Special Articles

Gregory Albo: Socialism means a feasible alternate social order where production for need governs over production of profit and where new possibilities for human freedom and co-operation can be explored. Alternatives to capitalism

Louis Althusser: To safeguard the endless development of the sciences and all human practice, to preserve the sciences from all forms of dogmatism and idealism by reminding them of their fundamental reality – such is the aim of materialism. It will give some idea of the characteristics of Marxism, of its rigour and fecundity. On Marxism

Mark Anielski: (1) We need to make bold efforts in the re-structuring of the global economic architecture, that makes the old system of measuring economic progress obsolete and replaces it with a system of measurement that is enlightened and aligns more closely with what people want: Happines, joy and love. The economy of well-being (site specific)

(2) We do not need to continue down this path of financial collapse as we have alternatives at our disposal. This requires a collective awareness and admission of the failure of the current debt-based monetary system, and that it cannot serve the purpose of pursuing the goals of happiness and the well-being of humanity. Redesigning money for well-being and happiness

Ross Ashcroft: Video presentation (2012): Four Horsemen: a documentary

Salvatore J. Babones: The 21st century will in retrospect turn out to have been an American century as the 20th was. China’s rise is provocative, but China lacks the one thing that made the similarly-resourced USSR’s challenge to American supremacy credible: An appealing ideology. It challenged America’s inherently unjust capitalist system. But China  has embraced the worst socioeconomic ills of capitalism without acquiring even the fig leaf offered by political democracy. China at century’s end (site specific)

Murray Bookchin: The reality is that capitalism is the uncontrollable work of historical “sorcery”—a system of production for its own sake—that, while it exists, must eat away at the natural world and drastically remake the planet, probably to the detriment of all life-forms, including human beings. The Communist Manifesto: insights and problems

Tucker Carlson: (1) Video presentation (2023): A Journal of the Plague Year 2023: Tucker Carlson—the last journalist

(2) Video presentation (2024): Carlson-Putin: The Interview

(3) Video presentation (2024): Carlson-Dugin: New Liberal Wokeism–the path to Dystopia

Jacques Derrida: Video presentation (2002): Derrida: a documentary

Albert Einstein: We should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society. Why socialism?

Frantz Fanon: (1) Video presentation based on a text of Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth: Violence

(2) Video presentation based on a text of Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth: Mental Disorder

Michel Foucault: (1) Video presentation: The Noam Chomsky-Michel Foucault debate (1971)–On human nature

(2) Video presentation (1993): Michel Foucault: beyond good and evil

Joshua Frank: Video presentation (2016): Propaganda and the Fake Left Media; or, Shills for Clinton

Steve Fraser: We have entered a new phase. What might be called capitalist underdevelopment and once again debt has emerged as both the central mode of capital accumulation and a principal mechanism of servitude. Warren Buffett has predicted that, in the coming decades, the United States is more likely to turn into a “sharecropper society” than an “ownership society.” The Politics of debt in America: From debtor’s prison to debtor nation

Sigmund Freud: Video presentation (1996): Sigmund Freud: analysis of mind

The Great Exhibition: Video presentation (2006): The great exhibition: in our time

Ernesto “Che” Guevara: Our America is integrated by a group of more or less homogeneous countries and in most parts of its territory U.S. monopolist capitals maintain an absolute supremacy. Puppet governments or, in the best of cases, weak and fearful local rulers, are incapable of contradicting orders from their Yankee master. The United States has nearly reached the climax of its political and economic domination. Ernesto “Che” Guevara: message to the Tricontinental

Henry A. Giroux: (1) There is more at work in the attack on ethnic studies and the banning of books considered dangerous in the Arizona schools than Tea Party politics and acts of censorship. Privatizing race preserves the dominant power structures that produce modes of structural racism that extend from racial discrimination to racial exclusion practised by schools, governments, banks, mortgage companies, and state policies, among others. Fahrenheit 451 redux (site specific)

(2) Pedagogy as a mode of witnessing, a public engagement in which students learn to be attentive and responsible to the narratives of others disappears within a corporate driven notion of learning where logic of the market devalues opportunities for students to make connections and foster relations with others in a mix of compassion, ethics and hope. Dangerous pedagogy (site specific)

(3) A state that embraces a policy of permanent war needs willing subjects to abide by its values, ideology, and narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through people’s immersion in a market-driven society that appears increasingly addicted to consumerism, militarism, and the spectacles of violence endlessly circulated through popular culture. Criminalizing dissent and punishing Occupy protesters

Emma Goldman: Today, as then, public opinion is the omnipresent tyrant; today, as then, the majority represents a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirrors its own soul and mind poverty. I know so well that as a compact mass it has never stood for justice or equality. It has suppressed the human voice, subdued the human spirit, chained the human body. Taking notes 43: minorities versus majorities

Uri Gordon: (1) Constructive direct action means that anarchists who seek a world based on different social relations undertake their construction by themselves. On such an account the modes of organization that will replace capitalism, the state and patriarchy must be prepared and developed alongside the attack on present institutions. Anarchist economics

(2) Insurrection is a mass armed uprising to overthrow a regime. Civil disobedience is selective refusal to obey some of the regime’s laws or policies, as a means of pressuring it into changing them. Tax strikes, refusal of conscription, and sitting in the “wrong” section of a segregated bus all belong to this category. There is no intention to overthrow the regime, only to force it to negotiate. Taking notes 5: The truant insurrection

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Big corporate banks backed by the Treasury are swallowing smaller banks in terrifying speed while these same politicians aligned with others, who have financial interests, are moving America along with the world to digital currency. A Journal of the Plague Year 2023: Marjorie Taylor Greene—truth telling

Martin Heidegger: Video presentation (1989): The magus of Messkirch: Martin Heidegger

