The conceptual coherence of market socialism is examined through engagement with Maxi Nieto’s claim that it represents an “impossible” form of socialism. While proponents argue that market socialism—through its retention of the allocative function of markets—preserves the efficiency of markets while eliminating capitalist exploitation, critics like Nieto assert that markets and capital are inseparable, with the latter perpetuating domination, inefficiency, and inequality. Building on Nieto’s thesis, this article advances a functionalist critique, arguing that even under “worker self-managed” models like David Schweickart’s Economic Democracy, competitive markets inevitably lead to the subsumption of labor under capital. On a functionalist interpretation of capitalist relations of production, labor can be subsumed to capital even through mere exchange. Analyzing the form of capitalist value shows that that surplus-labor extraction—and hence exploitation—can persist independently of formal ownership arrangements. The persistence of the law of value indicates that market socialism remains governed by capitalist social relations, which calls into question its compatibility with socialist commitments to equality, sustainability, and human development.
This paper argues that elite Western scientific philanthropy, exemplified by programs such as the MacArthur Fellowship, operates as a sophisticated instrument of neocolonial control. Using the 2025 MacArthur “genius grant” awarded for a cultural research project in Madagascar integrating “embodied practices, like dance, into research and climate science” as a case study, this analysis deconstructs the power dynamics inherent in such philanthropic endeavors. We contend that by centering Western academic methodologies, defining research agendas, and anointing individual “geniuses,” these grants perpetuate the economic and epistemic dependency of the Global South. This diverts critical resources and attention away from structural solutions, such as resource sovereignty and debt relief, towards academic projects that primarily serve Western epistemological interests. This dynamic constitutes a form of “epistemic rent-seeking,” where Northern institutions extract cultural and intellectual capital from the South under the guise of benevolence. The paper concludes that achieving genuine scientific equity requires a fundamental shift away from the model of elite philanthropy and towards a framework of reparative justice and direct, unconditional funding for autonomous Southern institutions, recognizing that true liberation can only be achieved through political struggle, not charity.
This piece addresses some common questions and concerns regarding the recent special issue on China as well as the Chinese political economy in general. I argue that what unfolds in China may well mark the beginning of a new phase in the global decline of capitalism and a worldwide revival of socialism.
This article re-examines the widespread view that Lenin pioneered a distinct 'party of a new type' by demonstrating that his political and organizational model was deeply rooted in the tradition of German revolutionary Social Democracy. Drawing on a comparative analysis of party structures, tactics, and theoretical commitments, it argues that the Bolshevik Party did not represent a radical break from the Second International, but rather a contextual application of orthodox Marxist principles developed in Germany between 1848 and 1890. Far from rejecting the German model, Lenin consistently upheld it as the ideal framework for proletarian organization under conditions of both legality and repression. This reframing restores continuity between Bolshevism and classical Marxism and calls for a reappraisal of the SPD's prewar legacy as a source of revolutionary praxis rather than a failed precursor.
An original interpretation of the relationship between labor and capital in the specific case of platforms like Uber is required. To this end, a critical dialog with the works of Simon Joyce (2020) and Sigurd Oppegaard (2023) proves particularly fruitful for the debate, since both authors draw on the essential Marxian category of the subsumption of labor under capital. This relationship is fundamentally parasitic, as, within the sphere of circulation, platforms appropriate part of the drivers' income, constituting a regressive form of capital accumulation. This dynamic is made possible by the platform's ownership of a specific technical infrastructure, allowing for the material subsumption of labor under capital, without, however, there being formal or real subsumption. Through this process, platforms like Uber radically restructure the traditional taxi service, imposing extensive external control and a particular form of precarization on drivers.
