Reading Guides

By the end of 2015 some forty percent or more of China’s rural workforce was thought to consist of roughly 250 million peasant migrants known as mingong, a cross between nongmin (peasant) and gongren (worker). They are ‘socialist’ China’s version of Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’, a drastically uprooted peasantry forced to survive on ‘dirty, dangerous and demeaning’ jobs in mining, construction and other sectors and seen by state and middle class alike as a ‘tidal wave’ threatening to flood their cities (Schultz 2018). In films like Still Life (by the brilliant director Jia Zhangke), they are neither peasants nor workers but a massive reservoir of commodified bodies with no real sense of their past lives, since the places they grew up in lie effaced in submerged landscapes, and no sense of a future either. What makes this vision of China so appealing as a description of what capitalism has and will come to mean for what Marx called the ‘peasant nations’ is the sheer speed (and bureaucratic purpose) with which much of this dystopian future is being unfolded before us.

Gavin WALKER

Steve Edwards

Grey Anderson

(Originally published in French: http://revueperiode.net/sur-la-production-de-lespace-et-quelques-questions-urbaines-tour-dhorizon-de-la-litterature-anglophone/ )

Daniel Hartley

Eric Blanc

This piece was first published in French at http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-marxisme-et-amerique-latine/

This piece was originally published in French at http://revueperiode.net/breve-bibliographie-annotee-sur-le-capitalisme-marchand/

The Marxism and religion debate has returned with renewed vigour of late. We need to remind ourselves that by ‘religion’, Marx and Engels usually meant the dominant form of religion in Europe: Christianity, although they also discuss Judaism. On this question, the full range of texts by Marx and Engels on theology are rarely discussed. The reason is that early in the debate a few texts were chosen as a ‘canon within the canon’, leaving many other texts out in the cold.[1] In order to bring attention to those writings, I offer this annotated bibliography, organised according to the main religious themes discussed by Marx and Engels. The following collection begins with Marx, drawing occasionally on joint works with Engels, before focusing in the last two sections on Engels’s life-long interest in religion.

This piece was originally published in French at http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-le-marxisme-ecologique/

This piece was originally published in French at http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-pour-un-marxisme-queer/