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February 1867, after more than two decades of herculean work, Karl Marx told his friend Friedrich Engels that the first part of his long-awaited critique of political economy was finally complete. Marx travelled from London to Hamburg to deliver the manuscript of Volume I (“The Process of Production of Capital”) of his magnum opus and, in agreement with his editor, Otto Meissner, it was decided that Capital would appear in three parts. Brimming with satisfaction, Marx wrote that the publication of his book was, “without question, the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie.”

Despite the long labor of composition before 1867, the structure of Capital would be considerably expanded over the coming years, and Volume I itself continued to absorb significant energies on Marx’s part, even after its publication. One of the most evident examples of this commitment was the French translation of Capital, published in forty-four installments between 1872 and 1875. This volume was not a mere translation but a version “completely revised by the author” in which Marx deepened the section on the process of capital accumulation and better developed his ideas about the distinction between the “concentration” and “centralization” of capital.

Seeking the Definitive Version

After interruptions due to poor health — and after a period of intense political activity for the International Working Men’s Association — Marx turned to work on a new edition of Capital, Volume I, at the beginning of the 1870s. Dissatisfied with how he had expounded the theory of value, he spent December 1871 and January 1872 rewriting what he had published in 1867. A reprint of Das Kapital in German that included the changes made by Marx came out in 1872. This was a key year for the dissemination of Capital, since it also saw the appearance of the Russian and French translations. Entrusted to Joseph Roy, who had previously translated some texts of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, the latter appeared in batches with the publisher Maurice Lachâtre. The first one was published 150 years ago, on September 17, 1872.

Marx agreed that it would be good to bring out a “cheap popular edition.” “I applaud your idea of publishing the translation . . . in periodic installments,” he wrote. “In this form, the book will be more accessible to the working class, and for me that consideration outweighs any other,” he argued with his publisher. Aware, however, that there was a “reverse side” of the coin, he anticipated that the “method of analysis” he had used would “make for somewhat arduous reading in the early chapters,” and that readers might “be put off” when they were “unable to press straight on in the first place.” He did not feel he could do anything about this “disadvantage,” other than alert and forewarn “readers concerned with the truth.” As Marx wrote in a well-known sentence of the preface to the French edition of Capital, “There is no royal road to learning and the only ones with any chance of reaching its sunlit peaks are those who do not fear exhaustion as they climb the steep upward paths.”

In the end, Marx had to spend much more time on the translation than he had initially planned for the proof correction. As he wrote to the Russian economist Nikolai Danielson, Roy had “often translated too literally,” forcing Marx himself to “rewrite whole passages in French, to make them more palatable to the French public.” Earlier that month, his daughter Jenny had told family friend Ludwig Kugelmann that her father was “obliged to make numberless corrections,” rewriting “not only whole sentences but entire pages.” Subsequently, Engels wrote to Kugelmann in a similar vein that the French translation had proved a “real slog” for Marx and that he “more or less had to rewrite the whole thing from the beginning.”

In revising the translation, moreover, Marx decided to introduce some additions and modifications. In the postscript to Le Capital, he did not hesitate to attach to it “a scientific value independent of the original” and stated that the new version “should be consulted even by readers familiar with German.” The most interesting point, especially for its political value, concerns the historical tendency of capitalist production. If in the previous edition of Capital, Volume I, Marx had written that “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those less developed, the image of its own future,” in the French version, the words in italics were substituted with “to those that follow it up the industrial ladder.” This clarification limited the tendency of capitalist development only to Western countries that were already industrialized.

Following a more in-depth study of history, Marx was now fully aware that the schema of linear progression through the “Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production,” which he had drawn in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in 1859, was inadequate for an understanding of the movement of history, and that it was indeed advisable to steer clear of any philosophy of history. He did not see historical development in terms of unshakable linear progress toward a predefined end. The more pronounced multilinear conception that Marx developed in his final years led him to look even more attentively at the historical specificities and unevenness of political and economic development in different countries and social contexts. This approach certainly increased the difficulties he faced in the already bumpy course of completing the second and third volumes of Capital.

