Marxism Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

To have family is to own something

March 30, 2026 • by Sophie Lewis

“The Left has largely abandoned questions of the family,” charged the queer and trans Marxists K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson in 2015. “Tacitly, at least, leftist organizations today have accepted families as a feature of contemporary capitalist society, which they will do nothing to end.” The authors’ timely ...

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

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. ...

Interviews

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

A conversation with Ronnie Grinberg about her book Write Like a Man

October 8, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor and Ronnie Grinberg

In this biographical study of the New York Jewish intellectuals behind journals like Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, Grinberg focuses on prominent post war writers and editors like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Kristol, many of them native New Yorkers and graduates of City College....

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

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....

Feminism

Not a Labor of Love

The radicalization of motherhood

March 14, 2022 • by Catrin Ashton and Silvia Federici

t was argued that domestic work doesn’t produce any social wealth, is a backward activity, and that it isn’t really part of the capitalist organization of work and, therefore, women who are mostly involved with this kind of work do not have the power to change society....

Capitalism

The Communism of Love

How the COVID pandemic has revealed anew the importance of Marx’s Gemeinwesen

May 5, 2021 • by Richard Gilman-Opalsky

_____ Marx was transfixed by the Gemeinwesen, a German word meant to grasp the essence of human community, the state of human relations. Marx did not think a world of exchange built around the relation of labor to capital made for the healthiest Gemeinwesen, and he wanted a different one. He ...

History

The Paris Commune of 1871 – Myth and Reality

It was not a spontaneous, prefigurative gathering of people waggling their fingers at a general assembly in the spirit of Occupy: it was a working government, and it passed a lot of decrees

April 28, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor

_____ This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, often regarded as the first instance of the working-class seizing power and establishing a government dedicated to its interests. The uprising occurred in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, after the defeat of France, the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, ...

The Paris Commune of 1871 – Myth and Reality

Economy

Why Adam Smith & Karl Marx Would Both Think $15 Isn’t Enough

Because the minimum wage is a subsistence wage, the left must aim higher

March 4, 2021 • by Peter J. Verovšek

_____ With the inauguration of the Biden administration, raising the federal minimum wage from its egregiously low level of $7.25 an hour is back on the political agenda in Washington, D.C. In recent years, activists across the county have convinced some cities and other jurisdictions to approve a higher minimum wage ...

Why Adam Smith & Karl Marx Would Both Think $15 Isn’t Enough

Capitalism

Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx in Conversation

On Working and Being in Modern Times

September 21, 2020 • by Steven Stoll

Modern Times, directed by Charlie Chaplin, was released in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression. It opens with a clock marking the beginning of the working day and a sentence: “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.” Stampeding sheep dissolve into men ...

Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx in Conversation

Uncategorized

Was Theodor Adorno “The Fifth Beatle”?

How a conspiracy theory about the Frankfurt School made its way around the world

October 8, 2019 • by Andrew Woods

His latest theory asserts the Beatles could not have written their own songs, because they “were semi-literate in music” and “barely knew how to play the guitar.” Instead it was Adorno, a composer trained by Alban Berg and skilled in twelve-tone technique, who masterminded the Lennon-McCartney songbook. Carvalho’s remarks will baffle fans of ...

Feature

Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt

On Rethinking Our Thoughts

April 19, 2019 • by David Stromberg

As political camps grow increasingly extreme in their messaging – with Democrat and Republican views both turning less nuanced, with the Right and Left seeming to need each other in order to justify their political survival -- it may be helpful to recall a person who tried to make a ...

Feature

Two Europes, Not Quite the Same

Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism in Eastern Europe

April 3, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

Yugoslavia was in a state of bloody mayhem. Bullets whistled back and forth across the streets from the weapons of invisible shooters, snipers. But as the shells vied to wipe out passersby, reduce thousand-year-old bridges to dust, and the formerly ‘new’ philosophers vied to shame us, going out of their ...