Series
Historical Materialism Book Series
Book
Open Access
Volume 309 in this series
In this book Geert Reuten presents 21 of his previously published essays on the three volumes Marx’s Capital, dating from 1991–2019. The essays largely take the form of a summary of Marx’s text (a Volume or its Parts or Chapters) followed by an appreciation and (when required) a reconstruction. The book thus offers an overview of each of the three volumes of Capital, including their interconnection, as well as a focus on specific Parts of Capital. Throughout the general overviews and more focused analyses, Reuten emphasises Marx’s systematic-dialectical method and his monetary value-form analysis.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 306 in this series
Rudolf Bahro, Wolfgang Harich and Robert Havemann were probably the best-known critics of the DDR’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. Yet they saw themselves as Marxists, and their demands extended far beyond a democratisation of real socialism. When environmental issues became more important in the West in the 1970s, the Party treated it as an ideological manoeuvre of the class enemy. The three dissidents saw things differently: they combined socialism and ecology, adopting a utopian perspective frowned upon by the state. In doing so, they created political concepts that were unique for the Eastern Bloc. Alexander Amberger introduces them, relates them to each other, and poses the question of their relevance then and now.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 304 in this series
Gilles Deleuze's assertion that 'Sartre knew how to invent the New' suggests a vital aspect of the French philosopher, one that departs from the image that has often been presented of him. Sartre’s post-1956 critique of the Stalinist USSR, together with the increasing prominence of anti-colonial struggles and a series of experiences that would find their condensation in 1968, pushed him to a continuous rearticulation of his political ideas, on the basis of an intense confrontation with Marx. In Basso’s lucid study, here newly translated into English, the expression 'singular universal' seeks to capture the revolutionary potential of individual and collective subjects, illuminating the close but also unstable relationship between history and politics.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 303 in this series
Daniel Bensaïd: From the Actuality of Revolution to the Melancholic Wager is the first systematic full-length study of Bensaïd’s renovation of Marxism. Bensaïd, a student leader during the May '68 revolt and founder of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, was an exemplar of a creative and open liberatory Marxism, leaving a vast oeuvre for a new generation of Marxists to explore. Much of Bensaïd’s writing remains untranslated into English, and Roso’s volume offers a comprehensive critical overview.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 302 in this series
Larisa Reisner (1895--1926), fighter, commissar, diplomat, was one of the most brilliant and popular writers of the Russian Revolution, whose journalism from her travels in Russia and Ukraine, Germany, Persia and Afghanistan was read by millions in the new mass circulation Soviet press. Together here for the first time in translation are the six books of her journalism, The Front, Afghanistan, Berlin October 1923, Hamburg at the Barricades and In Hindenburg’s Country, all written in the last nine years of her life, before her death at the age of thirty, published as the companion volume to Cathy Porter’s Larisa Reisner. A Biography.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 301 in this series
Across a powerfully wide-ranging set of themes, theoretical registers and historical examples, John Roberts analyses the key problems that continue to confront art after conceptual art, in the light of art’s longstanding relationship to market and institution the commodity and mass culture: namely, artistic labour and technology, modernity and the ‘new’, art and negation, identity and subjectivity, agency and audience, form and value. In these terms, the book provides a rigorous and ambitious, examination of the limits and possibilities of art’s contribution to emancipatory discourse and practice.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 282 in this series
During the second half of the twentieth century the countries of East Asia saw one of the most remarkable transformations in human history, from relatively poor societies to global powerhouses of accumulation, proletarianisation and mega-urbanisation. This volume features Marxist scholars from East Asia and Europe who are pioneering a new approach to this transformation using the theory of state capitalism. The essays analyse the histories of countries on either side of the Cold War divide within the broader framework of twentieth century global capitalist expansion, while at the same time offering a sophisticated critique of Developmental State Theory. Contributors are: Tobias ten Brink, Gareth Dale, Jeong Seongjin, Michael Haynes, Kim Ha-young, Kim Yong-uk, Lee Jeong-goo, and Owen Miller
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 281 in this series
In these innovative essays on poetry and capitalism, collected over the last fifteen years, Christopher Nealon shines a light on the upsurge of anticapitalist poetry since the turn of the century, and develops fresh ways of thinking about how capitalist society shapes the reading and the writing of all poetry, whatever its political orientation. Breaking from half a century of postmodernist readings of poetry, and bypassing the false divide between formalist and historicist criticism, these essays chart a path toward a new Marxist poetics.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 280 in this series
Despite the collapse of Soviet-style socialism, the spectre of Marx still haunts the French imagination. This is no accident, in a country whose intellectual life and political history have long been marked by his multiple presences.
This volume offers a historical and sociological insight into the way his thought has been received in the French context, from his own lifetime to the present. Analysing Marx’s place and influence in the French intellectual, political and artistic debate – across the political spectrum and even in the French-speaking colonial world – it helps us understand the uses and misuses of an œuvre of paramount importance.
This volume offers a historical and sociological insight into the way his thought has been received in the French context, from his own lifetime to the present. Analysing Marx’s place and influence in the French intellectual, political and artistic debate – across the political spectrum and even in the French-speaking colonial world – it helps us understand the uses and misuses of an œuvre of paramount importance.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 279 in this series
Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) was one of the best-known Marxist scholars active in the second half of the twentieth century. A leading member of the Fourth International, his books on capitalist economics, bureaucracies in the workers’ movement and on power and socialist strategy were translated into many languages. Democratic self-organisation of workers was a red thread that ran through all of his thinking. In Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy, Manuel Kellner presents the first and until now only comprehensive overview of Mandel’s theoretical and political contributions, arguing that his work remains important for the debates on a socialist alternative in the twenty-first century.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 278 in this series
In theorising on the causes, preconditions, dynamics and internal conflicts of the Greek Revolution of 1821, the analysis of Milios tackles the issue of bourgeois revolutions in general. Additionally, his investigation of the historical emergence and the limits of the Greek nation calls forth the broader theoretical and historical question of the economic, political, and ideological presuppositions of nation-building. The book illustrates how nationalism brings the masses to the political forefront, which the capitalist state then incorporates into its apparatuses as ‘sovereign people’. Nationalism, being enmeshed within the political element, consists the basis upon which irredentism develops, recruiting populations into the expansionist-imperialist strategies of the ruling classes.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 277 in this series
By digging through the stratigraphy of the history of ideas we can find within and beyond Marxism an ‘aleatory current’ that values the role of chance in history. Using this perspective, the book builds a case for a historical materialism that is stripped of all teleology. Starting in the ancient Mediterranean with Epicurus, it traces the history of conceiving history as plural up to Marxism and modern science. It shows that concrete historical ‘worlds’ such as ancient Mesoamerica and Eurasia cannot be reduced to a single template. Affirming the potentiality of a future non-capitalist ‘world’, it invalidates any ‘end of history’ thesis.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 275 in this series
Zheng Chaolin helped found the Chinese Communist Party's European branch in Paris in 1922 and its Trotskyist Opposition in Shanghai in 1931. He held the world record in political imprisonment - seven years under Chiang Kai-shek (as a revolutionary) and 27 under Mao (as a 'counterrevolutionary'), thus beating by a year Auguste Blanqui's previous record. After joining the revolution in his teens, his commitment never wavered. Born in 1901, he died in 1998, so his life was coterminous with the century and a dramatic embodiment of its vicissitudes. This book is record of his contribution to revolutionary thought in China.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 272 in this series
That the idea of world revolution was crucial for the Bolshevik leaders in the years following the 1917 revolution is a well-known fact. But what did the party’s rank and file make of it? How did it resonate with the general population? And what can a social history of international solidarity tell us about the transformation of Soviet society from NEP to Stalinism? This book undertakes the first in-depth analysis of the discourses and practices of internationalism in early Soviet society during the years of revolution, civil war and NEP, using forgotten archival materials and contemporary sources.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 270 in this series
As the author of the ground-breaking work of Marxist political economy, Finance Capital, and a leader in the German Social Democratic Party, Rudolf Hilferding was a dominant intellectual and political figure in the history of European socialism from its halcyon days in the pre-1914 era until its collapse in the 1930s. This collection of his previously unpublished correspondence allows readers to trace the evolution of Hilferding’s thought as socialism’s fortunes declined and his own fate became precarious. It shows how, in the face of rising Stalinism and fascism, democracy remained at the core of his socialist vision.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 269 in this series
How did the revolutionary Left view cultural modernists? Their uneasy relationship is illustrated in this book with quotations ranging from Alexander’s ‘Dada is merely an impertinence’ through Trotsky’s ‘There cannot be a proletarian culture’ to Averbakh’s ‘Tear off the masks!’ and Becher’s ‘There can only be one kind of genuine art: fighting art.’ This book covers communist attitudes to the whole field of cultural innovation, from the art of the left abstractionists to the literature of the worker-correspondent movement and the music of Weill and Eisler through to proletarian film, theatre and photography and takes full account of the impact on Weimar left culture of external events, such as the First World War, the ‘Great Change’ in the Soviet Union, and internal German developments such as the failure of revolution after 1918 and the rise of Nazism. Each chapter starts with an introduction that provides a context to the documents and indicates the current state of research.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 268 in this series
The Communist Women’s Movement (CWM), virtually unknown today, was the world’s first truly international revolutionary organisation of women. Formed in 1920, the CWM mapped out a programme for women’s emancipation; participated in struggles for women’s rights; and worked to advance women’s participation in the Communist movement.
The present volume, part of a series on the Communist International in Lenin’s time, contains proceedings and resolutions of CWM conferences, along with reports on its work around the world. Most of the contents here are published in English for the first time, with almost half appearing for the first time in any language.
The present volume, part of a series on the Communist International in Lenin’s time, contains proceedings and resolutions of CWM conferences, along with reports on its work around the world. Most of the contents here are published in English for the first time, with almost half appearing for the first time in any language.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 266 in this series
‘She burst across the revolutionary sky like a blazing meteor, dazzling all in her path,’ Trotsky wrote. For the poet Boris Pasternak, she was Lara, the heroine of his novel Doctor Zhivago. Commissar, revolutionary fighter, espionage agent, journalist, Larisa Reisner (1895–1926) was a model for the ‘new woman’ of the Russian Revolution, and one of its most popular and brilliant writers, whose works were published in mass editions and read by millions. Her life is set against the world-shaking events of 1917, and draws on material recently released from the Soviet archives to tell her story through the memories of those close to her, her own voluminous writings, and her six books, published for the first time together by Brill with this biography.
This biography is accompanied by Brill’s publication of Cathy Porter and Richard Chappell’s Writings of Larisa Reisner, published as volume 302 in the Historical Materialism book series.
This biography is accompanied by Brill’s publication of Cathy Porter and Richard Chappell’s Writings of Larisa Reisner, published as volume 302 in the Historical Materialism book series.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 265 in this series
Written at the height of the purges, but unpublished for decades, Megrelidze’s text is arguably the most significant, erudite and wide-ranging work of Marxist philosophy written in the USSR at the time. Discussing the emergence and development of human consciousness from the origins of humanity to the rise of capitalism, Megrelidze discusses the major achievements of contemporary cognitive science, sociology, philosophy and linguistics in the light of the works of Marx and Engels that were being published at the time. Far from the rigidities of official ‘diamat’, the book provides an insight into the important debates in Soviet intellectual life that led to the works of figures such as Vygotsky and the ‘Bakhtin Circle’.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 264 in this series
Subject of numerous interpretations and studies, the vicissitudes of the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research nevertheless still reserve some little-known pages, such as the human and scientific relationship that bound philosopher Max Horkheimer and economist Friedrich Pollock for over fifty years. Based on texts and letters translated here into English for the first time as well as some previously unpublished documents, the book reconstructs the crucial moments in the friendship between the two scholars with a narrative style and philological accuracy. Nicola Emery accompanies us through the two friends and intellectuals’ “nonconformism” and search for an alternative life-form that led to the birth of the Frankfurt critical theory.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 263 in this series
In contrast to the traditional Marxist interpretation of emerging capitalism and a revolutionary bourgeoisie, this book shows that commodified labor, fundamental to the existence of a capitalist bourgeoisie, did not take shape in eighteenth-century France. The mass of the population consisted of peasants and artisans in possession of land and workshops, and embedded in autonomous communities. The old regime bourgeoisie and nobility thus developed within the absolutist state in order to have the political means to impose feudal forms of exploitation on the people. These class relations explain the crisis of 1789 and the revolutionary conflicts of the 1790s.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 262 in this series
What do struggles over pipelines in Canada, housing estates in France, and shantytowns in Martinique have in common? In Urban Revolutions, Stefan Kipfer shows how these struggles force us to understand the (neo-)colonial aspects of capitalist urbanization in a comparatively and historically nuanced fashion. In so doing, he demonstrates that urban research can offer a rich, if uneven, terrain upon which to develop the relationship between Marxist and anti-colonial intellectual traditions. After a detailed dialogue between Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, Kipfer engages creole literature in the French Antilles, Indigenous radicalism in North America and political anti-racism in mainland France.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 260 in this series
Evgeny A. Preobrazhensky was Russia’s foremost economist in the 1920s. This volume editorially reconstructs his theory of socialist industrialisation in an agrarian country and relates it to previous socialist theories and to issues of political struggle, culture and communist morality. The editors create a unique portrait of Preobrazhensky as an economist and social theorist, assess the viability of NEP as a model of economic growth, and identify the fault lines that contributed to the split in the Trotskyist Opposition and its defeat in the struggle against Stalin. The bulk of the work consists of the important An Attempt to Provide a Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy, while the material in Volume III focuses on concrete analysis.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Volume 259 in this series
The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy examines the formative years of a classic social thinker once called the ‘bourgeois Marx’ from the standpoint of his relationship to the foremost working-class organization of his time. It argues that Weber’s early engagement with the standpoint of the rural worker — not his later study of the ethics of ascetic Protestant entrepreneurs — first convinced him of the central role of culture in human agency. The crisis of liberalism in a rapidly modernising, conflict-ridden Imperial Germany embarking on colonial expansion emerges in the work as the decisive setting for the genesis of Weberian social thought; the rising labour movement, in turn, as the young Weber’s little-know yet crucial interlocutor.
Book
Ahead of Publication
With an introduction by Gregor Benton. The Longest Night tells the story of Chinese Trotskyism in its later years, including after Mao Zedong's capture of Beijing in 1949. It treats the three ages of Chinese Trotskyism: the founding generation around Chen Duxiu, Zheng Chaolin, Wang Fanxi, and Peng Shuzhi, who joined the Opposition after their expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); the first generation of those who (after 1931) did not first pass through the ranks of the CCP before becoming Trotskyists; and those who became Trotskyists after 1949, mainly in Hong Kong and the diaspora.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book argues for the relevance, appropriateness, and usefulness of historical materialism to the musicological project. It interrogates the history of encounters between Marxism and music studies — both within and without the Soviet sphere — before staging the missed encounter between classical musicology and Second International Marxism. It concludes with a framework for understanding style history in terms of changes in the forces and relations of musical production.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Much has been written about the prospects of automation in recent years. While many have raised concerns over the threat of technological mass unemployment, others have anticipated a fully automated communist utopia which will provide material abundance to everyone. (De)Automating the Future gathers chapters that critically investigate automation’s ambivalences from inter-disciplinary Marxist perspectives. The contributions raise questions about automation’s affordances for postcapitalism, its transformation of manual and mental labour, and its role in the intensification of class antagonisms and exploitation.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Isaak I. Rubin, author of numerous works in Marxist theory, explains the failure of the Austrian School’s attempt to reduce political economy to individual psychology. Emphasising the sociological dimension of Marx’s work, Rubin welcomes a new ‘social direction’ in the writings of Rudolf Stolzmann, Alfred Amonn and Franz Petry. These economists rejected Austrian individualism, but their works were often influenced by the ethical idealism of Kant and Hegel, resulting in detachment of the economy’s social form from the material process of production. Rubin critically explores methodological differences between Marx and early twentieth-century critics and proponents of marginalist economic theory.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The present volume represents the first book-length monograph on the Marxian concept of totality as seen from a philosophical and sociopolitical perspective. Drawing on a large number of classical and contemporary works, Boveiri elucidates the distinctive features of Marxian totality with a particular focus on its methodology. The work has four fundamental elements, or moments. First, it develops arguments against undialectical conceptions of totality. Then it presents a critical reading of Hegelian totality focused on The Science of Logic. Its penultimate section examines the shortcomings of two well-known conceptions of totality, one by Georg Lukács, another by Karel Kosík, before a final section examines in detail the developmental characteristics of Marxian totality. The volume concludes with a chapter dealing with methodological implications.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Nimtz’s and Edwards’s real-time comparative political analysis offers a unique look at two historically consequential figures with two very different theoretical and political perspectives, both of whom expertly examined the most contentious issue of the nineteenth century. By juxtaposing the political thought and activism of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass, Nimtz and Edwards are able to make insightful observations and conclusions about race and class in America. The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal reveals how two still competing political perspectives, liberalism and Marxism, performed when the biggest breakthrough for the millennial-old democratic quest after the French Revolution occurred – the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. In so doing, it presents potential lessons for today.
Listen to the podcast about this title on New Books Network
Listen to the podcast about this title on New Books Network
Book
Ahead of Publication
Karl Marx wrote extensively on crisis but never presented a coherent theory of crisis. Samezo Kuruma, a Japanese Marxian economist, aimed to complete Marx’s unfinished theory.
Starting from Marx’s observation that the crises of the world market are the 'real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of the bourgeois economy', Kuruma seeks to grasp the inherent contradictions that drive forward and limit capitalism. His focus on the contradictory dynamics of capitalism sets him apart from Marxian thinkers who try to identify a single, primary cause of crisis. This volume brings together all of his writings related to crisis.
Starting from Marx’s observation that the crises of the world market are the 'real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of the bourgeois economy', Kuruma seeks to grasp the inherent contradictions that drive forward and limit capitalism. His focus on the contradictory dynamics of capitalism sets him apart from Marxian thinkers who try to identify a single, primary cause of crisis. This volume brings together all of his writings related to crisis.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The son of an industrialist who wanted to abolish private property. A Jew who didn’t want anything to do with Judaism. A professor who published little. An economist who squandered his wealth on the stock market. A communist who thought Marxism was anachronistic. And finally: a critical intellectual. When dealing with the political culture of the Weimar Republic, the development of Critical Theory and German-Jewish emigration to the USA, there is no way around Friedrich Pollock. Max Horkheimer’s companion and the founder of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt plays an important part in German-Jewish intellectual history as one of the most prominent representatives of Critical Theory. The present volume presents the first biography of a major but overlooked figure.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book shows the fruitfulness of approaching key philosophical and political questions from a Marxist-feminist point of view. The idea is that different modes of production like capitalism and feudalism have structures -- 'relations of production' -- which shape and limit the potentials for human emancipation in general and women’s freedom in particular. Capitalism is then understood as a framework within which other relations of oppression operate, with more or less salience in different times and places. Each of the essays takes this basic approach to key philosophical questions about freedom, rationality and human nature.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Focusing on the career of the Soviet historian M.N. Pokrovskii, the author examines the evolution of historical writing in the first decade of Soviet rule. As Deputy People’s Commissar for Education, Pokrovskii was among those who established the academic institutions of the new regime. The study of Pokrovskii’s writings and the political context in which they were conceived helps explain the origin of interpretations of modern Russian history current in Soviet times. The book can for that reason be regarded as a preliminary to the study of the Russian revolutionary era, and a key to the critical evaluation of the historical sources for the period.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Riding with the Revolution tells the story of Americans who from 1900 to 1925 became involved with the Mexican Revolution. John Reed actually saddled up and rode with Pancho Villa. Later, American war resisters crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they helped found the Communist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and a Feminist Council. Protestant ministers, Socialist Eugene Debs, Samuel Gompers head of the AFL, the anarchist Emma Goldman, and Communists John Reed, Louis Fraina, Bertram Wolfe, as well as foreign politicos M.N. Roy, Sen Katayama, and Alexander Borodin all took a hand in the Mexican labor movement.
