Matt Vidal

Aviva Chomsky

Neil Larsen

Ramaa Vasudevan

Alex Gourevitch

Abbie Rhodes

Prospects for left renewal dominate this issue of Catalyst. Around the world, progressive forces continue to rebuild after decades retreat. In the process, fundamental questions of strategy are reemerging — from organized labor to electoral strategy to the function of culture and ideology in solidifying capitalist domination.

This issue asks not only how we might achieve power, but what we should prioritize once we have it. We question both the theory and viability of fashionable post-work utopias, give political context to the leftist victory in Colombia’s recent election, which broke with decades of right-wing rule, and analyze how socialists should think about public debt. We also turn a critical eye on C. L. R. James’s cricket memoir Beyond a Boundary and debunk the new discourse on “decoloniality,” the latest incarnation of postcolonial studies.

Vol.6, No.2

Catalyst

Mathias Nilges

Nicholas Brown

Josh Robinson

Marxism and the Critique of Value aims to complete the critique of the value-form that was initiated by Marx. While Marx's "esoteric" critique of value has been rediscovered from time to time by post-Marxists who know they've found something interesting but don't quite know which end is the handle, Anglophone Marxism has tended to bury this esoteric critique beneath a more redistributionist understanding of Marx. The essays in this volume attempt to think the critique of value through to the end, and to draw out its implications for the current economic crisis; for violence, Islamism, gender relations, masculinity, and the concept of class; for revolutionary practice and agency; for the role of the state and the future of the commons; for the concepts that come down to us from Enlightenment thought: indeed, for the manifold phenomena that characterize contemporary society under a capitalism in crisis.

Marxism and the Critique of Value

Determinations employs a Marxist approach to examine postcolonial theory and provides critical readings of a range of postcolonial narratives, mainly Latin American. It argues that the national question remains an unresolved problem in this field, particularly in light of the confusions engendered by concepts of globalization, and that the cultural link between the ideas of nation and narrative remains a fruitful avenue of study. Taking issue with the approaches of theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, Larsen takes the reader through the work of writers such as Cortazar, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Rulfo and Vargas Llosa. He concludes with a pungent reassessment of Benedict Anderson's classic work, Imagined Communities.

Essays on Theory, Narrative, and Nation in the Americas

Determinations

On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics

Reading North by South

Annotation A critique of high modernism from a newly formulated Marxist perspective, achieved through analyses of texts by Marx and Adorno, Manet's paintings, and the works of several Latin American writers. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies

Modernism and Hegemony

Neil Larsen

Books

Your next favorite book is out there