In October 2016, cities across Poland were seized by massive demonstrations against proposals for a total ban on abortion. Whatever their ultimate outcome, the protests prove that mass mobilizations are possible in today’s Poland, and that the right’s political and cultural hegemony may yet be more fragile than it appears. | more…
Two Lives on the Left
Jane Lazare has written a fascinating, intensely personal book about history, family, and the Communist Party in the United States. She knows this story well: her father was an active Communist organizer, and the memoir recounts his life and hers, and the connections between them. | more…
April 2018 (Volume 69, Number 11)
Building on Marx’s own open-ended critique, three revolutionary new developments have recently arisen in Marxist theory, addressing social reproduction, the expropriation of nature, and racial capitalism. | more…
The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, millions of Africans and Native Americans were enslaved and traded by European settlers in the Americas. This story of slavery, colonialism, and emerging capitalism—and their handmaiden, white supremacy—is integral to that of modernity itself. | more…
The New Service Proletariat
From call centers to fast-food restaurants, the future of service work is one of precarious employment, with no stable schedules, wages, benefits, or union representation. Should these workers be considered part of a new service proletariat, or treated as a new class altogether, the “precariat”? | more…
The Multiple Meanings of Marx’s Value Theory
The Marxian critique of political economy is inseparable from the “labor theory of value.” But what exactly does this theory mean? This article considers Marx’s value theory from five perspectives: as a monetary value theory, a theory of exploitation, a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production, a theory of individual prices, and a theory of crises. | more…
A Predatory System
For several decades, intellectuals and economists who follow Marxist theory have hotly debated the financialization of capitalism. François Chesnais’s latest book represents the most thorough and polished attempt yet to clarify several lingering questions around the matter. | more…
Marx’s Ecological Education
Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy shows convincingly that Marx’s ideas about the interaction between humanity and nature did not arrive fully formed, but arose from his rigorous engagement with science and philosophy. His insights still offer unparalleled tools to understand capitalism’s current assault on the environment. | more…
March 2018 (Volume 69, Number 10)
Nuclear weapons have been used again and again—most often by the United States—as threats directed at various nation-states to achieve geopolitical ends. Each such use takes us closer to the precipice of all-out nuclear war. | more…
The Expropriation of Nature
To understand the present ecological crisis, it is necessary to dig much deeper into capitalism’s logic of expropriation, as first delineated by Marx during the Industrial Revolution. At the root of the problem is a spoliation of the natural environment—the expropriation of the earth itself. | more…
Invisible Exploitation
An expanded Marxist understanding of capitalist exploitation is long overdue. There are many pathways of surplus extraction beyond the wage form, and understanding them is a task with profound implications for anticapitalist movements around the world. | more…