Posts tagged: weekend-read

Was there a General Crisis of Feudalism?

Was the feudal order subject to accidental disintegration; did it collapse under several unrelated crises; or was there a general crisis of this society because of its inherent weaknesses?
"Explanations" of Male Dominance

To explain the origins of female subordination we need a theory that accounts for the control of women's work by men.
Red Scientist: Two Strands from a Life in Three Colours

An exploration of Bernal's contribution to the politicization of science and scientists, above all the development of the Social Relations of Science movement.
Movie (1934)

A 1934 poem by Muriel Rukeyser, collected in Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema.
Engels, Lenin, and the Poetic of Socialist Realism

Galvano Della Volpe's consideration of literary realism after Engels' famous remarks on Balzac and Lenin's on Tolstoy.
Eulogy

Kate Millett remembers her mother.
W.E.B. Du Bois and Black Sovereignty

An inquiry into Du Bois' articulation with Liberia, colonialism and its concomitant formations of Black middle classes, the history of the "Americo-Liberian" elite, and the advent of the United States as a colonial power.
Robots and Capitalism (1984)

Tessa Morris-Suzuki's prescient essay — written for New Left Review in 1984 and included in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution — on the contradictions of automated labor and the commodification of knowledge by software, which responds to claims about automation and value advanced by Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism.
Between Nature and Society: Introductions to On Materialism

Timpanaro launches a polemic against the two major tendences of post-war Western Marxism — Frankfurt School critical theory and Althusserian structuralism — and a defense of the late Engels in an effort to reunite historical materialism with a materialism of the natural sciences, inspired by the writings of Giacomo Leopardi.
Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence

Any concept which — like "exterminism" — collates all the "inertial," "irrational," "symmetrical" and institutionally "autonomous" aspects of the arms race into a single over-riding process will make it harder to understand the purposeful, strategic function of the current arms build-up within the larger context of the New Cold War.
History Was In a Hurry: Autumn 1956 in Paris

In this excerpt from his memoir, Juan Goytisolo reflects on the early months of his exile from Franco's Spain in France and his encounters with French intellectuals and PCF militants in his effort to launch a Spanish-language political and cultural journal.
Nationalism Painted Red

Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley look at the development of communist movements in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and respond to the claims of Western analysts who rooted conflicts between them after 1975 in "traditional" antagonisms.