Critical Reflections on Capitalist China: a talk by Richard Gilman-Opalsky Speaker: Richard Gilman-Opalsky Saturday, July 27, 2019, 7:00 PM Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan, Studio 632B (Chicago) The capitalist reality of the so-called “communist” regimes of the twentieth century has been exposed. An international diversity of theory and history going back a hundred years tells us that communism was to be found in movements […] […]

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Left Forum 2018 Panel: Hegelian-Marxism, Critical Theory and Marxist-Humanism Readers of Criticism &c. who have the opportunity to attend the 2018 Left Forum in New York (June 1-3) may be interested in the panel Hegelian-Marxism, Critical Theory and Marxist-Humanism: U.S. Origins and Development. The speakers are Russell Rockwell, author of Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic, Sarah Kleeb, and Kevin O’Brien. Time […]

We’ll always have Petrograd October: the story of the Russian Revolution China Miéville Verso, 2017 An enormous amount of intellectual effort is necessary to unearth what significance, if any, the Russian revolutions of 1917 hold for us today. Before it is possible to do so, the mind must travel backwards from the integrated spectacle of Putin’s Russia to confront, […]

Trump: Does the future belong to him? “He deported himself like an unappreciated genius, whom the world takes for a simpleton.”—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Daniel De Leon translation) “Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes; but he can give to none without taking from the others.”—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Daniel […]

One Hundred Years Ago: February 1916 The organized bloodshed in Europe entered a new phase in February as the battle of Verdun began on the morning of February 21. In the U.S., antipathy to the war continued to predominate, but President Wilson was well into a commitment to gradually prepare the country’s relatively small army and navy for entry into conflict. […]

One Hundred Years Ago: August 1915 The August 1915 cover of The Masses draws attention to the lynching of Leo Frank, which took place on August 17 in Marietta, Georgia. The drawing is by Robert Minor, later a major CP figure. Max Eastman, the magazine’s editor, was traveling in France and an account of a discussion on the war between him […]

The Full Weight of Surrealism History of the Surrealist Movement Gérard Durozoi University of Chicago Press, 2002 This massive work, originally published in France in 1997, is actually a history of surrealism as it manifested itself in the visual arts—painting, sculpture, and film. The movement’s core literary expression receives short shrift in the book’s 800-plus pages. The political b […]