Socialists today should learn from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: in particular, its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings about commodified liberation. But they should leave behind its moralism and despair about change.
A new edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s writings, most of which have never appeared in English before, gives us a unique perspective on her thought. Luxemburg believed that a socialist revolution would have to be democratic or else it would be doomed to failure.
Socialists throughout history have understood that holding office is not the same thing as winning power. Working people can only entrench their victories through a fight to change the state itself.
The idea that workers in wealthy countries like the United States are part of a “labor aristocracy” bought off with the fruits of imperialism is nonsense. The best way to build a movement against US imperialism is to build the labor movement domestically.
The late socialist writer Mike Davis’s first book was Prisoners of the American Dream, a deep exploration of how the US labor movement became so weakened. Nearly four decades later, Davis revisited the book in an interview with Jacobin.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone chronicled the growing loneliness and isolation of wealthy societies. Twenty years later, the problem is far worse than he could have imagined.
In the late nineteenth century, French Marxist Paul Lafargue put forward a demand that still resonates nearly a century and a half later: workers have a right to be lazy.
Milton Friedman argued that capitalism was democracy’s natural home. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Left political strategies have traditionally divided between social democratic parliamentarism and the Leninist idea of “smashing the state.” Nicos Poulantzas argued that neither strategy was adequate and developed his own vision of “revolutionary reformism.”
What Gramsci can tell us about the relationship between fascism and liberalism — and the rise of Donald Trump.
On this day in 1871, the Paris Commune began its brief history before a conservative government drowned it in blood. While it lasted, the Commune sketched out a new way to run a major city based on democracy and the public good, not private profiteering.
The tendency of some modern-day Marxists to pit reform against revolution is diametrically opposed to the vision of Karl Marx himself.
Walter Benjamin's Marxism owed much to his early engagement with anarchism and surrealism.
French socialist leader Jules Guesde established the first working-class party in modern history and popularized the ideas of Karl Marx at a crucial time. It’s impossible to imagine the subsequent history of Marxism and the French left without Guesde.
Georgii Plekhanov did more than anyone to popularize Marxist ideas in Russia from the late nineteenth century. While he fell out with the Bolsheviks and condemned the October revolution, Plekhanov had a huge influence over the development of Soviet Marxism.
Rosa Luxemburg’s work The Accumulation of Capital described the havoc that capitalism wreaked upon what we now call the Global South. Today’s socialist and environmental activists can draw valuable insights from Luxemburg’s understanding of the world system.
Antonio Labriola played a major role in the development of Italian Marxism and inspired the thinking of Antonio Gramsci. Labriola knew that capitalism wouldn’t collapse of its own accord: only a socialist culture of activism could bring about a new society.
Even if we were to free ourselves from the capitalist work ethic and provide everyone with a universal basic income, our society would still require some amount of socially necessary labor. Socialists should strive to reimagine work, not eliminate it.
With its poll numbers slipping, Podemos is searching for ways to recapture this spring's energy.
Robert Brenner’s theory of the post-1973 global economy — which depicts a long era of “stagnation” caused by chronic industrial overcapacity — is logically dubious and doesn’t fit the facts. But the theory’s biggest problem is its politics.