Karl Marx Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Chris Gilbert’s Commune or Nothing! places Venezuela’s communal movement as a key moment of working-class self-emancipation

March 6, 2025 • by Gant Roberson

In the central western region of Venezuela, a vast scenery of fertile land blends with the llanero (herdsman) culture of the people of Simón Planas township. Adults make use of children's bicycles (received as Christmas gifts from the government) to meet the exigencies of day-to-day life, evoking “a forgotten episode ...

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Capitalism

Reconstructing Capital

The politics of translating Marx

December 6, 2024 • by Gant Roberson and William Clare Roberts

Gant Roberson interviews William Clare Roberts about the evolving relevance of Marxist theory with the latest translation of Capital. ...

Capitalism

Social Capitalism

Synthesizing Marx, Keynes, and Schumpeter

September 17, 2024 • by Anna Pick and Mark Setterfield

Feathers were ruffled at Davos this year when, during a panel on “How to Trust Economics,” a speaker went rogue, accusing economists of being a “tribal clique” who only quote each other and have “blind faith” in models, however disconnected from real events they may be. The critique came not ...

Philosophy

Ideology After Marxism

From Karl Mannheim and Daniel Bell to Vaclav Havel

June 10, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

Among the many reckonings of [the twentieth century] was a reckoning, not merely with Marxism—but with the process of ideology-making itself....

Body & Mind

Driven Mad by a Marxist Daughter

Two billionaire fathers undergo a peculiar, public psychosis

March 25, 2024 • by Justin Joque

What defines Musk and Ackman’s psychosis is no longer their relation to their symbolic fathers, but their relation to that of their daughters’....

Activism

Atlanta’s Haunted Forest

Reckoning with a city’s settler colonial and racist legacies

May 3, 2023 • by Juliana Jones-Beaton

Atlanta is built on cycles of violence, and it is the permeating violence of convict labor, slavery, and settler colonialism that has led us here....

Capitalism

A World to Win

Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her recent book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It

May 1, 2023 • by Nancy Fraser and Claire Potter

Claire Potter sits down with New School for Social Research political theorist Nancy Fraser to discuss her latest book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022)....

Democracy

People Power?

The phrase “liberal democracy” has degenerated into an ideological cliché

April 12, 2023 • by John Keane

Democracy is not an all-knowing and arrogant Ideology. It is its antidote. ...

Economy

The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville

Do poor Americans have too much?

September 27, 2022 • by David Lay Williams

According to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Phil Gramm and John Early, the problem is not that the wealthiest Americans have seen their fortunes dramatically explode. It is rather that the poorest Americans have too much! ...

The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville

Technology

Truth, Damned Truth, and Statistics: A Quiet Mathematical Revolution Reshaping our Algorithmically-Mediated World

An interview with Justin Joque

July 20, 2022 • by Lydia Nobbs and Justin Joque

There’s a shift in statistical approaches from one driven by what we traditionally think of as knowledge—knowing ‘the truth’—to a more economic approach. That shows what's always been the case but admits it in a more clear-eyed way: knowledge production is always tied to political economy. In fact, the ways ...

Truth, Damned Truth, and Statistics: A Quiet Mathematical Revolution Reshaping our Algorithmically-Mediated World

Philosophy

When I Was One-Dimensional

How Herbert Marcuse’s text changed my life

July 20, 2022 • by James Miller

"For their sincere reception," Cavell concludes, some life-altering texts require "the shock of conversion." Reading Marcuse, I had felt that shock, with pleasure. Few experiences are quite as rapturous as the conviction that one has embarked on a splendid new life with the firmest of good convictions: as Plato long ...

Capitalism

Capitalism Uber Alles

After the collapse of Marx’s hopes for humanity, what’s left of the Left?

June 21, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

Though dominant for centuries, capitalism formerly coexisted with other economic forms, once alongside forms of feudalism, later among forms of socialism. This is no longer the case; with the demise of the Marxist regimes, the sway of capitalism is now universal....