Two characteristics set Samir Amin apart from most other Marxist intellectuals of his time. One was his total and absolute commitment to praxis for the cause of socialism. The second was the centrality he accorded to imperialism.
The Communist Manifesto not only foresaw today’s predatory and polarized global capitalism but shows that we have the power to create a better world, says the radical former Greek Finance Minister in his introduction to a reissue of the Manifesto.
Perry Anderson based his early Antonio Gramsci work on a reading of ruling class political hegemony based on consent. Now he insists that coercion is at history’s heart, a reading he also ascribes to Gramsci. Both propositions are overstated.
Two Marxists associated with the left journal Monthly Review correspond in the years leading up to the publication of their magisterial Monopoly Capital. The reviewer calls the collection "fascinating for its details and quiet wisdom," grappling with a reconfigured empire that persists today.
(Interview with David Edgar)
London Review of Books
Tariq Ali, a key figure in the British New Left of the 1960s and a well-regarded Marxist writer and activist, offers an extended take on the politics and culture of the1968 anticapitalist movements and their echoes in today’s resistance worldwide.
On the 50th anniversary of G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America, the author and 11 others take stock of the book’s findings about class and power in the United States, focusing on the drive to privatize public schools, extend power abroad...
Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is the best buddy movie since George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. It’s also among the most important films in decades, bringing to a mass audience not just the revolutionary ideas of Marx and his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels in the early days of modern capitalism, but an approach to politics and history that still has no peer.
Saying Marxism is a science is preface. Add organized sarcasm and we come closer to mocking not so much intimate feelings associated with worldly illusions but their form in a particular perishable world. It aims to give new form to certain aspirations, the better to regenerate them. Yet if Marxist movements are to be effective, they must create new tastes and a new language for struggles to be born. Sarcasm then is about what outrages our sense of what should be.
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