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. […]
Tag Archives: Karl Marx
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, […]
Paresh Chattopadhyay has published an interesting article in the latest issue of Science and Society, the theoretical journal long associated with the Communist Party. In “On the Question of Soviet Socialism,” he replies to an extremely hostile review of Marcel van der Linden’s Western Marxism and the Soviet Union by David Laibman, the journal’s current […]
New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, post festum and status nascendi, go best together when learning is in question. —Ernst Bloch (From the “Prefatory Note” to A Philosophy of the Future) … Two more books I hope to get to this year: • Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (University […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available an excerpt from American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard by Raya Dunayevskaya. This work was originally published as a pamphlet in 1963 (the title of the original was American Civilization on Trial: The Negro As Touchstone of History) and distributed in large numbers at the massive […]
I’m adding a new category of recommendations of books that I feel merit the effort to seek them out and read them. The first selection in this category is an intellectual biography of Marx by Jerrold Seigel, a professor of history at New York University, now retired. Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life was […]
Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings From Africa and the Diaspora Edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley University of Texas Press. 2009. 395 pages. A title in the Surrealist Revolution series. ••• African-American historian Robin Kelley and Surrealist Franklin Rosemont (who passed away in 2009) have produced a provocative compilation of Surrealist texts […]
The list of contemporary academics producing scholarship on Marx worth reading is, sadly, a short one. Paresh Chattopadhyay, however, has a secure place on it. Chattopadhyay, a faculty member of the Department of Sociology of the University of Montreal, has made an interesting intellectual journey from close association with the thought of Charles Bettelheim, a […]
Criticism &c. 