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Terry Eagleton: Still the most Formidable Critic of Populist Late-Capitalism

Melanie McDonagh New Statesman
Both analytical and droll, Terry Eagleton's Culture explores how culture evolved from rarified sphere to humble practices, and from a bulwark against industrialism's encroaches to present-day capitalism's most profitable export. Eagleton both illuminates culture's collusion with colonialism, nationalism, the decline of religion, the rise of and rule over the "uncultured" masses, as well a means for cultivating social life and social change.

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Can We Combine Intersectionality with Marxism?

Laura Miles International Socialism
While a sharp contribution to discussions of women's oppression and liberation, the book under review is faulted for not demonstrating the actual radical connection between class and other forms of oppression. While rejecting a tendency to reduce Marxism to a one-dimensional critique of class, the book's author is faulted for downplaying the limits of intersectionality as not articulating--but instead fudging--the existing gulf between identity politics and Marxism.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Socialism

Geoffrey Jacques People's World
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.

The Life and Times of Karl Marx, in the words of Ronnie Kasrils

Ronnie Kasrils Daily Maverick (South Africa)
What fashioned Marx, Marxist theories and challenges faced in South Africa. Essential today is an international solidarity movement uniting the broad masses of people of all lands under the leadership of organized labor, of hand and brain, to stop the perfidious transnational corporations, their government tools, and capitalism's imperialist wars - towards a new internationalism of the working class, labor masses, and freedom loving people everywhere.

The Silvertown Strike - A Partisan History

John Tully Monthly Review
The bourgeoisie does not rule by force alone; it does so by inculcating its ideas and values—its ideology—into the population at large. It follows, then, as the GMB’s John Callow argues in his preface to Silvertown, that “history, like politics…is a fiercely contested ideological space.” Historians who claim to be impartial and “value-free” are not to be trusted—or they are simple.

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Left Behind

Malcolm Harris Los Angeles Review of Books
It may be something of a stretch to claim, as Malcolm Harris does, that "anarchists get the artists and tacticians, Marxists get the theorists and politicians." Yet this remains an insightful review. It surveys the history of anarchism and its relationship to Marxism as it considers how adherents of these historic modes of thought might find themselves acting in this political year.

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Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts of a Great Transition (long)

John Bellamy Foster Great Transition Initiative
Socialist thought is re-emerging at the forefront of the movement for global ecological and social change. In the face of the planetary emergency, theorists have unearthed a powerful ecological critique of capitalism at the foundations of Marx's materialist conception of history. This has led to a more comprehensive conception of socialism rooted in Marx's analysis of the rift in "the universal metabolism of nature" and his vision of sustainable human development.

Tidbits - October 22, 2015 - Are You a Capitalist?; Sanders; Clinton; The Grassroots; Afghanistan; Puerto Rico; Palestine; Announcements; and more....

Portside
Reader Comments: Sanders forces question - Are You a Capitalist; Media and Country Debate Socialism like no time in a hundred years; Clinton; GOP Crackup; Afghanistan; Puerto Rico; Palestine; Leonard Peltier; Readers Debate Tipping; Rosalyn Baxandall Announcements: Marxist classes and book talks in New York; Paul Robeson play in Peekskill; Palestine Solidarity and Paid Family Leave events in New York
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