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.
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.
Socialism has a well-earned reputation as a secular, rational movement. But not all socialists throughout history were quite so grounded.
The ruling class will never give up fossil fuel, because it's key to their power over workers.
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.
ChatGPT feeds on language, outputting texts that reinforce the basic assumptions of our culture. The rise of AI forces the Left to take a hard look at the politics of language and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky.
Martin Luther King Jr had a rich relationship with socialist politics: he sympathized with but ultimately rejected Marxism, and he settled on a Christian socialism that viewed the struggle against racism and class oppression as fundamentally intertwined.
The workers of Red Vienna struggled to secure their basic needs — through militant organizing and political power.
How I learned to stop worrying about marketing the class struggle.
Leo Panitch emphasized three core themes throughout his career: the process of class formation, the key role of political parties in facilitating this process, and the need to transform the state instead of wielding it in its current form. In doing so, he gave the democratic-socialist movement an invaluable trove of resources to change the world with.
This century's LGBTQ liberation movement must be part of a broader project to redefine human freedom.
Critical theorist Axel Honneth accuses Marxism of having a narrowly economic idea of human emancipation. That’s wrong — and his own work could use a more structural understanding of social conflict and how progress really happens.
Right now, democratic socialism is on the rise in American society. Revolutionary socialists who have kept the torch of socialism burning during the lean years will now have to merge with democratic-socialist demands of the current moment.
Amid the radical upheavals of the early 1900s, the Austro-Marxists tried to marry revolutionary aims with reform-minded practice.
The historical shortcomings of liberalism don’t mean that socialists should throw liberalism out wholesale. On the contrary: socialism needs liberalism.
The National Review frets that “populist” paleoconservatives are vessels of Marxist influence on the Right. That’s nonsense.
In a 1914 essay, Eugene V. Debs pronounced Jesus “the world’s supreme revolutionary leader” and “as real and persuasive a historic character as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, or Karl Marx.” We reprint the essay here in full as our Christmas gift to you.
In 1952 the Harvard grad Victor Grossman defected to East Germany, hoping to help build socialism on the ruins of Nazism. Thirty years after that state collapsed, he insists that we should see it as a land of contradictions, not just a totalitarian monolith.
On her birthday, we honor the life of Eleanor Marx.
