Designing Socialism is a complete reprint, as an e-book, of the special April 2012 issue of the American academic Marxist journal Science & Society. It continues that publication’s tradition of providing, as stated by its usual editor David Laibman, “a major worldwide pulse-taking of the state of play in theoretical socialism” every April of the years ending in “2” in every decade (Campbell, ed., 7).
Author: Jason Schulman
JASON SCHULMAN is on the editorial board of New Politics, the editor of Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy (Palgrave, 2013), and author of Neoliberal Labour Governments and the Union Response: The Politics of the End of Labourism (Palgrave, 2015).
Bogdan Denitch
Perhaps ironically, shortly after writing the following memorial for Arthur Lipow, longtime New Politics sponsor Bogdan Denitch died on March 28 at the age of 86.
From the Editors
We have had an extraordinary presidential primary in 2016: in addition to the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, we have an authoritarian demagogue, Donald Trump, who has unleashed a reactionary rage which harkens back to fascism, and another, Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist.
Getting From Here to There: A Response to Barry Finger
I must admit that I’m somewhat reluctant to write a response to my friend Barry Finger’s response to my article in the Winter 2016 issue of New Politics on Bernie Sanders while the Democratic presidential candidate race between Hillary Clinton and Sanders is still going on. Nevertheless, I will do so.
First, it should now be clear, in the wake of Sanders’ victories in yesterday’s Democratic caucuses, that Barry’s assertion that “the Sanders challenge within the Democratic Party has come to its natural conclusion” is not justified. Let’s not make grand pronouncements of this sort until we’re far closer to the Democratic National Convention.
review
What Is This Thing Called Leninism?
First, allow me to come clean: I count Paul Le Blanc as a friend and comrade and am in his debt—along with Peter Hudis, author of Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Haymarket, 2013)—for inviting me to join the editorial board of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg being published by Verso Books. And I am in agreement with many of the positions on politics and historical matters that Le Blanc expresses in Unfinished Leninism.
Bernie Sanders and the Dilemma of the Democratic “Party”
Some months ago I responded to a piece that appeared on the New Politics blog by my longtime fellow NP editorial board member and friend Barry Finger.1 In my own blog, I argued that Barry had a better, more sophisticated understanding of the peculiarities of the Democratic Party and the U.S.
From the Editors
In this issue we are proud to present a previously unpublished lecture by C.L.R. James, the noted Afro-Caribbean Marxist intellectual. His discussion of Oliver Cox’s book Caste, Class, and Race, first published in 1948, brings an historic Black socialist voice to illuminate some of the issues that face our own times and the demand that Black Lives Matter.
Jeremy Corbyn versus the Third Way
A development which no one expected now appears inevitable. Barring either otherwordly intervention or old-fashioned political dirty tricks, Jeremy Corbyn, long on the left wing of the British Labour Party, is slated to become that party's new leader.
And the rabidly pro-capitalist heirs of long-gone "New Labour" leader Tony Blair, as well as the traditional right wing of the Labour Party, are absolutely apoplectic.
On Critical Theory, Value Theory, and So-Called Traditional Marxism
Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, 246 pp.
The Sanders Campaign and the Democratic “Party”
I appreciate the nonsectarian tone of the piece on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign by my longtime fellow New Politics editorial board member and friend Barry Finger. I think he has a better, more sophisticated understanding of the peculiarities of the Democratic Party (DP) and the U.S. electoral system than do many on the radical left that refuse to support any DP candidate regardless of that candidate’s personal political platform. However, I think that Barry still suffers from certain misunderstandings regarding just how different the big two U.S. political parties are from political parties that exist anywhere else in the world, and this means there are defects in his suggestions as to how left-wing socialists should relate to the Sanders campaign.
Remembering Marshall Berman
The death of Marshall Berman—City University of New York political theory professor, author of books including the seminal All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Dissent editorial board member, and one-time professor of mine—caught me quite by surprise, as I’m sure it did many. I’d last seen him in person at a Dissent holiday party and last talked to him on the phone some months ago. Alth
Beyond November: Thoughts on politics, social movements, and the 2012 elections
[This article first appeared in the September issue of Jacobin.]
Goodbye, Mr. Keynes?
Paul Mattick, Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism. Reaktion Books, London, 2011. 126 pp.
Michael Harrington and the Twilight of Capitalism
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay — Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)
Michael Harrington is rarely taken seriously as a Marxist thinker — indeed, his Marxism is rarely taken seriously at all, by either his critics or sympathizers.
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