In the last decade of his life, Marx undertook thorough investigations of societies outside Europe and expressed himself unambiguously against the ravages of colonialism. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise, and to attribute him a Eurocentric view of societal development. Marx criticized thinkers who, while highlighting the destructive consequences of colonialism, used categories peculiar to the European context in their analyses of peripheral areas of the globe. He repeatedly warned against those who failed to observe the necessary distinctions between phenomena, and — especially after his theoretical advances in the 1870s — he was highly wary of transferring interpretive categories across completely different historical or geographical fields. All this is clearer thanks to Le Capital.

In 1878, in a letter in which Marx weighed the positive and negative sides of the French edition, he wrote to Danielson that it contained “many important changes and additions,” but that he had “also sometimes been obliged — principally in the first chapter — to simplify the matter.” Later, Engels thought that these additions were simplifications not worth reproducing, and he did not include all the changes made by Marx to Le Capital in the fourth German edition of Capital, published in 1890, seven years after Marx’s death. Marx was unable to complete a final revision of Capital, Volume I. In fact, neither the French edition of 1872–75 nor the third German edition issued in 1881 can be considered the definitive version that Marx would have liked it to be.

Marx Through Le Capital

Le Capital had considerable importance for the diffusion of Marx’s work around the world. It was used for the translation of many extracts into various languages — the first in the English language, published in 1883, for example. More generally, Le Capital represented the first gateway to Marx’s work for readers in various countries. The first Italian translation — published between 1882 and 1884 — was made directly from the French edition. In the case of Spanish, Le Capital made it possible to bring out some partial editions and two complete translations: one in Madrid, in 1967, and one in Buenos Aires, in 1973. Since French was more widely known than German, it was thanks to this version that Marx’s critique of political economy was able to reach many countries in Hispanic America more rapidly. Much the same was true for Portuguese-speaking countries. In Portugal itself, Capital circulated only through the small number of copies available in French until an abridged version appeared in Portuguese, shortly before the fall of the Salazarist dictatorship in 1974. In general, political activists and researchers in both Portugal and Brazil found it easier to approach Marx’s work via the French translation than in the original. The few copies that found their way into Portuguese-speaking African countries were also in that language.

Colonialism also partly shaped the mechanisms whereby Capital became available in the Arab world. While in Egypt and Iraq it was English that featured most in the spread of European culture, the French edition played a more prominent role elsewhere, especially in Algeria, which, in the 1960s, was a significant center for facilitating the circulation of Marxist ideas in “non-aligned” countries. The significance of Le Capital stretched also to Asia, as demonstrated by the fact that the first Vietnamese translation of Volume I, published between 1959 and 1960, was based on the French edition.

Thus, as well as being often consulted by translators around the world and checked against the 1890 edition published by Engels, which became the standard version of Das Kapital, the French translation has served as the basis for complete translations of Capital into seven languages. One hundred and fifty years since its first publication, it continues to be a source of stimulating debate among scholars and activists interested in Marx’s critique of capitalism.

In a letter to his longtime comrade Friedrich Adolph Sorge, Marx remarked that with Le Capital, he had “consumed so much of [his] time that [he would] not again collaborate in any way on a translation.” That is exactly what happened. The toil and trouble that he put into producing the best possible French version were remarkable indeed. But we can say they were well rewarded. Le Capital has had a significant circulation, and the additions and changes made by Marx during the revision of its translation contributed to the anti-colonial and universal dimension of Capital that is becoming widely recognized nowadays, thanks to some of the newest and most insightful contributions in Marx studies.

*The English version of this article was originally published in . The article has also been published , , , , , and . 

