One interesting panel at the recent Historical Materialism conference in London featured several Marxist political economists discussing digital currencies, such as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It was a refreshing discussion primarily because it sought to locate the debate in a sophisticated understanding of Marxist theories of money. The panel drew on research that has appeared in an issue of The Japanese Political Economy (volume 51, issue 1-2) guest edited by Costas Lapavitsas. The journal itself is an interesting one, whose content goes far beyond discussions of the Japanese economy, embracing contributions on heterodox and Marxist political economy that might struggle to get into more mainstream outlets.
A recent fad among some academic Marxists has been to embrace idealist philosophical positions, which see human consciousness as the ultimate reality, and reject materialism and realism. The Marxist philosopher Helena Sheehan takes issue with them in the October 2025 issue of Monthly Review (volume 77, number 5) and her essay can be read online: https://monthlyreview.org/articles/marxism-and-the-history-of-philosophy/.
Sheehan seeks to situate the development of philosophical ideas in their historical context, noting the flowering of bourgeois thought when capitalism was still a rising system, clashing with the old feudal order. This culminating with the great German idealist philosopher Georg Hegel. Karl Marx was himself heavily influenced by Hegelianism, engaging critically with it in many of his early writings and drawing on it to help structure later works such as Capital. In the preface to the latter, Marx commented that idealist Hegelian philosophy “must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell”.
Once capitalism established itself as the dominant system, ruling ideas degenerated into fragmentary, anti-systemic philosophies, of which the most important are what Sheehan calls “myopic positivism and ever-new forms of obfuscating postmodernism”.
In asserting a materialism that owes a great deal to Marx’s close comrade Frederick Engels, Sheehan is overly critical of Hegelian Marxism—associated with figures such as György Lukács—interest in which revived from the late 1950s with the emergence of a “New Left” challenging the Stalinist orthodoxy. It is true that many on the New Left were dismissive of Engels, seeing him as the source of the original sin giving rise to the Stalinist philosophy dubbed “dialectical materialism”. Sheehan herself, a former member of the Irish Communist Party who mourned the collapse of the Soviet Union, has a far greater affinity with the Communist tradition than this journal does. Indeed, International Socialism is unusual in the seriousness many of its contributors accord to both Hegelian Marxism and Engels’s writing on science and nature.
Nonetheless, Sheehan is not far from the truth in claiming that, among academic Marxists, there is a tendency to view Marxist philosophy as either Hegelian—with a strong emphasis on esoteric readings of Hegel's Science of Logic increasingly distant from the real world concerns of Marxism—or through the prism of an anti-humanist “structuralist Marxism” inspired by the French Communist Louis Althusser. Though not without its flaws, Sheehan’s spirited defence of materialism is worth reading.
We do not know what the socialist Zohran Mamdani will do as New York’s new mayor. However, Keith Rosenthal, writing in the journal Spectre, points to the limits of the office and explains why scepticism is justified. He takes a historical look at Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s mayor 1934-46 and celebrated by many on the left to this day, including by Mamdani (“the greatest New York City mayor of all time”). Rosenthal summarises: “even a putatively reform-minded politician will exhibit the tendency to administer the city according to not only the essentially bourgeois remit of the office itself but also the dominant and hegemonic class and social forces within a capitalist polity.” In La Guardia’s case, this entailed attacks on trade unions and racist policing and the continued economic marginalisation of black people. The example shows, according to Rosenthal, that progressive change has to come through organising from below. His article is available online: https://spectrejournal.com/the-greatest-new-york-city-mayor-of-all-time/
Raquel Varela, a Marxist based in Portugal and a friend of International Socialism, who we interviewed in 2023, has written to us about a new Portuguese radical left journal, Maio (May), which launched in late 2025. It promises a space for radical intellectuals and trade unions to discuss and debate. Those able to read Portuguese—and automatic translation also does a reasonable job these days—can browse Maio’s coverage here: https://jornalmaio.org/. We are excited to see how the project develops.