Articles

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia. Although this grim event is now being discussed in profound and penetrating ways, few in the mainstream media are noting the particularly capitalist character of the New World’s modern form of slavery — a theme that runs through Marx’s critique of capital and his extensive discussions of capitalism and slavery.

I greet with great pleasure the Arabic translation of Marx at the Margins. As readers will see, the book takes up three intertwined issues within Marx’s thought, all them in relation to capital and the struggle for its transcendence: (1) race, ethnicity and class within a particular nation; (2) nationalism and national emancipation; (3) colonialism and the resistance to it.

In January 2019, a massive strike of over 30,000 public school teachers stunned the Los Angeles power structure when it received massive, almost unanimous public support, especially in the city’s large Latinx and Black communities.  Latinx students now make up 75% of the city’s over 600,000 public school students. Even the anti-labor Los Angeles Times, which had […]

This month marks the centennial of one of the great revolutionary thinkers and activists of the last century, Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). Born in Poland but active in the leftwing leadership of both the Polish and the German Social Democratic Parties, she was assassinated in Berlin on January 15, 1919 by proto-fascists. In her last days, […]

The White-Hot Anger of French Working People as a Real Fact After rumbling on social media for weeks, the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) movement emerged suddenly on November 17, when no less than 300,000 protestors occupied roads, traffic circles in exurbs and rural areas. They wore the yellow safety vests the government requires all motorists […]

As we mark Karl Marx’s 200th birth anniversary, it is clear that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women […]

It is the sixtieth anniversary of the of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, a work both of its time and out of joint with its time, in the sense that it was ahead of its time. First published in 1958 at the height of the Cold War but not long after the Hungarian Revolution of […]

Today’s Nuclear World, Capital, and the State In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous “Doomsday Clock” on the danger of nuclear holocaust to “two minutes to midnight–the closest the Clock has ever been to Doomsday, and as close as it was in 1953, at the height of the Cold War.”  This resulted, they […]

US President Donald Trump’s ripping up of the Iran nuclear pact, his shocking relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s equally shocking mass murder of peaceful Palestinian demonstrators has revealed the utter depravity of today’s rulers.  Despite their sometimes chaotic and reckless appearance, however, these moves amount to nothing short […]

The sad death of ecosocialist and Marxist psychologist Joel Kovel leaves a terrible void in both theory and practice, especially for Marxist-Humanists. A lifelong social justice activist, Kovel also made major theoretical contributions.  Less known is his direct relationship to our founder Raya Dunayevskaya and to Marxist-Humanism more generally, which also needs to be considered […]