Book
Ahead of Publication
John Weeks (1941-2020) was one of the most prominent Marxist economists of his generation. His writings inspired many activists and socialist economists around the world. This book brings together a selection of his writings engaging with and developing the Marxist tradition. These essays examine theoretical issues, directly building on Karl Marx’s work, as well as practical and political issues, engaging with transformative and revolutionary activity. The essays included in this book are now made available to a new generation of critics of capitalism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Historical materialism as Marx understood this was always an integrated conception or field of research, not one divided into separate disciplines. The essays gathered in this volume are a remarkable example of how this works across a wide range of subjects as diverse as agrarian history, capitalism, Hegel’s influence on Marx, and class struggles in India. They were written over some fifty years of both activism and academic work, embodying Banaji’s lifelong engagement with Marxist theory. His recent papers on merchant capitalism can also be found here, along with a biographical sketch that sets all of his work in context.
Book
Ahead of Publication
A part of the insurrectionary wave of the 1820s, the Greek Revolution remains a neglected episode in the revolutionary history of the period. The contributions included in this volume present the most recent research concerning the social, political and cultural history of this major event. Bringing together specialists in social, intellectual and cultural history, the volume adopts a broader temporal and spatial perspective than most existing analyses. Juxtaposing the views from without and within the Ottoman Empire, the authors reconsider the dialectics of social transformation and revolution and overcome simplistic dichotomies between structural continuities and conjectural ruptures, international context and internal conflicts, social and political aspects, and central state and local power-holders, putting the Greek Revolution squarely back on the agenda of Marxist and revolutionary historiography.
Contributors are: Zacharias Antonakis, Dimitris Bacharas, Athanasios Barlagiannis, Simos Bozikis, Aliki Fakoura, Şükrü Ilicak, Elias Kolovos, Phokion Kotzageorgis, Dimitris Kousouris, Dimitris Papastamatiou, Nikos Rotzokos, Mohammet Shariat-Panahi, Panagiotis Stathis, Panagiotis Sotiris, Dionysis Tzakis, and Eleftheria Zei.
Contributors are: Zacharias Antonakis, Dimitris Bacharas, Athanasios Barlagiannis, Simos Bozikis, Aliki Fakoura, Şükrü Ilicak, Elias Kolovos, Phokion Kotzageorgis, Dimitris Kousouris, Dimitris Papastamatiou, Nikos Rotzokos, Mohammet Shariat-Panahi, Panagiotis Stathis, Panagiotis Sotiris, Dionysis Tzakis, and Eleftheria Zei.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The main purpose of Supersuming Subsumption is to extrapolate from the Marxian understanding of subsumption — and the author's own socially historically situated reading of it — a dynamic and holistic theory of capitalist social power relations. The work brings this theory to bear on the anti-capitalist analysis of everyday practices.
Despite a recent and renewed interest in the subject, subsumption remains a fairly under-explored category, used either as a ‘floating signifier’ to describe a vague and wide-ranging tendency of capital to colonise social life, or, alternatively, as a highly technical concept in the specialist literature on Marx's later writings. The present work aims to maintain the specificity of the concept while opening up its domain of application to the realms of everyday life and practical politics.
Despite a recent and renewed interest in the subject, subsumption remains a fairly under-explored category, used either as a ‘floating signifier’ to describe a vague and wide-ranging tendency of capital to colonise social life, or, alternatively, as a highly technical concept in the specialist literature on Marx's later writings. The present work aims to maintain the specificity of the concept while opening up its domain of application to the realms of everyday life and practical politics.
Book
Ahead of Publication
When was male domination established in human societies, and why did it take hold? How does humanity's most remote past inform today's feminist struggle?
This new, updated edition of Primitive Communism Is Not What It Used to Be – available for the first time in English translation – represents a timely contribution to the debate, drawing on the accumulated knowledge of ethnology and archaeology.
While noting the many outdated aspects of Morgan and Engels' seminal work, this vast synthesis, guided by a rigorous materialist approach, renews Marxist analysis on a theme that is at once remote and pressingly topical.
This new, updated edition of Primitive Communism Is Not What It Used to Be – available for the first time in English translation – represents a timely contribution to the debate, drawing on the accumulated knowledge of ethnology and archaeology.
While noting the many outdated aspects of Morgan and Engels' seminal work, this vast synthesis, guided by a rigorous materialist approach, renews Marxist analysis on a theme that is at once remote and pressingly topical.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Louis Althusser cited an appendix which, it seems, remains lost or was never completed. This appendix was titled ‘the Ideology of Work’.
This book takes inspiration from this appendix, to think about what is at stake for both Marxism and sociology in analysing work from an Althusserian perspective today. The dominant form of this ideology of work today is theoretical humanism. This book demonstrates how theoretical humanism has undermined the analysis of work and makes the case for a Marxism in sociology with a committed theoretical anti-humanism at the forefront of its endeavour.
This book takes inspiration from this appendix, to think about what is at stake for both Marxism and sociology in analysing work from an Althusserian perspective today. The dominant form of this ideology of work today is theoretical humanism. This book demonstrates how theoretical humanism has undermined the analysis of work and makes the case for a Marxism in sociology with a committed theoretical anti-humanism at the forefront of its endeavour.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The world-shaking forced evictions of English peasants during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are treated by most historians as largely a 'Tudor myth'. For them, the peasantry disappeared much later through fair means thanks to industrialisation and trade. Centred on close scrutiny of the royal commission of 1517 – 'England's Second Domesday' – this book overturns these accounts. It demonstrates, unequivocally, that capitalism carved fundamental and irreversible breaches into the English countryside between 1400 and 1620. It began, grew and thrived on widespread illegal clearances of rural people and their culture by the English ruling class, long before the British industrial revolution.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In the early 19th century, a new social collective emerged out of impoverished artisans, urban rabble, wandering rural lower classes, bankrupt aristocrats and precarious intellectuals, one that would soon be called the proletariat. But this did not yet exist as a unified, homogeneous class with affiliated political parties. The motley appearance, the dreams and longings of these figures, torn from all economic certainties, found new forms of narration in romantic novellas, reportages, social-statistical studies, and monthly bulletins. But soon enough, these disorderly, violent, nostalgic, errant, and utopian figures were denigrated as reactionary and anarchic by the heads of the labour movement, since they did not fit into their grand linear vision of progress. In this book, Patrick Eiden-Offe tells their story, tracing the making of the proletariat in Vörmarz Germany (1815–1848) through the writings of figures like Ludwig Tieck, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling, Georg Weerth, Friedrich Engels, Louise Otto-Peters, Ernst Willkomm, and Georg Büchner, and in so doing, revealing a striking similarity to the disorderly classes of today.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This volume gathers papers written by archaeologists utilising the methods of historical materialism, attesting not only to what Marxism has contributed to archaeology, but also to what archaeology has contributed, and can contribute, to Marxism as a method for interpreting the history of humanity. The book’s contributors consider the question of what archaeology can contribute to a historical perspective on the overcoming of present-day capitalism, synthesising developments in world archaeology, and supplying concrete case studies of the archaeology of the Americas, Europe and the Near East.
Contributors are: Guillermo Acosta Ochoa, Marcus Bajema, Bernardo Gandulla, Alex Gonzales-Panta, Pablo Jaruf, Vicente Lull, Savas Michael-Matsas, Rafael Micó, Ianir Milevski, Patricia Pérez Martínez, Cristina Rihuete Herrada, Roberto Risch, Steve Roskams, Henry Tantaleán, Marcelo Vitores, and LouAnn Wurst.
Contributors are: Guillermo Acosta Ochoa, Marcus Bajema, Bernardo Gandulla, Alex Gonzales-Panta, Pablo Jaruf, Vicente Lull, Savas Michael-Matsas, Rafael Micó, Ianir Milevski, Patricia Pérez Martínez, Cristina Rihuete Herrada, Roberto Risch, Steve Roskams, Henry Tantaleán, Marcelo Vitores, and LouAnn Wurst.
Book
Ahead of Publication
On the Theory and History of Ideological Production promotes the existence of an ‘ideological unconscious’, understood primarily as a product of social relations, not of the Ideological State Apparatus. Attention focuses upon the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as theorised by the Spanish Marxist and former student of Althusser, Juan Carlos Rodríguez. Theorization of the ‘ideological unconscious’ presupposes a change of terrain from the individual/society opposition to a problematic based on the ‘social formation’. The present text assesses Rodríguez’s work alongside that of his contemporaries, Fredric Jameson, Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton, Roy Bhaskar, Slavoj Žižek, and others.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The pioneering and still relevant Marxist studies of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in this collection are, with one exception, published in English here for the first time. Before his better-known work on Marx’s theories, Henryk Grossman wrote about the economic history of Galicia, the Polish province annexed by the Habsburgs, drawing on very extensive primary research. His later, devastating critique of Weber argument about Protestantism and the rise of capitalism is also included in this volume.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The book offers a critical account of how utopian thinking became defeated as a tool of philosophy whose explicit objective has been to not only analyse but emancipate the world. While such philosophy was originally inseparable from ideas of a radically better society it aimed to realise, many of its most influential practitioners today object to the use of utopian ideas. Countering this scepticism, the book argues in favour of utopian thinking. By elucidating a concept of utopia freed of its alleged pitfalls, the book contends that utopian thinking indeed presents an important resource for achieving emancipatory social goals.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This volume collects the proceedings of the First Latin American Communist Conference, organized in Buenos Aires, Argentina in June 1929 by the South American Secretariat of the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern). The Conference was the first and in some ways only opportunity that communists in Latin America had to engage in a broad discussion of the most important problems and challenges that they faced. The topics that the assembled delegates addressed – including militarism, anti-imperialism, trade union issues, and racial discrimination – were all central to the question of how to organise a strong revolutionary movement.
This major documentary collection of the Latin American Communist movement, newly translated into English and with a substantial introduction, remains surprisingly relevant to our world today.
With an introduction by Victor Jeifets and Lazar Jeifets.
This major documentary collection of the Latin American Communist movement, newly translated into English and with a substantial introduction, remains surprisingly relevant to our world today.
With an introduction by Victor Jeifets and Lazar Jeifets.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Raising the Red Flag explores the origins of the British Marxist movement from the creation of the Social Democratic Federation to the foundation of the Communist Party.
It tells a story of rising class struggle, the founding of the Labour Party, the fight against World War One, the Russian Revolution, and the explosive year of 1919.
The book also uses new archival sources to re-examine Marxist organisations such as the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, and Sylvia Parkhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation.
Above all, this is the story of men and women who fought to liberate the working class from capitalism through socialist revolution.
It tells a story of rising class struggle, the founding of the Labour Party, the fight against World War One, the Russian Revolution, and the explosive year of 1919.
The book also uses new archival sources to re-examine Marxist organisations such as the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, and Sylvia Parkhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation.
Above all, this is the story of men and women who fought to liberate the working class from capitalism through socialist revolution.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Berlin council movement of 1919–20 proves that there was a left alternative beyond Social Democracy and Stalinism in the German Revolution. The movement combined an impressive mass mobilisation with extensive socialist and democratic aspirations that pointed far beyond the Weimar order. Berlin was not just the centre of the November Revolution of 1918, but also the most important arena of the Second Revolution that followed. For the first time, the movement is analysed here in all its diversity and on the basis of a broad range of sources. Beside the workers' and factory councils, it also includes councils of students, women, the unemployed and intellectuals. Central events such as the 1919 general strike and the struggle against the Kapp Putsch of 1920 are also examined.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The first book by the great French radical historian Maurice Dommanget (1888–1976) to be translated into English, this book is an engaging, sympathetic telling of the life and works of Sylvain Maréchal (1750–1803), an unjustly forgotten figure of the French Revolutionary era. Maréchal was not only a militant atheist and opponent of royalty, but, as the author of the Manifesto of the Equals he laid the groundwork for modern communism.
With an introduction by Jean-Numa Ducange.
With an introduction by Jean-Numa Ducange.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Heart of the Matter explores the legacies of Ilyenkov and Vygotsky, two Russian thinkers who marshalled their passion for truth, enlightenment and independent thought to understand the human mind, not for the sake of knowledge alone, but to help create the conditions in which human flourishing can become a reality for all. The book renders their theories intelligible against the dramatic social and historical background in which they lived and worked, bringing their ideas into dialogue with themes and thinkers in Western philosophy to reveal how they illuminate philosophical issues of enduring significance.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Environmental degradation, crises in care and the predations of finance capital impose new challenges to human reproduction. It is imperative to understand their roots in capitalism. But how best to do so? This book develops the concept of ‘immanent externalities’ to grasp the non-capitalist life processes produced by – and necessary for – capitalist reproduction. Immanent Externalities thus considers the category of reproduction by means of a philosophical re-reading of the three volumes of Marx’s Capital. In doing so, the book locates capitalism’s fundamental contradiction as that between the reproduction of profit-driven activity and ecologically situated human life, suggesting new orientations for theory and practice today.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Potentia of Poverty opposes to the surplus-value of capital a surplus-concept of life – of the worker, of the non-worker, of the poor, of the rich: an excess of being with the power to undo capital by using its own mechanism. Antonio Negri writes in the preface that ‘The poor is the powerful, Pascucci tells us. She interprets Marx as a reader of Spinoza; however, maybe there is something more here than there is in Spinoza and Marx themselves. A further passage is necessary to grasp this “more”: namely, to tie the experience of poverty to an ontology of “cupiditas” [desire], that is, of “amor” [love]’.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Capital is a chameleon that assumes different guises while maintaining the same logic, exploiting crisis as an opportunity for regeneration. Yet each transformation opens a passage for radical conflict and new revolutionary theories and subjects. This is particularly true of the critical passage from the 1920s to the 1930s, which Giacomo Marramao presents as an incandescent laboratory of theoretical and practical transformations and fierce confrontations. Moving from Austro-Marxism to Frankfurt School Critical Theory, from Hilferding to Grossmann, and Max Weber to Carl Schmitt, The Bewitched World of Capital shows how ‘the Political’ was remade in the passage from free-market capitalism to mass society, throwing new light on forms of domination and conflict that also traverse our present.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Rescuing Autonomy from Kant, James Furner argues that Marxism’s relation to Kant’s ethics is not one of irrelevance, complementarity or incompatibility, but critique. Although Kant’s formulas of the categorical imperative presuppose a belief in God that Kant cannot motivate, the value of autonomy can instead be grounded by appeal to an antinomy in capitalism’s basic structure, and this commits us to socialism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
What is the nature of the ‘laws’ that Marx and Engels sought to formulate for the development of capitalism? How to understand and judge Engels's attempt to formulate a general philosophy and worldview? These are the questions highlighted in this magnificent work that situates Marx and Engels’s writing against the background of the entire nineteenth-century world of scientific problems, from physics to historiography.
One of the major contributions to scholarship on Marx, Engels and nineteenth-century science, Liedman’s work is here presented in English translation and with a new preface by the author.
One of the major contributions to scholarship on Marx, Engels and nineteenth-century science, Liedman’s work is here presented in English translation and with a new preface by the author.
Book
Ahead of Publication
To this day, there persists a widespread assumption that Adorno’s references to Marx – and especially to Marx’s critique of political economy – represent a relic from an early and short-lived stage of Adorno’s theoretical development. On the basis of relevant and largely unpublished textual sources, this book refutes this thesis while showing that the centre of Adorno’s critical theory of society is occupied by a critique not only of political economy, but of economy in general.
Book
Open Access
What is money? What is capital? The Spectre of Capital tackles such fundamental questions at a deep philosophical level. It argues that the modern world is ruled by a ‘spectre’, the spectre of capital. This insight is rooted in an original combination of the ideas of Marx and Hegel. It presents the most sophisticated argument to date for ‘the homology thesis’, namely that the order of Hegel’s logical categories, and that of the social forms addressed by Marx’s Capital, share the same architectonic. The systematic-dialectical presentation shows how capital becomes a self-sustaining power.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Kz Unos Theory of Crisis presents an unparalleled and systematic demonstration of the inevitability of crisis under the capitalist mode of production. Based on a radical re-interpretation of Marxs Capital, Unos theory of crisis emphasizes excess capital alongside surplus populations and the commodification of labour power at the heart of Marxs theory of crisis, and additionally provides a concise overview of capitalist crises from the stage of mercantilism to the imperialist stage of capitalism.
Included are two Appendix essays by Uno, which disentangle theoretical difficulties related to the theory of crisis in Marxs Capital, and two original and contemporary essays by Professors Makoto Itoh and by Ken Kawashima and Gavin Walker.
This book was originally published in Japanese as Kyk-ron by Iwanami Shoten, 1953.
Included are two Appendix essays by Uno, which disentangle theoretical difficulties related to the theory of crisis in Marxs Capital, and two original and contemporary essays by Professors Makoto Itoh and by Ken Kawashima and Gavin Walker.
This book was originally published in Japanese as Kyk-ron by Iwanami Shoten, 1953.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Social-Imperialism in Britain Neil Redfern examines the relationship between British labour and British capital in the two world wars of the twentieth century. He argues that the Second World War, the so-called ‘People’s War’, no less than the First World War, was an imperialist war. He further argues that in both wars labour and capital entered into a social-imperialist contract in which labour would be rewarded for its support for war with such social and political reforms as votes for women and a health service, culminating in the ‘welfare state’ constructed after the Second World War. Concentrating on Lancashire, he examines the complex interaction between military successes and reverses, elite war aims, labour unrest and popular demands for reform.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Marx on Capitalism, James Furner offers a new answer to the fundamental question of Marxism: can a thesis connecting capital, the state and classes with the desirability of socialism be developed from an analysis of the commodity? The Interaction-Recognition-Antinomy Thesis is anchored in a systematic retranslation of Marx’s writings. It provides an antinomy-based strategy for grounding the value of social humanity in working-class agency, facilitates a dialectical derivation of political representation, and condemns capitalism as unjust without appeal to rights.
Book
Ahead of Publication
For almost 150 years, scholars have been debating how to interpret Marx’s seminal work Capital while they had access to just some of Marx’s economic manuscripts. This changed in 2013 with the publication of all the known economic writings of Marx and Engels in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). One can now reconstruct the lines of intellectual development, and one can also explore in detail how Friedrich Engels went about compiling volumes II and III of Capital from the vast legacy of manuscripts that Marx left behind after his death in 1883. It should be possible, now, to develop a more comprehensive and accurate picture of Marx as an economic theoretician. This volume of essays aims to initiate this process.
Contributors are: Christopher J. Arthur, Matthias Bohlender, Timm Graßmann, Jorge Grespan, Gerald Hubmann, Heinz D. Kurz, Marcel van der Linden, Kenji Mori, Fred Moseley, Lucia Pradella, Geert Reuten, Regina Roth, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf.
