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 [...]
Posts under ‘Revolutionary Strategy’
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 [...]
Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
This is the second part of an essay on the book Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, in which Bill Martin argues that Marxism requires morality in order to guide a revolutionary politics. Part I, which was posted yesterday, was principally concerned with exposition. Today’s post takes up the principal line of argument of [...]
Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
Is Marxism, or revolutionary politics generally, sufficient for human emancipation? In Ethical Marxism, Bill Martin argues that Marxism requires ethics as the necessary foundation of any politics which may actually be capable of leading to this goal. Following is the first part of an essay critically examining this book and this thesis. The entire piece [...]
Financialisation, empire, crisis: how to get out?
The following interview is with the three authors of In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, a recently published short book on the economic crisis by Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch. The book has its virtues and its vices, almost evenly divided between its analysis and its prescription. [...]
The crisis of the capitalist state and the crisis of the left
What are the parameters of the situation we face today? How serious? What sort of period are we in today: what time is it? What are our political needs? These are the sorts of questions — important and urgent — posed (although not in these words) by the following. Consider the ruling class responses in [...]
Pulling the Monster Down
The following consists of several excerpts from an interview with William K. Carroll, whose work we’ve featured previously on this site. Carroll’s research focus is on the contemporary capitalist political economy and transformative social movements. The author of a number of books, his Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class is due out in December. These [...]
‘Dialectical voluntarism’ as a basis of politics
What is the basis of an emancipatory politics? In what does collective human freedom consist? Although he doesn’t phrase it in these terms, these are the questions (I would say) that underlie Hallward’s investigation in this essay, which originally appeared in Radical Philosophy. ‘Voluntarism’ refers to a theory giving some sort of primacy to the [...]
What does the present crisis represent?
Immanuel Wallerstein, the originator of “world systems theory,” has been putting forward the projection that we are near the end of the present world system, which he identifies with capitalism, for the past fifteen years or more. In the following essay, published in the most recent New Left Review, he outlines some of the main [...]
A new pamphlet
“Into the Wild,” Bill Martin’s long essay recently published on this site, has now been published as a pamphlet by our sister site Kasama. The pamphlet, which includes as an appendix Martin’s earlier essay “Dear Professor Badiou: About the RCP Assault on Alain Badiou, Philosophy And (Ultimately) Communism Itself,” can be downloaded as a pdf [...]
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