Subjects Archives: Marxism

Law here, law there, law everywhere. The first nine months of the Trump administration have thrust questions about the force of law, legal strategy and tactics, and the role of judges in the United States’ much-vaunted system of constitutional checks and balances to the fore of public attention.

“Our mandate is that we take care of Earth and earthlings and human beings because we’re all family.”

Let us not forget that Standard & Poor, Moody and Fitch rating services are financed by the banks and therefore have no real independence.

Following is the text of a talk delivered by the author on Nov. 4 at the “The Solution is Socialism” educational conference in Connecticut. The conference was hosted by the Youth for Socialist Action chapter at Central Connecticut State University, where the sessions were held.

For Capital’s explosive force to truly unfold, not only was education in general necessary, but also knowledge of the relevant economic and philosophical theories, in order to perceive not just the explicit, but also the implicit critiques.

A question that might sound ludicrous to some: what do Trump and liberals have in common? Answer: a penchant for discussing anything other than class and capitalism—seriously.

It’s been one hell of a week and I have to be honest, I am really angry. Four times this week, I have been told that women are not oppressed under Capitalism in Advanced Capitalist Economies; this has come from the mouths of three men (one of whom is supposedly on the hard left) and one time by a young woman.

The Reserve Army of Labor

Congratulations, smart American shopper! You have just overcome months of electorally induced PTSD by purchasing a Li’l Orange President®! These droll, five-inch-high orange neo-fascist dudes are living genetic replicas of our current U.S. president!

This talk by Issac Deutscher was originally published in Monthly Review on December 1967 to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Capital. We are making it available here on the occasions of the 150^th anniversary of Capital. In the original editors’ note to this article, 50 years ago Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy wrote: “This is the text of a talk given last summer on the BBC’s Third Programme. It is reproduced here by permission. Isaac Deutscher is the author of distinguished biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, and at the time of his death at the age of 60 last August he was working on a biography of Lenin.” —The Editors

150 years back, Karl Marx’s Magnum Opus Das Kapital (Volume I) rolled out of the press on September, 1867. The publication signified nothing short of a silent revolution on the theoretical plane, and the world would never be the same again. Capital soon became the most discussed and debated work.

Although Nicos Poulantzas is rightly regarded as one of the most innovative Marxist theoreticians of the state, most analyses tend to focus on his account of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state in the organization of the hegemonic bloc of the capitalist class.

Writing in the October 28 New York Times, conservative columnist David Brooks said the preceding week was “when Donald Trump and Steve Bannon solidified their grip on the Republican Party and America’s national government”.

Universalism is not an innocent concept. In “The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism,” published shortly after the fall of historical communism, Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, former Marxist philosophers and disciples of Georg Lukács, accused Marx and his followers of turning the Hegelian concept of universalism into a philosophy of praxis, a “predictive and action-orienting device” applied to change the world.

Caliban and the Witch is a reminder that it is the task of feminists and Marxists alike to demand that the sphere of reproduction and continuing forms of colonialism be seen as key sources of value for capitalism and therefore as key sites of struggle against it.

Diana Lozado was 21 when she left her home city of Nieva and fled into the jungle to fight with the FARC. She had always been fascinated by the guerrilla movement and its fight against inequality in the countryside, and Lozado wanted to be part of it.

This week, representatives of three major internet platforms — Google, Facebook, and Twitter — are testifying before Congress about their role in facilitating Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But a fourth giant sat comfortably removed: Amazon.

The coming months mark the centennial of Palestine’s forcible incorporation into the British Empire. In November 1917, British foreign secretary Lord Arthur Balfour declared his government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”; in December, Jerusalem fell to British troops.

When President Xi Jinping addressed the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China last month, he spoke of “the scientific truth of Marxism-Leninism”. Marxism (with Chinese characteristics), as President Xi went on to set out, is to be the foundation for a Healthy China.

What follows is the paper I gave this past weekend at the ninth annual meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History in Dallas. I received excellent comments from our chair, Amy Wood, and from several audience members–comments that have made me rethink some of my argument. But I publish here without editing in the hopes that I receive more comments.