A review of Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought and Vanessa Will’s Marx’s Ethical Vision

In 1921, after a heated party “Debate on the Trade Unions”, the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) decided to dissolve all intra-party factions and groups and prohibited their creation in the future. Among others, the “Democratic Centralism” group, which had been active since 1919 and had presented its platform on issues of party building at the Tenth Congress, had to cease to exist.

A special dossier on the ongoing MEGA² edition and its international reception.

In 1921, after a heated party “Debate on the Trade Unions”, the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) decided to dissolve all intra-party factions and groups and prohibited their creation in the future. Among others, the “Democratic Centralism” group, which had been active since 1919 and had presented its platform on issues of party building at the Tenth Congress, had to cease to exist.

In 1925, Isaak Dashkovsky published the book Market and Price in the Contemporary Economy, issued by the state publishing house Proletariat. The work constitutes a significant intervention in the debates surrounding the “scissors crisis”.

For Asad Haider, the fact that people think constitutes the condition of liberation. Yet thinking does not take place in a vacuum. It remains bound to the situations of which it is a part. And these situations are not self-determined but – at least for the time being – largely determined by others. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci had drawn conclusions from this insight, which Asad Haider later took up. Following Gramsci, the young US American theorist shifted the emphasis of Marxist debate. Instead of continually targeting the supposedly absent or deficient class consciousness, in need of enlightenment or external guidance, Haider turned his attention to questions around the production of knowledge: how does it operate, what purposes does it serve, where is it contested, and, not least, can it be organised differently?

Matan Kaminer, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, Stanford University Press, 2024. 

In an interview given in 2011, Peter Watkins remarked ‘I don’t think I’ve made a particularly radical film in forty years, not really’,[1] a remark that might surprise those who regarded him as one of the most important left-wing film directors of the second-half of the twentieth century. Watkins’ caution seems here to point to his difficulty in working against the television and cinema apparatus in which his films were situated, and of generating the political effects on the audience that he desired. Still, even if Watkins found himself dissatisfied with his results, his attempts undoubtedly produced a compelling and highly unusual series of films.

‘Our subjective horizon is the optimism of the intellect; our objective, structuring condition is pessimism of the will. Without optimism of the intellect, we have the party without the people. Without pessimism of the will, we have the illusion of power. Until we recognize this there is no path for action.’[1]

Ciara Cremin, The Spectral Woman: Transfemininity and the Abolition of Gender, Pluto Press, 2025

Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, Trans femme futures: Abolitionist ethics for transfeminist worlds. Pluto Press, 2024.