Influential on the left, their theoretical tradition is built on lies and bad history. In Stalin’s Shadow, a new book by Marxist historian and regular Firebrand contributor Doug Enaa Greene, confronts the writers who’ve defended their hero’s counterrevolution. As Greene argues, apologetics for Stalinism inevitably lead to idealist distortions and irrational conspiracy theories.
Ridding society of the police is both a practical demand in the struggle against oppression, and an integral part of socialist revolution. brian bean’s new book, Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, is an excellent intervention in the debates on a future without state violence. As bean argues, the movement to abolish the police is really the movement to abolish capitalism.
The political mainstream is dominated by philosophies that promote idealism or dualism, which are ultimately irrational views of the universe. A new book by Canadian Marxists Murray E. G. Smith and Tim Hayslip argues eloquently for a monist or non-dualist dialectical materialist approach to politics — the only rational approach to solving the world’s crises and the only path to socialism.
Palestine and Marxism, the latest book by Swiss-Syrian scholar and activist Joseph Daher, is an important intervention into debates around Palestine. With its sharp theorizing of Palestinian liberation and resistance — armed and otherwise — it is a valuable read for...
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union was wracked by intense violence known as the Great Terror or the Great Purge. During this time, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin initiated a series of public show trials to eliminate his political competition within the Communist Party. ...
Sir,We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority.If resistance to the slave power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant warcry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery.— Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln,...
The Black Antifascist Tradition, by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen, is an extensive overview of the politics of anti-racist struggles by Black people in the United States. Published earlier this year by Haymarket Books, it is, first of all, a very interesting and...
In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Occurring at different times in different regions around the world, primitive accumulation is the...
The ongoing genocidal annihilation of Gaza and the racist pogroms in the West Bank, both conducted by the Israeli apartheid state with the full support of its imperial sponsor, the United States, have rightfully provoked the rage of tens of millions across the world....
Andor is a breath of fresh air for the Star Wars franchise, and for television in general. A prequel to 2016’s Rogue One, the Disney+ series is unexpectedly one of the most compelling and gripping in memory. Its combination of dark, dystopian mood, wrenching suspense,...
Every year I teach an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. In the section in which we focus on socioeconomic class, I ask my students to read and interpret the famous first pages of the Communist Manifesto. These are the pages in which Marx and Engels broadly...