Existential crisis

Reivew of Terry Pinkard, Practice, Power, and Forms of Life
Terry Pinkard, Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 200pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 22681 324 0 In the space of just three chapters and a ‘dénouement,’ Terry Pinkard’s Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx explicates Jean-Paul Sartre’s […]

The Red Pill: Breaking out of The Class Matrix

Rare is the book that provokes in me both frequent agreement and teeth-clenching, head-shaking, wincing frustration. But such is Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix. 1 Chibber is his generation’s foremost advocate of analytical Marxism, a program of articulating and defending socialist politics using the tools of contemporary social science. The journal he helms, Catalyst, has […]
Paper pasted to wall which says, "Money forgives you"

Intersectional humanism

Reivew of Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown, eds., Raya Dunayevskaya's Intersectional Marxism
Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown eds., Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 350pp., £99.99 hb., 978 3 03053 716 6 Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987) was a Marxist, humanist, feminist and revolutionary thinker, neglected in both Marxist and feminist traditions. This collection presents […]
Dunayevskaya lecturing with expressive right arm

Philosophy and the Communist Party

Dossier: Kojève on Europe and the USSR

It is well-known that the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – the current ruling party in the USSR – is fighting not only on an economic and political front, but also on a cultural one: it is fighting against bourgeois culture in the name of proletarian culture. 1 This in particular concerns philosophy. In the view […]

Toward an assessment of modernity

Dossier: Kojève on Europe and the USSR

In order to speak about the future one must first recognise the contemporary moment, as it is the contemporary moment that indicates the future. 1 Previous eras were defined by their culture, that is, by an organically stable system of social relations finding within itself its own ideological justification. In our times, however, culture has […]

Kojève out of Eurasia

Dossier: Kojève on Europe and the USSR

Accusations of Stalinism have long followed the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In his influential seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, held in Paris in the 1930s, Kojève had claimed that Hegel saw Napoleon as the embodiment of the universal state, as a reflection of the completed circularity of his philosophical system of knowledge at the end […]

Return of the conjuncture

Reivew of Morfino and Thomas, eds, The Government of Time
Vittorio Morfino and Peter D. Thomas, eds, The Government of Time: Theories of Multiple Temporality in the Marxist Tradition (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017). 306pp., £91.00 hb., 978 9 00429 119 5 A sense of impending collapse is a fixture of the present. Signs abound of the limits of a worldview of infinite accumulation in […]

The sociality of theory

Reivew of Fadi A. Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment
Fadi A. Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 280pp., £83.00 hb., £21.99 pb., 978 1 47800 616 9 hb., 978 1 47800 675 6 pb. A Flood in Baʿath Country, the 2003 documentary by Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay, opens with a stark confession on the […]

Agents of change

Reivew of Lilia D. Monzó, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity
Lilia D. Monzó, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity (New York: Peter Lang, 2019). 290pp., £95.59 hb., £36.74 pb., 978 1 43313 407 4 hb., 978 1 43313 406 7 pb. History is usually taught through a white, Eurocentric, male lens, erasing the contributions of women. Women of Colour and Indigenous […]

Witchcraft and magic among the Marxists

Reivew of Paul Mattick, Theory as Critique; Paul Mattick, Social Knowledge
Paul Mattick, Theory as Critique: Essays on Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2018; Chicago: Haymarket, 2019). 288pp., £110.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 9 00436 656 5 hb., 978 1 64259 013 5 pb. Paul Mattick, Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 142pp., £86.00 hb, 978 9 00441 480 […]

From organic subjectivity to internal reality

Reivew of Michel Henry, Marx: An Introduction
Michel Henry, Marx: An Introduction, trans. Kristien Justaert (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 101pp., £50.00 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 1 47426 942 1 hb., 978 1 47427 778 5 pb. As a phenomenologist who prioritises the ‘appearing’ of life, Michel Henry distinguishes the foundational content of subjectivity from the horizon of pure exteriority and inert appearances. […]

Not German enough?

Reivew of Tom Bunyard, Guy Debord, Time and Spectacle
Tom Bunyard, Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018). 430pp., £123.00 hb., 978 9 00435 602 3 Amid the copious notes taken by Guy Debord on the philosophy of Hegel, the following extract from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit appears repeatedly: ‘By the little which satisfies […]

A is for apocalypse

A is for apocalypseDavid J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, Zero Books, Winchester and Washington DC, 2013. 319 pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 78099 578 6. Amidst the recent flood of lachrymose reports on the neoliberal assault upon education, this book stands out for its unflinching survey of the extent […]

184 Reviews: Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Alain Badiou, Cinema George Henderson, Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl and Dorothy Ko, eds, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory Federico Campagna, The Last Night: Atheism, Anti-work and Adventure Gyanedra Pandey, A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States Peter K.J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 Gilbert Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism

REViEWS The cunning of capital explained? Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2012, xxi + 812 pp., £22.99 pb., 978 1 60846 067 0. In ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ (1976) Perry Anderson wrote: ‘Among the concepts traditionally associated with historical materialism, few have been so problematic and contested as that […]

A differing shade of green

Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013. 224 pp., £20.50 hb., 978 0 23115 828 2. This book is a welcome addition to the spate of recent books on the ecological and resource calamities currently facing the planet. Unlike so many others – one thinks in […]

Truly Liberating

Yotam feldman Dialectics of liberationKevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse–Fromm Correspondence, 1954–1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, Lexington Books, Lanham MD and Plymouth, 2012, 269 pp., £49.95 hb., £21.95 pb., 978 0 73916 835 6 hb., 978 0 73916 836 3 pb. Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but […]

Inside the factory, and out

Fredric Jameson, Representing ‘Capital’: A Reading of Volume One, Verso, London and New York, 2011. 158pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 84467 454 1. John Kraniauskas Fredric Jameson’s latest book, published hot on the heels of a monograph on Hegel’s Phenomenology (The Hegel Variations, 2010) and a large collection of essays on the dialectic (Valences of […]