Tag: Karl Marx

  • Michael Parenti, 1933-2026

    With the death of Michael Parenti, we have lost one of the greatest dissident voices in American history. Parenti earned a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1962, and taught at a number of colleges and universities, never attaining a tenured position because he was “red-baited out of my college-teaching profession and left […]

  • Imperialism, Multipolarity, and Palestine

    It is a continuing source of frustration that an important segment of the Left holds the view that weakening the United States’ long-established grip on the top rungs of the hierarchical system of imperialism is — in itself — an attack on imperialism. Many of our friends, including those who claim to aim at a […]

  • A Return to Basics: Rasmus, the “Neoliberal” Turn, and Exploitation

    Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wage system!’ Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit Today, the point that Marx made in his 1865 address to the First International Working Men’s Association is largely lost […]

  • Did Marx Have Anything Good to Say About Capitalism?

    Those who assume that Karl Marx emphasized only the negative characteristics of capitalism such as alienation, crisis, and exploitation are mistaken. Indeed, throughout his intellectual career – in philosophic, journalistic, historical, and economic writings – Marx stressed the creative and progressive features of capital. His social theory makes no sense unless essential duality is retained. […]

  • Elusive Language: What Is Terrorism Really?

    Elusive Language: What Is Terrorism Really?

    Actually I have gotten tired of explaining to people the deception at the heart of airport security procedures. For years I have tried to show that the explanations given for the increasingly intrusive, not to mention time-consuming, controls to which passengers in international travel and for decades now domestic movement have nothing to do with […]

  • The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations

    The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations

    Orientation Power struggles between the two sides of the brain In Part I of this article, I compared the left to the right side of the brain across many categories. One of the most interesting prospects in Iain McGilchrist’s great book The Master and His Emissary, is that the two sides of the brain functions […]

  • East or West? West is Best

    East or West? West is Best

    Konstantin Kisin emigrated to Britain in 1993 at age 11, to join the flood of Russian emigres, high and low, looking for a new life. Kisin is the usual: loves the West, hates the Soviet Union, hates Putin. Ironically, the best writing in this billet doux is Kisin’s depiction of the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist: health care, […]

  • Empathy or Anthropomorphism

    Empathy or Anthropomorphism

    Words don’t mean anything, people do. Much of the conflict we experience, observe or imagine arises from the problem every human and arguably most other mammals confront from the moment they become distinct beings—animals. While I never studied classical languages, I believe the very term “animal” designates a being, an entity, endowed with a soul. […]

  • Peoples’ China: What Lies Ahead?

    Whither China? was the name of a widely circulated pamphlet authored by the respected Anglo-Indian Marxist author, R. Palme Dutt. Writing in 1966, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the throes of the “Cultural Revolution,” the pamphlet sought to shed light on the PRC’s tortured road from liberation in 1949 to a vast […]

  • The World of Yesterday

    Ninety years ago (1934), the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig began writing the book published posthumously in 1942 as Die Welt von Gestern. In 1932, Joseph Roth published Radetzkymarsch. Both authors died in exile essentially by what in German is so prosaically called “Freitod” or suicide. Their principal subject was the end of Austria-Hungary. However for both […]

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