Heraclitus: Video presentation (2011): Heraclitus: in our time

Dave Hill: Are we complicit in our servile, self-justified, acceptance of exponentially expanding capitalist kleptocracy. Do we take a principled stand for humanity, social and economic justice, and redistribution of wealth, income, power, life chances, and for a critical democratic socialist, anti-capitalist future? Fighting neo-liberalism with education and activism (site specific)

Patrick Colm Hogan: The treatments of academic freedom and the value of universities do not form a sequence of increasingly extreme views, with a sensible, conservative view being taken up and progressively distorted by liberals, leftists, and radicals. The university does not comprise a set of sensible professionals in struggle with an evidently non-professional group of “tenured radicals.” Academic freedom and the purposes of universities (site specific)

David Hume: Video presentation (2011): David Hume: in our time

Aldous Huxley: Video presentation (1993): Aldous Huxley: darkness and light

Fredric Jameson: Communism can be posited as a radical, even unimaginable break; socialism is a political process within our system, that is, within capitalism itself. Socialism is capitalism’s dream of a perfected system. Communism is that unimaginable fulfillment of a radical alternative that cannot even be dreamt. An infernal machine: A new reading of Capital

Carl Jung: Video presentation (1990): The world within: C.G. Jung in his own words

Peter Kirstein: Socialists, anarchists and progressive faculty who cross the line of accepted speech, have been severely punished for their antiwar views. Certainly a free society includes the right to condemn, criticize and vigorously denounce written or oral utterances. Rarely does it merit punishment unless it causes imminent harm to others. Without free speech and protest, progress cannot be made. Free speech, war and academic freedom

Aleksandra Kollontai: Women’s Day did achieve something. It turned out to be an excellent method of agitation among the less political of our proletarian sisters. They could not help but turn their attention to the meetings, demonstrations, posters, pamphlets and newspapers that were devoted to them. More women joined the socialist parties, trade unions grew, organizations improved and political consciousness developed. International Women’s Day

V.I. Lenin: The petty bourgeoisie oppose every kind of state interference, accounting and control, whether it be state capitalist or state socialist. They give free rein to ranting and phrase-mongering but are incapable of sustained, thoughtful and deliberate revolutionary work which takes into account the most difficult stages of transition. ‘Left-wing’ childishness and the petty-bourgeois mentality

Michael Maloney: Video presentation (2013): The Biggest Scam In The History Of Mankind – Who Owns The Federal Reserve?

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: Video presentation (2013): “Karl Marx was right”: A debate

Peter McLaren: The logic of capital is present in the most sophisticated of bourgeois thinkers, as they rush headlong into their quest for both epistemic and material privilege over the unthinkable aberration of the working class. But we can’t let them take us down. We must intensify our fight against an obscenely wealthy transnational capitalist plutocracy, that pursues self-enrichment and imposes imperialism and a reactionary social agenda. The death rattle of the American mind

Friedrich Nietzsche: Human, all too human, a BBC documentary (1999): Nietzsche: human, all too human

George Orwell: Video presentation (2000): George Orwell: the last man in Europe

John Rawls: Video presentation by Michael Sandel (2009): Is it just to tax the rich to help the poor? We should answer this question by asking what principles you would choose to govern the distribution of income and wealth if you did not know who you were, whether you grew up in privilege or in poverty.  Justice: what’s the right thing to do? Episode 8: “What’s a fair start?”

John Reed: Modern nations have two governments; the political government, in which every man theoretically has a vote, and the economic government, in which the few who own industry and control production are autocrats over millions of workers. The US government is in the hands of the great corporations. Aspects of the Russian revolution

Bertrand Russell: Video presentation (2012): Bertrand Russell: in our time

Michael Sandel: Video presentation by Michael Sandel (2014): what money can’t buy

Jean-Paul Sartre: Human, all too human, a BBC documentary (1999): Jean-Paul Sartre: the road to freedom

Arthur Schopenhauer: Video presentation (2009): Schopenhauer: in our time

Jeff Shantz: Radical criminology must not flinch in the face of condemnation by corporate mass media and political institutions. It is not enough to be a public criminologist. Criminology must go further to be an active player in contemporary struggles. It must stand with the movements of the exploited and against the exploiters. It must stand with the marginalized and against those who would impose the privileged center. It must stand with the criminalized and against those who would criminalize them. Radical criminology: A manifesto (site specific)

Adam Smith: Video presentation on Adam Smith (2010): Why is the Wealth of Nations so important? Adam Smith and classical economics.

Brian Tokar: From urban centers to remote rural villages, we are all sold a way of life that continues to devour the earth and its peoples. Today’s high-tech consumer lifestyle aims to defy all meaningful limits, ultimately raising global inequality and economic oppression to previously unimaginable proportions while profoundly destabilising the earth’s ability to sustain life. Toward a new social ecology

Leon Trotsky: Mendacity, slander, bribery, venality, coercion, murder grew to unprecedented dimensions. To a stunned simpleton all these vexations seem a temporary result of war. Actually they are manifestations of imperialist decline. The decay of capitalism denotes the decay of contemporary society with its right and its morals. Their morals and ours

Yanis Varoufakis: Video presentation (2016): Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky: a dialogue

Thorstein Veblen: There is high esteem accorded to men of wealth especially to those who have succeeded in business. Business success is quite uncritically taken as conclusive evidence of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to business. Final discretion is entrusted to those proven in their capacity for work that has nothing in common with higher learning. “The Governing boards”: a memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Video presentation (1989): Wittgenstein: a wonderful life

Ali Shehzad Zaidi: Greenhouse emissions only redouble the need to free the world from the corporate death grip. We need to go beyond self-transformation by abolishing capitalism, a destructive economic system that is like the cancer cell which destroys its host in pursuit of unlimited growth. A new age of reason