Books & ideas

The Depletion of Life on Earth

Esteban Arcos — 2025-11-13T08:30:00Z

The “ardor of pillagers” refers to the momentum driving the depletion of life, which is outlined by Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa in his new book, drawing on the entire field of ecological thought.

Ecologists, Let's Get to Work!

Bertrand Vaillant — 2025-09-30T12:39:59Z

How can we reconcile the working classes with ecology? By reminding ecologists of the need to address together production and consumption. Doing so would lead to the constitution of “biocommunism,” the fundamental concepts of which are outlined by Paul Guillibert.

Capitalism and injustice

Fabien Tarrit — 2025-05-27T07:56:01Z

It is hard to do without the concept of exploitation when describing the many forms of injustice created by capitalism. Marx remains very much our contemporary.

Let's Get This Bread

Michael C. Behrent & Jean Bérard — 2023-10-26T07:30:00Z

Alessandro Stanziani recounts the long story of how agriculture embraced capitalism and productivism, from the transformation of seeds and species to producers' farms, by way of peasant expropriation and the chemistry of fertilizers and pesticides.

Digital Serfs

Thibault Darcillon — 2023-03-09T09:30:00Z

Cédric Durand analyzes the consequences for economic structures of the rise of the digital economy, in terms both of competitive dynamics and social relations – and sees in them a new form of feudalism.

“Brains” and their “Servants”: the New Class Domination

Bruno Palier — 2020-06-25T07:00:00Z

Advanced capitalist democracies have undergone deep changes over the past thirty years, described by Torben Iversen as a transition to a knowledge-based economy. However, his account misses an aspect of class development: the emergence of a new proletariat, highly exploited in the knowledge economy.

Regulating Globalisation

Sylvain Maechler — 2020-04-23T07:00:00Z

The excesses of globalisation, including labour exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, are often seen as the result of a lack of rules. Tim Bartley shows that these rules exist and overlap—they are just failing because they ignore the context in which they operate.

Work That Doesn't Pay Off

Anne Jourdain — 2019-06-03T07:00:00Z

Free labour takes a wide variety of forms today: charity work, civic service, internships, digital labour… Taking as her starting point the teachings on domestic labour put forward by feminists many years ago, the sociologist Maud Simonet provides an updated analysis of these contemporary forms of exploitation.

A Digital Age Without Proletarians

Sébastien Broca — 2017-12-18T08:00:00Z

Has the digital economy definitively made the main tools of Marxist analysis obsolete? This is Mariano Zukerfeld's argument, in a lively essay that suggests rethinking the critique of capitalism around the question of knowledge rather than labour. However, his demonstration lacks a convincing theory of value.