I wrote this shortly after participating in an historic HM Conference in London, only days after having heard the election result in the US while in the UK. We now face the increasing threat of reaching dangerous climatic tipping points simultaneously with an incoming climate-denialist Trump administration with virtual control of Congress. So, given this very sober outlook, should we assume, as media pundits tell us, that the 1.5-degree Celsius warming target is dead, or is there still a window of opportunity to avoid breaching it?

Dear comrades,

Programme Amendments

Dear Comrades,

Dear Comrades,

It is likely that most readers will come to this book searching not for an introduction to Critical Theory (though it serves this purpose well) but for an introduction to the thought of its author, the famously difficult English philosopher Gillian Rose. Rose helped put Frankfurt School ideas on the curriculum of British universities, published books of remarkable subtlety and insight and inspired a generation of students (including myself) before, in 1995, her life was tragically cut short by cancer at the age of 48.

Historical Materialism is deeply grieved by the passing of the Marxist intellectual giant, philosopher and cultural critic Fredric Jameson at the age of 90. Jameson’s work fundamentally reshaped our understanding of culture, politics and aesthetics, leaving behind an enduring legacy that has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars.

Joshua Morris, The Many Worlds of American Communism (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2022), xxiii + 497 pp.

The title alone betrays the compactness of A. Kiarina Kordela’s Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure (Routledge 2018). This is a critique of modern thought and politics, including metaphysics, political economy, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, and of the ideological wrapping that enfolds them within separate domains of interest and insight.

If, at the top of the state building, they play the violin, how can we not expect those at the bottom to start dancing?

By Gilbert Achcar

Twenty-First Annual Historical Materialism London Conference