Todd McGowan’s task in Embracing Alienation is to contend with two ideas that are usually associated with the problem of alienation, first that it is a modern phenomenon and second, that it is a negative aspect and hence must be overcome. The book hinges on the thesis that alienation is constitutive of our beings and […]
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The new translation by Paul Reitter of Marx’s most important work has two main things going for it. Firstly, it has a direct relationship to a determinate original text by Marx, the 1872 second German edition. This means that it is very straightforward to compare the translation with what Marx actually wrote. This is in
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with strands of Scandinavian romanticism and libertarian activism, all within a materialist and Marxist framework. This is as simple as it sounds, which is to say not at all. In The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up, Karen Kurczynski offers an excellent and much-needed overview of Jorn’s development and of his
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Alami and Dixon’s The Spectre of State Capitalism is a careful discussion of a topic often dealt with in platitudes and sound-bites. The authors cover uses of ‘state capitalism’ as an ideological tool, as well as serious scholarly work on the subject. They accept that ‘all capitalism is state capitalism to some extent,’ and ‘the new state capitalism may not
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In Progress and Regression, social philosopher Rahel Jaeggi wants to make the concepts of progress and regression fruitful again. This is a challenging project, as post- and decolonial criticism has left progress in a rather battered state in recent years. For example, back in 2016, Amy Allen criticised in The End of Progress that renowned representatives of recent
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Despite an impressive and insightful body of work, Dutch astronomer and revolutionary theorist Anton Pannekoek has remained a remarkably neglected figure and thinker in the history of Marxist thought. Caused to a large extent by Lenin’s (in)famous rebuttal of ‘left communist’ thinking in his 1920 pamphlet Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Pannekoek’s tireless efforts to develop
Karlsbad is a German-speaking city in Bohemia on the River Teplá. As a spa resort it is renowned for the curative effects of its thermal springs, attracting those from all parts of Europe, ‘princes, ministers, aristocrats, chamber singers, order-hunters, soldiers of fortune, adventurers, spies, and courtesans.’ (19) Into this exotic place, in August 1874, steps
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Carlos Henrique Lopes Rodrigues’ Imperialismo e Empresa Estatal no Capitalismo Dependente Brasileiro (1956-1998) is the result of research carried out for the author’s doctoral thesis. It analyses the actions of US imperialism and its relationship with the transformations in the processes of capitalist development in Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century and
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Neocleous’ work, Pacification, is the confluence of two projects: a Foucauldian-Marxist genealogical project into the nature of police power and the fabrication of social order, and a historical analysis from Plato and Aristotle into the emergence of security through discourses on the body and disease. By combining these divergent, but related projects, Neocleous deftly moves
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Anytime a Marxist talks about Stalin they fall into a trap. In certain contexts, merely mentioning his name produces an impression of regression, of a Marxism forever stuck in the past, entrapped by the problems and dramatis personae of the 1930s. Any attempt on the part of the Marxist to situate Stalinism in the complexities of the