Marxism

Marxism: Last refuge of the bourgeoisie? - Paul Mattick

Extracts of Paul Mattick's book on Marxism.

Marxism and Darwinism - Anton Pannekoek

1909 text by council communist Anton Pannekoek about Marxism and evolution.

I.

What is alienation? The career of a concept - Lewis Feuer

Lewis Feuer writes on alienation in 1969.

Every age has its key ethical concept around which it can best formulate the cluster of its basic problems.

Marxism as action - Anton Pannekoek

1915 call to action by left communist Anton Pannekoek.

“Until now, the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;
the point, however, is to change it.”
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy - Antonio Negri

Books for Burning consists of five pamphlets that Negri wrote between 1971 and 1977, which attempt to identify and draw lessons from new conditions of class struggle that emerged in the course of the 1970s. Conceived as organizational hypotheses intended for debate among the members of the political movements Workers' Power (Potere operaio) and Organized Autonomy (Autonomia organizzata), these texts were later misread and misrepresented by the Italian state in its attempt to frame Negri as responsible for the assassination of former Italian president Aldo Moro, as the leader of the Red Brigades, and as the mastermind of an armed insurrection against the state.

Thoughts on David Graeber’s ‘Debt: the first 5,000 years’

Submitted by Joseph Kay on Jan 3 2012 19:09

I finally finished this book after reading it on and off for months. First, I'll say this is a very unsettling book. By this, I mean it makes you think again about things you thought you knew already, and can't be easily assimilated into an existing worldview. For that reason alone, it's worth reading.

What follows isn't really a review, but some thoughts on some of the concepts put forward and ideas raised in the book. Nor am I going to summarise the arc of the book's main arguments.

The accumulation of capital - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg's major work, in full, in pdf format.

Transnational classes and international relations - Kees van der Pijl

This book focuses on an historical perspective on class formation under capitalism and its transnational integration ('globalisation'), and international relations between the English-speaking centre of capital and successive contender states.

This study seeks to present, in a concise format, an outline of critical international relations (IR) theory that builds on insights developed in the International Relations Department of the University of Amsterdam, currently the Research Centre for International Political Economy.

The new dialectic and Marx's Capital - Chris Arthur

This book consists in part in a study of dialectical motifs in Marx’s work, and in part in further developing these themes in the context of a new tendency that has emerged in recent years, which is variously labelled ‘the New Dialectic’, ‘New Hegelian Marxism’ or ‘Systematic Dialectic’.

This book both argues for, and demonstrates, a new turn to dialectic. Marx's "Capital" was clearly influenced by Hegel's dialectical figures: here, case by case, the significance of these is clarified. More, it is argued that, instead of the dialectic of the rise and fall of social systems, what is needed is a method of articulating the dialectical relations characterising a given social whole.

Science and practice in Marx's political economy - Ron Rothbart

Published in 1981 in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. Discusses Marx's concept of science, his dialectical method, his critique of fetishism, his attempts to resolve the revolutionary and evolutionary (determinisitic) aspects of his theory, and Grossman's and Korsch's attempts to avoid determinism through a turn to subjective factors (working-class self-activity).