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 is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Westfield State University (Massachusetts, USA). She is the author of Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (Brill, 2012).

 is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College (Des Plaines, IL, USA). He is author of: Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Brill, 2012) and Frantz Fanon, Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto, 2015). He has edited: The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, 2011), and The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, volumes 1, 2, and 3 (Verso, 2013, 2015, and 2019).

is Emeritus Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (Paris, France). Among his books there are: Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (Verso, 2005), La Cage d’acier: Max Weber et le marxisme wéberien (Éditions Stock, 2013), and Rosa Luxemburg, l’étincelle incendiaire (Le Temps des Cerises, 2018).

 is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University (UK). He is the author of: Kritik der Staatsfinanzen: zur politischen Ökonomie des Steuerstaats (VSA Verlag, 1984) and Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie heute. Zeitgenosse Marx (VSA Verlag, 2017).

is a professor of Sociology at 91��ɫ and is acknowledged globally as one of the authors who has made significant contributions to the revival of Marx studies over the last decade. His major writings comprise Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford, 2020).��

The planet is in deep trouble because of capitalism, and Karl Marx, freed from the chains of “real socialism,” is being rediscovered all around the world as the thinker who provided us with its most insightful critique.��The Marx Revival is the best, most complete and most modern guide to Marx’s ideas that has appeared since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Written by highly reputed international experts, in a clear form accessible to a wider public, it brings together the liveliest and most thought-provoking contemporary interpretations of Marx’s work. It presents what he actually wrote in respect of 22 key concepts, the areas that require updating as a result of changes since the late-nineteenth century, and the reasons why it is still of such relevance in today’s world. The result is a collection that will prove indispensable both for specialists and for a new generation approaching Marx’s work for the first time. For more, click .

For the Italian Edition of Marx Revival, click .��

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Discussion with John Bellamy Foster & Marcello Musto

on Marx's Ideas on Ecology and Communism

Saturday, 7 May 2022

2:00 - 4:00 (Eastern Standard Time)

Organized jointly by

Marxist Education Project, Shelter & Solidarity, and Monthly Review

is a professor of Sociology at 91��ɫ and is acknowledged globally as one of the authors who has made significant contributions to the revival of Marx studies over the last decade. His major writings comprise Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford, 2020). His writings have been published in 25 languages.

is an editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as a major environmental sociologist. His major writings include The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift (with Brett Clark, Monthly Review Press, 2020); and The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2020).

The planet is in deep trouble because of capitalism, and Karl Marx, freed from the chains of “real socialism,” is being rediscovered all around the world as the thinker who provided us with its most insightful critique.��The Marx Revival is the best, most complete and most modern guide to Marx’s ideas that has appeared since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Written by highly reputed international experts, in a clear form accessible to a wider public, it brings together the liveliest and most thought-provoking contemporary interpretations of Marx’s work. It presents what he actually wrote in respect of 22 key concepts, the areas that require updating as a result of changes since the late-nineteenth century, and the reasons why it is still of such relevance in today’s world. The result is a collection that will prove indispensable both for specialists and for a new generation approaching Marx’s work for the first time. For more, click .

For the Italian Edition of Marx Revival, click .��

The post The Marx Revival: A Discussion with John Bellamy Foster and Marcello Musto appeared first on Laboratory for Alternative Theories.

Marcello Musto is a professor of Sociology at 91��ɫ and is acknowledged globally as one of the authors who has made significant contributions to the revival of Marx studies over the last decade. His major writings comprise Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford, 2020). His writings have been published in 25 languages.

Vijay Prasad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

In the last years of his life, Karl Marx expanded his research in new directions—studying recent anthropological discoveries, analyzing communal forms of ownership in precapitalist societies, supporting the populist movement in Russia, and expressing critiques of colonial oppression in India, Ireland, Algeria, and Egypt. Between 1881 and 1883, he also traveled beyond Europe for the first and only time. Focusing on these last years of Marx's life, this book dispels two key misrepresentations of his work: that Marx ceased to write late in life, and that he was a Eurocentric and economic thinker fixated on class conflict alone.

With The Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello Musto claims a renewed relevance for the late work of Marx, highlighting unpublished or previously neglected writings, many of which remain unavailable in English. Readers are invited to reconsider Marx's critique of European colonialism, his ideas on non-Western societies, and his theories on the possibility of revolution in noncapitalist countries. From Marx's late manuscripts, notebooks, and letters emerge an author markedly different from the one represented by many of his contemporary critics and followers alike. As Marx currently experiences a significant rediscovery, this volume fills a gap in the popularly accepted biography and suggests an innovative reassessment of some of his key concepts.