Contributors are: Christopher J. Arthur, Matthias Bohlender, Timm Graßmann, Jorge Grespan, Gerald Hubmann, Heinz D. Kurz, Marcel van der Linden, Kenji Mori, Fred Moseley, Lucia Pradella, Geert Reuten, Regina Roth, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The present studies on Brazilian modern art seek to specify some of the dominant contradictions of capitalism’s combined but uneven development as these appear from the global ‘periphery’. The grand project of Brasília is the main theme of the first two chapters, which treat the ‘ideal city’ as a case study in the ways in which creative talent in Brazil has been made to serve in the reproduction of social iniquities whose origins can be traced back to the agrarian latifundia. Further chapters scrutinise the socio-historical basis of Brazilian art, and develop, against the grain of the most prominent art historical approaches to modern Brazilian culture, a critical approach to the distinctly Brazilian visual language of geometrical abstraction. The book contends that, from the fifties up to today, formalism in Brazil has expressed the hegemony of the market.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Class Strikes Back examines a number of radical, twenty-first-century workers’ struggles. These struggles are characterised by a different kind of unionism and solidarity, arising out of new kinds of labour conditions and responsive to new kinds of social and economic marginalisation. The essays in the collection demonstrate the dramatic growth of syndicalist and autonomist formations and argue for their historical necessity. They show how workers seek to form and join democratic and independent unions that are fundamentally opposed to bureaucratic leadership, compromise, and concessions.
Specific case studies dealing with both the Global South and Global North assess the context of local histories and the spatially and temporally located balance of power, while embedding the struggle in a broader picture of resistance and the fight for emancipation.
Contributors are: Anne Alexander, Dario Azzellini, Mostafa Bassiouny, Antonios Broumas, Anna Curcio, Demet S. Dinler, Kostas Haritakis, Felix Hauf, Elias Ioakimoglou, Mithilesh Kumar, Kari Lydersen, Chiara Milan, Carlos Olaya, Hansi Oostinga, Ranabir Samaddar, Luke Sinwell, Elmar Wigand.
Specific case studies dealing with both the Global South and Global North assess the context of local histories and the spatially and temporally located balance of power, while embedding the struggle in a broader picture of resistance and the fight for emancipation.
Contributors are: Anne Alexander, Dario Azzellini, Mostafa Bassiouny, Antonios Broumas, Anna Curcio, Demet S. Dinler, Kostas Haritakis, Felix Hauf, Elias Ioakimoglou, Mithilesh Kumar, Kari Lydersen, Chiara Milan, Carlos Olaya, Hansi Oostinga, Ranabir Samaddar, Luke Sinwell, Elmar Wigand.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In this volume, Marx’s Theory of the Genesis of Money. How, Why, and Through What is a Commodity Money?, the first of the author’s works to be translated into English, Samezō Kuruma examines the different angles from which Marx analyses the commodity and money in the first two chapters of Capital, Volume I. Kuruma carefully explains each of the theoretical questions raised by Marx, particularly the theory of the value-form, which unravels the mystery surrounding money. The theoretical knowledge Marx gains from his analysis of the commodity is the linchpin of Capital, but he recognises that this presents the reader with the ‘greatest difficulty’ – just as ‘beginnings are always difficult in all sciences’. Kuruma helps to ease this difficulty by making the reader clearly aware of how and why Marx poses his theoretical questions.
This work includes an English translation of the full text of Kuruma’s book, Kachikeitai-ron to kōkankate-ron (Theory of the Value Form and Theory of the Exchange Process) (Iwanami Shoten, 1957) and a slightly abridged version of Part I of Kahei-ron (Theory of Money) (Otsuki Shoten, 1979). It is a substantially revised edition of the English translation under the same title, Marx's Theory of the Genesis of Money, that was self-published by the translator (Outskirts Press, 2008).
This work includes an English translation of the full text of Kuruma’s book, Kachikeitai-ron to kōkankate-ron (Theory of the Value Form and Theory of the Exchange Process) (Iwanami Shoten, 1957) and a slightly abridged version of Part I of Kahei-ron (Theory of Money) (Otsuki Shoten, 1979). It is a substantially revised edition of the English translation under the same title, Marx's Theory of the Genesis of Money, that was self-published by the translator (Outskirts Press, 2008).
Book
Ahead of Publication
U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part I: Emergence -- Left Opposition in the United States is the first of a documentary trilogy on a revolutionary socialist split-off from the U.S. Communist Party, reflecting Leon Trotsky’s confrontation with Stalinism in the global Communist movement. Spanning 1928 to 1940, this volume surveys important U.S. labor struggles in the 1930s, early efforts to comprehend the so-called “Negro Question,” and substantial contributions to the study history and the development of Marxist theory. Also covered are confrontations and convergences with other currents on the Left, internal debates and splits among Trotskyists themselves, and repressive efforts by the U.S. government in the first Smith Act Trial. Scholars and activists will find much of interest in these primary sources.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Debord, Time and Spectacle Tom Bunyard provides a detailed philosophical study of the theoretical work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Drawing on evidence from Debord’s books, films, letters and notes, Bunyard reconstructs the Hegelian and Marxian ideas that support Debord’s central concept of ‘spectacle’. This affords a reconsideration of Debord’s theoretical claims, and a reinterpretation of his broader work that foregrounds his concerns with history and lived time. By bringing Situationist theory into dialogue with recent reinterpretations of Marx, this book also identifies problems in Debord’s critique of capitalism. It argues, however, that the conceptions of temporality and spectacle that support that critique amount to a philosophy of praxis that remains relevant today.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Economists generally assume that wage differentials among similar workers will only endure when competition in the capital and/or labor market is restricted. In contrast, Howard Botwinick uses a classical Marxist analysis of real capitalist competition to show that substantial patterns of wage disparity can persist despite high levels of competition. Indeed, the author provocatively argues that competition and technical change often militate against wage equalization. In addition to providing the basis for a more unified analysis of race and gender inequality within labor markets, Botwinick’s work has important implications for contemporary union strategies. Going against mainstream proponents of labor-management cooperation, the author calls for militant union organization that can once again take wages and working conditions out of capitalist competition.
This revised edition was originally published under the same title in 1993 by Princeton University Press.
This revised edition was originally published under the same title in 1993 by Princeton University Press.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Can the Marxist tradition still provide new resources for thinking the specificity of historical time? This volume proposes to transform our understanding of Marxism by reconnecting with the ‘subterranean currents’ of plural temporalities that have traversed its development. From Rousseau and Sieyès to Marx, from Bloch to Althusser, from Gramsci to Pasolini and Postcolonialism, the chapters in this volume seek both to valorise neglected resources from Marxism’s contradictory history, and also to read against the grain its orthodox and heterodox currents. Privileging not the single time of historical development, but the plural temporalities that intertwine in and constitute any given historical conjuncture, and arguing against merely subjectivist theories of temporal multiplicity, this volume studies the articulation of the real, plural temporalities of mass political action. Comprehending their dynamics is a necessary precondition for a renewed politics of emancipation.
Contributors include: Luca Basso, Stefano Bracaletti, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Fabio Frosini, Augusto Illuminati, Nicola Marcucci, Vittorio Morfino, Luca Pinzolo, Peter D. Thomas and Massimiliano Tomba.
Contributors include: Luca Basso, Stefano Bracaletti, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Fabio Frosini, Augusto Illuminati, Nicola Marcucci, Vittorio Morfino, Luca Pinzolo, Peter D. Thomas and Massimiliano Tomba.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Petrograd Workers in the Russian Revolution is a study of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and of the first months of Soviet power as viewed and experienced 'from below', by the industrial workers of Petrograd, Russia’s capital and the centre of its revolutionary movement. Based largely on contemporary sources, it lets the workers speak for themselves, showing them as conscious, creative subjects of the revolutionary process, indeed, as the leading force of the revolution. In doing so, it sheds light on the nature and role of the Bolshevik party as an authentic workers’ organization that by the summer of 1917 had become the leading political force among workers.
Revised and expanded edition of two books published in English, namely: The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (Macmillan, 1983) and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (Macmillan, 1984).
Revised and expanded edition of two books published in English, namely: The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (Macmillan, 1983) and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (Macmillan, 1984).
Book
Ahead of Publication
In The Popular Front Novel in Britain, 1934-1940, Elinor Taylor provides the first study of the relationship between the British novel and the anti-fascist Popular Front strategy endorsed by the Comintern in 1935. Through readings of novels by British Communists including Jack Lindsay, John Sommerfield, Lewis Jones and James Barke, Taylor shows that the realist novel of the left was a key site in which the politics of anti-fascist alliance were rehearsed. Maintaining a dialogue with theories of populism and with Georg Lukács’s vision of a revived literary realism ensuing from the Popular Front, this book at once illuminates the cultural formation of the Popular Front in Britain and proposes a new framework for reading British fiction of this period.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Marx and Social Justice, George E. McCarthy presents a detailed and comprehensive overview of the ethical, political, and economic foundations of Marx’s theory of social justice in his early and later writings. What is distinctive about Marx's theory is that he rejects the views of justice in liberalism and reform socialism based on legal rights and fair distribution by balancing ancient Greek philosophy with nineteenth-century political economy. Relying on Aristotle’s definition of social justice grounded in ethics and politics, virtue and democracy, Marx applies it to a broader range of issues, including workers’ control and creativity, producer associations, human rights and human needs, fairness and reciprocity in exchange, wealth distribution, political emancipation, economic and ecological crises, and economic democracy. Each chapter in the book represents a different aspect of social justice. Unlike Locke and Hegel, Marx is able to integrate natural law and natural rights, as he constructs a classical vision of self-government ‘of the people, by the people’.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Responses to Marx's Capital: From Rudolf Hilferding to Isaak Illich Rubin is a collection of primary sources dealing with the reception of the economic works of Karl Marx from the First to the Third International. The documents, translated for the first time from German and Russian, range from the original reviews of the three volumes of Capital and the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value to the debates between the Marxist economists and the bourgeois academic representatives of the theory of marginal utility and the German historical school. The volume closes with six essays by the prominent economist Isaak I. Rubin, including ‘Essays on Marx's Theory of Money’ and ‘The Dialectical Development of Categories in Marx’s Economic System’.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Nigel Harris’s Selected Essays: From National Liberation to Globalisation presents an encompassing overview of the work of one of the most prolific and insightful Marxist economists of the second half of the twentieth century. It starts off with a new interview in which Harris reflects on the development of his thought over the more than half a century separating the death of Stalin from the latest developments in globalisation and capitalist restructuring. The collected essays deal with topics ranging from imperialism and the state to the political economy of development and migration, and offer an ample selection from Harris’s political journalism. Together the work constitutes at once a personal journey through the history of the British revolutionary left and a trenchant commentary on some of the most fundamental problems facing a renewed Marxist theory.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917 is the most comprehensive book on the epic uprising that toppled the tsarist monarchy and ushered in the next stage of the Russian Revolution. Hasegawa presents in detail the intense drama of the nine days of the revolution, including the workers' strike, soldiers' revolt, the scrambling of revolutionary party activists to control the revolution, and the liberals’ conspiracy to force Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. Based on his previous work, published in 1981, the author has revised, enlarged, and reinterpreted the complexity of the February Revolution, resulting in a major and timely reassessment on the occasion of its centennial.
See inside the book.
See inside the book.
Book
Ahead of Publication
British Communism and the Politics of Race explores the role that the Communist Party of Great Britain played within the anti-racism movement in Britain from the 1940s to the 1980s. As one of the first organisations to undertake serious anti-colonial and anti-racist activism within the British labour movement, the CPGB was a pioneering force that campaigned against racial discrimination, popular imperialism and fascist violence in British society.
The book examines the balancing act that the Communist Party negotiated in its anti-racist work, between making appeals to the labour movement to get involved in the fight against racism and working with Britain's ethnic minority communities, who often felt let down by the trade unions and the Labour Party. Transitioning from a class-based outlook to an embrace of the new social movements of the 1960s–70s, the CPGB played an important role in the anti-racist struggle, but by the 1980s, it was eclipsed by more radical and diverse activist organisations.
The book examines the balancing act that the Communist Party negotiated in its anti-racist work, between making appeals to the labour movement to get involved in the fight against racism and working with Britain's ethnic minority communities, who often felt let down by the trade unions and the Labour Party. Transitioning from a class-based outlook to an embrace of the new social movements of the 1960s–70s, the CPGB played an important role in the anti-racist struggle, but by the 1980s, it was eclipsed by more radical and diverse activist organisations.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Progressive theorists and activists insist that contemporary capitalism is deeply flawed from a normative point of view. However, most accept the liberal egalitarian thesis that the serious shortcomings of market societies (financial excess, inequality, and so on) could be overcome with proper political regulation. Building on Marx's legacy, Tony Smith argues in Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism that advocates of this thesis (Rawls, Habermas, Stiglitz, et al.) lack an adequate concept of capital and the state. These theorists also fail to comprehend new developments in world history ensuring that the 'destructive' aspects of capitalism increasingly outweigh whatever 'creative' elements it might continue to possess. Smith concludes that a normative social theory adequate to the twenty-first century must explicitly and unequivocally embrace socialism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Global Labour History is a latecomer to historical science. It has only developed in the last three decades. This anthology provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art. Prominent representatives of the discipline discuss its fundamental methodological and conceptual aspects. In addition, the volume contains field and case studies from Africa and Latin America, as well as from the Middle East and China. In these studies, the local, regional and continental constitutive processes of the working class are discussed from a global-historical perspective. The anthology has been composed as a Festschrift dedicated to Marcel van der Linden, the leading theoretician of, and networker for, Global Labour History.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Art History as Social Praxis: The Collected Writings of David Craven brings together more than thirty essays that chart the development of Craven’s voice as an unorthodox Marxist who applied historical materialism to the study of modern art. This book demonstrates the range and versatility of David Craven’s praxis as a ‘democratic socialist’ art historian who assessed the essential role the visual arts play in imagining more just and equitable societies. The essays collected here reveal Craven’s lifelong commitment to exposing interstices between western and non-western cultures by researching the reciprocating influences between First- and Third-World artists, critics and historians.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Walter Benjamin derided Werner Scholem as a ‘rogue’ in 1924. Josef Stalin referred him as a ‘splendid man’, but soon backtracked and labeled him an ‘imbecile’, while Ernst Thälmann, chairman of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), warned his followers against the dangers of ‘Scholemism’. For the philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem, however, Werner was first and foremost his older brother. The life of German-Jewish Communist Werner Scholem (1895–1940) had many facets. Werner and Gerhard, later Gershom, rebelled together against their authoritarian father and the atmosphere of national chauvinism engulfing Germany during World War I. After inspiring his younger brother to take up the Zionist cause, Werner himself underwent a long personal journey before deciding to join the Communist struggle. Scholem climbed the party ladder and orchestrated the KPD's ‘Bolshevisation’ campaign, only to be expelled as one of Stalin's opponents in 1926. He was arrested in 1933, and ultimately murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp seven years later. This first biography of Werner Scholem tells his life story by drawing on a wide range of original sources and archive material long hidden beyond the Iron Curtain of the Cold War era.
First published in German by UVK Verlagsgesellschaft as Werner Scholem - eine politische Biographie (1895-1940), Konstanz, 2014.
First published in German by UVK Verlagsgesellschaft as Werner Scholem - eine politische Biographie (1895-1940), Konstanz, 2014.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This text reasserts the Marxist view of the French Revolution as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Based mainly on articles published in the journal Historical Materialism it challenges the still dominant revisionist view of the French Revolution. It serves to restore the close tie between the history of the Old Regime and the Revolution. It demonstrates that the rise of a bourgeois capitalist class has a long history dating back to the sixteenth century. Moreover, it shows that the Revolution itself played a large role in strengthening the bourgeoisie politically and economically while bringing about the unification of financial and productive capital. Indeed, it shows that the rising of the masses during the Revolution, viewed by revisionism as economically regressive, in fact helped to bring about the consolidation of capitalism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In The Conspiracy of Modern Art the Brazilian critic and art-historian Luiz Renato Martins presents a new account of modern art from David to Abstract Expressionism. The once vibrant debate on these touchstones of modernism has gone stale. Viewed from the Sao Paulo megalopolis the art of Paris and New York - embodying Revolution, Thermidor, Bonapartistm and Bourgeois ‘Triumph' - once more pulsates in tragic key.
Equally attentive to form and politics, Martins invites us to look again at familiar pictures. In the process, modern art appears in a new light. These essays, largely unknown to an English-speaking audience, may be the most important contribution to the account of modern painting since the important debates of the 1980s.
Equally attentive to form and politics, Martins invites us to look again at familiar pictures. In the process, modern art appears in a new light. These essays, largely unknown to an English-speaking audience, may be the most important contribution to the account of modern painting since the important debates of the 1980s.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Landscape between Ideology and the Aesthetic
Marxist Essays on British Art and Art Theory, 1750–1850
At a time of growing interest in relations between Marxism and Romanticism, Andrew Hemingway’s essays on British art and art theory reopen the question of Romantic painting’s ideological functions and, in some cases, its critical purchase. Half the volume exposes the voices of competing class interests in aesthetics and art theory in the tumultuous years of British history between the American Revolution and the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. Half offers new perspectives on works by some of the most important landscape painters of the time: John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, John Crome, and John Sell Cotman. Four essays are hitherto unpublished, and the remainder have been updated and in several cases substantially rewritten for this volume.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This collection of some 32 articles and essays by Adrian Rifkin were written over a period of forty years. It contains innovative and influential studies of the archives of art, urbanism, music and popular life in France and Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arranged around a number of studies of the representation of the Paris Commune, the book also contains chapters on Edith Piaf’s role in French culture, histories of art education, opera and queer life in the city as well as analytical accounts of the commodity and cultural theory in Adorno and Benjamin. An extended introduction by Steve Edwards works over the questions of uneven time in Marxist cultural theory and the disciplinary formations that underpin many of Rifkin’s essays.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In his study Jan Hoff charts the unprecedented global boost that has been experienced by critical Marxism since the mid-1960s. In particular Hoff shows the development of interpretations of Marx’s method; of critical social theory oriented towards Marx's critique of political economy; and of significant disputes concerning the different versions and iterations of the critical project that ultimately culminated in Capital. His book investigates the ‘globalisation’ of Marx debates, the complex network of international theoretical approaches that have been devised between the poles of science and politics, the transfer of theory and the historical development of schools of thought beyond national and linguistic borders.
Marx Worldwide provides an overview of Marx reception in various regions of the world, in which the extra-European process of theory formation receives particular attention; and it shows how, despite the supersession of Marxism in the sense of an all-encompassing worldview, the Marxian aim of providing an explication of the internal connection of economic categories and relations, and thereby of accomplishing the ‘de-mystification’ of the ‘deranged world’ of the economy, is as relevant and as theoretically important as it has ever been.
First published in German by Akademie Verlag as Marx Global. Zur Entwicklung des internationalen Marx-Diskurses seit 1965, Berlin, 2009.
Marx Worldwide provides an overview of Marx reception in various regions of the world, in which the extra-European process of theory formation receives particular attention; and it shows how, despite the supersession of Marxism in the sense of an all-encompassing worldview, the Marxian aim of providing an explication of the internal connection of economic categories and relations, and thereby of accomplishing the ‘de-mystification’ of the ‘deranged world’ of the economy, is as relevant and as theoretically important as it has ever been.
First published in German by Akademie Verlag as Marx Global. Zur Entwicklung des internationalen Marx-Diskurses seit 1965, Berlin, 2009.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The collected papers of Costas Lapavitsas are a pathway to Marxist monetary theory, a field that continues to attract strong interest. The papers range far and wide, including markets and money, finance and the enterprise, power and money, the financialisation of capitalism, finance and profit, even money as art. Despite its breadth, the collection remains highly coherent.
Money and finance are pre-eminent, even dominant, features of contemporary capitalism. Lapavitsas has been one of the first political economists to notice their ascendancy and to devote his research to it. He offers a resolutely Marxist perspective on contemporary capitalism while remaining conversant with the history of political economy, sensitive to mainstream economic theory, and fully aware of the empirical reality of financialisation.
