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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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 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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
Stop Plastic Pollution as We Commemorate 50th World Environment Day 2023 
Modi Regime should be Called to Account for the Deadliest Triple Train Collision at Balasore 
Thoughts on World Environment Day 
Nuclear Fusion: Eternal Energy = Eternal Damnation 
Why There Should Be A Treaty Against the Use of Weaponized Drones 
Protests in Germany after Anti-fascists sent to five years in prison 
Women Wrestler’s Protests: Exposing Beti Bachao Slogan 
Inauguration of Parliament Building: Coronation Ceremony? 
FBI appears to be continuing investigation of Julian Assange 
And We Are Much More Than Our Uterus. (In Solidarity With the protesting wrestlers) 
Strike ends in Belsonika with reinstatement of 10 suspended workers 
A Man Without a Strategy: How Netanyahu Is Provoking Armed Intifada in the West Bank 
The Ancient Patterns of Migration 
Seven Reasons Why the Present Phase of Imperialism is the Most Dangerous Ever 
Unmasking Tourism’s Roadblocks 
Metro authorities humiliating ordinary commuters 
PLI Scheme- Do subsidies to profit-earning private manufacturers yield commensurate societal benefits? World Environment Day in India: Doing Justice with the Day 
Ben Roberts-Smith: The Breaking of a Plaster Saint 
Do we All need Religion? An Introspection 
Obama, Kissinger and the Nobel Peace Prize 
The Politics of Erdogan and Western Anxieties 
The Compulsion to Intervene – Why Washington Underwrites Violence in Ukraine 
Just War and Just War Theory 
Stolen Heirloom or poppycock 
‘Simply Inconceivable’ to Dump Fukushima Water in Pacific, Critics Say After Latest IAEA Report 
Eradicate Dowry, Eliminate Dowry Violence 
Growing number of elderly homeless in the US 
Rise Up in Solidarity with Protesting Wrestlers 
Plastic Pollution in Destinations: A Growing Threat to Environmental Sustainability 
The US Censors Dissenting Voices: On the Attacks Against the Midwestern Marx Institute 
The US Government Should At Least Listen to this Wisdom of its Top Experts on the Ukraine Crisis 
Indigenous Australians & Palestinians: Treaty, Truth, Voice, Referendum & Senator Lidia Thorpe 
Kya Sharmsaar hai hindustan……are wrestling champions of India going the Mohammed Ali way? 
Legislative Gaps Helping Overseas Shell Companies? 
Book Review: Marginalised but not Defeated 
When Will US Join Global Call to End Ukraine War? 
AUKUS, Congress and Cold Feet 
The Wars We Don’t (Care to) See – Aggression Made Easy 
Raising the Palestinian flag in Daley Plaza Center, Chicago: A powerful symbolic gesture 
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
