The Invention of Marxism is a rich group biography of the founding generation of European socialists who introduced millions to Karl Marx’s ideas. But it doesn’t identify this generation’s core theoretical and philosophical unities.
Classless Politics traces the historical roots of Egypt's current revolutionary closure. It examines why the 2011 mass revolt found a Left in deep political crisis and the Muslim Brotherhood ascendant.
During the Industrial Revolution, the British working class lived in poverty and squalor. Their written testimonies capture those conditions — but also how they fought to find fulfillment despite their exploitation and bleak circumstance.
Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation is a riveting account of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. But it ignores class and capitalism and fails to explain the reasons behind Egypt’s mass mobilization and why it was defeated.
The New Left rightly struggled against bureaucracy and conservatism, but it failed to organize popular dissent into a new democratic mass party. That remains the key challenge for the Left.
The American public is rightly horrified by the traumas that US wars inflict on its soldiers. But the Vietnam War era connected that trauma to the broader brutality of war and its foreign victims — and to the healing power of antiwar activism.
Gary Gerstle’s new book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order tackles important questions of the last century about democracy, economy, and war. But it fails to answer a basic question: why governments in capitalist democracies are compelled to serve capital.
The Saudi state is packaging its heritage industry as a mode of citizen participation. It’s an attempt to paper over a fundamental fact: the regime remains a dictatorship that maintains its rule by violently clamping down on opposition.
As a philosopher, Raymond Geuss usually insists on highlighting the effects of structures of power. But his examination of work in the age of climate crisis is impoverished without analyzing the politics of capitalist production.
Adam Theron-Lee Rensch’s memoir is a deep examination of the meaning of class in America’s postindustrial hinterlands that shows how it is distorted by useless and misleading culture talk. Foregrounding economic disparities and class politics is now a matter of survival for the Left.