Archives: Online Posts
Managing Contradictions at the Border
Elaine Wik looks at the political economy subtending the dynamics of conflict and securitization at the India/Bangladesh border.
A Review of Nancy Holmstrom’s “From a Marxist-Feminist Point of View”
Cinzia Arruzza reviews Nanvy Holmstrom’s rigorous philosophical development of Marx’s theories in From a Marxist-Feminist Point of View.
Communes and Crisis
Manuel Casique Herrera responds to the recent Spectre interview with Geo Maher, arguing that Maher defends the Chavista regime by over-inflating the extent and power of the communes and ignoring political-economic trends before US sanctions. Closer attention to the Venezuelan state’s function as gate-keeper for ground rent for oil in light of global economic trends is necessary to make sense of the regime’s dynamics.
States of Indebtedness
Brandon Webb and Matthew Penney use Japanese state debt to show how both mainstream economics’ fiscal panic narratives and Modern Monetary Theory’s (MMT) closed economy model fail to account for how the monetization of public debt fuels speculative finance, redistributes wealth upward, and undermines social reproduction. A Marxist account of money does far better and points towards the need for a different, non-fetishized social form.
Non-natalism
Leslie Root shows how misguided it is for the left to accept pro-natalist positions. Worry about declining birth rates is based on a misinterpretation of the Total Fertility Rate, and minor social policies promoting higher birth rates will be met with pyrrhic defeat, producing backlash against minorities. The left can rely on better demographic data, and debates on the issue should be informed by reproductive justice, family abolition, and feminism.
Fascism, Trump, and Trumpism
Justin Reed challenges Tood Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber’s mechanical application of Trotskyist analysis to describe Trumpism, arguing that it should be understood as a part of an international neofascist response to capitalist crisis.
Who speaks for Iran?—and from where?
Nazanin Shahrokni rethinks the meaning of transnational solidarity, understood as a political intervention stretched across an uneven and unequal geopolitical landscape. What does it mean to speak for “the Iranian People?”
On Vivek Chibber, Political Marxism, and the Tradition of Telling Half the Story
Bilal Zahoor challenges Political Marxism’s, and in particular Vivek Chibber’s, reduction of capitalism to its hyperlocal origin in the English countryside.
Beyond the Wage Relation
Hugo de Camps Mora challenges Vivek Chibber’s fetishized account of materialism in favor of the broader and more expansive conception Marx argued for.
“Gender Ideology,” Bodily Mutilation, and End of the Masculine West
Taking Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies as a starting point, Tiffany Berruti looks at the reactionary right’s fixation on trans persecution.