“The Far Left Is Winning the Democratic Civil War” was the headline over a Washington Post report (5/16/18) on the results of recent primary elections.
Subjects Archives: Socialism
Chavismo will be socialist or it will cease to exist
If there was something Hugo Chavez longed to build in Venezuela, it was a transition to 21st century socialism, writes Marco Teruggi.
Capitalism and the Expropriation of Nature: The Strategic Discourse of Ecosocialism with John Bellamy Foster
Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally.
Five Questions and Answers Concerning the Presidential Elections in Cuba
If the importance of Fidel Castro in the history of Cuba is undeniable, talk about a Castro brothers’ Cuba is inaccurate on the political level.
Socialists are urgently looking for the future: American Marxist Mike Davis talks to Algerian journalist Mohsen Abdelmoumen
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.
Dreaming of communism: News from Nowhere
There can be no denying that the content of News from Nowhere, the utopian romance penned by painter, poet and designer William Morris, was heavily indebted to the writings of Karl Marx. Morris was exploring these from the spring of 1882, the year before Marx died and the year of his own 48th birthday. He […]
A Review of The Young Karl Marx
The success of The Young Karl Marx derives from Peck’s ability to demonstrate the relevance of Marx for the present.
What do we mean by socialism?
What the hell is socialism, anyway? Over the last decade, it has been one of the most frequently looked up words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. And it’s easy to see why so many people feel the need for clarification.
The political economy of space and time in Eduardo Galeano
Uruguyan novelist and historian Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) wrote more than 40 books. Monthly Review lauded his creative non-fiction Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1973[1971]) as ‘outstanding political economy … and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx’.
Reds under the Bed
The British conservative media and party establishment are renewing their attempts to paint Jeremy Corbyn as a traitor. But given the failure of this approach in the past, why would they attempt it again?
Utopian socialism
Just nine years ago, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, Newsweek declared that “we are all socialists now.”
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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).