See below for the editions of The Last Years of Karl Marx in other languages.

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As Europe, broadly the West, goes to war and the media grimly predicts a third world war, this panel discussion asks pertinent questions about the meaning of this war for the working people of the world and in particular the rest of the world. The 'third' world or the 'global south' has historically been crucial in the construction of Europe as the dominant and civilized other. What are the geopolitical implications of the present war in Europe for the rest of the world? How does this war hinder the prospect of global peace and people’s security? What is the impact of the war on food security, energy security, and in general security of nations? Is there any necessity for the weaker and smaller nations and the working people to take side in the war? Must they support military alliances? Is this war, which includes weaponised policies of economic sanctions and discriminatory policies of protection of refugees, essential to save “democracy”? What, in fact, will be the definition of peace in this context? How can we articulate the politics of peace in this time?

Speakers:

Prof. Marcello Musto, Professor of Sociological Theory, 91��ɫ, Toronto

Prof. Sandro Mezzadra, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Bologna

Prof. Ranabir Samaddar, Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group, India

Moderator: 

Prof. Paula Banerjee, Professor and Head in South and South-East Asian Studies, University of Calcutta & Calcutta Research Group, India 

* This webinar is a part of CRG's research programme in migration and forced migration studies organised in collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna and several other universities and institutions in India.

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This review essay offers a critical overview of five influential books on the topic of alternatives to capitalism published between the Great Recession and the Global Pandemic. These titles are a small fraction of this burgeoning literature. However, these titles have been selected to give a sense of the diversity of the debate while highlighting a general failure to incorporate class analysis into the critique of capitalism and visions of an alternative. The article argues that the analysis of class dynamics should be integrated into the discussion at the level of not only economic relations but also the state and international relations. This is indeed essential for the theoretical efficacy and strategic pertinence of the analysis. Here is  to this piece. 

Socialism, Markets, and the Critique of Money The Theory of “Labor Notes”, by Tsuyoshi Yuki - 

This book provides a comprehensive overview of historical and international debates on the theory of “labor money” or “labor notes.” These debates exist in a triangular context of market socialism, communism (community-based socialism), and local currency, joining numerous socialists, anarchists, and Marx and Engels. Labor note theory encompasses theoretical, ideological, and practical doctrines aimed at designing a fair and desirable labor-based market or non-market economy by reforming the monetary and credit system. This theory was considered an unfeasible utopian idea in the context of orthodox Marxism, which is typically based on a historical study of surplus value doctrines. However, this book eschews Marx’s critique of “labor money” that limits the debate regarding a concrete alternative society, and instead proposes practical and gradual approaches to social reform by scrutinizing the primary sources of labor money theories and practical experiences and reconstructs their theoretical relationships. For more, see the webpage of the book .��

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While political science has probed the ideological, political, economic, and even psychological motivations behind the drive to war, socialist theory has made a unique contribution by highlighting the relationship between the development of capitalism and war. The Left has long theorized its opposition to war, and the main positions of socialist theorists and organizations over the past 150 years offer useful resources for opposing Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, as well as for continuing to oppose NATO.

Rarely have wars — not to be confused with revolutions — had the democratizing effect that the theorists of socialism hoped for. Indeed, they have often proved themselves to be the worst way of carrying out a revolution, both because of the human cost and because of the destruction of the productive forces that they entail. If this was true in the past, it is even more evident in contemporary societies where weapons of mass destruction are continually proliferating.

The Economic Causes of War

In the debates of the First International, César de Paepe, one of its principal leaders, formulated what would become the classical position of the workers’ movement on the question of war: namely, that wars are inevitable under the regime of capitalist production. In contemporary society, they are brought about not by the ambitions of monarchs or other individuals but by the dominant social-economic model. The lesson for the workers’ movement came from the belief that any war should be considered “a civil war,” a ferocious clash between workers that deprived them of the means necessary for their survival.

Karl Marx never developed any consistent or systematic position on war in his writings. In Capital, volume 1, he argued that violence was an economic force, “the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” But he did not think of war as a crucial shortcut for the revolutionary transformation of society, and a major aim of his political activity was to commit workers to the principle of international solidarity.

