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A large number of people around the world now support the idea of socialism and are critical of capitalism. These numbers, though growing, are not yet enough to end capitalism, but they form the basis for a movement to win over more people to socialism and away from a system dominated by capitalist market relations. Besides, many of those who have a favourable view of socialism may not exactly know what it is or they may not exactly know how/why capitalism is the cause of their misery. A socialist movement requires ideas that not only defend socialism but also show how capitalism works and why it is harmful to the majority. Many of these ideas are present in
The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels almost 175 years ago, in a context where people were turning to revolutionary ideas and practices in Europe. If, as Lenin said, a revolutionary movement needs revolutionary ideas,
The Communist Manifesto is indeed a fertile source of some of these ideas. It makes two main kinds of knowledge claim: knowledge claims to describe and explain the world, and knowledge claims to critique the world and show that an alternative world is necessary and possible. Keeping in view the newly radicalizing elements of the public, including the youth, this article presents the ideas of
The Communist Manifesto in terms of precise and systematically organized knowledge claims that cover three main areas of Marxism (historical materialism, political economy, and communist/socialist practice).

Asking questions – questioning – is a medium through which we clarify our thinking as well as others'. Questioning is also a medium through which we begin to oppose the current system. An important space for questioning is academia. When students ask critical questions to their educators, this practice becomes a form of students' active participation in their learning process. Besides, the vast majority of students are future workers (and many of them are indeed already workers), so developing a critical perspective on society is crucial to their lives as workers. To the extent that some of them might wish to become what Gramsci would call the organic intellectuals of the masses, then what kind of questions might they ask their educations that might expose the biases of their educators, that might aid their own learning process, and that might indeed make learning a collaborative process between students and teachers? The article suggests that these questions centre on the class character of the society in which we live.

This article has three main sections. In section 1, I discuss what identity politics is and what are its theoretical presuppositions. I also talk about the nature of the political action in identity politics, and about its limits. In section 2, I present my views on Marxist politics, which is centered on the theory and the politics of class, combined with the class-theory and class-politics of anti-oppression. I unpack what I consider are the Marxist notions of 'the common ground' and of 'the majority', as important components of Marxist politics. The majority, in the Marxist sense, are those who are objectively subjected to class-exploitation. And in terms of the common ground for politics, there are two aspects: a) the majority of people experience one common fate, i.e. they are exploited, and b) this exploited majority are subjected to one or more of the many mechanisms of oppression (race, gender, caste, etc.), all of which represent one experience: attack on democratic rights (or the experience of 'tyranny', in Lenin's sense). In the final section, I conclude the article and draw some implications of my arguments.

This article is condensed from three chapters of my Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Haymarket, 2018) and from a longer article based on these chapters. It is based on a talk on Marx's politics' delivered at 'A Bicentenary Conference: Karl Marx at 200' at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario. Canada. I am thankful to the participants at this conference for their comments. Put simply, Marx's politics is about class struggle for state power to build socialism, a society of popular democracy, by overthrowing capitalism. In this short article, I will explore different aspects of this single idea, from Marx's political writings, as I interpret them, and I will do this schematically. This is the first part of the article. In the second part, I will extend my articulation and interpretation of Marx's politics, and briefly and schematically, relate this to some aspects of the Leninist legacy. Needless to say, this article does not provide a detailed exposition of Marx's or Marxist politics (for this, see Das, 2018a).

David Harvey is well known for his extensive writings on accumulation by dispossession (ABD). ABD refers to "the continuation and proliferation of accretion practices" that Marx had designated as "primitive accumulation." Harvey has sought to update Marx's theory of primitive accumulation to consider the ways in which dispossession occurs in present-day capitalism in its various forms. His theory of ABD is very problematic. Yet a comprehensive, critical assessment of Harvey's work on dispossession that considers its intellectual and political problems is missing. This article considers Harvey's ideas advanced since the 1980s to be problematic on multiple grounds. To begin, the concept of ABD itself is chaotic in the critical-realist philosophical sense: it includes processes which bear no internal relations, and it separates processes which should not be separated. He inflates the causal significance of the concept far too much, and mistakenly considers ABD to be the dominant moment of contemporary capitalism. He generally fails to connect ABD of producers to what I will call "accumulation by exploitation" of proletarians and semi-proletarians. His views on dispossession in the South with which he associates (new) imperialism are inadequate in part because he abstracts from the exploitative character of imperialism as it is rooted in production controlled by imperialist businesses. And the political implications of his theory, which significantly differ from the conclusions that Marx draws from his own analysis of dispossession in Capital vol. 1, and which have a dim view of the role of the working class in the anti-capitalist socialist movement, are reformist.

This commentary examines the relationship between a Marxist scholar and the institutional and societal environment of the university. The focus is on how a Marxist academic navigates the social, economic and political aspects of the university while attempting to maintain a commitment to class analysis and Marxism as political practice.