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On the 28 February, Greece experienced its biggest day of mass protest in many years. During a general strike with mass participation, large gatherings where organised in every city and town in Greece, along with protests in almost every city abroad with a Greek community. In Athens alone, it was a giant demonstration, with the estimates ranging from 400,000 to 800,000 persons attending, and everyone agreeing this was perhaps the biggest demonstration ever organised. This followed, another day of protest, on the Sunday 26 January, when the demonstrations organised all over Greece were the biggest since the 2010s.

I’ve divided this presentation into four distinct parts.[1] A shorthand description of these might be

This is the text of a discussion of Álvaro García Linera and Sandro Mezzadra, responding to questions by Matteo Polleri. In this dialogue, Álvaro García Linera and Sandro Mezzadra discuss the relevance and irrelevance of Nicos Poulantzas’s thought. After tracing the role played by Poulantzas’s theory of the State in their respective works, the conversation turns to its potential uses in the present. The conversation touches on a number of key issues for the critical analysis of contemporary capitalism, such as recent changes in the global economy and the international scene, the rise of the far right and the possible horizons of a post-capitalist transition.

Let me start with some explanations concerning the title of my paper.[1] There is a commonly shared opinion on the relation between the “founding fathers” of historical materialism and the nation. Shared by non- or anti-Marxists and by most Marxists alike, this claims that Marx and Engels have little to say on the subject. “Little” does not mean here quantitatively little, since it is acknowledged that their writings include lengthy discussions of those “national questions” that were of primary importance at their time – Poland, Italy, Ireland, German unity, the “Eastern question”, colonial expansion, to name just the most prominent ones. The claim is, rather, that, in all those texts, there is little, if anything, that is properly original and specific, that is, integrated to their broader theoretical framework.

The following essay is a revised and expanded version of the author’s online intervention entitled “Lenin’s Alternative: A Politics of Another Type”, which took place on 25 May 2024, as the closing address of the international series of events Leninist Days/Jornadas leninistas (27 January to 25 to May 2024), organised in commemoration of the centenary of the death of Vladimir I. Lenin.

I am almost eighty, an age when one begins to think about what one has done, what one has accomplished in life. So, I have been looking back on my forty-year career as a writer about labour and social movements. During this time, I have written principally about the importance of democracy in the labour movements, in society and in politics. I have written about ordinary working people’s attempts to take control over their workplaces, their labour unions, and of the political parties in which they became involved or created. I explore how ordinary people often ran into the power of the bureaucracies of unions, parties or the state, whether in the United States, Mexico, Nicaragua, or Indonesia, bureaucracies that frustrated their desire for control of their own lives.

Edited by Max Horkheimer for the Institute for Social Research, the journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung stands in admirable contrast to the usual grey publications from the emigration-circles. From Thomas and Heinrich Mann to Brecht and Feuchtwanger, from Georg Bernhard to Hart and Hiller, from Stampfer to Walcher, Münzenberg and Pieck, those only reflect the general intellectual stagnation and decay. Apart from a small number of exceptions that we will discuss later, the contributions to this journal are on the contrary characterised by a high scientific level and purity in thought and words. Most of all, the essays by Horkheimer himself attract our interest. Horkheimer attempts to address the contemporary philosophical reaction – irrationalism, neo-empiricism, ‘neo-humanism’- with the tools of dialectical materialism, which he also calls critical theory.

In this interview, conducted on 10 February 2023, John Bellamy Foster speaks with Daniel Tutt about the work of István Mészáros and Paul Baran, contemporary irrationalist tendencies in left ecological thought, intensifying global class struggles and the continued relevance of Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1952), recently reissued with an introduction by Enzo Traverso by Verso in 2021. The interview is being made available in advance of a forthcoming special issue of Historical Materialism, for which Tutt is a co-editor, dedicated to Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason.