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200 Years of Friedrich Engels: A Critical Assessment of His Life and Scholarship (edited book). 2022.
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114Marx and Engels as PolyglotsMonthly Review (Number 09): 22-35. 2024.Karl Marx’s 1852 work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte opens with the famous remark that men “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.” He goes on to argue that whatever happens in the present time arises from and is a reaction to a political past. Recollecting and interpreting the past for present purposes requires a language. Such a language is not naturally given but needs to be socially constructed. What is more, its vocabulary and grammar stem from ling…Read more
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221In Defense of the Planet Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, by Kohei Saito, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 276 pp., £85.00 (cloth), £29.99 (paper), £23.99 (Kindle) (review)The European Legacy 29 (2): 204-207. 2023.Kohei Saito, a Japanese Marx researcher and editor of the historical-critical edition of Marx and Engels’s complete works (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe or MEGA), is known to Anglophone readers for his...
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211The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, by John Bellamy Foster (review)Science and Society 87 (2): 295-297. 2023.
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197Engels’ name stands and falls today with a variety of his contributions to socialist thought and Marxist philosophy. Yet there is one particular component of the Marxist body of thought that has been subject to a group of controversies for quite some time for which Engels is usually held responsible: dialectics and dialectics of nature. It is curious and ironic that a theoretical contribution to an intellectual tradi tion within the history of European political philosophy could be perceived and…Read more
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727Young Marx on Fetishism, Sexuality, and Religion Revisiting the Bonn NotebooksMonthly Review 5 (74): 46-57. 2022.There is hardly any theme in Karl Marx’s theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force, creating its own gravitational center toward which the interest of later generations of historians, social theorists, and political activists has been pulled. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fet…Read more
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19Perfektionismus der Autonomie (review)The European Legacy 28 (1): 109-112. 2022.The concept of perfectionism has been around for quite some time, circulated most notably in current debates on analytical political philosophy, Kantian moral theory, and liberal conceptions of sta...
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353Friedrich Engels und die »Dialektik der Natur«In Smail Rapic (ed.), Naturphilosophie, Gesellschaftstheorie, Sozialismus: Zur Aktualität von Friedrich Engels, Suhrkamp Verlag. pp. 63-79. 2022.
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261What follows is an attempt to question the ways of how Engels coined the term “dialectics” in his Dialectics in Nature. My focus is directed by an interest in re-reading Engels’s undertaking from the perspective of his much-celebrated and downplayed Plan 1878. I would like to make clear from the outset that, by Engels’s dialectics, the Plan 1878 and Dialectics of Nature, I refer neither to a complete and compact account of dialectics nor to the list of contents of Engels’s work nor to a “book.” …Read more
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760Marx’s ‘Bonn Notebooks’ in Context. Reconsidering the Relationship between Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx between 1839 and 1842Historical Materialism 28 (4). 2020.The following is a critical reconstruction of the collaboration between Bauer and Marx between 1839 and 1842. The turbulences in the period in question reveal themselves in Marx’s thought as well as in his relationship with Bruno Bauer. Correspondingly, Marx’s detours, false paths, dead ends and abandoned work are therefore made the focus of this study. The ambivalent initial relations between the two of them, which both made their collaboration possible and hindered it, clearly go back further …Read more
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442Engels’ Dialektik in der Dialektik der NaturZeitschrift Fur Marxistische Erneuerung 31 (122): 81-94. 2020.
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23The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital TodayContemporary Political Theory 18 (S2): 106-109. 2019.
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521Friedrich Engels and Dialectics of NaturePalgrave Macmillan. 2020.Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx and Engels’ works has been a common but somewhat unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a case in point. The entire Engels debate separates into two opposite views: Engels the contaminator of Marx’s “new materialism” vs. Engels the self-educated genius of dialectical materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has not enjoyed so far is a critical…Read more
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735Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature. And the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, by Kohei Saito (review)Science and Society 83 130-132. 2019.no abstract
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3047Engels’ Intentions in Dialectics of NatureScience and Society 83 (2): 215-243. 2019.Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx and Engels’ works has been somewhat a common but rather unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a case in point. A bold line seems to shape the entire Engels debate and separate two opposite views in this regard: Engels the contaminator of Marx’s materialism vs. Engels the self-started genius of dialectical materialism. What Engels, unlike Ma…Read more
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393The Karl Marx Problem in Contemporary New Media Economy: A Critique of Christian Fuchs’ AccountTelevision and New Media 17 (5). 2016.This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs’ approach of Web 2.0 economy. Here, Fuchs’ views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification of users’ data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation of Marx’s laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate, and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary pheno…Read more
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471Sean Sayers' Concept of Immaterial Labor and the Information EconomyScience and Society 81 (1): 124-132. 2017.The concept “immaterial labor” is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary social theory. In his 2007 work The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics, Sean Sayers offered an extensive response to several critical redefinitions of labor (Habermas, Benton, Arendt) and immaterial labor (Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri). Sayers returned to the subject in his more recent book, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes.1 As one of the few accounts that contests the contemporary Marx critic…Read more
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669Carchedi's Dialectics: A CritiqueScience and Society 81 (3): 427-436. 2017.Several years ago Guglielmo Carchedi (2008; 2012) published in S&S two interesting pieces on Marx’s dialectics and mathematics. His basic aim was to discover whether Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts provide a new insight into Marx’s dialectics. The reading he suggested was addressed to Marx alone, i.e., without Hegel and Engels. This, he argued, is the only way to grasp Marx’s dialectics if one wants to understand Marx in his own terms. Since Marx never explicated his notion of dialectics, we oug…Read more