War was such an important question for Friedrich Engels that he devoted one of his last pieces of writing to it. In his pamphlet “Can Europe Disarm?”, he noted that in the previous twenty-five years, every major power had tried to outdo its rivals militarily and in terms of war preparations. This had involved unprecedented levels of arms production and brought the old continent closer to “a war of destruction such as the world has never seen.”

According to Engels, “The system of standing armies has been carried to such extremes throughout Europe that it must either bring economic ruin to the peoples on account of the military burden, or else degenerate into a general war of extermination.” He emphasized that standing armies were maintained just as much for reasons of domestic politics as they were for external military purposes. They were intended “to provide protection not so much against the external enemy as the internal one,” Engels wrote, by strengthening the forces to repress the proletariat and workers’ struggles. As popular layers paid more than anyone else the costs of war, through taxes and the provision of troops to the state, the workers’ movement should fight for “the gradual reduction of the term of [military] service by international treaty” and for disarmament as the only effective “guarantee of peace.”

Tests and Collapse

It was not long before a peacetime theoretical debate turned into the foremost political issue of the age. Initially, representatives of the workers’ movement opposed any support for war when the Franco-Prussian conflict (the one that preceded the Paris Commune) erupted in 1870. The Social Democratic deputies Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel condemned the annexationist objectives of Bismarck’s Germany and voted against war credits. Their decision to “reject the bill for additional funding to continue the war” earned them a two-year prison sentence for high treason, but it helped to show the working class an alternative way to build on the crisis.

As the major European powers kept up their imperialist expansion, the controversy on war acquired ever greater weight in the debates of the Second International. A resolution adopted at its founding congress had enshrined peace as “the indispensable precondition of any emancipation of the workers.

As the Weltpolitik — the aggressive policy of imperial Germany to extend its power in the international arena — changed the geopolitical setting, anti-militarist principles sank deeper roots in the workers’ movement and influenced the discussions on armed conflicts. War was no longer seen only as hastening the breakdown of the system (an idea on the Left going back to Maximilien Robespierre’s slogan, “no revolution without revolution.”) It was now viewed as a danger because of its grievous consequences for the proletariat in the shape of hunger, destitution, and unemployment.

The resolution “On Militarism and International Conflicts,” adopted by the Second International at its Stuttgart congress in 1907, recapitulated all the key points that had become the common heritage of the workers’ movement. Among these were a vote against budgets that increased military spending, antipathy to standing armies, and a preference for a system of people’s militias.

As the years passed, the Second International commitment to peace lessened, and by the time of World War I, the majority of European socialist parties voted to support it — a course of action that had disastrous consequences. Arguing that the “benefits of progress” should not be monopolized by the capitalists, the workers’ movement came to share the expansionist aims of the ruling classes and was swamped by nationalist ideology. In this sense, the Second International proved completely impotent in the face of the war, ceding its own aim to preserve peace.

Against this backdrop, it was Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin who were two of the most vigorous opponents of the war. Articulate and principled, Luxemburg demonstrated how militarism was a key vertebra of the state and worked to make the “War on war!” slogan “the cornerstone of working-class politics.” As she wrote in The Crisis of German Social Democracy, the Second International had imploded because it failed “to achieve a common tactic and action by the proletariat in all countries.” From then on, the “main goal” of the proletariat should therefore be “fighting imperialism and preventing wars, in peace as in war.”

In Socialism and the War — among other writings penned during World War I — Lenin’s great merit was to identify two fundamental questions. The first concerned the “historical falsification” at work whenever the bourgeoisie tried to attribute a “progressive sense of national liberation” to what were in reality wars of “plunder.”

The second was the masking of contradictions by the social reformists who had replaced the class struggle with a claim on “morsels of the profits obtained by their national bourgeoisie through the looting of other countries.” The most celebrated thesis of this pamphlet — that revolutionaries should seek to “turn imperialist war into civil war” — implied that those who really wanted a “lasting democratic peace” had to wage “civil war against their governments and the bourgeoisie.” Lenin was convinced of what history would later show to be inaccurate: that any class struggle consistently waged in time of war would “inevitably” create a revolutionary spirit among the masses.

