Stanley Aronowitz died this week at 88. He hated work, loved life, and brought his overflowing, exuberant approach to social problems to picket lines, classrooms, and vacation. A fighting left needs more people like him.
While Marx never devoted a specific work to a discussion of life after capitalism, his distinctive critique of the central realities of capitalism is far more liberatory than has generally been appreciated.
The solution for capitalism’s problems requires transforming the capitalist workplace into democratic institutions where everyone has an equal say on what happens there.
A paean to Marx's contemporary relevance, the author argues in an excerpt from his new book that what makes Marx a stranger even to Marxist movements is not simply the difficulty of certain key works and passages, but a series of other obstacles.
The point of an activist reading of Capital is not to figure out what Marx ‘really’ wanted to say but to use the text as a platform to explore the worlds in which activists now live, work and struggle.
Thinking about how the lessons of the 20th Century might inform a socialist vision for our times is the task the author of this book has set for himself. Reviewer Kai-Li Cheng offers an assessment.
Historians Eric Foner and Matt Karp on the international ambitions of the US slaveholding class — and the abolitionist movement that brought them down.
This paper was presented at the International conference “150 years Karl Marx's - Reflections for the 21st century” held in Athens, Greece on January 14-15, 2017. Organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - Athens Office. The conference discussed the actuality of Marx's theoretical system of the critique of political economy 150 years on from the publication of Capital Volume I.
Gaining social control over the economic life of society - achieving socialism, in a word - requires not only that we know that the democratic republic is the staging ground for such change. It also requires that we recognize that the evidence of the future we want is visible and "invading" our present, to borrow a term from C. L. R. James, in forms that exist in the current conditions of our social life.
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