Money and finance are pre-eminent, even dominant, features of contemporary capitalism. Lapavitsas has been one of the first political economists to notice their ascendancy and to devote his research to it. He offers a resolutely Marxist perspective on contemporary capitalism while remaining conversant with the history of political economy, sensitive to mainstream economic theory, and fully aware of the empirical reality of financialisation.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Dutch-German Communist Left, represented by the German KAPD-AAUD, the Dutch KAPN and the Bulgarian Communist Workers Party, separated from the Comintern (1921) on questions like electoralism, trade-unionism, united fronts, the one-party state and anti-proletarian violence. It attracted the ire of Lenin, who wrote his Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder against the Linkskommunismus, while Herman Gorter wrote a famous response in his pamphlet Reply to Lenin. The present volume provides the most substantial history to date of this tendency in the twentieth-century Communist movement. It covers how the Communist left, with the KAPD-AAU, denounced 'party communism' and 'state capitalism' in Russia; how the German left survived after 1933 in the shape of the Dutch GIK and Paul Mattick’s councils movement in the USA; and also how the Dutch Communistenbond Spartacus continued to fight after 1942 for the world power of the workers councils, as theorised by Pannekoek in his book Workers’ Councils (1946).
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Communes and Workers' Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below, Dario Azzellini offers an account of the Bolivarian Revolution from below. While authors on Venezuela commonly concentrate on former president Hugo Chávez and government politics, this book shows how workers, peasants and the poor in urban communities engage in building 21st century socialism through popular movements, communal councils, communes and fighting for workers' control. In a relationship of cooperation and conflict with the state, social transformation is approached on 'two tracks', from below and from above. Azzellini’s fascinating account stands out because of the extensive empirical examples and original voices from movements, communal councils, communes and workers.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book develops a Marxist theory of literary style. The first part explains why Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson came to see style as central to political criticism. It delineates the historical and conceptual preconditions for the emergence of a ‘politics of style’, and uncovers an underground current of stylistics within the Marxist tradition from Marx to Barthes. The second part sets out precisely what each thinker has written on style and demonstrates how this came to figure in their overall intellectual and political projects, focusing above all on a detailed reconstruction of Williams’s best-known concept, the ‘structure of feeling’. Finally, the third part sets out an independent theory of style and makes an ambitious attempt to establish it as a foundational element of a new Marxist poetics.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Uno, who proposes to study capitalism at three distinct levels of abstraction, insists that there should be a mid-range theory of its developmental stages (dankaïron) between the pure theory of capital, which must be couched in the form of Hegelian dialectic (genriron), and capitalist histories which must be recounted with full empirical detail. In this book he illustrates how he would himself expose that mid-range theory, by summarising the three types of economic policy that the bourgeois state successively adopted: mercantilism, liberalism and imperialism. He moreover indicates that economics can relate and cross-fertilise with other branches of social science, such as law and politics, only at this level of abstraction, thus achieving an adequate theory of the bourgeois state. Nowhere else is Marx’s insight into ‘the state as the epitome of bourgeois society’ more vividly endorsed than in this book.
First published in Japanese as Keizai-Seisakuron by Kobundo, Ltd. in 1936. The current work is a translation of the enlarged and revised edition of 1971.
First published in Japanese as Keizai-Seisakuron by Kobundo, Ltd. in 1936. The current work is a translation of the enlarged and revised edition of 1971.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Many large Italian cities have a main thoroughfare ‘via Gramsci’, showing that the Communist leader has become part of Italy’s ‘national patrimony’, while internationally, the interest in Gramsci’s writings is second to none.
As a consequence of this fame, Gramsci’s heritage is claimed by rival groups: on the one hand by those who hope to establish his writings as ‘sacred texts’ for their own policies and on the other by those who stress any differences with Lenin in order to prove Gramsci a ‘rebel’.
A great merit of this biography is that it lifts the study of Gramsci away from the sterile debate about whether he was or was not a Leninist; another achievement of the author has been to integrate the circumstances of Gramsci’s life – the childhood in Sardinia, the politics of the left in the 1920s, the years of exile and prison – with his developing political and philosophical ideas.
As a consequence of this fame, Gramsci’s heritage is claimed by rival groups: on the one hand by those who hope to establish his writings as ‘sacred texts’ for their own policies and on the other by those who stress any differences with Lenin in order to prove Gramsci a ‘rebel’.
A great merit of this biography is that it lifts the study of Gramsci away from the sterile debate about whether he was or was not a Leninist; another achievement of the author has been to integrate the circumstances of Gramsci’s life – the childhood in Sardinia, the politics of the left in the 1920s, the years of exile and prison – with his developing political and philosophical ideas.
Book
Open Access
This work depicts Otto Bauer as the main politician of the SDAP and attempts a critical-analytical interpretation of his socio-political theories, which are shown against the background of the debates within the First and Second Internationals, political events within the SDAP, the international workers’ movement, and the socio-historical processes in Austria and Europe at the time. The book emphasises Bauer’s analyses, philosophical and historiosophical arguments, his theories of imperialism and the national question, his deliberations on possible ways to socialism, the war question, and fascism, as well as his political activity. Otto Bauer (1881-1938) is also a treatise of the ideological, intellectual, cultural and political movement shaped by Bauer: Austromarxism.
First published in German by Peter Lang as Otto Bauer: Studien zur social-politischen Philosophie, Frankfurt, 2005.
First published in German by Peter Lang as Otto Bauer: Studien zur social-politischen Philosophie, Frankfurt, 2005.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Reform, Revolution and Direct Action amongst British Miners, Martyn Ives offers a new perspective on one of the most volatile periods in labour history. His research into the astonishing coalfield militancy of 1919 reveals it was a watershed year on a par with 1926. Indeed the General Strike was in many ways merely its dim echo.
Whilst historians have skated over the labour unrest of 1919, Martyn Ives uncovers a remarkable incidence of unofficial mass strikes in the coalfields, waged against mine-owners, government and trade union leaders alike. Led by revolutionaries, and infused with political radicalism, this mass movement offered a glimpse of an alternative road to socialism, based upon the organised industrial power of the working class.
Whilst historians have skated over the labour unrest of 1919, Martyn Ives uncovers a remarkable incidence of unofficial mass strikes in the coalfields, waged against mine-owners, government and trade union leaders alike. Led by revolutionaries, and infused with political radicalism, this mass movement offered a glimpse of an alternative road to socialism, based upon the organised industrial power of the working class.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Many scholars have recently shown great interest in a diachronic re-examination of Antonio Gramsci’s main theoretical-political categories in the Prison Notebooks. This method would uncover the origins and development of Gramsci’s concepts using the same method that Gramsci himself believed would allow us to grasp ‘the rhythm of thought’ in Marx. The present work embraces this perspective and puts it to work in two ways. Its first part analyzes the relation between structure and superstructure and the concepts of hegemony and the regulated society. Its second part extends the diachronic analysis to the conceptual pairings which represent alternatives to structure-superstructure, encompassing questions of political and cultural organisation as well as the relation between Gramsci and the major proponents of historical materialism (Marx, Engels, Lenin).
English translation of Il ritmo del pensiero: per una lettura diacronica dei «Quaderni del carcere» di Gramsci published by Bibliopolis, Naples (2011).
English translation of Il ritmo del pensiero: per una lettura diacronica dei «Quaderni del carcere» di Gramsci published by Bibliopolis, Naples (2011).
Book
Ahead of Publication
This volume is a valuable re-assessment of the Nicaraguan Revolution by a Marxist historian of Latin American political history. It shows that the FSLN (‘the Sandinistas’), with politics principally shaped by Soviet and Cuban Communism, never had a commitment to genuine democracy either within the revolutionary movement or within society at large; that the FSLN’s lack of commitment to democracy was a key factor in the way that revolution was betrayed from the 1970s to the 1990s; and that the FSLN’s lack of rank-and-file democracy left all decision-making to the National Directorate and ultimately placed that power in the hands of Daniel Ortega. Pursuing his narrative into the present, La Botz shows that, once their would-be bureaucratic ruling class project was defeated, Ortega and the FSLN leadership turned to an alliance with the capitalist class.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form gathers Patrick Murray’s essays reinterpreting Marx and Marxian theory published since his Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (1988), along with a previously unpublished essay and an introduction. Murray’s essays concentrate on Marx the historical materialist, the investigator of historically specific social forms of wealth and labour. There is no production in general; the production of wealth always involves specific social forms and purposes that matter in many ways. Marx’s attention to the dynamics and far-reaching consequences of historically specific social forms – in particular those that are constitutive of the capitalist mode of production – sets him off from classical political economy and traditional Marxism. In probing Marx’s dialectical accounts of the commodity, value, money, surplus value, wage labour and capital, The Mismeasure of Wealth establishes Marx’s singular relevance for critical social theory today.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Finance Capital Today is shortlisted for the The Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize 2017.
Finance Capital Today presents a rich new analysis of the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably its truly global nature and its financialisation, calling on Marxist analyses of the concentration, centralisation and globalisation of capital and Marx’s theory of interest-bearing and fictitious capital. Chesnais shows how financial globalisation and the exponential growth of financial assets have developed alongside the globalisation of productive capital, paying special attention to the contemporary operations of transnational corporations and global oligopoly. He argues that the macroeconomic perspective is one in which large amounts of capital are looking for profitable investment in a setting of underlying overproduction and low profits. The outcome will be low global growth, repeated financial shocks and the growing interconnection between the environmental and economic crises.
Finance Capital Today presents a rich new analysis of the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably its truly global nature and its financialisation, calling on Marxist analyses of the concentration, centralisation and globalisation of capital and Marx’s theory of interest-bearing and fictitious capital. Chesnais shows how financial globalisation and the exponential growth of financial assets have developed alongside the globalisation of productive capital, paying special attention to the contemporary operations of transnational corporations and global oligopoly. He argues that the macroeconomic perspective is one in which large amounts of capital are looking for profitable investment in a setting of underlying overproduction and low profits. The outcome will be low global growth, repeated financial shocks and the growing interconnection between the environmental and economic crises.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Religion has always been an object of philosophical analysis, as well as a platform for political practice. One cannot imagine a form of philosophical thinking without its relation to a religion, whether it negates or affirms the latter. In different philosophical orientations, religion also serves as a condition for philosophy.
Althusser and Theology intends not so much to fill a gap in Althusser scholarship as to make an important contribution to the contemporary radical left movement. In this regard, Althusser and Theology is of significant importance in the current debates on the Left concerning its relation to theology. It will also contribute to the ongoing debate on Althusser, as well as opening up a new perspective on his philosophical project.
Contributors are: Roland Boer, Stanislas Breton, Isa Blumi, Geoff Pfeifer, Agon Hamza, Warren Montag, Vittorio Morfino, Knox Peden, Panagiotis Sotiris, Ted Stolze, Jana Tsoneva, and Gabriel Tupinambá.
Althusser and Theology intends not so much to fill a gap in Althusser scholarship as to make an important contribution to the contemporary radical left movement. In this regard, Althusser and Theology is of significant importance in the current debates on the Left concerning its relation to theology. It will also contribute to the ongoing debate on Althusser, as well as opening up a new perspective on his philosophical project.
Contributors are: Roland Boer, Stanislas Breton, Isa Blumi, Geoff Pfeifer, Agon Hamza, Warren Montag, Vittorio Morfino, Knox Peden, Panagiotis Sotiris, Ted Stolze, Jana Tsoneva, and Gabriel Tupinambá.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The 'Red International of Labour Unions' (RILU, Russian abbreviation Profintern) was a central instrument for the spreading of international communism during the inter-war period. This comprehensive and scholarly history of the organisation, based on extensive research in the former communist archives in Moscow and East Berlin, sheds significant light on the international trade union movement of the period.
Tosstorff shows how the RILU began as a revolutionary alliance of syndicalists and communists in defiance of the social democratic International Federation of Trade Unions. His text presents a full account of the organisation’s main stages: the decline of the revolutionary wave after World War One, after which many syndicalists left, and others were integrated into the communist parties; the continuation of the RILU as an international communist apparatus; and its dissolution in 1936–7 as part of communism's popular front policy.
First published in German as Profintern: Die Rote Gewerkschaftsinternationale 1920-1937 by Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, in 2004.
Tosstorff shows how the RILU began as a revolutionary alliance of syndicalists and communists in defiance of the social democratic International Federation of Trade Unions. His text presents a full account of the organisation’s main stages: the decline of the revolutionary wave after World War One, after which many syndicalists left, and others were integrated into the communist parties; the continuation of the RILU as an international communist apparatus; and its dissolution in 1936–7 as part of communism's popular front policy.
First published in German as Profintern: Die Rote Gewerkschaftsinternationale 1920-1937 by Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, in 2004.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In The History of Italian Marxism, Paolo Favilli offers an articulated analysis of the different levels at which Marx's ideas - and 'Marxism' as a doctrinal 'system' - were received in Italy from the time of the First International up till the eve of the First World War.
Rejecting any linear understanding of the relation between Marx's texts and the assumption of Marxism as the ideology of the burgeoning workers' movement, Favilli explores the growth of different forms of Marxist culture through the period of the Paris Commune, the late-nineteenth-century debate on 'revisionism', and the rise of revolutionary syndicalism.
Asking in each case whether 'Marxism' meant a science, an ideology, a way of doing politics, a utopia, a myth or a religion, Favilli goes on to assess which of these 'Marxisms' died with, and which have survived, the 'crisis' at the end of the twentieth century.
With a new preface to the English edition.
First published in Italian as Storia del marxismo italiano: dalle origini alla grande guerra, FrancoAngeli s.r.l. Milan, 1996.
Rejecting any linear understanding of the relation between Marx's texts and the assumption of Marxism as the ideology of the burgeoning workers' movement, Favilli explores the growth of different forms of Marxist culture through the period of the Paris Commune, the late-nineteenth-century debate on 'revisionism', and the rise of revolutionary syndicalism.
Asking in each case whether 'Marxism' meant a science, an ideology, a way of doing politics, a utopia, a myth or a religion, Favilli goes on to assess which of these 'Marxisms' died with, and which have survived, the 'crisis' at the end of the twentieth century.
With a new preface to the English edition.
First published in Italian as Storia del marxismo italiano: dalle origini alla grande guerra, FrancoAngeli s.r.l. Milan, 1996.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The historical studies presented here examine four ideologies— Leninism, Trotskyism, anarchism, and anti-imperialism— still with us, however different and diffuse in form. They are a contribution to the worldwide Marx renaissance of recent decades which has helped clear away the legacies of the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals, not to mention of the ‘real existing socialism’ of the Soviet Union and its bastard progeny.
These revolutionary predecessors did not fail because ‘they had the wrong ideas’; in contrast to today, they were merely embedded in an earlier dynamic where capitalism, globally, was not yet fully dominant. The cases of Russia, Turkey, Spain and Bolivia allow us to measure the distance between their epoch and our own, and to clear away their problematic legacies.
These revolutionary predecessors did not fail because ‘they had the wrong ideas’; in contrast to today, they were merely embedded in an earlier dynamic where capitalism, globally, was not yet fully dominant. The cases of Russia, Turkey, Spain and Bolivia allow us to measure the distance between their epoch and our own, and to clear away their problematic legacies.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Suvin’s ‘X-Ray’ of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism. It shows that the plebeian surge of revolutionary self-determination was halted in SFR Yugoslavia by 1965; that between 1965– 72 there was a confused and hidden but still open-ended clash; and that by 1972 the oligarchy in power was closed and static, leading to failure. The underlying reasons of this failure are analysed in a melding of semiotics and political history, which points beyond Yugoslavia – including its achievements and degeneration – to show how political and economic democracy fail when pursued in isolation. The emphasis on socialist Yugoslavia is at various points embedded into a wider historical and theoretical frame, including Left debates about the party, sociological debates about classes, and Marx’s great foray against a religious State doctrine in The Jewish Question.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The republication of Karl Korsch's Karl Marx (1938) makes available to a new generation of readers the most concise account of Karl Marx's thought by one of the major figures of twentieth-century Western Marxism. Originally written for publication in a series on 'Modern Sociologists', Korsch's book sought to bring Marx's work to life for an audience of non-specialist readers. As Michael Buckmiller writes in his new introduction to the work, Korsch wanted his book to serve as a passport into the non-dogmatic sections of the American labour movement. The result is a bracing, concise, and accessible overview of the entirety of Marx's thought, and a pungent history of 'Marxism' itself.
Book
Ahead of Publication
A decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new, revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, including his value analysis. Now in Marx and the Earth Foster and Burkett expand on this analysis in the process of responding to recent ecosocialist criticisms of Marx. The result is a full-fledged anti-critique—pointing to the crucial roles that dialectics, open-system thermodynamics, intrinsic value, and aesthetic understandings played in the original Marxian critique, holding out the possibility of a new red-green synthesis.
Book
Open Access
Karl Kautsky was, for three decades before the First World War, the main authority on the intellectual heritage of Marx and Engels, the founding fathers of Marxism. His interpretation of Marx’s Capital and the basic laws and contradictions of capitalism was the standard reference point for both the foes and allies of Social Democracy. Jukka Gronow’s On the Formation of Marxism analyses Kautsky’s impact on the self-understanding of the European labour movement from his dispute over Revisionism with Eduard Bernstein to his polemics with V.I. Lenin over Imperialism and the Russian Revolution. Despite many political differences, Gronow shows that these authors shared a common understanding of the basic nature of capitalism, which in important respects differed from Marx’s critique of political economy.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Marx´s Capital, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity, Guido Starosta develops a materialist inquiry into the social and historical determinations of revolutionary subjectivity. Through a methodologically-minded critical reconstruction of the Marxian critique of political economy, from the early writings up to the Grundrisse and Capital, this study shows that the outcome of the historical movement of the objectified form of social mediation, which has turned into the very alienated subject of social life (i.e., capital), is to develop, as its own immanent determination, the constitution of the (self-abolishing) working class as a revolutionary subject. A crucial element in this intellectual endeavour is the focus on the intrinsic connection between the specifically dialectical form of social science and its radical transformative content.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Trotsky’s Challenge: The ‘Literary Discussion’ of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution, Frederick C. Corney examines the political polemic surrounding the publication of Trotsky’s The Lessons of October. Trotsky’s analysis ran counter to the efforts of Bolshevik leaders to fashion the narrative of October as a foundation event in which the Bolshevik Party, under the clear-sighted leadership of Lenin, played a major role in bringing about a radical socialist revolution in Russia. Corney has translated into English the major contributions to this polemic, annotated them, and written an extensive contextualising introduction, examining the polemic for its impact not only on the figure of Trotsky, but also on the changing political culture of the 1920s and 1930s.
Book
Ahead of Publication
According to an established interpretation, the transition from Hegel’s materialism to Marx’s materialism signifies a progressive development from an abstract-idealist theory of becoming, to a theory of the concrete actions of human beings within history. A Failed Parricide by Roberto Finelli offers an innovative reading of the Marx-Hegel relationship, arguing that the young Marx remained structurally subaltern to Hegel’s distinctive conception of the subject that becomes itself in relation to alterity. Marx’s early critique of Hegel is represented as a ‘failed parricide’, relying upon an organicist and spiritualist anthropology derived from Feuerbach’s presumed materialism. Only in Marx’s mature critique of political economy will he be able to return to this ‘primal scene’ and produce a distinctive theory of the role of formal determinations in social and political modernity.
