Karl Marx and the Present Moment: Beyond “Resistance” and Toward Human Emancipation
A talk and discussion: with Kevin B Anderson, author of Marx at the Margins
2 p.m. Saturday 14 April 2012 at The Lucas Arms, 245a Grays Inn Road, King's Cross, London, WC1 (5 minutes from Kings Cross Tube)
Kevin Anderson's most recent books are Foucault and the Iranian Revolution; Gender and the Seductions of Islamism(with Janet Afary, 2005), Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies(2010), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory(coedited with Russell Rockwell, 2012). He is also the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study(1995) and the coeditor (with Peter Hudis) of The Rosa Luxemburg Reader(2004).
The European Crisis: Regression and Resistance
By David Black
12 April 2012 -- The financial meltdown of 2008, the first effect of which was a decline in the “real” economy, has now plunged several European states into sovereign debt crises, amid fears of further collapses of the banks, decline in “social cohesion,” the end of globalisation, and the deepening of international conflicts. As unemployment in the European Union reaches 17 million, its national governments, bitterly divided amongst themselves, are effectively waging war on the livelihoods of their people. But can the Left, Labour and Occupy activists move popular resistance towards an adequate critique of capitalism that raises the prospect of a radical overturning of capitalist relations of production? READ IN FULL
Critique of Roman Rosdolsky's The Making of Marx’s Capital by Raya Dunayevskaya (1978)
"Despite all talk of dialectic, and relationship of Marx to Hegel, Rosdolsky, by no accident whatever, concluded that one need 'no longer bite into the sour apple, study the whole of Hegel's Logic in order to understand Marx's Capital—one can arrive at the same end, directly, by studying the Rough Draft' [Grundrisse]. Too bad that all Rosdolsky arrived at by the end of his study of the Rough Draft was the quagmire of Polish neo-Stalinism which Rosdolsky calls 'neo-Marxism'." READ IN FULL
The Elusive “Threads of Historical Progress”: The Early Chartists and the Young Marx and Engels
By David Black
The Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s went beyond 18th century popular radicalism toward socialism. Leaders like George Julian Harney not only called for social revolution but also published Helen Macfarlane’s first English translation of the Communist Manifesto. This article was first published in Platypus Review No. 42 (Dec. 2011-Jan. 2012).
Against Intervention and War, Against Dictatorship and Exploitation, for Peace, Freedom and Equality
Iranian Left Alliance Abroad
March 7, 2012. See statement and petition HERE
Why John Brown?
Why Now?
By Dan Beltaigne
150 years after the U.S. Civil War, how does John Brown’s stand at Harpers Ferry look after the rise of identity politics, multiculturalism and cultural relativism in an increasingly globalized world?READ IN FULL
David Cameron’s Attack on Health and Safety
By Richard Abernethy
January 15, 2012 -- “So one of the Coalition’s New Year resolutions is this: kill off the health and safety culture for good”. So declares British prime minister, David Cameron, in an article in the London Evening Standard (5 January 2012). Cameron boasts of “waging war against the excessive health and safety culture that has become an albatross around the neck of British businesses”. READ IN FULL
On Hegel, Rosa Luxemburg and Marxist-Humanism
By David Black
On Hegel’s Dialectic of the “Beautiful Soul” in the French Revolution and the question of “ethical reality” in the political philosophies of Rosa Luxemburg, Raya Dunayevskaya and Gillian Rose; originally presented at a panel on “Marxism Beyond the Boundaries,” sponsored by The Hobgoblin Online Journal and the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, London, November 11, 2010 – Editors READ IN FULL
The revolutionary movements of the year 2011, above all in the Arab countries, and the life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg, are connected. Presented at the Anarchist Book Fair, London READ IN FULL