Marxism & Disability Network (MDN) call for abstracts for 2026 events

Dear comrades, On behalf of the steering committee for the Marxism & Disability Network (MDN), we hope you all have been keeping well amidst a year of struggle but also success. To continue efforts that heighten understanding while prefiguring the communities and society we want to live in, the steering committee is excited to announce

Peter Watkins (1935–2025)

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

In memoriam: Asad Haider (1987-2025)

‘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] Asad Haider It is

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