Lines of Demarcation

World War I produced divisions not only in the Second International but also in the anarchist movement. In an article published shortly after the outbreak of the conflict, Peter Kropotkin wrote that “the task of any person holding dear the idea of human progress is to squash the German invasion in Western Europe.”

In a reply to Kropotkin, the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta argued that, although he was not a pacifist and thought it legitimate to take up arms in a war of liberation, the world war was not — as bourgeois propaganda asserted — a struggle “for the general good against the common enemy” of democracy but yet another example of the ruling-class subjugation of the working masses. He was aware that “a German victory would certainly spell the triumph of militarism, but also that a triumph for the Allies would mean Russian-British domination in Europe and Asia.”

In the Manifesto of the Sixteen, Kropotkin upheld the need “to resist an aggressor who represents the destruction of all our hopes of liberation.” Victory for the Triple Entente against Germany would be the lesser evil and do less to undermine the existing liberties. On the other side, Malatesta and his fellow-signatories of The Anarchist International Antiwar Manifesto declared, “No distinction is possible between offensive and defensive wars.” Moreover, they added that “none of the belligerents has any right to lay claim to civilization, just as none of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defense.” For Malatesta, Emma Goldman, Ferdinand Nieuwenhuis, and the great majority of the anarchist movement, World War I was a further episode in the conflict among capitalists of various imperialist powers, which was being waged at the expense of the working class. With no “ifs” or “buts,” they stuck with the slogan “no man and no penny for the army,” firmly rejecting even indirect support for the pursuit of war.

Attitudes to the war also aroused debate in the feminist movement. The need for women to replace conscripted men in jobs — for much lower wages, in conditions of overexploitation — encouraged support for war in a sizable part of the newborn suffragette movement. Some of its leaders went so far as to petition for laws allowing the enlistment of women in the armed forces. Yet more radical, antiwar elements persisted. Communist feminists worked to expose duplicitous governments, which were using the war to roll back fundamental social reforms.

Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Sylvia Pankhurst, and of course Rosa Luxemburg were among the first to embark lucidly and courageously on the path that would show successive generations how the struggle against militarism was essential to the struggle against patriarchy. Later, the rejection of war became a distinctive part of International Women’s Day, and opposition to war budgets at the outbreak of any new conflict featured prominently in many platforms of the international feminist movement.

With the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II, violence escalated still further. After Adolph Hitler’s troops attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Great Patriotic War that ended with the defeat of Nazism became such a central element in Russian national unity that it survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and has lasted until our own days.

With the postwar division of the world into two blocs, Joseph Stalin taught that the main task of the international communist movement was to safeguard the Soviet Union. The creation of a buffer zone of eight countries in Eastern Europe was a central pillar of this policy. From 1961, under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union began a new political course that came to be known as “peaceful coexistence.” However, this attempt at constructive cooperation was geared only to the United States, not to the other countries of “actually existing socialism.”

The Soviet Union had already brutally crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Similar events took place in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Faced with demands for democratization during the “Prague Spring,” the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided unanimously to send in half a million soldiers and thousands of tanks. Leonid Brezhnev explained the action by referring to what he called the “limited sovereignty” of Warsaw Pact countries: “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country toward capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.” According to this antidemocratic logic, the definition of what was and was not “socialism” naturally fell to the arbitrary decision of the Soviet leaders.

With the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Red Army again became a major instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy, which continued to claim the right to intervene in what it described as its own “security zone.” These military interventions not only worked against a general arms reduction but served to discredit and globally weaken socialism. The Soviet Union was increasingly seen as an imperial power acting in ways not unlike those of the United States, which, since the onset of the Cold War, had more or less secretly backed coups d’état and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in more than twenty countries around the world.

To Be on the Left Is to Be Against War

With the onset of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the Left is once again confronted with the question of how to position itself when a country’s sovereignty is under attack. It is a mistake for governments like Venezuela’s to refuse condemnation of the invasion. This will make denunciations of possible future acts of aggression by the United States appear less credible. We might recall Lenin’s words in The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination:

"The fact that the struggle for national liberation against one imperialist power may, under certain circumstances, be utilized by another “Great” Power in its equally imperialist interests should have no more weight in inducing Social Democracy to renounce its recognition of the right of nations to self-determination."

