Articles
The billionaire who did away with money
Musk’s future is full of things. Things produced, things launched, things switched on, things automated, things intelligent, things orbiting, things in abundance. But a liberated society is not a society full of things. It is a society in which human beings need not be things amongst things.
Why trans liberation is class struggle
The policing of trans life is central to the oppression of the bodies, expression and relationships of the class as a whole
Why Talking About the Oil-Dollar Nexus Is Important
The persistence of the dollar’s role as world money after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system raises a puzzle: how does a currency continue to function as world money even when the issuing country loses its economic competitiveness and, over time, becomes the world's largest trade-deficit economy?
Berlinguer and Spinelli: Europe as Dreamt by Italian Eurocommunism
The emergence of a new figure of party communism in the period of its final crisis, distinct from both the Soviet and Chinese tendencies, and capable of circumventing the logics of geopolitical “camps”, was only possible because of the development of European construction, for at least some of its initiators
Iran: To Suture the Stateless Subject
Iran can offer lessons on both colonial patricide and anti-colonial resistance, self-harm and healing. In the coming wars, we need strategies rooted in concepts and faith that can offer not only perspective into an increasingly more elusive totality ruling over our fragmented worlds, but also a feeling of the self as a non-split subjectivity living in real ecologies and in bodies with real organs.
Carlo Ginzburg, Marcos and Adolfo Gilly
In memory of Carlo Ginzburg, Historical Materialism returns to this remarkable reception of his work and, in particular, his ‘evidential paradigm’. These letters exchanged between Subcomandante Marcos and Adolfo Gilly, originally published in the Mexican journal Viento del Sur1 and translated here into English for the first time, show how Ginzburg’s work resonated well beyond microhistory and historiography, inspiring wider debates on Marxism, knowledge ‘from below’, revolution, class struggle, and armed struggle.
The Contemporary Political Economy of Venezuelan Oil in Historical Perspective
Following the United States’ military invasion of Venezuela on 3 January 2026, Venezuela’s oil sector is undergoing widespread transformation. US sanctions against Venezuela have been lifted, and reforms in and outside of Venezuela establish US control over oil production and sales. Oil production is increasing, though Venezuela’s trading partners have changed to adhere to the conditions set out in US licences. Overall, there is a greater role for foreign private capital in the hydrocarbons sector. With these developments, there is renewed international attention on Venezuelan oil.
Traces, omens, histories. Letter to the Subcomandante from Adolfo Gilly
(You can download the three pieces as a single PDF here. You can also find the Introduction by Juan Grigera and the Letter from Subcomandante Marcos)
Letter to Adolfo Gilly from Subcomandante Marcos
(You can download the three pieces as a single PDF here. You can also find the Introduction by Juan Grigera and the Letter to Marcos by Adolfo Gilly)
The Capitalist Chicken That’s ‘Come Home to Roost’: What Two Hundred Fifty Years Hath Bequeathed
The commercialisation of the bicentennial a half-century ago pales in comparison to what’s already underway for the Trump administration’s semiquincentennial celebration. Self-interest on steroids, unapologetically—embarrassingly, perhaps, for those who subscribe to capitalism’s dog-eat-dog/I-got-mine-you-get-your ethic. The capitalist chicken now roosting in the White House itself.
The Artist who Took up Arms: Reclaiming the Marxist Vision of Bishnu Prasad Rabha
During his years as an underground Marxist guerilla, Rabha produced an impressive and original analyses of the potential Indian revolution from a Marxist perspective, which often remains unappreciated not only globally, but also in India.
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of Myanmar
The question of Palestine in Myanmar is overdetermined by religious affiliation and communal ties. But it doesn’t have to be. There is another way of plotting the links, connections, parallels, and, indeed, solidarities that can and should bridge these two places so rarely brought together—by way of a clear set of ties that follow historical and material relations.
