Karl Marx Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

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. ...

Capitalism

Synthesizing Marx, Keynes, and Schumpeter

September 17, 2024 • by Anna Pick and Mark Setterfield

Feathers were ruffled at Davos this year when, during a panel on “How to Trust Economics,” a speaker went rogue, accusing economists of being a “tribal clique” who only quote each other and have “blind faith” in models, however disconnected from real events they may be. The critique came not ...

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....

Capitalism

A World to Win

Talking with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser about her recent book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It

May 1, 2023 • by Nancy Fraser and Claire Potter

Claire Potter sits down with New School for Social Research political theorist Nancy Fraser to discuss her latest book, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It (Verso, 2022)....

Technology

Truth, Damned Truth, and Statistics: A Quiet Mathematical Revolution Reshaping our Algorithmically-Mediated World

An interview with Justin Joque

July 20, 2022 • by Lydia Nobbs and Justin Joque

There’s a shift in statistical approaches from one driven by what we traditionally think of as knowledge—knowing ‘the truth’—to a more economic approach. That shows what's always been the case but admits it in a more clear-eyed way: knowledge production is always tied to political economy. In fact, the ways ...

Truth, Damned Truth, and Statistics: A Quiet Mathematical Revolution Reshaping our Algorithmically-Mediated World

Philosophy

When I Was One-Dimensional

How Herbert Marcuse’s text changed my life

July 20, 2022 • by James Miller

"For their sincere reception," Cavell concludes, some life-altering texts require "the shock of conversion." Reading Marcuse, I had felt that shock, with pleasure. Few experiences are quite as rapturous as the conviction that one has embarked on a splendid new life with the firmest of good convictions: as Plato long ...

Capitalism

A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods

What Winslow Homer’s Old Mill teaches us about the world industrialization made

September 28, 2021 • by Steven Stoll

A woman in a red jacket, lunch pail in hand and eyes forward, travels to work. She ascends a ramp leading from a meadow of wildflowers, over a millpond to a small water-powered textile factory. Winslow Homer painted Old Mill in 1871, but its subject looks back fifty years to the first ...

Capitalism

The Commons versus Capitalism

Can commonality dodge the threat of capitalist exploitation and develop into an organizational principle for complex societies?

August 31, 2021 • by Thijs Lijster

_____ Although every proprietor knows his own, … all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them. Thomas Morton regarding the Five Nations in North America Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of the ‘commons’ has steadily ascended in significance in activist circles, scientific literature ...

Education

Teaching Patriotism

Abraham Lincoln’s idea of America

October 8, 2020 • by Steven B. Smith

In the midst of a global pandemic and an economic crisis, President Donald Trump recently found time to convene a Committee on Patriotic Education. In principle this was not a bad idea. The great question of course is how will patriotism be taught, and who will be its teachers? Or, as Karl ...

Capitalism

QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America

Alienation, anxiety, and religion

September 28, 2020 • by Martin Shuster

QAnon is a conspiracy theory alleging that the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is battling an organized and criminal deep state—which also happens to be a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles engaged in sex-trafficking—and that this battle is moving towards an apocalyptic showdown in which our president will ...

QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America

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

Capitalism

Is Capitalism in Crisis, Dying, Dead — or Very Much Alive, for Better or Worse?

In search of an elusive concept

August 27, 2020 • by Ben Kodres-O'Brien

In 2014, a Museum of Capitalism opened for the first time, as if to commemorate a dying form of life. “The museum began just as capitalism ended,” declared the wall text for the most recent iteration of the travelling museum, at The New School in New York in fall 2019: ...