The International Working Men’s Association was launched in London on this day in 1864. As the “First International,” it cemented class solidarity across countries as a shared ideal and inspired large numbers to organize against capitalist exploitation.
For three decades, Italian liberals have promoted technocratic neoliberal governments with no popular mandate. The effect is to hollow out democracy — and alienate the center left from its former working-class base.
That workers must liberate themselves rather than rely on top-down liberation is one of the few rules for socialist organizing that Marx and Engels ever laid down. It’s nonnegotiable: socialists believe in workers freeing themselves through class struggle.
The French secular ideal of laïcité is not a misused noble idea — it is deeply flawed at its roots.
Martin Hägglund speaks about This Life, his new book about love, grief, wealth, and Karl Marx.
Austrian socialist Rudolf Hilferding, author of the magisterial Finance Capitalism, used the tools of Marxism to develop a rigorous understanding of the changing capitalist economy while making the case for a socialism that put freedom and democracy at the center of the project.
On why the rise of fundamentalism in Muslim-majority countries owes much to the failings of the secular left.
Though embraced by the likes of Glenn Beck, Thomas Paine was the American Revolution's most radical figure.
From Winston Churchill to the Nazis, anticommunists have long blamed the spread of socialism on Jews. With the Left again on the rise, the antisemitic trope of "Judeo-Bolshevism" is back.
Thinkers like Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin identified the commune as the political framework for a transformed, radically democratic society. We can find examples of this in some of the key social and environmental struggles of the world today.
The conventional understanding of Marxism as doggedly anti-religious is wrong. In fact, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued, Christianity and Marxism have at times inspired in humanity a radical sense of hope to build a more just world.
On Bastille Day 1889, militants from around the world met in Paris to declare an international union of socialist parties. The Second International promised to spread the spirit of the revolution across borders, only itself to fall victim to nationalist passions.
The Reformation was a fundamental transformation in European society, blending religious disputes with political ideology and class conflict. Marx and Engels fully understood its importance for their view of history, and today’s Marxists should do the same.
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.
This St. Patrick's Day we remember the 1867 Fenian uprising — and its radical vision of an Irish Republic.
Polish economist Michal Kalecki is often linked with the “Keynesian revolution,” but Kalecki’s view of capitalism was much more radical than Keynes’s. His ideas are a vital tool for understanding how the system works, and how it might be overcome.
Socialism is again a major current in American life, and the Right has been freaking out over it nonstop. Socialists have to explain what we’re really for: giving people a say in how every aspect of their lives is run.
The Marxist economist Paul Sweezy dedicated his life to understanding how capitalism works, and how it had changed since Karl Marx’s time. The big economic questions that Sweezy addressed are still fundamental for socialists today.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s farcical labeling of Justin Trudeau as a communist echoes hysterical historical precedents. The rhetoric underscores a cynical misunderstanding of both Trudeau’s policies and communism.