The Left has historically supported the principle of national self-determination and defended the right of individual states to establish their frontiers on the basis of the express will of the population. Making direct reference to Ukraine, in Results of the Discussion on Self-Determination, Lenin argued:

"If the socialist revolution were to be victorious in Petrograd, Berlin, and Warsaw, the Polish socialist government, like the Russian and German socialist governments, would renounce the “forcible retention” of, say, the Ukrainians within the frontiers of the Polish state." 

Why suggest, then, that anything different should be conceded to the nationalist government led by Vladimir Putin?

On the other hand, all too many on the Left have yielded to the temptation to become — directly or indirectly — cobelligerents, fueling a new union sacrée. Such a position today serves increasingly to blur the distinction between Atlanticism and pacifism. History shows that, when they do not oppose war, progressive forces lose an essential part of their reason for existence and end up swallowing the ideology of the opposite camp. This happens whenever left parties make their presence in government the essential element of their political action — as the Italian Communists did in supporting the NATO interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, or as does much of today’s Unidas Podemos, which joins the chorus of the Spanish parliament in favor of sending weapons to the Ukrainian army.

Bonaparte Is Not Democracy

Reflecting on the Crimean War, in 1854 Marx opposed liberal democrats who exalted the anti-Russian coalition:

"It is a mistake to describe the war against Russia as a war between liberty and despotism. Apart from the fact that if such be the case, liberty would be for the nonce represented by a Bonaparte, the whole avowed object of the war is the maintenance . . . of the Vienna treaties — those very treaties which annul the liberty and independence of nations."

If we replace Bonaparte with the United States and the Vienna treaties with NATO, these observations seem as if written for today.

In today’s discourse, those who oppose both Russian and Ukrainian nationalism, as well as the expansion of NATO, are often accused of political indecision or simple naivete. But this is not the case. The position of those who propose a policy of nonalignment is the most effective way of ending the war as soon as possible and ensuring the smallest number of victims. It is necessary to pursue ceaseless diplomatic activity based on two firm points: de-escalation and the neutrality of independent Ukraine.

Furthermore, although support for NATO across Europe appears strengthened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is necessary to work harder to ensure that public opinion does not see the largest and most aggressive war machine in the world — NATO — as the solution to the problems of global security. It must be shown that it is a dangerous and ineffectual organization, which, in its drive for expansion and unipolar domination, serves to fuel tensions leading to war in the world.

For the Left, war cannot be “the continuation of politics by other means,” to quote Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum. In reality, it merely certifies the failure of politics. If the Left wishes to become hegemonic and to show itself capable of using its history for the tasks of today, it needs to write indelibly on its banners the words “anti-militarism” and “No to war!”
 

*The English version of this article was originally published in .��

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The theory of alienation occupies a significant place in the work of Marx and has long been considered one of his main contributions to the critique of bourgeois society. Many authors who have written on this concept over the 20th century have erroneously based their interpretations on Marx’s early writings. In this anthology, by contrast, Marcello Musto has concentrated his selection on the most relevant pages of Marx’s later economic works, in which his thoughts on alienation were far more extensive and detailed than those of the early philosophical manuscripts. Additionally, the writings collated in this volume are unique in their presentation of not only Marx’s critique of capitalism, but also his description of communist society. This comprehensive rediscovery of Marx’s ideas on alienation provides an indispensable critical tool for both understanding the past and the critique of contemporary society.

Marcello Musto is a professor of Sociology at 91��ɫ and is acknowledged globally as one of the authors who has made significant contributions to the revival of Marx studies over the last decade. His major writings comprise Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford, 2020). Among his edited books there are Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury, 2014); Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, (Routledge, 2019); and The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (Cambridge, 2020).His writings have been published in 25 languages.

