Karl Marx

Politics of Disablement review

Nova Sobieralski reviews Michael Oliver's The Politics of Disablement — considered a paradigm defining work for the sociological study of disability.

Is ChatGPT a challenge to humanity? For Aleks Wansbrough, ultimately, it is the product of human beings, reflecting and refracting current social relations.

Capital in the Anthropocene

Marxist economist Michael Roberts reviews Kohei Saito's forthcoming book.

Italian historian Marcello Musto's stimulating account of Karl Marx's last decade shows he did not fade as he aged, but engaged with developing his theories, reviewed by Barry Healy.

Neville Spencer reviews a new book by Canadian socialist and political economist Michael Lebowitz.

More and more, people own less and less when it comes to digital technology. Aleks Wansbrough looks at how the privatisation of communication technologies has serious social consequences.

Karl Marx drew on horror, gothic and fantasy literature throughout his mature works, evoking the power, wonder and terror of capital through supernatural allusions writes Aleks Wansbrough.

The cost of the COVID-19 corporate bailouts is still growing, but the battle over who will carry that cost has only just begin, writes Peter Boyle.

Imagine you came across a 150-year-old message in a bottle that predicted the world would face a catastrophic crisis as a result of profit-driven capitalism.

Imagine that prediction also explained why capitalism — sustained for generations through the exploitation of nature and human labour — would push aside all moral, rational and scientific objections in the blind pursuit of profit.

"For many of us, defining ourselves as ecosocialists is a way of distinguishing our socialism from such environmental blindness. We are not saying that Marx and Engels were infallible or that they offer all the answers we need today — we are saying that they offered insights and analysis that must be relearned by the left in the 21st century.

"Ecosocialists recognise the global environmental crisis as the most important problem that humanity faces in the 21st century. If socialists don’t recognise its centrality, our politics will be irrelevant," says Ian Angus, ecosocialist activist and editor of Climate and Capitalism.

John McDonnell, Labour's shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, declared Marxism a “force for change today” as he addressed the closing session of a conference in London marking Karl Marx’s 200th birthday on May 5.

McDonnell, a close comrade of Labour's socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn, received stormy applause for a speech in which he paid tribute to the revolutionary thinker and noted that public interest in his ideas had soared since the bankers’ crash of 2008.

Climate & Capitalism editor and author of A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism Ian Angus takes a look at six new books on Marx’s ecosocialist views, climate change and health, theory and action, inevitability versus contingency in evolution, new politics and the meaning of Marx’s Capital.