First published in Italian by Bollati Borighieri Editore as Un parricidio mancato. Il rapporto tra Hegel e il giovane Marx, Turin, 2004.
First published in Italian by Bollati Borighieri Editore as Un parricidio mancato. Il rapporto tra Hegel e il giovane Marx, Turin, 2004.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In this work, Marcos Del Roio analyses Gramsci's pre-prison political-theoretical activity in light of a radical thesis: that throughout Gramsci's life we see a total continuity between his political praxis and his philosophical reflection. That is not to ignore the changes, turns, and even fractures in the Sardinian communist's thinking across his brief but rich existence. On the contrary. Reading Gramsci, we find key ideas that set the rhythm of all of his thought, at least from the time of the Turin factory councils up till the writing of his final notebooks. These ideas also established the essential identity of his thinking, throughout (and over and above) the diversity of its manifestations: just as we typically find in all great thinkers. This book's title, referring to the metaphor of a ray of light passing through a prism, expresses this counterpoint between identity and diversity. The main category we find in the subtitle speaks to this same problematic, considered in the context of Gramsci's political action and the radical Leninism that guided him in his victorious battle with Bordiga: the 'united front'. This political formula was coined in Germany in 1921 and was central to the late Lenin's thinking, and in this work Del Roio shows its various different interpretations as the basis for analysing Gramsci's own position in this regard.
Book
Ahead of Publication
‘Delivery from slavery’: these words, taken from a Dutch labour movement song, perfectly map onto the Bible’s central concern. They are also similar to the Torah’s key phrase: ‘I am YHWH, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage' (Ex 20:2).
The words are invoked here to serve as an axiom to be introduced into the modern period. The watchword ‘delivery from slavery’ translates the biblical message of the exodus from slavery into the theory and practice of a modern liberation movement. The present work argues that biblical theology is the attempt to ‘update’ the ‘language of the message’. It searches for a language that attends to the concerns of today’s world while ‘preserving’ the concerns that originally motivated biblical language.
The words are invoked here to serve as an axiom to be introduced into the modern period. The watchword ‘delivery from slavery’ translates the biblical message of the exodus from slavery into the theory and practice of a modern liberation movement. The present work argues that biblical theology is the attempt to ‘update’ the ‘language of the message’. It searches for a language that attends to the concerns of today’s world while ‘preserving’ the concerns that originally motivated biblical language.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In The Thatcherite Offensive, Alexander Gallas provides a class-centred political analysis of Thatcherism. Drawing upon Greek state theorist Nicos Poulantzas, he challenges both mainstream and critical accounts of British politics in the 1980s and 90s. He shows that Thatcherism’s sucess and novelty, indeed its unity as a political project, lay in the fact that the Thatcher governments profoundly shifted class relations in Britain in favour of capital and restructured the institutions underpinning class domination. According to Gallas, it was an integral part of the Thatcherite project to directly intervene in labour relations, to deprive workers of their ability to forge coalitions, and to smash militant trade unionism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Politics of Transindividuality re-examines social relations and subjectivity through the concept of transindividuality. Transindividuality is understood as the mutual constitution of individuality and collectivity, and as such it intersects with politics and economics, philosophical speculation and political practice. While the term transindividuality is drawn from the work of Gilbert Simondon, this book views it broadly, examining such canonical figures as Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, as well as contemporary debates involving Etienne Balibar, Bernard Stiegler, and Paolo Virno. Through these intersecting aspects and interpretations of transindividuality the book proposes to examine anew the intersection of politics and economics through their mutual constitution of affects, imagination, and subjectivity.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This ambitious book presents a comprehensive new 'macro-monetary' interpretation of Marx’s logical method in Capital, based on substantial textual evidence, which emphasises two main points: (1) Marx’s theory is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole; and (2) Marx’s theory is a monetary theory from beginning to end and the circuit of money capital – M - C - M’ – is the logical framework of Marx’s theory. It follows from this 'macro-monetary' interpretation that, contrary to the prevailing view, there is no 'transformation problem' in Marx’s theory; i.e., Marx did not 'fail to transform the inputs of constant capital and variable capital' in his theory of prices of production in Part 2 of Volume III.
Book
Ahead of Publication
For the first time, this book presents to Western readers a current in the late Soviet philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s known as the ‘activity approach’. It had to some degree a counterpart in so-called cultural-historical psychology, but whilst the work of Vygotsky and Leontyev was received in the West decades ago, its sibling in philosophy has remained virtually unnoticed. Started by Evald Ilyenkov and other young Moscow philosophers in the early 1960s, the activity approach soon became an intellectual mode, leading to several different interpretations of human activity and challenging Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. The book depicts in detail the rise and fall of this remarkable phenomenon in Soviet Marxism.
Contributors are: David Bakhurst, Aleksandr Khamidov, Vladislav Lektorsky, Alex Levant, Pentti Määttänen, Andrey Maidansky, Sergei Mareyev, Elena Mareyeva, Vesa Oittinen, Edward Swiderski, and Inna Titarenko.
Contributors are: David Bakhurst, Aleksandr Khamidov, Vladislav Lektorsky, Alex Levant, Pentti Määttänen, Andrey Maidansky, Sergei Mareyev, Elena Mareyeva, Vesa Oittinen, Edward Swiderski, and Inna Titarenko.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This volume offers the essential theoretical thought of the Austro-Marxist thinkers Otto Bauer, Max Adler, Karl Renner, Friedrich Adler, Rudolf Hilferding, and Otto Neurath over the span of their Austrian Social-Democratic careers, from the decades before World War I until the mid-1930s. Austro-Marxist theoretical perspectives were conceived as social scientific tools for the issues that faced the development of socialism in their time. The relevance of their thought for the contemporary world inheres in this understanding.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Marx’s only full draft of Volume III of Capital was written in the Economic Manuscript of 1864—1865. The Volume III that we know was heavily edited by Engels. It has been a long-standing question in Marxian scholarship whether or not there are significant differences between Marx’s original manuscript and Engels’s edited version. Marx’s manuscript was published for the first time in German in 1992 in the Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Section II, Volume 4.2, but this important manuscript has not previously been translated into English. The publication of this English translation of Marx’s original manuscript is thus an important event in Marxian scholarship. English-speaking Marxist scholars can finally compare Engels’s Volume III with Marx’s original manuscript and evaluate for themselves the significance of the differences.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Marx and the Common, Luca Basso provides a detailed reconstruction of the late Marx's connection of the collective dimension of communism and the element of individual realisation. Through an original analysis of a vast range of Marx's writings - from Capital to his political texts and scientific notes - the author brings out an articulated historical-theoretical landscape in which the notion of 'individual' is intertwined with the ideas of 'class', 'society' and 'community'. Rooting his analysis in the revolutionary power of the workers' 'acting in common', Basso brings to the fore an anthropological dynamic in Marx, irreducible to either liberal individualism or any kind of organicist approach.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The two volumes of Marxism and Historical Practice bring together a wide range of essays written by one of the major Marxist historians of the last fifty years. Collected in Volume II, Interventions and Appreciations, are articles and reviews capturing the breadth of Palmer’s interests as a radical historian. Cultural forms and representational productions are analysed; political readings of historiography and pioneering historical practice provided. Themes as diverse as the analytic and political contributions of Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, the conflicted legacies of American Trotskyism, and the representation of class politics in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York are covered.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Critical Marxism in Mexico, Stefan Gandler, coming from the tradition of the Frankfurt School, reveals the contributions that Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Bolívar Echeverría have made to universal thought. While in recent times Latin America has taken its distance from global power centers, and reorganised its political and economic relations, in philosophy the same tendency is barely visible. Critical Marxism in Mexico is a contribution to the reorganisation of international philosophical discussion, with Critical Theory as the point of departure.
Despite having studied in Europe, where philosophical Eurocentrism remains virulent, Gandler opens his eyes to another tradition of modernity and offers an account of the life and philosophy of Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Bolívar Echeverría, former senior faculty members at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
Despite having studied in Europe, where philosophical Eurocentrism remains virulent, Gandler opens his eyes to another tradition of modernity and offers an account of the life and philosophy of Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and Bolívar Echeverría, former senior faculty members at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
Book
Ahead of Publication
The two volumes of Marxism and Historical Practice bring together essays written by one of the major Marxist historians of the last fifty years. The pieces collected in Volume I, Interpretive Essays on Class Formation and Class Struggle, offer a stimulating, empirically grounded survey of North American collective behaviour, popular mobilizations, and social struggles, ranging from a rich discussion of ritualistic protest like the charivari through the rise of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s to campaigns against neoliberal labour reform in British Columbia in the early 1980s. What emerges is Palmer's sustained reflection on long-standing interpretive historical problems of class formation, the dynamics of social change, and how popular social movements arise and relate to law, the state, and existing cultural contexts.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Prophets Unarmed is an authoritative sourcebook on the Chinese Communist Party's main early opposition, the Chinese Trotskyists, who emerged from the Chinese Communist Party, in China and Moscow, in reaction to its 1927 defeat. In spite of being Trotskyism’s main section outside Russia, they were crushed by Stalin in Moscow and by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong in China, thus becoming China’s most persecuted party. Their strategy in the Japan war, when they failed to take up arms, was short-sighted and doctrinaire, and they had scant impact on the revolution. Even so, their association with Chen Duxiu and Wang Shiwei, their attachment to democracy, and their critique of Mao’s bureaucratic socialism brought them a scintilla of recognition after Mao’s death. Their standpoints and proposals and their association with the democratic movement are not without relevance to China's present crisis of morals and authority.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Studies on Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production British and Argentinian historians analyse the Asiatic, Germanic, peasant, slave, feudal, and tributary modes of production by exploring historical processes and diverse problems of Marxist theory. The emergence of feudal relations, the origin of the medieval craftsman, the functioning of the law of value and the conditions for historical change are some of the problems analysed. The studies treat an array of pre-capitalist social formations: Chris Wickham works on medieval Iceland and Norway, John Haldon on Byzantium, Carlos García Mac Gaw on the Roman Empire, Andrea Zingarelli on ancient Egypt, Carlos Astarita and Laura da Graca on medieval León and Castile, and Octavio Colombo on the Castilian later Middle Ages.
Contributors include: Chris Wickham, John Haldon, Carlos Astarita, Carlos García Mac Gaw, Octavio Colombo, Laura da Graca, and Andrea Zingarelli.
Contributors include: Chris Wickham, John Haldon, Carlos Astarita, Carlos García Mac Gaw, Octavio Colombo, Laura da Graca, and Andrea Zingarelli.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Gramsci's works, in particular his Prison Notebooks, are a real 'workshop' of activity. Even though these texts were the product of a great mind and an organic conception of the world, the particular context in which they are written poses challenges for their interpreters. This philological 'excavation' of the pathways of Gramsci's thinking brings us closer to an author who is more 'widely-known' than he is understood. The first part of the volume deals with central themes of Gramsci's worldview such as the concepts of the state, civil society, ideology, common sense, morality and conformism. The second part deals with Gramsci’s relations with thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Marx, Engels, Labriola, Togliatti, whereas the third part offers some reflections on the metaphors used by Gramsci as well as contemporary views of the Sardinian Communist.
First published in Italian by Carocci Editore as Sentieri gramsciani, 2006.
First published in Italian by Carocci Editore as Sentieri gramsciani, 2006.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In War, Capital, and the Dutch State (1588-1795), Pepijn Brandon traces the interaction between state and capital in the organisation of warfare in the Dutch Republic from the Dutch Revolt of the sixteenth century to the Batavian Revolution of 1795. Combining deep theoretical insight with a thorough examination of original source material, ranging from the role of the Dutch East- and West-India Companies to the inner workings of the Amsterdam naval shipyard, and from state policy to the role of private intermediaries in military finance, Brandon provides a sweeping new interpretation of the rise and fall of the Dutch Republic as a hegemonic power within the early modern capitalist world-system.
Winner of the 2014 D.J. Veegens prize, awarded by the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. Shortlisted for the 2015 World Economic History Congress dissertation prize (early modern period).
Winner of the 2014 D.J. Veegens prize, awarded by the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. Shortlisted for the 2015 World Economic History Congress dissertation prize (early modern period).
Book
Ahead of Publication
The first 'American Exceptionalists' belonged to a left-wing current led by Jay Lovestone. Briefly in control of, then dramatically expelled from, the US Communist Party, they maintained an independent existence on the US Left from 1929 to 1940. Some became prominent in the labour and civil rights movements, while Will Herberg became a prominent Jewish theologian and an editor of the conservative National Review, and Bertram Wolfe worked as an anti-Communist ideologist with the US State Department. Lovestone himself collaborated with the CIA to help shape the Cold War foreign policy of the AFL-CIO. Yet earlier documents and articles from the Lovestone group provide rich information and remarkable insights on twentieth-century realities and radicalism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The legacy of the relationship between African American writers and Communism in the US is a contested one. Bergin argues that in three novels, by seminal mid-century authors (Wright, Himes and Ellison) Communism is not dismissed as incapable of meeting the demands of black political identity but is castigated for its refusal to do so. A detailed focus on the political milieu in which these texts operate challenges many of the presumptions about the ‘inability’ of Communism to comprehend racial oppression, which dominate literary critical approaches to these novels. She draws on the complex formations black political agency presumed and reproduced by American Communism during the Depression.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's political economy throughout classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics. It provides a critical-historical survey of the theories of art's economic exceptionalism, of art as a merit good, and of the theories of art's commodification, the culture industry and real subsumption.
Key debates on the economics of art, from the high prices artworks fetch at auction, to the controversies over public subsidy of the arts, the 'cost disease' of artistic production, and neoliberal and post-Marxist theories of art's incorporation into capitalism, are examined in detail.
Subjecting mainstream and Marxist theories of art's economics to an exacting critique, the book concludes with a new Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.
Key debates on the economics of art, from the high prices artworks fetch at auction, to the controversies over public subsidy of the arts, the 'cost disease' of artistic production, and neoliberal and post-Marxist theories of art's incorporation into capitalism, are examined in detail.
Subjecting mainstream and Marxist theories of art's economics to an exacting critique, the book concludes with a new Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Time, Capitalism and Alienation. A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time, Jonathan Martineau offers an account of the histories of social time in Europe, from the innovation of the clock around 1300 to the making of World Standard Time around the turn of the twentieth century. Approaching 'time' as a social phenomenon traversed by various power and property relations, this work provides a socio-theoretical and historical analysis of the relationship between clock-time and capitalist social relations, problematizing the rise to hegemony of a clock-time regime harnessing various social temporalities to the purpose of capitalist development. This book sheds light on the alienating tendencies of the modern temporal regime and the relationship between time and modern economic development.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Degeneration and Revolution: Radical Cultural Politics and the Body in Weimar Germany Robert Heynen explores the impact of conceptions of degeneration, exemplified by eugenics and social hygiene, on the social, cultural, and political history of the left in Germany, 1914–33. Hygienic practices of bodily regulation were integral to the extension of modern capitalist social relations, and profoundly shaped Weimar culture.
Heynen’s innovative interdisciplinary approach draws on Marxist and other critical traditions to examine the politics of degeneration and socialist, communist, and anarchist responses. Drawing on key Weimar theorists and addressing artistic and cultural movements ranging from Dada to worker-produced media, this book challenges us to rethink conventional understandings of left culture and politics, and of Weimar culture more generally.
Heynen’s innovative interdisciplinary approach draws on Marxist and other critical traditions to examine the politics of degeneration and socialist, communist, and anarchist responses. Drawing on key Weimar theorists and addressing artistic and cultural movements ranging from Dada to worker-produced media, this book challenges us to rethink conventional understandings of left culture and politics, and of Weimar culture more generally.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Much has been written about the activity of Lenin and his colleagues on the editorial board of the Iskra newspaper, whereas little has been said about the opponents of Leninism, who unsuccessfully fought for control of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party during the Iskra period. To redress the balance, Richard Mullin has translated 25 documents from this period, most of which express an anti-Lenin view. They include articles from Rabochee Delo, the Jewish Bund's Poslednie Izvestiia and the post-Lenin Iskra, pamphlets by Plekhanov and Martov, the resolutions of Party meetings and some very revealing private correspondence. However, the result is not an anti-Bolshevik polemic: through these documents a clearer, and curiously flattering picture of Lenin's thought and activity is obtained.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Cataclysm 1914 brings together a number of leftist scholars from a variety of fields to explore the many different aspects of the origins, trajectories and consequences of the First World War. The collection not only aims to examine the war itself, but seeks to visualise the conflict and all its immediate consequences (such as the Bolshevik Revolution and ascendency of US hegemony) as a defining moment—perhaps the defining moment—in 20th century world politics rupturing and reconstituting the ‘modern’ epoch in its many instantiations. In doing so, the collection takes up a variety of different topics of interest to both a general reader, those focused on Marxian theory and strategy, and leftist and socialist histories of the war.
Contributors are: Alexander Anievas, Shelley Baranowski, Neil Davidson, Geoff Eley, Sandra Halperin, Esther Leslie, Lars T. Lih, Domenico Losurdo, Wendy Matsumura, Peter D. Thomas, Adam Tooze, Alberto Toscano, and Enzo Traverso.
Contributors are: Alexander Anievas, Shelley Baranowski, Neil Davidson, Geoff Eley, Sandra Halperin, Esther Leslie, Lars T. Lih, Domenico Losurdo, Wendy Matsumura, Peter D. Thomas, Adam Tooze, Alberto Toscano, and Enzo Traverso.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Though generally associated with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the idea of hegemony had a crucial history in revolutionary Russia where it was used to conceptualize the dynamics of political and cultural leadership. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study considers the cultural dimensions of hegemony, with particular focus on the role of language in political debates and in scholarship of the period. It is shown that considerations of the relations between the proletariat and peasantry, the cities to the countryside and the metropolitan centre to the colonies of the Russian Empire demanded an intense dialogue between practical politics and theoretical reflection, which led to critical perspectives now assumed to be the achievements of, for instance, sociolinguistics and post-colonial studies.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Recent victories for LGBT rights, especially the spread of same-sex marriage, have gone faster than most people imagined possible. Yet the accompanying rise of gay 'normality' has been disconcerting for activists with radical sympathies. Global in scope and drawing on a wide range of feminist, anti-racist and queer scholarship and analysis, Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism shows how the successive 'same-sex formations' of the past century and a half, corresponding to different phases of capitalist development, have led both to the emergence of today's 'homonormativity' and 'homonationalism' and to ongoing queer resistance. The book's second half summarises different sexual rebellions and the queer dimension of multifarious movements for social justice and transformation, seeing in them harbingers of a unified and powerful queer anti-capitalism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Debates at world Communism’s 1921 congress reveal Lenin’s International at a moment of crisis. A policy of confrontational initiatives by a resolute minority contends with the perspective of winning majority working-class support on the road to the revolutionary conquest of power. A frank debate among many currents concludes with a classic formulation of Communist strategy and tactics. Thirty-two appendices, many never before published in any language, portray delegates’ behind-the-scenes exchanges. This newly translated treasure of 1,000 pages of source material, available for the first time in English, is supplemented by an analytic introduction, detailed footnotes, a glossary with 430 biographical entries, a chronology, and an index. The final instalment of a 4,500-page series on Communist congresses in Lenin’s time.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik, Barbara Allen recounts the political formation and positions of Russian Communist and trade unionist, Alexander Shlyapnikov. As leader of the Workers’ Opposition (1919–21), Shlyapnikov called for trade unions to realise workers’ mastery over the economy. Despite defeat, he continued to advocate distinct views on the Soviet socialist project that provide a counterpoint to Stalin’s vision. Arrested during the Great Terror, he refused to confess to charges he thought illogical and unsupported by evidence. Unlike the standard historical and literary depiction of the Old Bolshevik, Shlyapnikov contested Stalin's and the NKVD's construct of the ideal party member. Allen conducted extensive research in archives of the Soviet Communist party and secret police.
