In defiance of predictions, American Marxism has survived and even flourished, notably in universities. This institutional base has produced plenty of good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.
For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we’re all suffering for it.
Media pundits hail the economist Karl Polanyi as a brilliant theorist of capitalism and a thinker for our time. In order to understand Polanyi’s ideas, however, we need to see him in the context of his own time: Europe’s "age of catastrophe" in the early twentieth century.
The Second International’s history is usually seen through the prism of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, a mass party in an industrial power. But militants in the Balkans had to adapt its lessons to their own local realities — and in the decades before World War I, they were the first socialists to confront the looming dangers of the national question.
Lenin remained true to the tactical guidelines of Karl Kautsky after the latter had abandoned them.
The Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti was one of the outstanding postwar Marxist thinkers. But Colletti’s subsequent drift to the right symbolized a wider shift in Italy’s whole political axis as its once-powerful left-wing movements went into decline.
A coalition of industrial workers and small farmers underpinned democratic politics in the twentieth century. Can workers in a precarious service economy fill their shoes today?
In his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos offers a novel — and profoundly disturbing — conception of value creation: a handful of visionaries are the sole source of all “real value.” This aristocracy mercifully blesses customers, clients, and even Amazon workers with social goods.
The 1980s BBC series The History Man was a venomous takedown of academic pseudo-radicals. How does it stand up today?
Long working hours kill more than 700,000 people per year, even as millions are unable to find enough work to survive. The irrationality of capitalism has a human price.
Over many years, when the labor movement and socialism were at their weakest in decades, Mike Parker helped train a new generation of rigorous thinkers and activists in management’s latest schemes and how to fight back.
Our society is deeply invested in a rosy version of romance while offering little support for families to survive the challenges of marriage and child-rearing. We can’t survive those challenges without honest narratives about the maddening realities of love.
The failed Amazon union drive in Alabama is a stark reminder of a basic fact of life under capitalism: it’s always easier for bosses to destroy a fledgling unionization effort than it is for workers to get together and fight for their own interests.
Sixty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to leave our planet. The space race was inseparable from Cold War rivalry, but it also stands out as an inspiring example of what humanity can achieve through grand collective projects that aren’t geared to private profit.
The US Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property. We should draw on that memory today for struggles against racism and capitalism.
The story of the boat lodged in the Suez Canal spurred countless memes and dominated headlines for days. It also dramatized the reality that seemingly magical global supply chains are based on real equipment and real workers — and more often than not, drudgery and worker exploitation.
In a 1902 article, Eugene V. Debs described his journey from young labor organizer to militant socialist. We reprint it here in full.
In 1886, workers came together on the original May Day to demand an eight-hour day. Today, from Starbucks stores to Amazon warehouses, that struggle continues.
While certain writers or texts might fall afoul of polite society today, great writing can and will never stay canceled.
Born 100 years ago today, Italian communist Enrico Berlinguer grew up under Fascist dictatorship. In postwar decades, he became leader of Europe’s biggest Communist Party — and an iconoclastic champion of a democratic path to socialism.