Michael Hardt is a professor of Literature at Duke University, and a political philosopher whose writings explore new forms of domination in the world as well as social movements and other forces of liberation that counter such domination. In the Empire trilogy—Empire (Harvard, 2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin, 2004), and Commonwealth (Harvard, 2009)—he and Antonio Negri investigate the political, legal, economic, and social aspects of globalization. Their most recent work, Assembly (Oxford, 2017), challenges social movements having traditional, centralized forms of political leadership and instead advocate a social unionism—a combination of mixing labor organizing with social movements.

Karl Marx's Writings on Alienation (2021), edited and introduced by Marcello Musto, provides the most comprehensive selection on Marx’s conception of alienation. Written in an accessible style, for academic and general readers alike The introduction of the editor represents a critical, comprehensive and updated overview of the numerous interpretations of alienation within Marxist tradition. See for more details.��

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Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisations: Critical Studies, by Miguel Vedda - 

This book analyses multiple facets of Kracauer’s work, comprehending the essayistic, narrative, philosophical, theoretical and critical writings, and putting special emphasis on some aspects: the phenomenology of metropolis, the theory of historiographic method, the reflections on the crisis of the subject and the emergence of a new subjectivity, the new forms of perception and aesthetic behaviour in late capitalism, the function of critic-intellectuals, the sociology of the middle classes, the theory of fascism, the aesthetical and sociological reflections on literary genres, the politicization of melancholy. An original feature of this book is the attention it pays to the links between Kracauer’s theoretical and critical writings and the traditions of heterodox Marxism, against a habitual tendency to obliterate the political (and emancipatory) dimension in the German author. For more, see the webpage of the book . 

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, by V. Geetha - 

This book offers a reading of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s engagement with the idea and practice of socialism in India by linking it to his lifelong political and philosophical concerns: the annihilation of the caste system, untouchability and the moral and philosophical systems that justify either. Rather than view his ideas through a socialist lens, the author suggests that it is important to measure the validity of socialist thought and practice in the Indian context, through his critique of the social totality. The book argues its case by presenting a broad and connected overview of his thought world and the global and local influences that shaped it. The themes that are taken up for discussion include: his understanding of the colonial rule and the colonial state; history and progress; nationalism and the questions he posed the socialists; his radical critique of the caste system and Brahmancal philosophies, and his unusual interpretation of Buddhism. For more, see the webpage of the book . 

Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, edited by Jean-Numa Ducange and Elisa Marcobelli - 

This book is an anthology of the writings of Jean Jaurès, a central figure of French socialism in the period leading up to World War I. Born in 1859, and killed in 1914 just a few days before the outbreak of the conflict, Jaurès remains one of the most celebrated politicians in France. His writings in this anthology touch on the subjects most dear to him, which were also some of the great political themes of his time. In this book are writings on war and pacifism, on colonialism and anti-colonialism, and on the central themes of socialism of this era, such as reformism and revolution. Despite Jaurès’s notoriety in France, he is not well known abroad. This book, a corpus of his emblematic writings, aims to make Jaurès known to readers outside France unfamiliar with his work. For more, see the webpage of the book . 

Frontier Socialism Self-Organisation and Anti-Capitalism, by Monica Quirico and Gianfranco Ragona - 

Considering the history of workers' and socialist movements in Europe, Frontier Socialism focuses on unconventional forms of anti-capitalist thought, particularly by examining several militant-intellectuals whose legacy is of particular interest for those aiming for a radical critique of capitalism. Following on the work of Michael Löwy, Quirico & Ragona identify relationships of “elective affinity” between figures who might appear different and dissimilar, at least at first glance: the German Anarchist Gustav Landauer, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the German communist Paul Mattick, the Italian Socialist Raniero Panzieri, the Greek-born French euro-communist Nikos Poulantzas, the German-born Swedish Social Democrat Rudolf Meidner, and the French social scientist Alain Bihr as well as two historical struggle experiences, the Spanish Republic and the Italian revolutionary group “Lotta continua”. Frontier Socialism then analyzes these thinkers' and experiences’ respective paths to socialism based on and achieved through self-organization and self-government, not to build a new tradition but to suggest a path forward for both research and political activism. For more, see the webpage of the book .

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