A return to some of Marx’s lesser-known texts may help us articulate the links that exist between the commune as modern political form or strategy, typically associated with the heroic case of the Paris Commune, and the community or communality as forms of life with deep roots, especially in Latin America, in indigenous uses and customs that otherwise are alien or even opposed to the dream of Western modernity. [Continue reading here…]
Monthly Archives: April 2025
4 posts
Few historical events or great defeats have inspired as much hope and inspiration, against all odds, as the Paris Commune of 1871. Voltairine de Cleyre’s “The Commune is Risen” (1912) and Plotino Rhodakanaty’s “The American Commune” (1877) are two brilliant illustrations of the lasting spirit of the Commune in the Americas. Marx’s address “The Civil War in France” is of course another standard-bearer. With Bruno Bosteels, we will be exploring these texts and their interrelations. [Continue reading here…]
Politically Red is a magnificent reading of Marx and his companions, Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jameson, Cedric Robinson, and their interlocutors and readers. It is an archive embedded in a gallery of images, gorgeously reproduced, inspiring, mobilizing in their beauty, and evocative. Politically Red is a work of art, an ode to the red common-wealth. [Read more here…]
Read through the lens of scholars such as Kohei Saito, Marcello Musto, Teodor Shanin, Bruno Bosteels, Kolja Lindner, and others—scholars of the “Late Marx”—the final writings of Karl Marx constitute a very different Marx than the one that we are accustomed to, especially the Marx of the mature economic writings of Capital, Volume 1. [Continue reading here…]