Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake. Walter Benjamin, 1940, Notes for “On… Continue Reading
Zuerst auf Englisch erschienen in International Socialism 166—isj.org.uk/jcox-marx-engels-women-lib/. Aus dem Englischen von Rosemarie Nünning. Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels waren große Verfechter der Frauenbefreiung – in Bezug auf die Theorieentwicklung und die Praxis, sowohl öffentlich als auch privat.1 Es wurden… Continue Reading
Zuerst auf Englisch erschienen in International Socialism 165—http://isj.org.uk/socialism-in-a-time-of-pandemics/. Aus dem Englischen von David Albrich. Es ist verlockend, Pandemien als unvorhersehbare, unheilvolle Eingriffe der Natur in die menschliche Gesellschaft zu betrachten.1 Der Ausbruch der Coronavirus-Erkrankung (Coronavirus Disease 2019, kurz COVID-19) ist… Continue Reading
A review of Grace Blakeley, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation Grace Blakeley (Repeater, 2017), £10.99. Stolen is a very comprehensive and readable account of the roots of financialisation in the 1970s crisis, which ended the “golden age”… Continue Reading
Twenty years ago, Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri exerted a powerful influence on sections of the left. It presented the idea that capitalism had evolved into a new global order, dominated by supranational bodies such as the World… Continue Reading
A review of Donny Gluckstein and Terry Sullivan, Hegel and Revolution (Bookmarks, 2020), £7. The thought of G W F Hegel might seem like an odd topic of conversation for Marxists. By the time he died in 1831, Hegel had… Continue Reading
The issues that have driven the “trade union debate” in International Socialism are fundamental to the left in Britain and most importantly to Marxists. The “problem”, often repeated in this journal and elsewhere, is simply this: the level of strike… Continue Reading
On a fine day in late April 2007, a group of us were gathered outside the Istanbul offices of Agos, an Armenian-language newspaper, the editor of which had been shot dead three months earlier on the pavement where we were… Continue Reading
Few figures from the history of Marxism appear so frequently in the press and in public debate as Antonio Gramsci.1 For example, in December 2019 the New York Times used Gramsci’s oft-quoted phrase “the old is dying and the new… Continue Reading
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were champions of women’s liberation, both in theory and in practice, in public and in private.1 Important work has already been published exploring both Marx’s and Engels’s writings about women and the family, and developing… Continue Reading