Listen to SRB Podcast's episode on Alexander Shlyapnikov: An Old Working Class Bolshevik featuring Barbara Allen.
Listen to SRB Podcast's episode on Alexander Shlyapnikov: An Old Working Class Bolshevik featuring Barbara Allen.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Marxism in a Lost Century retells the history of the radical left during the twentieth century through the words and deeds of Paul Mattick. An adolescent during the German revolutions that followed World War I, he was also a recent émigré to the United States during the 1930s Great Depression, when the unemployed groups in which he participated were among the most dynamic manifestations of social unrest. Three biographical themes receive special attention -- the self-taught nature of left-wing activity, Mattick’s experiences with publishing, and the nexus of men, politics, and friendship. Mattick found a wide audience during the 1960s because of his emphasis on the economy’s dysfunctional aspects and his advocacy of workplace councils—a popularity mirrored in the cyclical nature of the global economy.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Since the late-1990s much of Latin America has experienced an uneven and contradictory turn to the Left in the electoral arena. At the same time, there has been a rejuvenation of Marxist critiques of political economy. Drawing on the expertise of Latin American, North American, and European scholars, this volume offers cutting-edge theoretical explorations of trends in the region, as well as in-depth case studies of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela. Essays in the volume focus on changes to class formation in Latin America and offer new insights into the state-form, exploring the complex relationship between state and market in contexts of late capitalist development, particularly in countries endowed with incredible natural resource wealth.
Contributors are: Dario Azzellini, Emilia Castorina, Mariano Féliz, Juan Grigera, Nicolas Grinberg, Gabriel Hetland, Claudio Katz, Thomas Purcell, Ben Selwyn, Susan J. Spronk, Guido Starosta, Leandro Vergara-Camus, and Jeffery R. Webber.
Contributors are: Dario Azzellini, Emilia Castorina, Mariano Féliz, Juan Grigera, Nicolas Grinberg, Gabriel Hetland, Claudio Katz, Thomas Purcell, Ben Selwyn, Susan J. Spronk, Guido Starosta, Leandro Vergara-Camus, and Jeffery R. Webber.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Reading Gramsci is a collection of essays by Francisco Fernández Buey with a unifying theme: the enduring relevance of Gramsci’s political, philosophical and personal reflections for those who wish to understand and transform ‘the vast and terrible world’ of capital. Reading Gramsci is of considerable biographical and philosophical interest for scholars and partisans of communism alike.
Fernández Buey distils Gramsci’s intimate thinking on the relation between love and revolutionary engagement from Gramsci’s personal correspondence; he reveals how Gramsci draws on both Marxism and Machiavellianism in order to formulate his conception of politics as a collective ethics; he retraces the trajectory of Gramsci’s thinking in the Prison Notebooks, and elucidates Gramsci’s reflections on the relation between language and politics.
English translation of Leyendo a Gramsci, published by El Viejo Topo in 2001.
Fernández Buey distils Gramsci’s intimate thinking on the relation between love and revolutionary engagement from Gramsci’s personal correspondence; he reveals how Gramsci draws on both Marxism and Machiavellianism in order to formulate his conception of politics as a collective ethics; he retraces the trajectory of Gramsci’s thinking in the Prison Notebooks, and elucidates Gramsci’s reflections on the relation between language and politics.
English translation of Leyendo a Gramsci, published by El Viejo Topo in 2001.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Basing his research on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Rehmann provides a comprehensive socio-analysis of Max Weber’s political and intellectual position in the ideological network of his time. Max Weber: Modernisation as Passive Revolution shows that, even though Weber presents his science as ‘value-free’, he is best understood as an organic intellectual of the bourgeoisie, who has the mission of providing his class with an intense ethico-political education. Viewed as a whole, his writings present a new model for bourgeois hegemony in the transition to ‘Fordism’. Weber is both a sharp critic of a ‘passive revolution’ in Germany tying the bourgeois class to the interests of the agrarian class, and a proponent of a more modern version of passive revolution, which would foreclose a socialist revolution by the construction of an industrial bloc consisting of the bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy.
© 1998 Argument Verlag GmbH, Hamburg. Translated from German “Max Weber: Modernisierung als passive Revolution. Kontextstudien zu Politik Philosophie und Religion im Übergang zum Fordismus”.
© 1998 Argument Verlag GmbH, Hamburg. Translated from German “Max Weber: Modernisierung als passive Revolution. Kontextstudien zu Politik Philosophie und Religion im Übergang zum Fordismus”.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Richard Müller, a leading figure of the German Revolution in 1918, is unknown today. As the operator and unionist who represented Berlin’s metalworkers, he was main organiser of the ‘Revolutionary Stewards’, a clandestine network that organised a series of mass strikes between 1916 and 1918. With strong support in the factories, the Revolutionary Stewards were the driving force of the Revolution. By telling Müller's story, this study gives a very different account of the revolutionary birth of the Weimar Republic. Using new archival sources and abandoning the traditional focus on the history of political parties, Ralf Hoffrogge zooms in on working class politics on the shop floor and its contribution to social change.
First published in German by Karl Dietz Verlag as Richard Müller - Der Mann hinter der November Revolution, Berlin, 2008, this english edition was completerly revised for the english speaking audience and contains new sources and recent literature.
First published in German by Karl Dietz Verlag as Richard Müller - Der Mann hinter der November Revolution, Berlin, 2008, this english edition was completerly revised for the english speaking audience and contains new sources and recent literature.
Book
Ahead of Publication
What is the relationship between music and time? How does musical rhythm express our social experience of time? In Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Mark Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western music of a new way of organising rhythm: groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components which make it work.
Tracing the influence of key philosophical arguments about the nature of time on musical aesthetics, Mark Abel draws on materialist interpretations of art and culture to challenge those, like Adorno, who criticise popular music’s metrical regularity. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it.
Tracing the influence of key philosophical arguments about the nature of time on musical aesthetics, Mark Abel draws on materialist interpretations of art and culture to challenge those, like Adorno, who criticise popular music’s metrical regularity. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Since the Cold War, most historians have set up an opposition between the “American” and “international” aspects of early American Communism. This book examines the development of the Communist Party in its first decade, from 1919 to 1929. Using the archives of the Communist International, this book, in contrast to previous studies, argues that the International played an important role in the early part of this decade in forcing the party to “Americanise”. Special attention is given to the attempts by the Comintern to orient American Communists on the role of black oppression, and to see the struggle for black liberation and the fight for socialism as inextricably linked. The later sections of the book provide the most detailed account now available of how the Comintern, reflecting the Stalinisation of the Soviet Union, intervened in the American party to ensure the Stalinisation of American Communism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Marxism of Manuel Sacristán: From Communism to the New Social Movements offers a substantial selection of some the most significant writings on Marx, Marxism, and radical social theory by Manuel Sacristán, Spain’s most important Marxist philosopher. Whether discussing Marx’s intellectual development and philosophical views, exploring central issues in Marxist theory or analysing the challenge to contemporary Marxism from feminism, pacifism and environmentalism, Sacristán emerges in these pages as both a major Marx scholar and a formidable social theorist in his own right.
The Marxism of Manuel Sacristán makes available in English for the first time many of the key texts by a brilliant, yet neglected, Marxist thinker.
The Marxism of Manuel Sacristán makes available in English for the first time many of the key texts by a brilliant, yet neglected, Marxist thinker.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, by means of a careful textual and contextual analysis of the writings of Lenin and his Marxist contemporaries, Alan Shandro traces the contours of the ‘(anti-) metaphysical event’ identified by Gramsci in Lenin’s political practice and theory, the emergence of the ‘philosophical fact’ of hegemony. In so doing, he effectively disputes conventional caricatures of Lenin’s role as a political actor and thinker and unearths the underlying parameters of the concept of hegemony in the class struggle. He thereby clarifies the conceptual status of this pervasive but now increasingly elusive notion and the logic of theory and practice at work in it.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The German Left and the Weimar Republic illuminates the history of the political left by presenting a wide range of documents on various aspects of socialist and communist activity in Germany. Separate chapters deal with the policy of Social Democracy in and out of government, the attempts of the Communist Party to overthrow the Weimar Republic, and then later to oppose it. Later chapters move away from the political scene to treat the attitudes of the parties to key social issues, in particular questions of gender and sexuality. The book concludes with a presentation of documents on various groups of socialist and communist dissidents. Many of the documents are made accessible for the first time, and each chapter begins with an original introduction indicating the current state of research.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Revolutionary Marxism in Spain, 1930-1937 examines the impact of Trotsky’s political thought upon those Spanish communists who dissented from the ‘general line’ laid down by Moscow. It explores the political ideas of leading POUM figures, Andreu Nin and Joaquín Maurín, and their complex relationship with Trotsky. The contention is that the POUM owed far more to Trotsky than many of the party’s historians care to admit. Drawing heavily upon Spanish sources, the book seeks to present and explain the POUM’s political ideas in order to understand why the party adopted the positions it did. The author engages with broader scholarly debates around the role of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, especially those surrounding the Popular Front.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza’s thought through Althusser's and vice versa, with the intention of opening new horizons for the question of materialism. From the fragmentary intuitions Althusser produced about Spinoza throughout his life, Morfino builds a new and comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy. In the later sections of the book, this interpretation is put to work to help to clarify some of the more problematic aspects of the late Althusser’s philosophy, thereby offering new concepts for a materialist position in philosophy and the development of Marxist theory.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Incorporating original archival research and a series of critiques of recent accounts of economic development in pre-modern England, in The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400-1600, Spencer Dimmock has produced a challenging and multi-layered account of a historical rupture in English feudal society which led to the first sustained transition to agrarian capitalism and consequent industrial revolution.
Genuinely integrating political, social and economic themes, Spencer Dimmock views capitalism broadly as a form of society rather than narrowly as an economic system. He firmly locates its beginnings with conflicting social agencies in a closely defined historical context rather than with evolutionary and transhistorical commercial developments, and will thus stimulate a thorough reappraisal of current orthodoxies on the transition to capitalism.
Genuinely integrating political, social and economic themes, Spencer Dimmock views capitalism broadly as a form of society rather than narrowly as an economic system. He firmly locates its beginnings with conflicting social agencies in a closely defined historical context rather than with evolutionary and transhistorical commercial developments, and will thus stimulate a thorough reappraisal of current orthodoxies on the transition to capitalism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
From the Vanguard to the Margins is dedicated to the work of the late British historian, Dr Mark Pittaway (1971-2010), a prominent scholar of post-war and contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Breaking with orthodox readings on Eastern bloc regimes, which remain wedded to the 'totalitarianism' paradigm of the Cold War era, the essays in this volume shed light on the contradictory historical and social trajectory of 'real socialism' in the region.
Mainstream historiography has presented Stalinist parties as 'omnipotent', effectively stripping workers and society in general of its 'relative autonomy'. Building on an impressive amount of archive material, Pittaway convincingly shows how dynamics of class, gender, skill level, and rural versus urban location, shaped politics in the period. The volume also offers novel insights on historical and sociological roots of fascism in Hungary and the politics of legitimacy in the Austro-Hungarian borderlands.
Mainstream historiography has presented Stalinist parties as 'omnipotent', effectively stripping workers and society in general of its 'relative autonomy'. Building on an impressive amount of archive material, Pittaway convincingly shows how dynamics of class, gender, skill level, and rural versus urban location, shaped politics in the period. The volume also offers novel insights on historical and sociological roots of fascism in Hungary and the politics of legitimacy in the Austro-Hungarian borderlands.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Looking for the Proletariat is a contribution to understanding the implosion of the Marxist Imaginary. The implosion is staged in terms of the first English-language history of the French revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1949 to 1957. It explains why Socialisme ou Barbarie was the only Marxist organization interested by worker experience and how the group’s anti-Leninist position on organization led it to privilege first-person worker narratives in order to understand worker experience and its revolutionary possibilities. Using the only first-person accounts of working-class experience in French industry of the 1950s, the book explores the disintegration of collective investment in the Marxist Imaginary that unfolded at Renault’s Billancourt factory in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution and the contexts that shaped it.
Book
Ahead of Publication
During the twentieth century the problem of post-revolutionary bureaucracy emerged as the most pressing theoretical and political concern confronting Marxism. No one contributed more to the discussion of this question than Leon Trotsky. In Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy, Thomas M. Twiss traces the development of Trotsky’s thinking on this issue from the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution through the Moscow Trials of the 1930s. Throughout, he examines how Trotsky’s perception of events influenced his theoretical understanding of the problem, and how Trotsky’s theory reciprocally shaped his analysis of political developments. Additionally, Twiss notes both strengths and weaknesses of Trotsky’s theoretical perspective at each stage in its development.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In The Postcolonial Orient, Vasant Kaiwar presents a far-reaching analysis of the political, economic, and ideological cross-currents that have shaped and informed postcolonial studies preceding and following the 1989 moment of world history. The valences of the ‘post’ in postcolonialism are unfolded via some key historical-political postcolonial texts showing, inter alia, that they are replete with elements of Romantic Orientalism and the Oriental Renaissance. Kaiwar mobilises a critical body of classical and contemporary Marxism to demonstrate that far richer understandings of ‘Europe’ not to mention ‘colonialism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘difference’ are possible than with a postcolonialism captive to phenomenological-existentialism and post-structuralism, concluding that a narrative so enriched is indispensable for a transformative non-Eurocentric internationalism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth reappraisal of the relation between Marx’s economic theory in Capital and Hegel’s Logic by leading Marxian economists and philosophers from around the world. The subjects dealt with include: systematic dialectics, the New Dialectics, materialism vs. idealism, Marx’s ‘inversion’ of Hegel, Hegel’s Concept logic (universality-particularity-singularity), Hegel’s Essence logic (essence-appearance), Marx’s levels of abstraction of capital in general and competition, and capital as Hegelian Subject.
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the 22nd annual meeting of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory at Mount Holyoke College in August 2011. The twelve authors are divided between seven economists and five philosophers, as is fitting for the interdisciplinary subject of the relation between Marx’s economic theory and Hegel’s logic.
Contributors are: Chris Arthur, Riccardo Bellofiore, Roberto Fineschi, Gastón Caligaris, Igor Hanzel, Juan Iñigo Carrera, Mark Meaney, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten, Mario Robles, Tony Smith, and Guido Starosta.
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the 22nd annual meeting of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory at Mount Holyoke College in August 2011. The twelve authors are divided between seven economists and five philosophers, as is fitting for the interdisciplinary subject of the relation between Marx’s economic theory and Hegel’s logic.
Contributors are: Chris Arthur, Riccardo Bellofiore, Roberto Fineschi, Gastón Caligaris, Igor Hanzel, Juan Iñigo Carrera, Mark Meaney, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten, Mario Robles, Tony Smith, and Guido Starosta.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Christoph Henning writes a concise history of misreadings of Marx in the 20th century. Focussing on German philosophy from Heidegger to Habermas, he also addresses the influence of Rawls and Neopragmatism, subsequently scrutinizing a previous history of Marx-interpretations that had served as the premises upon which these later works were based. Henning sketches a historical trajectory in which a theory of socialist politics enters the fields of economics, sociology, critical theory and theology, before finally – overloaded with intellectually dead freight – entering into philosophy. In so doing, he takes a hermeneutic approach to how misreadings in a specific field proliferate into further misreadings across a variety of fields, leading to an accumulation of questionable preconceptions. With the recent resurgence of interest in Marx, Henning's historical recursions make evident where and how academic Anti-Marxism had previously got it wrong.
English translation of Philosophie nach Marx. 100 Jahre Marxrezeption und die normative Sozialphilosophie der Gegenwart in der Kritik, Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld, 2005.
English translation of Philosophie nach Marx. 100 Jahre Marxrezeption und die normative Sozialphilosophie der Gegenwart in der Kritik, Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld, 2005.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In addition to his role as Evo Morales’s vice-president, Álvaro García Linera is one of Bolivia’s foremost intellectuals. With a theoretical trajectory beginning in efforts to combine Marxism and Indianism, then developed in reaction to the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and in contact with the mass social movements of recent years, García Linera's Plebeian Power can be read as both an evolving analysis of Bolivian reality through periods of great social change, and as an intellectual biography of the author himself. Informed by such thinkers as Marx, Bourdieu and René Zavaleta, García Linera reflects on the nature of the state, class and indigenous identity and their relevance to social struggles in Bolivia.
English translation of La potencia plebeya: Acción colectiva e identidades indígenas, obreras y populares en Bolivia published by Siglo del Hombre Editores and CLASCO in 2007.
English translation of La potencia plebeya: Acción colectiva e identidades indígenas, obreras y populares en Bolivia published by Siglo del Hombre Editores and CLASCO in 2007.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Global Political Economy and the Modern State System Tobias ten Brink contributes to an understanding of the modern state system, its conflicts, and its transformation. In contrast to the political attractiveness of optimistic theoretical approaches to globalisation, this book demonstrates how an analytical approach rooted in Global Political Economy (GPE) helps to explain both the tendencies towards integration and towards rivalry in international relations. By way of a historical reconstruction of different ‘world order’ phases in the twentieth century, ten Brink analyses multiple, phase-specific variations of socioeconomic and geopolitical conflicts that are significant for the modern capitalist world system.
Revised edition of Geopolitik. Geschichte und Gegenwart kapitalistischer Staatenkonkurrenz, Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster, 2008.
Revised edition of Geopolitik. Geschichte und Gegenwart kapitalistischer Staatenkonkurrenz, Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster, 2008.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Historians generally recognise E.A. Preobrazhensky as the most famous Soviet economist of the 1920s. English-language readers know him best as author of The New Economics and co-author (with N.I. Bukharin ) of The ABC of Communism. The documents in this volume, many newly discovered and almost all translated into English for the first time, reveal a Preobrazhensky previously unknown, whose interests ranged far beyond economics to include not only party debates and issues affecting the lives of workers and peasants, but also philosophy, world events, and Russian history, culture and politics. Including moments of triumph and tragedy, they tell an intimate story of political awakening and of commitment to socialist revolution as the path to human dignity.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Antonio Gramsci was not only one of the most original and significant communist leaders of his time but also a creative thinker whose contributions to the renewal of Marxism remain pertinent today. In The Revolutionary Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, Frank Rosengarten explores Gramsci's writings in areas as diverse as Marxist theory, the responsibilities of political leadership, and the theory and practice of literary criticism. He also discusses Gramsci's influence on the post-colonial world. Through close readings of texts ranging from Gramsci's socialist journalism in the Turin years to his prison letters and Notebooks, Rosengarten captures the full vitality of the Sardinian communist's thought and outlook on life.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In a work centred on Marx's harsh biography of Simón Bolívar, José Aricó examines why Latin America was apparently 'excluded' from Marx's thought, challenging the allegation that this expressed some 'Eurocentric' prejudice.
Aricó shows how the German thinker's hostility towards the Bonapartism and authoritarianism he identified in the Liberator coloured his attitude towards the continent and the significance of its independence-processes.
Whilst criticising Marx's misreading of Latin-American realities, Aricó demonstrates contemporaneous, countervailing tendencies in Marx's thought, including his appraisal of the revolutionary potentialities of other 'peripheral' extra-European societies. As such, Aricó convincingly argues that Marx's work was not a dogma of linear 'progress', but a living, contradictory body of thought constantly in development.
English translation of the Marx y América Latina edition, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010.
