OMNI
MARX
NEWSLETTER #1
January 19, 2020
Compiled by
Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
My randomly collected Marx readings appear under the general heading of “Marx,” except for
everything on Marx, enviro, and climate and on Marx, gender, women, and feminist
which are in separate docs in preparation for newsletters. The increasing global identification of US
capitalism (exploitation of natural resources and people for profit, endless growth,
unrestricted competition, deregulation, lower taxes for the rich) with climate
chaos makes this newsletter one of our most important.
Table of Contents: Marx Newsletter #1, January 19, 2020.
MARX
Ideas, the Larger Concepts and
Practices
Socialism
Epistemology
Capitalism Today, Review of
Money and Totality
Massive Vision
More Specific Critiques
British
Politics
Dutch East India Company
Marxists, Marxism, Socialism
Samir Amin
In the Red Corner: The Marxism of Mariàtegui
Abby Martin and Richard
Wolff Converse
Film Sorry to Bother You
Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory
and Practice
Marx’s Ideas, the larger prospects
Marx’s concept of socialism. Mronline.org
(1-2-2020)
The discussions and debates that have
accompanied the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth since 2018 have provided
an important opportunity to re-examine heretofore neglected aspects of his
political and philosophical legacy. Foremost among them is the extent to which
his body of work provides conceptual resources for developing a viable emancipatory to capitalism in
[…]
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Today, as the global economy flounders from
crisis to crisis, Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the essential basis for a
correct understanding of what is going on. Moseley’s book reaffirms key elements
of this analysis.
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More specific writings
If you get nauseated by the perverse state of
contemporary world politics and the slavish way in which mainstream media help
to sustain the spectacle that is Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte
or their local variants, here is the perfect antidote: read Marx’s journalistic
articles for the New York Daily Tribune.
“Marx and the Dutch East India Company. “ Mronline.org 6-23-19.
In the final part of Capital,
Volume I on “the so-called original accumulation”, Marx gives a dazzling
overview of the often violent historical phenomena that contributed to the
birth of the capitalist system, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore,
with blood and dirt.” Source
MARXISTS, MARXISM, SOCIALISM
With the passing of the great anti-imperialist
and Marxist intellectual Samir Amin on August 12 of last year, the
international communist movement lost a giant.
In the Red Corner:
The Marxism of José
Carlos Mariátegui
by Mike
Gonzalez
248pp.
The first English-language biography of one of
Latin America’s most important, innovative, and enduringly relevant, Marxist
thinkers.
José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) is widely
recognized across Latin America as one of the most important and innovative
Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet his life and work are largely
unknown to the English-speaking world. In this gripping political biography—the
first written in English—Mike Gonzalez introduces readers to the inspiring life
and thought of the Peruvian socialist. As one of the first modern thinkers to
discuss what Marxism has to offer, and to learn from, the struggles of
Indigenous peoples, his ideas have an immediate relevance in the context of
Standing Rock and other native-led fights challenging pipelines across North
America.
Reviews
“Mariátegui’s Marxism involved a deep, almost
archaeological, appreciation for the deposition and accumulation of Peruvian
history's sedimentary layers. In his brief life he probed the complex particularities
of that social formation across economics, history, politics, literature, and
ideology. He intervened tirelessly in local affairs. At the same time, he knew
these immediate, local concerns did not exist in pristine isolation from wider
relations. With unparalleled determination, he insisted Peruvian reality could
only be grappled with insofar as its innumerable entanglements with the rest of
Latin America, and indeed the world—through the history of colonialism and
capitalism—were fathomed and assimilated into revolutionary strategy. Latin
America's socialist revolutions would never be a mere copy of European
traditions, but they were nevertheless bound up in a shared universal project
of emancipation. Mariátegui’s heretical Marxism involved a utopian-revolutionary
dialectic, in which select elements of indigenous communal traditions of the
pre-capitalist past were combined with a forward-looking post-capitalist
future, where the difference of the particular wasn't cancelled by the project
of the universal. This impressive book by Mike Gonzalez turns Mariátegui’s
dialectic back on its author, parsing Mariátegui’s life and work with all the
necessary attentiveness to time and place, while simultaneously borrowing
selectively from its riches to help reinvent a living Marxism and revolutionary
politics adequate to our present."
—Jeffery R. Webber, author of The Last Day of Oppression, and the First
Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left
ALSO by Gonzalez
Praise for Hugo
Chavez: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century:
“Mike Gonzalez possesses a extraordinarily rich
knowledge of the Latin American left, has engaged critically with the politics
of modern military institutions, and has an abiding interest in
independently-minded public figures. He has brought these singular attributes
together in this lucid portrait of Hugo Chavez. “ —Professor James Dunkerley, Queen Mary
University
“For activists and scholars alike, this is an
excellent biography, which mirrors in its nuances and subtleties the complexity
of the Bolivarian process and the figure of Chavez himself.”
—Jeffery R. Webber, Queen Mary University of
London, author of The Last Day of Oppression and the First Day of The Same
“A seminal work on the ideological and
political formation of the former Venezuelan President and leading figure of
twenty-first century socialism.”
—Francesco Di Bernardo, LSE Review of Books
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9-7-19
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Abby Martin & Richard Wolff Discuss Socialism in
2019
Abby Martin sits down with renowned Marxist Economist Richard
Wolff to discuss the growing popularity of socialism under Trump and its
historical roots in America, misconceptions about Russia and China’s economic
success and Marx’s theory of alienation and monopoly capitalism.
Watch
Abby's last interview with Richard Wolff in May: "Debunking Jordan Peterson’s
'Cultural Marxism'", and her first interview in 2016: "Marxism 101"
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Cultural Logic: A
Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice
Current Issue Vol 23 (2019)
Sample Articles
History, Class Consciousness, Imperialism
Re-visiting Carlos Bulosan’s "America is
in the Heart" by E. San Juan, Jr.
Anthropology and the Moscow Trials by Dennis
Bartels
Some Remarks on Marx’s Philosophy and
Philosophical Methodology by Matthew McManus
END MARX AND MARXISM NEWSLETTER #1, January
19, 2020
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