Russian politician Vladimir Medinsky's criticisms of Marx turn out, on close inspection, to be poorly sourced and inaccurate; this is unsurprising, given their author's ideological stance and his track record of falsifications. But examination of Marx and Engels' writings does reveal alarming rhetoric about Slav peoples (in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolutions), along with inaccuracies of their own: a mistranslation from the Russian historian Karamzin, and repeated references to a fake document, the so-called "Will of Peter the Great." Marx used these supposed citations to support his view that Russia was the most serious threat to the revolutionary movement in Europe, and to the wider world. While his concerns in his earlier years were understandable, the nature of the Russian regime had changed by the 1870s, requiring new policies and terminology. Meanwhile, Marx gained a closer acquaintance with Russian language and culture, allowing him to develop a more nuanced position; this led to his writing influential texts (in particular, letters addressing topics of historical inevitability and the existence of diverse paths for societal development).
The Marxian notions of "wear and tear" and "moral depreciation" have been employed in the scholarly debate on the value-determinations of knowledge-intensive commodities (KICs) to account for their alleged "peculiar cost structure". The latter refers to the substantial disparity between the high costs incurred in the production of the first unit or "prototype" of KICs, on the one hand, and the relatively negligible costs associated with the generation of their subsequent copies, on the other. This paper examines the relevant literature to elucidate whether "moral depreciation" and "wear and tear" have been utilized in a manner consistent with Marx's own analysis. His original account is reconstructed through an exegetical reading of key passages found across the three volumes of Capital. It is demonstrated that Marx's original ideas have been misinterpreted and distorted, resulting in an inaccurate and unrealistic characterisation of the value-determinations of KICs. The paper also challenges the idea that the "peculiar cost structure" is a distinctive feature of KICs, thereby suggesting that the entire debate may be misplaced. This contribution adds to the growing body of Marxist scholarship that affirms the actuality and validity of the core categories of Marx and Engels's Critique of Political Economy under contemporary capitalist conditions of production.
Fully automated luxury communism (FALC) advocates a post-capitalist utopian vision in which technological automation eliminates the need for drudgery, abundant material goods are universally available, and economic planning is algorithmically assisted and democratically guided. While objections to FALC often focus on the (in)feasibility of its goals, this paper follows recent critiques of FALC in shifting the focus to desirability: should we want a world structured around full automation, universally accessible luxury, and AI-augmented democracy? This paper first outlines FALC's theoretical foundations before developing a semi-detailed model of a FALCist society (FALC-S). Then, employing a pluralistic evaluative framework, it provides reasons to affirm FALC-S's desirability across five key dimensions: freedom, equality, well-being, solidarity, and security. It also addresses major objections, including concerns that FALC would deprive humans of labor and the meaning it provides, as well as critiques of its commitment to luxury from anti-consumerist and eco-aesthetic perspectives. FALC-S is well-positioned to satisfy the normative criteria for a highly desirable political future. While broad in scope, this analysis is intended as preliminary rather than definitive, laying the groundwork for further exploration of FALC in debates on utopianism, technology, and post-scarcity within Marxist discourse.
Universal interconnection and universal change are what call for the dialectical method of inquiry. Superdeterminism requires that the changes coming to anything result, in part, from causes within it, but its perseverance nonetheless will mean these are temporarily counteracted: so every phenomenon is contradictory. Nor can change remain unchangingly incremental: at a threshold, quantity will be transformed into quality. Neither can the superseded remain unchangingly absent, or return just as before: hence, the negation of the negation.
Capitalist commodity production subordinates concrete and distinct forms of creative activity to the quantifiable and homogeneous category of abstract labor. In order for commodities to be exchanged on the market, products of specific types of human labor must be equalized as measurable units of abstract labor-time. Capital's logic of value separates us from the essential human capacity to labor, turning human activity into a means of obtaining a wage for workers and producing surplus-value for capitalists. Marx's theory of alienation shows that, under capitalism, workers have been alienated from their species-being, or their ability to fulfill biological and social needs through conscious activity in and on the world. This process reduces qualitatively distinct forms of human activity to quantifiable units of abstract labor-time. The subordination of concrete labor to abstract labor-time alienates workers from their essential human capacity to consciously and creatively act in and on the world-their ability, that is, to engage in unalienated labor-while also subsuming non-capitalist forms of time to the logic of value production. Anti-colonial resistance to the subordination of all forms of life to the logic of value represents a concrete example of the struggle against alienation in practice. By viewing elements of the past as an ongoing site of contestation, Romantic Marxism seeks to combine a living tradition of life and resistance with working-class organizing in the present, as part of a movement toward a qualitatively different communist society in the future. Integrating the Romantic view of the past with Marx's critique of alienation expands the utopian vision of communist freedom, while remaining grounded in, and emerging from, the material conditions of the present.
