The name Zaira Rodríguez Ugidos is barely known outside the Latin American and Spanish-speaking world. And yet she was a charismatic Marxist thinker at a time when philosophy in general, and Marxist philosophy in particular, rarely included a woman. International Friends of Ilyenkov co-organiser Corinna Lotz interviewed Cuban philosopher Rogney Piedra Arencibia about his discovery of this outstanding woman thinker, who died tragically young at 44 in 1985. Her focus on dialectical logic was inspired by the work of Evald Ilyenkov, who was still alive when she studied in Moscow during the late 1 ..read more

A statue of Engels in Manchester, salvaged by artist Phil Collins depicted on a tea towel Review-article by Corinna Lotz Frederick Engels was Karl Marx’s closest friend and collaborator. In the light of the ongoing ecological crisis and Covid-19 pandemic, Engels’ Dialectics of Nature takes on a new significance. So it is good that Kaan Kangal, currently a philosophy scholar at Nanjing University in China, has made a new study of Engels’ work. As Kangal explains, the manuscripts that make up Dialectics of Nature remained unpublished for some 30 years after Engel’s death in 1895. They laid burie ..read more

I first met Sergei Nikolaivich Mareev, who has died at the age of 78, on a trip to Moscow in the aftermath of Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.  It was the period of “shock therapy” during which Russia’s GDP fell by 50%. The economy was in chaos and people’s lives were being turned upside down. Demonstrators were being killed by the paramilitary riot police OMON outside the state television centre at Ostankino. It was in these extreme conditions that two UK Marxists travelled to Moscow, thanks to the unstinting support of a socialist opponent of Stalinism, the p ..read more

Entry in Encyclopedia  of Russian Philosophy, 3rd edition, General editor M. A. Salina. Moscow, Mir Philosophii, 2020. Published with the kind permission of Andrey D. Maidansky Translated by Alla Potapova MAREEV Sergey Nicolaevich (2 May 1941 – 12 September 2019, Moscow) was a philosopher, a doctor of philosophy and a university professor. He was the pupil and associate of Ilyenkov, a specialist in the field of dialectical logic and a historian of Soviet philosophy. He was a committee member of the “Dialectics and Culture” philosophical society, responsible for organising international re ..read more