Aricó shows how the German thinker's hostility towards the Bonapartism and authoritarianism he identified in the Liberator coloured his attitude towards the continent and the significance of its independence-processes.
Whilst criticising Marx's misreading of Latin-American realities, Aricó demonstrates contemporaneous, countervailing tendencies in Marx's thought, including his appraisal of the revolutionary potentialities of other 'peripheral' extra-European societies. As such, Aricó convincingly argues that Marx's work was not a dogma of linear 'progress', but a living, contradictory body of thought constantly in development.
English translation of the Marx y América Latina edition, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism Levant and Oittinen provide a window into the subterranean tradition of ‘creative’ Soviet Marxism, which developed on the margins of the Soviet academe and remains largely outside the orbit of contemporary theory in the West. With his ‘activity approach’, E.V. Ilyenkov, its principal figure in the post-Stalin period, makes a substantial contribution toward an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of the subject, which should be of interest to contemporary theorists who seek to avoid economic and cultural reductionism as well as the malaise of postmodern relativism. This volume features Levant’s translation of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal (2009), which remained unpublished until thirty years after the author’s tragic suicide in 1979.
Contributors include: Evald Ilyenkov, Tarja Knuuttila, Alex Levant, Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen, Paula Rauhala, and Birger Siebert.
Contributors include: Evald Ilyenkov, Tarja Knuuttila, Alex Levant, Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen, Paula Rauhala, and Birger Siebert.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx anticipated, and the working class has, until now, hardly lived up to his hopes.
The Marxian concept of class rests on exclusion. Only the ‘pure’ doubly-free wage-workers are able to create value; from a strategic perspective, all other parts of the world’s working populations are secondary. But global labour history suggests, that slaves and other unfree workers are an essential component of the capitalist economy.
What might a critique of the political economy of labour look like that critically reviews the experiences of the past five hundred years while moving beyond Eurocentrism? In this volume twenty-two authors offer their thoughts on this question, both from a historical and theoretical perspective.
Contributors include: Riccardo Bellofiore, Sergio Bologna, C. George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Niklas Frykman, Ferruccio Gambino, Detlef Hartmann, Max Henninger, Thomas Kuczynski, Marcel van der Linden, Peter Linebaugh, Ahlrich Meyer, Maria Mies, Jean-Louis Prat, Marcus Rediker, Karl Heinz Roth, Devi Sacchetto, Subir Sinha, Massimiliano Tomba, Carlo Vercellone, Peter Way, Steve Wright.
The Marxian concept of class rests on exclusion. Only the ‘pure’ doubly-free wage-workers are able to create value; from a strategic perspective, all other parts of the world’s working populations are secondary. But global labour history suggests, that slaves and other unfree workers are an essential component of the capitalist economy.
What might a critique of the political economy of labour look like that critically reviews the experiences of the past five hundred years while moving beyond Eurocentrism? In this volume twenty-two authors offer their thoughts on this question, both from a historical and theoretical perspective.
Contributors include: Riccardo Bellofiore, Sergio Bologna, C. George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Niklas Frykman, Ferruccio Gambino, Detlef Hartmann, Max Henninger, Thomas Kuczynski, Marcel van der Linden, Peter Linebaugh, Ahlrich Meyer, Maria Mies, Jean-Louis Prat, Marcus Rediker, Karl Heinz Roth, Devi Sacchetto, Subir Sinha, Massimiliano Tomba, Carlo Vercellone, Peter Way, Steve Wright.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book demonstrates that the basic concepts of the three volumes of Capital come under different categories of time: "time of production" in the first volume is linear, “time of circulation” in the second is circular, while in the third volume “organic time” is the unity of the two. Capitalist relations emerge as a definite organisation of social time that obeys its own intrinsic criteria and operates as an autonomous, social subject. Reading Capital from this perspective, it becomes possible to restore its dialectical (Hegelian) logic – not in order to reveal the “real” Marx, but as a means to contribute to the understanding of the real, capitalist world with its present-day fetishes, its explosive contradictions and its ever deeper crises.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Winner of the 2014 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
In the Vale of Tears brings to a culmination the project for a renewed and enlivened debate over the interaction between Marxism and religion. It does so by offering the author's own response to that tradition. It simultaneously draws upon the rich insights of a significant number of Western Marxists and strikes out on its own. Thus, it argues for the crucial role of political myth on the Left; explores the political ambivalence at the heart of Christianity; challenges the bent among many on the Left to favour the unexpected rupture of kairós as a key to revolution; is highly suspicious of the ideological and class alignments of ethics; offers a thorough reassessment of the role of fetishism in the Marxist tradition; and broaches the question of death, unavoidable for any Marxist engagement with religion. While the book is the conclusion to the five-volume series, The Criticism of Heaven and Earth, it also stands alone as a distinct intervention in some burning issues of our time.
In the Vale of Tears brings to a culmination the project for a renewed and enlivened debate over the interaction between Marxism and religion. It does so by offering the author's own response to that tradition. It simultaneously draws upon the rich insights of a significant number of Western Marxists and strikes out on its own. Thus, it argues for the crucial role of political myth on the Left; explores the political ambivalence at the heart of Christianity; challenges the bent among many on the Left to favour the unexpected rupture of kairós as a key to revolution; is highly suspicious of the ideological and class alignments of ethics; offers a thorough reassessment of the role of fetishism in the Marxist tradition; and broaches the question of death, unavoidable for any Marxist engagement with religion. While the book is the conclusion to the five-volume series, The Criticism of Heaven and Earth, it also stands alone as a distinct intervention in some burning issues of our time.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In War and Revolution in Catalonia, 1936-1939, Pelai Pagès i Blanch analyses the political and military evolution of the events in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War: the street battles that defeated the military rebellion; the social revolution that pervaded all levels of Catalonia's politics, economy, and culture; the gradual erosion of workers' power, culminating in the May Events; and Catalonia's eventual fall to Franco's forces. Pagès i Blanch demonstrates the extent to which the war was lost when the Republican leaders, in order to ‘unify’ the left against Franco and fascism, turned their backs on the social revolution. This translation of Pagès i Blanch's landmark study is the first full-length monograph in English to focus on Catalonia's experience during the war.
English translation of Cataluña en guerra y en revolución, Ediciones Espuela de Plata, 2007.
English translation of Cataluña en guerra y en revolución, Ediciones Espuela de Plata, 2007.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Marx’s Laboratory. Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse provides a critical analysis of the Grundrisse as a crucial stage in the development of Marx’s critique of political economy. Stressing both the achievements and limitations of this much-debated text, and drawing upon recent philological advances, this volume attempts to re-read Marx’s 1857-58 manuscripts against the background of Capital, as a ‘laboratory’ in which Marx first began to clarify central elements of his mature problematic. With chapters by an international range of authors from different traditions of interpretation, including the International Symposium on Marxian Theory, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of key themes and concepts in the Grundrisse, such as method, dialectics and abstraction; abstract labour, value, money and capital; technology, the ‘general intellect’ and revolutionary subjectivity, surplus-value, competition, crisis; and society, gender, ecology and pre-capitalist forms.
Contributors include: Chris Arthur, Luca Basso, Riccardo Bellofiore, George Caffentzis, Martha Campbell, Juan Iñigo Carrera, Howard Engelskirchen, Roberto Fineschi, Michael Heinrich, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, Guido Starosta, Massimiliano Tomba, Jan Toporowski, Peter D. Thomas, Joel Wainwright, and Amy Wendling.
Contributors include: Chris Arthur, Luca Basso, Riccardo Bellofiore, George Caffentzis, Martha Campbell, Juan Iñigo Carrera, Howard Engelskirchen, Roberto Fineschi, Michael Heinrich, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, Guido Starosta, Massimiliano Tomba, Jan Toporowski, Peter D. Thomas, Joel Wainwright, and Amy Wendling.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In 1980 Polish workers astonished the world by demanding and winning an independent union with the right to strike, called Solidarity--the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. Jack M. Bloom's Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution explains how it happened, from the imposition to Communism to its end, based on 150 interviews of Solidarity leaders, activists, supporters and opponents. Bloom presents the perspectives and experiences of these participants. He shows how an opposition was built, the battle between Solidarity and the ruling party, the conflicts that emerged within each side during this tense period, how Solidarity survived the imposition of martial law and how the opposition forced the government to negotiate itself out of power.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Winner of the prestigious 'Giuseppe Sormani International Prize' for the best monograph on Antonio Gramsci (4th edition, 2012-2017).
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is one of the most translated Italian authors of all time. After the Second World War his thought became increasingly influential, and remained relevant throughout the second half of the century. Today, it is generally agreed that his Marxism has highly original and personal features, as confirmed by the fact that his international influence has continued to grow since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gramsci and Languages offers an explanation of this originality and traces the origins of certain specific features of Gramsci’s political thought by looking at his lifelong interest in language, especially in questions of linguistic diversity and unification.
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is one of the most translated Italian authors of all time. After the Second World War his thought became increasingly influential, and remained relevant throughout the second half of the century. Today, it is generally agreed that his Marxism has highly original and personal features, as confirmed by the fact that his international influence has continued to grow since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gramsci and Languages offers an explanation of this originality and traces the origins of certain specific features of Gramsci’s political thought by looking at his lifelong interest in language, especially in questions of linguistic diversity and unification.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Minneapolis in the early 1930s was anything but a union stronghold. An employers' association known as the Citizens' Alliance kept labour organisations in check, at the same time as it cultivated opposition to radicalism in all forms. This all changed in 1934. The year saw three strikes, violent picket-line confrontations, and tens of thousands of workers protesting in the streets.
Bryan D. Palmer tells the riveting story of how a handful of revolutionary Trotskyists, working in the largely non-union trucking sector, led the drive to organise the unorganised, to build one large industrial union. What emerges is a compelling narrative of class struggle, a reminder of what can be accomplished, even in the worst of circumstances, with a principled and far-seeing leadership.
Bryan D. Palmer tells the riveting story of how a handful of revolutionary Trotskyists, working in the largely non-union trucking sector, led the drive to organise the unorganised, to build one large industrial union. What emerges is a compelling narrative of class struggle, a reminder of what can be accomplished, even in the worst of circumstances, with a principled and far-seeing leadership.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism in England, Michael Andrew Žmolek offers the first in-depth study of the evolution of English manufacturing from the feudal and early modern periods within the context of the development of agrarian capitalism. With an emphasis on the relationship between Parliament and working Britons, this work challenges readers to 'rethink' the common perception of the role of the state in the first industrial revolution as essentially passive.
The work chronicles how a long train of struggles led by artisans resisting efforts by employers to transform production along capitalist lines, prompted employers to appeal to the state to suppress this resistance by coercion.
The work chronicles how a long train of struggles led by artisans resisting efforts by employers to transform production along capitalist lines, prompted employers to appeal to the state to suppress this resistance by coercion.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In The New Left, National Identity, and the Break-Up of Britain Wade Matthews charts the nexus between socialism and national identity in the work of key New Left intellectuals, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, and Tom Nairn. Matthews considers these New Left thinkers’ response to Britain’s various national questions, including decolonization and the End of Empire, the rise of European integration and separatist nationalisms in Scotland and Wales, and to the national and nationalist implications of Thatcherism, Cold War and the fall of communism. Matthews establishes a contestatory dialogue around these issues throughout the book based around different New Left perspectives on what has been called “the break-up of Britain.” He demonstrates that national questions where crucial to New Left debates.
Book
Ahead of Publication
How to explain the hegemonic stability of neoliberal capitalism even in the midst of its crises? The emergence of ideology theories marked a re-foundation of Marxist research into the functioning of alienation and subjection. Going beyond traditional concepts of ‘manipulation’ and ‘false consciousness’, they turned to the material existence of hegemonic apparatuses and focused on the mostly unconscious effects of ideological practices, rituals and discourses. Jan Rehmann reconstructs the different strands of ideology theories ranging from Marx to Adorno/Horkheimer, from Lenin to Gramsci, from Althusser to Stuart Hall, from Bourdieu to W.F. Haug, from Foucault to Butler. He compares them in a way that a genuine dialogue becomes possible and applies the different methods to the ‘market totalitarianism’ of today’s high-tech-capitalism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading figures in both fields, discuss the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements; explore the developmental processes and political tensions within movements; set the question in a long historical perspective; and analyse contemporary movements against neo-liberalism and austerity.
Exploring struggles on six continents over 150 years, this collection shows the power of Marxist analysis in relation not only to class politics, labour movements and revolutions but also anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, community activism and environmental justice, indigenous struggles and anti-austerity protest. It sets a new agenda both for Marxist theory and for movement research.
Contributors include: Paul Blackledge, Marc Blecher, Patrick Bond,Chik Collins, Ralph Darlington, Neil Davidson, Ashwin Desai, Jeff Goodwin, Chris Hesketh, Gabriel Hetland, Elizabeth Humphrys, Christian Høgsbjerg, David McNally, Trevor Ngwane, Heike Schaumberg and Hira Singh.
Exploring struggles on six continents over 150 years, this collection shows the power of Marxist analysis in relation not only to class politics, labour movements and revolutions but also anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, community activism and environmental justice, indigenous struggles and anti-austerity protest. It sets a new agenda both for Marxist theory and for movement research.
Contributors include: Paul Blackledge, Marc Blecher, Patrick Bond,Chik Collins, Ralph Darlington, Neil Davidson, Ashwin Desai, Jeff Goodwin, Chris Hesketh, Gabriel Hetland, Elizabeth Humphrys, Christian Høgsbjerg, David McNally, Trevor Ngwane, Heike Schaumberg and Hira Singh.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Nearly thirty years after its initial publication, Marxism and the Oppression of Women remains an essential contribution to the development of an integrative theory of gender oppression under capitalism. Lise Vogel revisits classical Marxian texts, tracking analyses of “the woman question” in socialist theory and drawing on central theoretical categories of Marx's Capital to open up an original theorisation of gender and the social production and reproduction of material life. Included in this edition are Vogel's article, “Domestic Labor Revisited” (originally published in Science & Society in 2000) which extends and clarifies her main theoretical innovations, and a new Introduction by Susan Ferguson and David McNally situating Vogel's work in the trajectory of Marxist-feminist thought over the past forty years.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Meanings of Work aims to explore some dimensions of the changes taking place in the labour-world, as well as looking at the consequences, theoretical and empirical, entailed by these transformations, such as the relevance and pertinence of the category of labour in the contemporary world. Billions of men and women depend exclusively on their labour to survive and encounter increasingly unstable, precarious or casual workers and the unemployed. As the contingent of workers has grown, there have been a vast reduction in jobs, rights have been corroded and the gains of the past have been eroded. The Meanings of Work starts with a wider conception of work and seeks to understand this new condition of labour today.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The book rethinks the central categories of Marx's work beyond any philosophy of history, providing a critical analysis of his political and theoretical development from his early writings, to the elaboration of the critique of political economy and his final anthropological studies on pre-individualistic and communist forms. The study aims to integrate the paradigm of the spatialisation of time with that of the temporalisation of space, showing how capital places diverse temporalities into hierarchies that incessantly produce and reproduce new forms of class struggle. An adequate historiographical paradigm for globalised capitalism has to consider the plurality of temporal layers that are combined and come into conflict in the violently unifying historical dimension of modernity.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Marx and Singularity by Luca Basso attempts to understand the development of Marx’s thought, from the early writings to the Grundrisse, as a search for individual realisation. Drawing upon the concept of singularity in contemporary French theory, and problematising its relation to Marx’s vocabulary, this book challenges organicist interpretations of Marx’s early work. The productivity of the notion of singularity is argued to be based on the fact that it allows us to highlight the element of individual realisation, stressing at the same time its distance from the modern conception of individuality. The “correlate” of singularity is the reciprocity, moving and unstable, between the “individual” and the “collective”, which occurs in class struggles.
Updated and revised edition of Socialità e isolamento: la singolarità in Marx published by Carocci in 2008.
Updated and revised edition of Socialità e isolamento: la singolarità in Marx published by Carocci in 2008.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Ellen Meiksins Wood is a leading contemporary political theorist who has elaborated an innovative approach to the history of political thought, the ‘social history of political theory’. She has been described as the founder, together with the historian Robert Brenner, of ‘Political Marxism’, a distinct version of historical materialism which has inspired a research program that spans a number of academic disciplines. Organized thematically, this Reader brings together selections from Wood’s groundbreaking scholarship, published over three decades, providing an overview of her original interpretations of capitalism, precapitalist societies, the state, political theory, democracy, citizenship, liberalism, civil society, the Enlightenment, globalization, imperialism, and socialism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In Gramsci's Political Thought, Carlos Nelson Coutinho offers an analysis of the evolution of the political thought of Antonio Gramsci. Focusing on central concepts of the Prison Notebooks and relating them to the history of modern political ideas, the book also demonstrates that Gramsci’s ideas continue to be relevant resources for understanding the controversies of our present time. Written by a leading Brazilian Marxist theorist, Gramsci's Political Thought provides one of the most succinct and theoretically focused introductions to the thought of Antonio Gramsci available internationally.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In contrast to the traditional view that Marx's work is restricted to a critique of capitalism and does not contain a detailed or coherent conception of its alternative, this book shows, through an analysis of his published and unpublished writings, that Marx was committed to a specific concept of a post-capitalist society that informed his critique of value production, alienated labor and capitalist accumulation. Instead of focusing on the present with only a passing reference to the future, Marx's emphasis on capitalism's tendency towards dissolution is rooted in a specific conception of what should replace it. In critically re-examining that conception, this book addresses the quest for an alternative to capitalism that has taken on increased importance today.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This, the first book-length study devoted exclusively to Marx’s perspectives on gender and the family, offers a fresh look at this topic in light of twenty-first century concerns. Although Marx’s writings sometimes exhibit sexism, especially through the naturalization of certain female social functions, his work often transcends these. Brown studies those writings on gender, as well as his 1879-1882 notebooks on precapitalist societies and gender, some of them still unpublished in any language. The author argues that although Marx never fully developed these ideas, he gave important indications toward a theory of gender and society. This study attempts to fill a significant gap in the literature on Marx and offer some general insights into the intersectionality of gender and class.
Book
Ahead of Publication
In a series of probing analytical essays, John Marot tracks the development of Bolshevism through the prism of pre-1917 intra-Russian Social Democratic controversies in politics and philosophy. For 1917, the author presents a critique of social historical interpretation of the Russian Revolution.
Turning to NEP Russia, the author applies Robert Brenner's analysis of pre-capitalist modes of production and concludes that neither Bukharin nor Trotsky's NEP-premised programs of economic transformation and advance toward socialism were feasible. At the same time, he rejects the view that Stalinism was pre-destined to supplant NEP. Instead, he hypothesises that the superior alternative to Stalinism was NEP without collectivization and the Five-Year Plans — a outcome that would have been possible had Bukharin and Trotsky joined forces to stop Stalin.