Allen Buchanan and others have put forward a popular view that Marx holds a "general conception of exploitation," in which one individual benefits by exploiting the interests of others. However, a close reading of Marx's texts reveals that this interpretation lacks theoretical grounding and is, in fact, an ideological construction that can be traced back to the utilitarian theory of exploitation. Marx exposed this ideology as rooted in the sphere of production and closely connected to the rise of capitalist relations of production. Following the method of critique of political economy, which proceeds from the concrete to the abstract and then rising to the concrete, Marx further takes "individuals producing in society" as his starting point for a critical analysis of relations of production. The concept of exploitation must be understood within the specific context of capitalist production relations, rather than as a general notion of harm between individuals. Marx therefore consistently emphasizes the class nature of exploitation and rejects the views of bourgeois political economy, which interpret exploitation from individualistic or moralistic perspectives.
In the 70s, Marxist-feminist currents defined gender through the division of labor that relegated women to the home and made their work unwaged. However, the assignment of domestic tasks to women remains a more complex process than it has been made out to be. By opening the scopes from the Marxist feminist debates around gender, this study aims to define the gender category through concepts developed in the critique of political economy and its study of the capitalist social relation. Through this insight, I argue that during the first two centuries of capitalism the necessities for the establishment of the family institution and the figure of the free individual laborer were resolved through a specific division of labor that created a relation of domination within the family household, which was reified as the category of gender. By understanding how the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production give way to the division of labor, this study attempts to revitalize the Marxist debate on gender and relate it to the cycle of capitalist production.
According to G.A. Cohen's socialist egalitarianism, distributive justice applies to both institutions and personal choices, challenging John Rawls's liberal egalitarian view which holds that the basic structure of society is the primary subject of justice. Cohen endorses the Christian social nostrum that social revolution demands fundamental changes in motivation and not only in the institutional structure. He also contends that incentives should not be permitted in a society based on the idea that contingent personal assets are morally irrelevant in distributive terms. These ideas find a vivid illustration in a radical construal of the Parable of the Talents, where the traditionally reviled third servant becomes the hero by refusing to take unfair advantage of his position. Contrary to the conventional reading that extolls exploitative profit-making, his choice shows that justice cannot be achieved only by institutional means and that incentivized inequalities, which undermine communal ties, are unjust.
Disability and disabled people present a theoretical, empirical and, ultimately, political problem for Marxian political economists. As a group frequently distinguished by its marginal attachment to labor markets, the condition of disabled people challenges Marxists in identifying where exactly the disabled fall within the dialectic between the proletariat and the capitalist class. Equally unclear to Marxists, therefore, is what function the disabled serve in cycles of capitalist accumulation and crisis, and what role they may play in the class struggle. Complicating this problem are two issues: (1) disabled people are a large, heterogeneous group that may hold multiple class positions (including that of the capitalist class), and (2) that Marx's concepts of the relative surplus population, the industrial reserve army of labor, etc. are themselves ambiguous within his work. Beginning with a discussion of the social theory of disability, I follow with a genealogical discussion of the relative surplus population, an overview of current debates within Marxian disability theory, and a subsequent examination of where the various disabled people fit within this schema. Finally, a discussion of how to operationalize Marxian class categories in relation to national unemployment statistics in the United States paves the way for future empirical research. While most disabled people occupy the stagnant and pauper layers of the relative surplus population, the disabled's role within cycles of capitalist accumulation cannot be discovered using the existing macroeconomic data alone, and must be supplemented with qualitative work on disabled people's class positions.
