Surrealist Leonora Carrington, an accomplished painter and writer, passed away in Mexico City on May 25. She was the author of (among other books) The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below. The New York Times ran an obituary on May 26, describing her as “one of the last living links to the world of […]
The long-delayed arrest of the butcher Ratko Mladic (he had friends in higher places than Radovan Karadzic—it took longer for them to decide it was no longer worth protecting him) dreges up memories of the Balkan intervention debates of the 1990s. Criticism &c. recently came across an article by Marko Attila Hoare—author of The History […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1958 piece by Raya Dunayevskaya called “Colonial Revolts and the Creativity of People.” ••• The editors of the journal Revolutionary History have released a new issue on the Iranian revolutionary movement, “The Left in Iran: 1941-1957” (Vol. 10, No. 3). Unfortunately, this valuable resource for the history […]
Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies by Kevin B. Anderson The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 319 pp. Marx is journalistically rediscovered at regular intervals, at least when business writers have to confront an economic crisis. He makes good copy. The academic intellectual consensus, however, is that Marx is no longer relevant. […]
Along with the release of a new viewing interface, the HathiTrust Digital Library has just introduced the option to download a full PDF version of public domain and other freely-available texts. You will see the terms under which the text is available in the record. There is a wealth of valuable material available in the […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1959 column by Raya Dunayevskaya on the history of May Day and the meaning of the struggle to shorten the working day (“May 1 and the Shorter Work Day“). While it is always a good idea to refamiliarize people with the trans-Atlantic origin of May Day, this […]
The latest issue of the academic journal Socialism and Democracy features a special section titled “Re-reading Marx in 2010.” Paresh Chattopadhyay, author of The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience has an essay in it: “The Myth of Twentieth Century Socialism and the Continuing Relevance of Karl Marx.” I haven’t seen it yet, […]
East European Politics and Societies has published a long essay, “On Ruins and the Place of Memory: A Bosnian Post-Script to Communism”, by Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, the most profound and consistent literary interpreter of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s cultural and historic particularity. Mahmutćehajić produced the single most important analysis of the intellectual and political foundations of the attempt of […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1955 piece by Raya Dunayevskaya on rank-and-file opposition to UAW leader Walter Reuther (“New Stage of Struggle Against Labor Bureaucracy“). 1955—the year Reuther achieved the reunification of the CIO with the AFL—may well have been the high point of his influence in U.S. society, but here Dunayevskaya […]
Wakefield Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts will publish in April The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, a collection of works by Benjamin Perét, one of the most committed of Surrealists and an important participant in the international Trotskyist movement (he helped found the Trotskyist movement in Brazil). Unfortunately, Perét is not widely translated into […]
Criticism &c. 