Subjects Archives: Marxism

Two recent articles in Open Democracy report responses from Ukrainian trade unions to the “Lugano Declaration”, which came out of a conference between high Western and Ukrainian officials in Switzerland last week and sets out plans for economic reconstruction “after the war is over” by the Ukrainian Oligarchy* and its major imperial sponsors; the U.S., UK and EU.

Two hundred years ago, on July 8, 1822, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned. He was less than a month short of thirty.

IN 1959, one of the revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Haydée Santamaria, a hundred years old this year, arrived at a cultural centre in the heart of Havana, Cuba.

Kenny Coyle exposes the fake news fed to the world by the talking heads of the local CNN or BBC bureaus and beyond.

The war in Ukraine, rising oil prices and spiralling global inflation have fuelled food scarcity and surges in the price of basic goods in Egypt. Most worrying among the goods affected is bread, which makes up almost 40 percent of the average Egyptian’s diet.

Global politics seems to be moving in two opposite directions. On the one hand, the U.S. and its closest allies are stepping up their efforts to consolidate and expand U.S. hegemony. On the other hand, the countries of the developing world, the socialist countries and the formerly-colonised countries are increasingly united in their efforts to promote multipolarity, multilateralism, sovereign development, and democracy in international relations.

Bernard D’Mello’s India After Naxalbari: Unfinished History is simultaneously a history of India’s political, economic and social development since the British Raj to the present; a historical retracing of the different attempts to build a revolutionary movement in India; and a political intervention into contemporary debates within the Indian left.

Who, or what, is the “middle class”? Most people identify themselves as middle class, but what does that mean, and what difference does it make?

The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors.

If you ask most teenagers in the United States or Europe what they like to do, they’ll probably tell you they enjoy playing video games like “Call of Duty,” where they pretend to be at war. For them, war is a game. An entertaining way to spend their time after school or on weekends.

Marxist, Nationalist, Feminist – these are the words that describe not only the political convictions but also the artwork of Frida Kahlo. Although born as Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón outside of Mexico City in 1907, Kahlo eventually shortened her name and frequently told people that she was born in 1910. This was the year that widespread political unrest finally culminated in the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.

When the news spread a couple weeks ago that San Diego scholar and activist Mike Davis was going on palliative care, it generated an outpouring of support online. And for good reason.

Boris Johnson resigning would only be interesting in an alternate universe where there was some remote chance that he won’t be replaced by another depraved sociopath.

In June, a federal appeals court upheld an Arkansas law barring state contractors from boycotting Israel, sparking concerns over First Amendment rights in the United States.

In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, adopted a resolution calling on fellow Southern Baptists to work to make abortion legal under certain conditions, namely, ‘rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother’.

The drastic reduction in infant mortality rates is yet another testimony to the Cuban Revolution’s attention to the health of the country’s population.

As Lenin prepared to understand the First Great Slaughter of the twentieth century, he spent from September to December 1914 absorbing Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1813). Humphrey McQueen begins a six-part exploration of why Lenin thought he had to do so. This first installment, Dialectical Reasoning: ‘The Science of Interconnectedness’ shows why Hegel is still not ‘a dead dog.’

We have no reason to succumb to the complex comfort of despair, a lugubriousness by which failure is foreordained. But to stress the repeated failures of the Left is a necessary corrective to its history of boosterism and bullshit, and to stress how appalling these days are, even if we can also find in them hope.

In the first post of my Future of Work series, I looked at the impact of working from home and remote work which has mushroomed since the COVID pandemic.

Frankfurt School critical theory has been—along with French theory—one of the hottest commodities of the global theory industry. Together, they serve as the common source for so many of the trend-setting forms of theoretical critique that currently dominate the academic market in the capitalist world, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to queer theory, Afro-pessimism and beyond.