Turning to NEP Russia, the author applies Robert Brenner's analysis of pre-capitalist modes of production and concludes that neither Bukharin nor Trotsky's NEP-premised programs of economic transformation and advance toward socialism were feasible. At the same time, he rejects the view that Stalinism was pre-destined to supplant NEP. Instead, he hypothesises that the superior alternative to Stalinism was NEP without collectivization and the Five-Year Plans — a outcome that would have been possible had Bukharin and Trotsky joined forces to stop Stalin.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Criticism of Earth thoroughly reassesses Marx and Engels’s engagement with theology, drawing on largely ignored texts. Thus, alongside ‘opium of the people’, Hegel’s philosophy of law, and the Feuerbach theses, other works are also central. These include Marx’s early pieces on theology, continual transformations of fetishism, and lengthy treatments of Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. Engels too is given serious attention, since he moved beyond Marx in appreciating theology’s revolutionary possibilities. Engels’s Calvinism is discussed, his treatments of biblical criticism and theology, and his later writings on early Christianity’s revolutionary nature. The book continues the project for a renewed and enlivened interaction between Marxism and religion, being the fourth of five volumes in the Criticism of Heaven and Earth series.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The turmoil of 2007-2009 is a crisis of financialised capitalism, and for this reason it is systemic and unusual. The crisis commenced in the sphere of finance, spread to production, and then became a world recession. Its unusual character is apparent since never before has a global economic crisis been triggered by banks lending to workers to buy houses. Moreover, state intervention to forestall the crisis becoming a major depression has been unprecedented. This book brings together several well-known political economists to analyse the domestic and international aspects of financialisation, thus putting the crisis in its appropriate context. It draws on Marxist and other heterodox economics to cast light on the broader implications of financialisation and crisis for society.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The theory of imperialism is usually associated with some of the ‘big names’ in the history of European Marxism, such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding and Nikolai Bukharin, alongside whom the English Progressive John Hobson is usually mentioned. However, little is known about the development of Marxist theory on this subject besides the books of these figures. This volume assembles for the first time the main documents of the international debate on imperialism that took place in the Second International during the period 1898–1916. It assesses the contributions of the individual participants to the developing theory of imperialism, placing them in the context of contemporary political debates.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The proceedings of the last Comintern congress in which Lenin participated, now at last available in English, reveals a Communist world movement grappling to reconcile the goal of unifying workers and colonial people in struggle with that of pressing forward to socialist revolution. The principle of national parties’ autonomy strains against calls for more stringent centralisation. Debates range over the birth of Fascism, decay of the Versailles Treaty system, the rise of colonial revolution, and women’s emancipation. Newly translated and richly annotated, the stenographic transcript of the month-long congress discloses a rich spectrum of viewpoints among delegates. Indispensable source material on early Communism is supplemented by an analytic introduction, detailed footnotes, more than 500 short biographies, glossary, chronology, and index.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Bolivia witnessed a left-indigenous insurrectionary cycle between 2000 and 2005 that overthrew two neoliberal presidents and laid the foundation for Evo Morales’ successful bid to become the country’s first indigenous head of state in 2006. Building on the theoretical traditions of revolutionary Marxism and indigenous liberation, this book provides an analytical framework for understanding the fine-grained sociological and political nuances of twenty-first century Bolivian class-struggle, state-repression, and indigenous resistance, as well the deeply historical roots of today’s oppositional traditions. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including more than 80 in-depth interviews with social-movement and trade-union activists, Red October is a ground-breaking intervention in the study of contemporary Bolivia and the wider Latin American turn to the left over the last decade.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Paul Levi remains one of the most interesting and controversial figures in the early history of the Communist movement. As leader of the KPD after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, he successfully built up a party of a third of a million members, but by 1921 Comintern pressure for ‘Bolshevisation’ forced Levi’s resignation and expulsion. Until his early death in 1930 he remained ‘a revolutionary socialist of the Rosa Luxemburg school’ (Carl von Ossietsky), and was described by Albert Einstein as ‘one of the wisest, most just and courageous persons I have come across’. The first English edition of Levi’s writings fills a long-standing gap in the documents of German Communism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Winner of the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’.
Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Most US historians assume that capitalism either “came in the first ships” or was the inevitable result of the expansion of the market. Unable to analyze the dynamics of specific forms of social labour in the antebellum US, most historians of the US Civil War have privileged autonomous political and ideological factors, ignoring the deep social roots of the conflict. This book applies theoretical insights derived from the debates on the transition to capitalism in Europe to the historical literature on the US to produce a new analysis of the origins of capitalism in the US, and the social roots of the Civil War.
Winner of the Paul Sweezy Marxist Sociology Book Award 2013
Short-listed for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Winner of the Paul Sweezy Marxist Sociology Book Award 2013
Short-listed for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Criticism of Theology provides a detailed and critical commentary on the continued fascination with religion by yet more significant Marxist philosophers, historians and critics: Max Horkheimer, E.P. Thompson, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, Michael Löwy, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri. Simultaneously critique and construction, Criticism of Theology carefully analyses their work through close textual readings, with a view to locating hidden gems that may be developed further. The book continues the project for a renewed and enlivened interaction between Marxism and religion, being the third of five volumes in the Criticism of Heaven and Earth series.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Much has been written since Capital was first published, and more recently after the demise of the Soviet Union and the consequent triumph of neoliberalism, about the irrelevance, inconsistency, and obsoleteness of Marx. This has been attributed to his unworkable method of inquiry. This book goes against the current. It introduces the issues that are presently most hotly debated, it evaluates them, and it groups them into four headings, each one of them corresponding to a chapter. At the same time, it submits a new reading of Marx’s method of social research and on this basis it argues that Marx’s work offers a solid foundation upon which to further develop a multi-faceted theory of crises highly relevant for the contemporary world.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
The essays collected here straddle four decades of work in both historiography and Marxist theory, combining source-based historical work in a wide range of languages with sophisticated discussion of Marx's categories. Key themes include the distinctions that are crucial to restoring complexity to the Marxist notion of a 'mode of production'; the emergence of medieval relations of production; the origins of capitalism; the dichotomy between free and unfree labour; and essays in agrarian history that range widely from Byzantine Egypt to 19th-century colonialism. The essays demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory with history and of bringing history back into historical materialism. An introductory chapter ties the collection together and shows how historical materialists can develop an alternative to Marx's 'Asiatic mode of production'.
The essays collected here straddle four decades of work in both historiography and Marxist theory, combining source-based historical work in a wide range of languages with sophisticated discussion of Marx's categories. Key themes include the distinctions that are crucial to restoring complexity to the Marxist notion of a 'mode of production'; the emergence of medieval relations of production; the origins of capitalism; the dichotomy between free and unfree labour; and essays in agrarian history that range widely from Byzantine Egypt to 19th-century colonialism. The essays demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory with history and of bringing history back into historical materialism. An introductory chapter ties the collection together and shows how historical materialists can develop an alternative to Marx's 'Asiatic mode of production'.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Winner of the Premio internazionale Giuseppe Sormani 2011, awarded by the Fondazione Istituto Piemontese Antonio Gramsci in Turin for the best book/article on Gramsci in the period between 2007-2011 internationally.
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are today acknowledged as a classic of the human and social sciences in the twentieth century. The influence of his thought in numerous fields of scholarship is only exceeded by the diverse interpretations and readings to which it has been subjected, resulting in often contradictory 'images of Gramsci'. This book draws on the rich recent season of Gramscian philological studies in order to argue that the true significance of Gramsci's thought consists in its distinctive position in the development of the Marxist tradition. Providing a detailed reconsideration of Gramsci's theory of the state and concept of philosophy, The 'Gramscian moment' argues for the urgent necessity of taking up the challenge of developing a 'philosophy of praxis' as a vital element in the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are today acknowledged as a classic of the human and social sciences in the twentieth century. The influence of his thought in numerous fields of scholarship is only exceeded by the diverse interpretations and readings to which it has been subjected, resulting in often contradictory 'images of Gramsci'. This book draws on the rich recent season of Gramscian philological studies in order to argue that the true significance of Gramsci's thought consists in its distinctive position in the development of the Marxist tradition. Providing a detailed reconsideration of Gramsci's theory of the state and concept of philosophy, The 'Gramscian moment' argues for the urgent necessity of taking up the challenge of developing a 'philosophy of praxis' as a vital element in the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Louis Althusser’s interpretation of Niccolò Machiavelli has never really been studied in any detail as an analysis of political action and intervention. The same is also true for Althusser’s notion of aleatory materialism. Instead, these have conventionally been studied from the viewpoint of a philosophical perspective in which politics is excluded. The objective of the present book thus runs against many of the prevailing views on Althusser. Here the emphasis is placed on Althusser's advancement of a theory of materialist politics. The main argument put forward is that, for Althusser, it was essential to reflect on how the conjunctural understanding of history and reality could offer a theoretical starting point for a subversive political strategy.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Criticism of Religion offers a spirited critical commentary on the engagements with religion and theology by a range of leading Marxist philosophers and critics: Lucien Goldmann, Fredric Jameson, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Georg Lukács, and Raymond Williams. Apart from offering sustained critique, the aim is to gather key insights from these critics in order to develop a comprehensive theory of religion. The book follows on the heels of the acclaimed Criticism of Heaven, being the second volume of a five volume series called Criticism of Heaven and Earth.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The theory of Permanent Revolution has been associated with Leon Trotsky for more than a century since the first Russian Revolution in 1905. Trotsky was the most brilliant proponent of Permanent Revolution but by no means its sole author. The documents in this volume, most of them translated into English for the first time, demonstrate that Trotsky was one of several participants in a debate from 1903-7 that involved numerous leading figures of Russian and European Marxism, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Parvus and David Ryazanov.
This volume reassembles that debate, assesses it with reference to Marx and Engels, and provides new evidence for interpreting the formative years of Russian revolutionary Marxism.
This volume reassembles that debate, assesses it with reference to Marx and Engels, and provides new evidence for interpreting the formative years of Russian revolutionary Marxism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
What does it mean to follow Marx? In this examination of Marx’s methodology combined with specific applications on topics in political economy such as neo-Ricardian theory, analytical Marxism, the falling rate of profit, crisis theory, monopoly capital, Paul Sweezy, advertising and the capitalist state, this volume argues that the failure to understand (or explicit rejection of) Marx’s method has led astray many who consider themselves Marxists. By focusing particularly upon the concept of a totality and the necessary form of appearance of capital as many capitals in competition, Following Marx both demonstrates why Marx insisted that ‘in competition everything is reversed’ and provides a guide for following Marx.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Although Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the author of After Virtue (1981), he was, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most erudite members of Britain’s Marxist Left: being a militant within, first, the Communist Party, then the New Left, and finally the heterodox Trotskyist International Socialism group. This selection of his essays on Marxism from that period aims to show that his youthful thought profoundly informed his mature ethics, and that, in the wake of the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe, the powerful and optimistic revolutionary Marxist ethics of liberation he articulated in that period is arguably as salient to anti-capitalist activists today as it was half a century ago.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism is an international and interdisciplinary volume which aims to provide a thorough and precise panorama of recent developments in Marxist theory in the US, Europe, Asia and beyond. Drawing on the work of thirty of the most authoritative scholars, the Companion spans all the humanities and social sciences, with particular emphasis on philosophy. The work is divided into three parts: 'General Trends', which provides a broad intellectual and historical context; 'Currents', which tracks the trajectories of twenty specific currents or disciplinary fields; and 'Figures', which examines in detail the work of fifteen key actors of Marxist or para-Marxist theory (Adorno, Althusser, Badiou, Benjamin, Bhaskar, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Gramsci, Habermas, Jameson, Lefebvre, Uno, Williams). The Companion is set to be unsurpassed for many years, in breadth and depth, as the definitive guide to contemporary Marxism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The point of departure of Heide Gerstenberger’s path-breaking work is a critique of structural-functionalist theory of the state, in both its modernisation theory and materialist variants. Prof. Gerstenberger opposes to these a historical-theoretical explanation that proceeds from the long-term structuring effect of concrete social practice. This is elucidated by detailed investigation of the development of bourgeois state power in the two key examples of England and France. The different complexions that the bourgeois state assumed are presented as the results of processes of social and cultural formation, and thus irreducible to a simple function of capitalism. This approach culminates in the thesis that the bourgeois form of capitalist state power arose only where capitalist societies developed out of already rationalised structures of the Ancien Régime type.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This volume consists of a critical commentary on the interactions between Marxism and theology in the work of the major figures of Western Marxism. It deals with the theological writings of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Žižek and Theodor Adorno. In many cases their theological writings are dealt with for the first time in this book. It is surprising how much theological material there is and how little commentators have dealt with it. Apart from the critical engagement with the way they use theology, the book also explores how their theological writings infiltrate and enrich their Marxist work. The book has three parts: Biblical Marxists (Bloch and Benjamin), Catholic Marxists (Althusser, Lefebvre, Gramsci and Eagleton), and the Protestant Turn (Žižek and Adorno).
Book
Ahead of Publication
The ‘Russian Question’ was an absolutely central problem for Marxism in the twentieth century. Numerous attempts were made to understand the nature of Soviet society. The present book tries to portray the development of these theoretical contributions since 1917 in a coherent, comprehensive appraisal. It aims to present the development of the Western Marxist critique of the Soviet Union across a rather long period in history (from 1917 to the present) and in a large region (Western Europe and North America). Within this demarcation of limits in time and space, an effort has been made to ensure completeness, by paying attention to all Marxist analyses which in some way significantly deviated from or added to the older theories.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This volume, originally published in French under the title Que faire du Capital?, offers a new interpretation of Marx’s great work. It shows how the novelty and lasting interest of Marx’s theory arises from the fact that, as against the project of a ‘pure’ economics, it is formulated in concepts that have simultaneously an economic and a political aspect, neither of these being separable from the other.
Jacques Bidet conducts an unprecedented investigation of Marx’s work in the spirit of the history of science, exploring it as a process of theoretical development. Traditional exegesis reads the successive drafts of Capital as if they were complementary and mutually illuminated one another. In actual fact, like any scientist, Marx only wrote a new version in order to correct the previous one. He started from ideas borrowed from Ricardo and Hegel, and between one draft and the next it is possible to see these being eliminated and restructured. This labour, moreover, was never fully completed.
The author thus re-assesses Marx’s entire system in its set of constitutive categories: value, market, labour-power, classes, working class, exploitation, production, fetishism, ideology. He seeks to pin down the difficulties that these encountered, and the analytical and critical value they still have today.
Bidet attaches the greatest importance to Marx’s order of exposition, which assigns each concept its place in the overall system, and makes the validity of the construction depend on the pertinence of its initial presuppositions. This is particularly the case with the relationship between market mechanism and capitalism – and thus also between the market and socialism.
This books an English translation of Jacques Bidet, Que faire du capital? Philosophie, economie et politique dans "La Capital" de Marx, published y Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2000.
Jacques Bidet conducts an unprecedented investigation of Marx’s work in the spirit of the history of science, exploring it as a process of theoretical development. Traditional exegesis reads the successive drafts of Capital as if they were complementary and mutually illuminated one another. In actual fact, like any scientist, Marx only wrote a new version in order to correct the previous one. He started from ideas borrowed from Ricardo and Hegel, and between one draft and the next it is possible to see these being eliminated and restructured. This labour, moreover, was never fully completed.
The author thus re-assesses Marx’s entire system in its set of constitutive categories: value, market, labour-power, classes, working class, exploitation, production, fetishism, ideology. He seeks to pin down the difficulties that these encountered, and the analytical and critical value they still have today.
Bidet attaches the greatest importance to Marx’s order of exposition, which assigns each concept its place in the overall system, and makes the validity of the construction depend on the pertinence of its initial presuppositions. This is particularly the case with the relationship between market mechanism and capitalism – and thus also between the market and socialism.
This books an English translation of Jacques Bidet, Que faire du capital? Philosophie, economie et politique dans "La Capital" de Marx, published y Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2000.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The purpose of this book is to give a precise meaning to the formula: English is the language of imperialism. Understanding that statement involves a critique of the dominant views of language, both in the field of linguistics (the book has a chapter criticising Chomsky’s research programme) and of the philosophy of language (the book has a chapter assessing Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action).
The book aims at constructing a Marxist philosophy of language, embodying a view of language as a social, historical, material and political phenomenon. Since there has never been a strong tradition of thinking about language in Marxism, the book provides an overview of the question of Marxism in language (from Stalin’s pamphlet to Voloshinov's book, taking in an essay by Pasolini), and it seeks to construct a number of concepts for a Marxist philosophy of language.
The book belongs to the tradition of Marxist critique of dominant ideologies. It should be particularly useful to those who, in the fields of language study, literature and communication studies, have decided that language is not merely an instrument of communication.
The book aims at constructing a Marxist philosophy of language, embodying a view of language as a social, historical, material and political phenomenon. Since there has never been a strong tradition of thinking about language in Marxism, the book provides an overview of the question of Marxism in language (from Stalin’s pamphlet to Voloshinov's book, taking in an essay by Pasolini), and it seeks to construct a number of concepts for a Marxist philosophy of language.
The book belongs to the tradition of Marxist critique of dominant ideologies. It should be particularly useful to those who, in the fields of language study, literature and communication studies, have decided that language is not merely an instrument of communication.
Book
Ahead of Publication
First published in 1987, Althusser, The Detour of Theory was widely received as the fullest account of its subject to date. Drawing on a wide range of hitherto untranslated material, it examined the political and intellectual contexts of Althusser’s ‘return to Marx’ in the mid-1960s; analysed the novel character of the Marxism developed in his major works; charted their author’s subsequent evolution, from his self-criticism to the proclamation of a ‘crisis of Marxism’; and concluded with a balance-sheet of Althusser’s contribution to historical materialism.
For this second edition, Gregory Elliott has added a substantial postscript in which he surveys the posthumous edition of the French philosopher’s work published in the 1990s, from the early writings of the 1940s through to the late texts of the 1980s, relating the unknown Althusser revealed by them to the familiar figure of For Marx and Reading Capital, together with a comprehensive bibliography of Althusser’s oeuvre.
For this second edition, Gregory Elliott has added a substantial postscript in which he surveys the posthumous edition of the French philosopher’s work published in the 1990s, from the early writings of the 1940s through to the late texts of the 1980s, relating the unknown Althusser revealed by them to the familiar figure of For Marx and Reading Capital, together with a comprehensive bibliography of Althusser’s oeuvre.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book undertakes the first general assessment of ecological economics from a Marxist point of view, and shows how Marxist political economy can make a substantial contribution to ecological economics. The analysis is developed in terms of four basic issues: (1) nature and economic value; (2) the treatment of nature as capital; (3) the significance of the entropy law for economic systems; (4) the concept of sustainable development. In each case, it is shown that Marxism can help ecological economics fulfill its commitments to multi-disciplinarity, methodological pluralism, and historical openness. In this way, a foundation is constructed for a substantive dialogue between Marxists and ecological economists.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Lenin’s What is to Be Done? (1902) has long been seen as the founding document of a 'party of a new type'. For some, it provided a model of ‘vanguard party’ that was the essence of Bolshevism, for others it manifested Lenin’s élitist and manipulatory attitude towards the workers.
This substantial new commentary, based on contemporary Russian- and German-language sources, provides hitherto unavailable contextual information that undermines these views and shows how Lenin's argument rests squarely on an optimistic confidence in the workers' revolutionary inclinations and on his admiration of German Social Democracy in particular. Lenin's outlook cannot be understood, Lih claims here, outside the context of international Social Democracy, the disputes within Russian Social Democracy and the institutions of the revolutionary underground.
The new translation focuses attention on hard-to-translate key terms. This study raises new and unsettling questions about the legacy of Marx, Bolshevism as a historical force, and the course of Soviet history, but, most of all, it will revolutionise the conventional interpretations of Lenin.
This substantial new commentary, based on contemporary Russian- and German-language sources, provides hitherto unavailable contextual information that undermines these views and shows how Lenin's argument rests squarely on an optimistic confidence in the workers' revolutionary inclinations and on his admiration of German Social Democracy in particular. Lenin's outlook cannot be understood, Lih claims here, outside the context of international Social Democracy, the disputes within Russian Social Democracy and the institutions of the revolutionary underground.
The new translation focuses attention on hard-to-translate key terms. This study raises new and unsettling questions about the legacy of Marx, