Articles by: Carlos L Garrido

The US Censors Dissenting Voices: On the Attacks Against the Midwestern Marx Institute

The US Censors Dissenting Voices: On the Attacks Against the Midwestern Marx Institute

by Edward Liger Smith, Carlos L. Garrido, and Noah Khrachvik    The First Amendment of the United States Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law… Abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Yet in 2023 the United States[Read More…]

by 01/06/2023 Comments are Disabled World
The Significance of the Paris Commune 152 Years After

The Significance of the Paris Commune 152 Years After

I would like to thank the International Manifesto Group for hosting this event, and for inviting me to say a few words about the relevance of that heroic experiment in socialist democracy which took place 152 years ago. My discussion of the Paris Commune’s relevance, and of the relevance of Marx and Engels’s reflections on it, will revolve around three[Read More…]

by 19/03/2023 Comments are Disabled World
Rural health care in Cuba (Photo by Carol Foil, 2009).

The US Blockade and Its Effects on Cuban Medicine

The Cuban socialist healthcare system is internationally recognized as one of the best in the world.1 It is innovative, preventative, people-oriented, comprehensive, community-centered, internationalist, and, of course, de-commodified—treating healthcare as a human right, not a profitable commodity. However, in spite of its extraordinary successes, the United States’ sixty-year long blockade has tremendously detrimental effects on Cuban life in general, and their[Read More…]

by 08/03/2023 Comments are Disabled World
Book Review: Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. By: Marcello Musto

Book Review: Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. By: Marcello Musto

Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2021). 164 pages Marcello Musto’s anthology of Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation[1] is both comprehensive and concise, containing within the span of 100 pages the three decades long development of the concept through more than a dozen published works and posthumously published manuscripts. Additionally, Musto’s introduction to the anthology[Read More…]

by 10/06/2022 Comments are Disabled Book Review
The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography

The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography

The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography. By: Marcello Musto Marcello Musto’s The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography provides an illuminating glance at the work and life of Karl Marx during the most unexamined period of his life. Musto’s oscillation between Marx’s work and life provides readers with both an intellectual allurement towards research in[Read More…]

by 08/03/2022 Comments are Disabled Book Review
Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature By Kaan Kangal

Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature By Kaan Kangal

Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature has been arguably the most polemic ‘book’ within the corpus of classical Marxist literature.  It is fair to say that since its initial 1925[1] publication in German and Russian, one can infer a ‘Marxists’ political orientation based on their assessment of Engels’ text. However, the centrality of the ‘text’ in the debate between the artificial bifurcation of ‘soviet’[Read More…]

by 09/02/2022 Comments are Disabled Book Review
A Marxist Analysis and Critique of “Don’t Look Up”

A Marxist Analysis and Critique of “Don’t Look Up”

Capitalism is a form of life riddled with social antagonisms. Every Marxist knows this well. Most have been using the effects these antagonisms produce to predict the fall of capitalism for the last century and a half. However, like the weebles wobble toys from the early 2000s, these contradictions have wobbled capitalism, but have yet (in the West at least),[Read More…]

by 29/12/2021 1 comment Arts/Literature
The World-Historic Shift Labor Undergoes in Hegel’s Philosophy

The World-Historic Shift Labor Undergoes in Hegel’s Philosophy

For most of civilization physical labor, that labor which creates a tangible object, has been seen as an unfortunate task done merely for the sake of acquiring the necessaries of life. The Greeks and Romans in large part relegated this sort of work to slaves. The Middle Ages tell stories of kings, philosophers, theologians, and priests, but not of workers.[Read More…]

by 04/11/2021 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
The Real Reason why Socrates was Killed and why Class Society Must Whitewash his Death     

The Real Reason why Socrates was Killed and why Class Society Must Whitewash his Death     

       The killing of Socrates left a stain on the fabric of Athenian society, a stain it nearly expanded 80 years later with similar threats of impiety towards an Aristotle determined not to let Athens “sin twice against philosophy.”[i] This original sin against philosophy has been immortalized in philosophy classrooms for millenniums to come – turning for philosophy[Read More…]

by 23/08/2021 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Hands off Cuba: Defend the Revolution!

Hands off Cuba: Defend the Revolution!

by Carlos L. Garrido & Edward Liger Smith Yesterday, the Midwestern Marx co-founders got together to discuss the recent imperialist attacks on Cuba. In the podcast below, Carlos and Edward analyze the Cuban protests in their historical context; beginning from the development of colonial monocropping and the subsequent sugar and tobacco dependency created on the Cuban economy thereof, to the[Read More…]

by 14/07/2021 Comments are Disabled World
Thomas Hobbes – The Communist?

Thomas Hobbes – The Communist?

The British materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the fathers of social contract theory and modern political philosophy. His magnus opus – Leviathan[i] – is a text which á la Plato’s Republic covers a wide breadth of subjects from epistemology, science, religion, and moral and political philosophy. However, his text is most widely remembered for its monarchism-endorsing political[Read More…]

by 08/07/2021 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor

Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor

Karl Marx’s 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy[i] represents one of the clearest reflections of the development of his and Engels’ thought. In what amounts to a short four and a half pages, Marx concisely exhibits the resulting conclusions of more than two decades worth of studies – from his first encounter with the economic[Read More…]

by 16/06/2021 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
The Relevance of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and its Failures

The Relevance of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and its Failures

Posing the Question This year marks the 57th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). This text, although plagued with a pessimistic spirit, was a great source of inspiration for the development of the New Left and the May 68 uprisings. The question we must ask ourselves is whether a text that predates the last 50 years of neoliberalism has[Read More…]

by 01/06/2021 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Marxism and Intersectionality

Marxism and Intersectionality

​ In her 2020 text Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, Ashley J. Bohrer sets out to demystify the erroneous conception that the traditions of Marxism and Intersectionality are incompatible. In finding that in academia the interactions between these two traditions have been “grounded more in caricature than in close reading,” Bohrer sets out to expose and[Read More…]

by 28/05/2021 Comments are Disabled Book Review