Subjects Archives: Philosophy

One of Venezuela’s most respected intellectuals talks about fascism and corruption scandals in the lead-up to the presidential elections.

One day after his inauguration, Bassirou Diomaye Faye—Senegal’s new self-proclaimed “left Pan-Africanist” president—announced that the new government will conduct an audit of the country’s oil, gas and mining sectors.

ROAPE interviews Mark Duffield about his life and work.

Modern liberalism was developed in response to the Bolshevik Revolution during the capitalist crisis of the inter-war period, as a way of resolving that crisis, and other similar crises that could arise in future, without transcending capitalism.

Piero and Nino exchanged ideas, criticized one another, encouraged each other; Nino often used Piero, seven-years his junior, as an intellectual sounding board, as a trusted interlocutor, asking for advice, for suggestions, whether his friend could chase up a source, a book or journal, a magazine or newspaper article, could he confirm this fact and that, find out some precise detail about Croce’s historical studies, if Machiavelli ever wrote anything about economics, or David Ricardo about philosophy.

How Marxists should approach the critique of Martin Heidegger.

In this second article in a series on philosophy and science, we take a look at dialectics and its relevance to understanding change in the natural world.

In this first article in a series on philosophy and science, we take a look at materialism and why it is fundamental to science.

Words can be highly deceptive; and Hindu rashtra is a perfect example of this.

I. To summarise the reception history of Marx in Japan is no small task.1 In fact, it is essentially impossible to give an adequate overview of one of the deepest, most prolific, and most variegated linguistic repositories of the Marxist tradition. Although it remains remarkably little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual circles, Marxism […]

While most leftists have no problem rejecting Heidegger as a person, many ostensibly progressive or left-wing philosophers have nevertheless adopted Heideggerian positions.

Objective dialectics, i.e., the dialectical materialist ontology, first and foremost holds that the world is dominated by change and interconnection, “nothing is eternal but eternally changing.”

Historically speaking, Zionist feminism shares key characteristics of colonial feminisms of the nineteenth century.

The Left has tossed Lenin’s corpse to the victors of history—both the Stalinists and their liberal opponents.

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, is one of history’s most well-known figures, and one of its most maligned. Mainstream culture vilifies him as a despot. 

Science is not an innocent activity, performed outside society. Lewontin and Levins write: ‘To do science is to be a social actor, whether one likes it or not, in political activity’ (1985: 4).

Literacy campaigns targeting African (Black) youth in Africa and across the diaspora have played a crucial role in fostering educational empowerment.

​”From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. But for ordinary usage such definitions are very convenient and in places cannot well be dispensed with; moreover, they can do no harm, provided their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten.” – Friedrich Engels

NICK MATTHEWS looks at the great Bolshevik leader’s intense three-week period of furious study in the British Library in 1908 and the timeless classic on Marxism and philosophy it produced: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

Karl Marx (1818-83), like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) before him, emphasized that human societies can and do undergo dramatic transformations, moving from one social order to another where each formation is governed by its own distinct laws, and a discontinuous logic separates one social order from the next.