45: KMY2K OK?

Introduction: Marx Without Monsters

The disintegration of socialist states has inspired a strange nostalgia in the supposedly triumphant West.

Marxism After Ho Chi Minh

Viet Thanh Nguyen
Reading Marx and Marxist theory has always produced a mixture of excitement and discomfort.

Blacks and Reds in Polish Technicolor

Ewa Pagacz
In post-communist Poland, the grass gets painted green whenever the Pope comes to visit.

Marxing Across the Border

Frederick Aldama
As capital shrinks the globe by sucking "vampire-like" (Marx's term) the life out of the working classes, it is creating new (albeit unintended) transnational proletarian collectives.

Farce, Conservative Marxism, and "The Eighteenth Brumaire"

Bill Freind
Some contemporary Marxists have responded to their perceived anachronism by advocating substantially more conservative positions, especially with respect to that undefinable phenomenon we define as "postmodernism."

Marx vs. Weber: Uno Mas!

J C Myers
Social revolutions have come and gone. Proletarian internationalism lived and died. It fought and lost, and for the moment at least, has disappeared from our world. We are certainly closer to common ruin than to any more sustainable, more humane way of existence.

Marxism, Class Analysis, and the USSR: A Y2K Perspective

Richard D. Wolff
The end of Marxism's first full century at Y2K seems a reasonable moment to compare its strengths and achievements with its weaknesses and failures.

Marx's Media Corps

Jonathan Sterne
The media enhance capitalism, capitalism feeds the media. This is what we are told.

Shamanic Marxism and the Ghosts of Capital

Joe Lockard
Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is a good end-of-the-millenium book: its historical time scale is millenial and its vision is apocalyptic.

The Microserfs Are Revolting: Sid Meier's Civilization II

William Stephenson
Computer games which do have the potential to address social issues, by placing the player in the responsible position of managing a society, generally assume that colonization, economic expansion and the suppression of internal dissidence are good things.

Reification and the Standards Movement in Public Education

Tim Hardin
I have taught high school English in Portland, Oregon public schools for 14 years. Our task, clarified to us time and time again, was to prepare kids for successful employment in the adult world.

Making Histories

Jillian Sandell
One of the reasons autobiography is such an important genre is that it is a powerful way for marginalized groups to tell their previously unheard stories.

Reading Communism: Italy, Berenguer, and Me

Joel Schalit
I asked myself whether these journalists really knew what they were talking about, or whether they were living out some kind of masochistic fantasy about what it must have been like to live in a real totalitarian society.

Please, Hammer, Don't Hurt Me: Why I Don't Read Marx

Aaron Shuman
I have never read a word of Marx that I took pleasure in, or understood. While ignorance may not be bliss, the writing of Angela Davis, Mike Davis, or Che Guevara is.

Ingrate

Jeremy Russell
Ingrate -- Ergonomics -- a cartoon

Marxist Valuable Players

Mike Mosher
A drawing of the all-star team of Marxist theory and practice.