Ahmed Kanna
The Measure of Everything: David McNally’s Materialist History of Money
David McNally’s new book, Blood and Money, is a devastating and brilliant account of money and its role in historical and current processes of class and state domination. A model of Marxist historical scholarship, it’s a must-read for Marxists and other anticapitalist activists and thinkers, speaking both to our current moment and to more enduring questions class, power, dispossession, and the potential of working class movements from below to transcend these.
Ahmed Kanna
August 25, 2020Cohering the Rebellions: For a Combat Party of the Working Class
Large sections of the socialist left --- in venues like Jacobin --- argue for channelling the ongoing rebellions against the capitalist state into electoralism and the Democratic Party. In the context of no-growth, predatory capitalism, this is utopian. We need instead a fighting, independent party of the working class to cohere the rebellions and to win power.
Ahmed Kanna
July 18, 2020Vivek Chibber’s ABCs of Reformism: Reality Has Overtaken Social Democratic Illusions
A year and a half ago, Jacobin magazine put out a series of pamphlets on the ABCs of Capitalism. Reformist theorist Vivek Chibber argues that the bourgeois democratic state has so much legitimacy as to make revolutionary politics impossible. Today, when 54% of the U.S. population thinks it is justified to burn down a police station, such reformist ideas appear like satire.
Ahmed Kanna
June 10, 2020Iraq: A Revolutionary Situation?
The current Iraqi protests are the first united, nationwide uprisings in the country in recent memory. Protesters have exhibited admirable levels of discipline and have been exemplars of the principle that practical anti-oppression and the struggle for proletarian power are inseparable.
Ahmed Kanna
December 20, 2019