In her new book, economist Mariana Mazzucato explodes the myth that wealth is created solely by a select few trailblazing entrepreneurs, and lays out how our collective innovation can be put into the service of a more equal economy.
In his survey of the writing of dictators, Daniel Kalder is so dismissive of the tyrants’ actual ideas that it becomes difficult to understand why they had any power in the first place.
In our fully globalized world, Marx’s ideas still conform to a deeply felt sense about what capital does to our labor.
Marx’s social-democratic critics recognized a fundamental point that the great economist missed: that a better world was not inevitable, but achievable, and that their job was to bring that world into being through politics.
No regime identifying with Bolshevism has led to anything that can be called “liberation,” as early left-wing critics like Julius Martov and Rosa Luxemburg foresaw.
An interview with Thomas Laqueur about his book The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.
The incomplete or fragmentary state of Marxism is a sign of its ongoing life. It remains unfinished because so does history.
An intelligent left today can neither live within nor without Marx’s thought. Marxism today is most useful when it is erratic, irreverent, non-doctrinaire.
Jonathan Sperber is right to portray Marx as a product of his times. But he goes astray in limiting the application and relevance of Marx’s ideas to the relatively brief time—from 1840 to 1880—in which he wrote. If a thinker discerns deeper trends within the history of his time, he may produce ideas that are relevant well beyond his passing.
The following is an exchange between Tim Barker, assistant editor at Dissent, and James Livingston, professor of history at Rutgers University and author, most recently, of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your …
Marx’s understanding of love tells us a lot about his interpretation of capital.
We can learn more about globalization, inequality, and modernity from the Communist Manifesto than from any book ever written.
The author tells a Chinese audience that now is the moment for Marx
Karl Marx ruled out any role for the market in a post-capitalist economy. “Within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production,” he wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Program, “the producers do not exchange …
Capitalism doesn’t work: the 1930s proved that. Communism doesn’t work: the 1980s proved that. So what works? Socialism—of the democratic variety, of course. But, viewed concretely, as it is applied in practice, what is socialism today? The answer is—the mixed …
