Friedrich Engels Archives - Public Seminar

Feature

“The Young Karl Marx”

A film review

July 30, 2018 • by Ronald Tiersky

After a month in American theaters, the box office for “The young Karl Marx” was all of $58,277. This is almost incomprehensible as this is a wonderful, politically, historically and culturally rich film. A major international collaboration with first rate foreign actors, the film played at a single indie theater on ...

Feature

Reading The Second Sex in the Age of #MeToo

Where are we coming from, and where do we go?

March 12, 2018 • by Hannah Leffingwell

In the firestorm of debates about the implications of #MeToo, feminist activists and commentators have found themselves circling around the definitions of a handful of essential terms: rape, harassment, assault, consent. We have seen the word “pleasure” disentangled, and the word “inappropriate” expanded. We have discussed power and victimhood, empowerment ...

Reading The Second Sex in the Age of #MeToo

Feature

Marx’s Radical Development

Following Marx’s Train of Thought

November 16, 2016 • by Aaron Jaffe

There have been a few recent calls for a return to Marx, or openness to the thought that he “got it right.” To be sure, Marx got a lot -- a lot -- right, but simply peering into his writing desk -- as if setting things right for all time ...

Theory & Practice

Emotions at Work

May 7, 2015 • by Angelica Stathopoulos

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save -- the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour -- your capital. ...

Uncategorized

The Place of the Global South in the World Capitalist System

March 10, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

Sanjay Ruparella’s lucid and compelling talk on the global South can help us to clarify what we mean by capitalism. If the “global South” implies a global capitalist system or project, what was that project? We can think of it as unfolding in two waves: the first began with the ...

Uncategorized

(Which) Feminism against (Which) Capitalism?

March 4, 2015 • by Mayra Cotta

Why start a course on feminism reading the first volume of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto? Do Marx and Engels have anything to say about gender oppression? How deeply, if at all, is patriarchy intertwined with capitalism? In which terms can the feminist struggle be part of a systemic ...

Uncategorized

Feminism, Marxism and Social Transformation: Beyond Economic Monism

March 2, 2015 • by Derek Baron

Friedrich Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) has been a central text for Marxist-feminist thinkers in the 20th century and up until the present. But its centrality is not marked by a universal acceptance or agreement with the central tenets of Engels’ elaboration of Lewis ...

History

Marx and Nature

January 21, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

"What Engels called “the monopolization of the earth by a few” has reached absurdist proportions as I was writing this. (60) It would appear that the 1% now own more than half the wealth of the planet. It is the greatest concentration of wealth ever, and yet it corresponds to ...

Uncategorized

Althusserians Anonymous (1)

October 11, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

This post has been revised, here: https://publicseminar.org/2016/02/aa/ I am a recovering Althusserian. For decades now I have been Althusser-free, for the most part, but we all have our lapses. The first step to becoming a recovering Althusserian is to recognize that you have no control and are unconsciously always a little bit ...

Theory & Practice

#Accelerate and inertia

October 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Thinking historically and systematically would appear to be something of an urgent requirement for critical theory in the Anthropocene. Yet there was a great allergic reaction to all such lines of thought in the late twentieth century from which social thought never really recovered. Recently, there has been some attempt to ...

Theory & Practice

Extrapolation, not Acceleration

September 29, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

We hoped; we waited for the day The state would wither clean away, Expecting the Millennium That theory promised us would come: It didn’t… W. H. Auden, New Year Letter, 1941 It would appear that in the twenty-first century, we should probably relinquish a faith in a force external to capital, even if generated by it, ...