There’s a justly famous passage in the third volume of Capital (quoted at the head of this article) in which Marx talks about moving beyond the “realm of necessity” into “the realm of freedom.” But what exactly is included in each of these realms? Specifically, can work ever be a part of the realm of [...]
Posts under ‘Marxism’
Could the present crisis be an opening to communism?
The following very interesting — and challenging — piece originally appeared on troploin. Thanks to Nick for drawing attention to this. The following quotations from this essay are not consecutive; they are a few excerpted with an eye to showing a main line of thought in the piece. In the capitalist mode of production as [...]
How can communism be brought about?
David Harvey has recently published two notable books. One, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, is essentially a text version of his introductory course of lectures on Capital. (The book is not a transcription of the lectures, but a written work encompassing the same territory.) The other is an approach to the analysis of the current [...]
Capitalist crisis and left response
Perhaps no one has done so much on the contemporary scene to simultaneously advance and popularize a Marxist political economy as David Harvey, who has recently published A Companion to Marx’s Capital and The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. This interview appeared recently in International Socialist Review. I don’t see a unified [...]
The Cultural Revolution in China: what was its meaning?
The Cultural Revolution in China (the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was its official title) was one of the great revolutionary political events of the 20th century, and coming to grips with it is part of what’s essential, I believe, to any renewal of the communist hypothesis (to use Badiou’s very apt term). The following essay [...]
How to read Marx
The following piece has to do with more than simply another go-round on the question of base and superstructure — as important as this topic is, obviously, and Pepperill’s take on it is valuable. But also of high importance is the question of how to read Marx and how to read Capital, a topic which [...]
Badiou: on the way to Being & Event
Although he may have received little attention here for some time, this site maintains an active interest in Alain Badiou and the contribution of his work to the rethinking of the revolutionary project. In the following piece, originally appearing in a very interesting issue of Belgrade-based Prelom magazine, Alberto Toscano is concerned to delineate Badiou’s [...]
The discovery of Marx’s Grundrisse
Marx’s Grundrisse (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, or Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy) is a large work, comprising notebooks or drafts of material, written in 1857-58 in the midst of his extensive (and intense) economic studies, as he was thinking of methods of approach and presentation. As the following piece recounts, the [...]
What could the end of capitalism look like?
We’ve had some interesting and important discussions on this site (see, recently, the comments on the Henwood piece and on the interview with Albo, Gindin, and Panitch) which have sometimes referenced fictitious capital and have often come back to three very large questions: the character and cause of the neoliberal period of the past 30 [...]
Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3
This is the final portion of an examination of some principal themes in Bill Martin’s book, Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation. The first two parts of this essay have been published over the past two days and can be found below. Marxism, Politics, and Evil: A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism” John Steele [...]
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