This interview with Henri Lefebvre was conducted for the French Communist Party (PCF) journal La Nouvelle Critique in 1979. As the interview shows, Lefebvre's renewed engagement with the PCF was neither nostalgic nor opportunistic but grounded in his conviction that Marxism required continual theoretical renegotiation if it was to remain capable of grasping contemporary reality.

E. Ahmet Tonak reviews Güney Işıkara and Patrick Mokre, Marx’s Theory of Value at the Frontiers: Classical Political Economics, Imperialism and Ecological Breakdown. New York: Routledge, 2025

2025 has proved to be another difficult year for the Trotskyist movement. Despite reasonable election results in Argentina and Germany, extensive involvement in the new left party in Britain and a merger of two International bodies, the movement, as a whole, has suffered significant political splits and has made little headway in the scores of countries where Trotskyist parties are to be found.

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

Text in English, Russian and Portuguese

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.