Fully Emasculated, Red Lipstick Communism Now!

Ciara Cremin, The Spectral Woman: Transfemininity and the Abolition of Gender, Pluto Press, 2025  Reviewed by Cat Moir Wolfe   Introduction: the mask of manhood One of the memes on the popular satirical social media profile #manwhohasitall shows a picture of a man (young, white, able-bodied) running along a tarmacked road wearing a grey sports

Enemies, Comrades, and The Counterrevolutionary Logic of Cisness

Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, Trans femme futures: Abolitionist ethics for transfeminist worlds. Pluto Press, 2024.  Sophie Lewis, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses against Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025.   Reviewed by Katharina Hunfeld What does the consolidation of far-right power in mainstream politics demand of the Left? On the current terrain

Interview with Shi Yongqin: Leon Trotsky was a Milestone Figure in the Development of Marxism

This interview with Shi Yongqin was originally commissioned by Mr. Shen Wentao for Wenyi Yanjiu (文艺研究Literary Research) (monthly) but, for some reason, the journal did not publish it. Wenyi Yanjiu was founded in May 1979. It is a large comprehensive literary theory journal supervised by the Ministry of Culture and hosted by the Chinese Academy

Council Communists Meet Philosophers from Heidelberg – The Pre-History of Critical Theory in 1920s Germany

In der Dämmerung: Studien zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte der Kritischen Theorie (In the Twilight. Studies on the Pre- and Early History of Critical Theory) by Christian Voller, Matthes & Seitz, 2022, 414 pages, German.   Reviewed by Jonathan Roessler, Free University Berlin, 2023.   Pentecost 1923, Geraberg, a small village on the northern edge of the

Materialism and the Legal Form

Sonja Buckel, Subjectivation and Cohesion, trans. Monika Vykoukal (Brill, 2021) Reviewed by Susan Dianne Brophy   From the start, Sonja Buckel faces a difficult task. Although writing “in the tradition of Karl Marx”, she is “diametrically opposed” to the standard line adopted by latter-day Marxist legal theorists, namely that law should be unmasked as ideologically

The USSR Home Front and World War II

Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer (eds.), Hunger and War. Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2015   Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern. The Soviet Home Front During World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021   Reviewed by Michael Haynes

Geert Reuten: a fond recollection

On 29 July, Geert Reuten passed away after a short illness with liver cancer. Geert was the youngest of twelve children and belonged to a prominent Catholic family. His grandfather, textile manufacturer Vincent van den Heuvel, had for many years been a member of parliament for the Catholic Party and played an important role in

R.I.P. Geert Reuten (1946-2025)

The Historical Materialism journal and book series editorial boards are very sad to announce the death of Geert Reuten due to cancer. Geert was a great supporter of the HM project from the very beginning. Aside from being a brilliant Marxist theorist, Geert was also a kind person – not always the most frequent combination!

Historical Materialism Conference East and Southeast Asia 2025 – Schedule

23 July 2025   Time Agenda 13.20 – 13.30 Opening 13.30 – 15.00 Panel 1: Capital, Ideology, and Historical Formations   Chair: Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung – University of Vienna   Embedded Sufficiency? The Sufficiency Economy as Labor Discipline in Post-Crisis Thailand Aila Trasi – Johns Hopkins University and Goethe University Frankfurt   Travelling Mangoes: Tropical