote to Ursula Le Guin. He was feeling miserable, bad things had happened to him and he wanted to run away to Earthsea. He told her that he felt ashamed that he wasn’t facing up to life, felt it was a failing that he just wanted to live a fantasy.

  • MLK Blvd and Malcom X Blvd

    Bill Fletcher Jr. on Black Marxism

    Veteran labor activist Bill Fletcher jr. talks about how capitalism is based on the slave trade and colonialism, the Black contribution to Marxism, and the need to organize.

  • Caracas Distrito Federal Venezuela

    A socialist development strategy for the 21st century (Part 1)

    1. Introduction Capitalist development is based upon labour exploitation and environmental destruction. Through sexism and racism it has established second class citizens who are doubly-exploited. Democracy under capitalism is of the ‘low-intensity’ variety—where decision over economic resource generation and use are off-limits to the majority of the population, and where political systems facilitate the (mis)representation […]

  • Automobile Factory Production Motor Industrial

    Marx and historical materialism

    Karl Marx was a materialist – more than that, he was a historical materialist. Marxists, in order to establish their credentials in political arguments, frequently claim that they are giving a materialist analysis of a phenomenon. The claim that a materialist analysis is being provided both attests to the Marxist credentials of the argument, and validates the attitudes and actions that follow from that analysis.

  • Time is money

    Value, credit and crisis: Reading Marx out of context can lead to confusion

    A literalist, out-of-context reading of Marx can get one into trouble, or at the very least, leave you hopelessly confused. For help, I look to David Harvey. Perhaps the preeminent expert on Marx’s Capital in the English-speaking world, Harvey meticulously reconstructed Marx’s approach to money in his major treatise, Limits to Capital (1982).

  • Demonstrators in Zurich this week. While many are poised to recoil at President Trump’s arrival in Davos this week, much of the moneyed elite there are willing to overlook what they portray as the president’s rhetorical foibles in favor of the additional wealth he has delivered to their coffers. (Ennio Leanza/European Pressphoto Agency)

    Dutiful dirges of Davos

    Thousands of people will gather next week in Davos. Their combined wealth will reach several hundred billion dollars, perhaps even close to a trillion. Never in world history will be the amount of wealth per square foot so high. And this year, for the sixth or seventh consecutive time, what would be one of the principal topics addressed by these captains of industry, billionaires, employers of thousands of people across the four corners of the globe: inequality…

  • Red Guards and students

    The struggle for actually building socialist society

    “The economic base built in Mao’s era laid the foundation for a sovereign capitalist development.”

  • István Mészáros

    After alienation

    Since the collapse of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, many on the left seem to have swallowed the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism.