Marx (Karl) 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

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....

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

Theory & Practice

Sentencing the Present: Part Two

Critical conversations in a time of crisis

May 14, 2020 • by Jonathon Catlin, Ayça Çubukçu, Benjamin P. Davis, Stephen Hopgood, Siddhant Issar, Martin Jay, Lissa McCullough and Mohammad Salama

This seminar is part of an ongoing series. Read part one of "Sentencing the Present" here. A sentence is protean: It can describe, question, or cry out. A sentence is critical: In passing judgment, it names wrongs, makes decisions, and declares publicly. In a spirit of both open inquiry and political ...

Theory & Practice

Sentencing the Present

Critical conversations in a time of crisis

May 7, 2020 • by Jonathon Catlin, Andrew Cole, Benjamin P. Davis, Bonnie Honig, Joy James, Mark Kingwell, Vincent Lloyd, Sarah Schulman, Dara Z. Strolovitch and Enzo Traverso

In light of Marx’s 1843 conception of critical thought, how does your perspective contribute to “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age”? In a time of social breakdown and uncertainty, we find that critique comes almost too easily. Hence we also take inspiration from the historian E. ...

Theory & Practice

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

on Paolo Virno

July 2, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Paolo Virno offers a curious diagnosis of the times. In A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004), he writes of the communism of capital. It’s a thought that has some pedigree in Marx, who made a similar observation in his own time about the formation of the joint-stock company, which ...

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

Feature

Eleven Theses on American Democracy

June 19, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

1 The main defect of actually-existing democracy in America is that it does not actually exist. Or, rather, it exists in a stage-managed way: economic, military, and policy elites jockey for power, bypassing the citizenry, through the ubiquity of money and the subtle and not-so-subtle influence of the mainstream media, which ...

Education

A Radical New Approach to the Field of Economics

May 16, 2016 • by Ebba Boye

Anwar Shaikh has been teaching economics at The New School for 42 years. One of the world’s leading heterodox economists, he argues that the neoclassical models taught at most universities are bad tools for analyzing capitalism. He hopes that his recent book, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crisis, can be ...

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Feature

The IMF Makes Class Warriors of Us All

April 22, 2016 • by Tithi Bhattacharya

On October 24, 1973, the Egyptian military, under the command of General Hosni Mubarak, and under instructions from President Anwar Sadat, dealt an unprecedented blow to the most powerful regime in the Middle East: Israel. As the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal and established bridgeheads in the Sinai peninsula, ...
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Theory & Practice

Althusserians Anonymous (the relapse)

February 26, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

1. Old versus Young Marx 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 Althusserian ...
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