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 […]
Tag Archives: Marxism
The recent verdict and sentence announced in the trial of Khmer Rouge prison warden Kaing Guek Eav calls the world’s attention, however fleetingly, to the experience of Cambodia in the Pol Pot years. The Khmer Rouge seized complete control of Cambodia in April 1975 and embarked upon a methodical four-year attempt at a reconstruction of […]
The Romanian writer Panaït Istrati (1884-1935) seems to be virtually unknown in the U.S., although the recent republication of his first novel, Kyra Kyralina by Talisman House may serve to remedy this situation somewhat. Biographical information about him is not in abundance in English and, sadly, I have had to rely on the Wikipedia entry […]
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 […]
Capitalist rule is caught in its own trap, and cannot ban the spirit that it has invoked. —Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (1915) *** I don’t often express enthusiasm about the appearance of new left groups, but I have come across a case in which I’m at least willing to withhold judgment. The International Luxemburgist […]
To mark May Day 2010, which in the U.S. will be a day of mass demonstrations against the ongoing anti-immigrant political offensive, I am providing link to the Hathi Trust scan of The Working-Class Movement in America by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx (Karl Marx’s youngest daughter). This fascinating account of their 1886 speaking tour […]
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) can be called the outsider of German Marxist thought. While the members of the Frankfurt School and its extended circle have practically become household names in American academia, Bloch’s highly individualistic blend of Expressionism, Marxism, “Left” Aristotleanism, and messianism remains acknowledged by, but not assimilated into, the academic canon of Critical Theory. […]
Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (University Press of Mississippi , 2008, 282 pages) *** While not exactly a new book, Frank Rosengarten’s Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society is an important addition to the large body of James literature and deserves a serious critical […]
Criticism &c. 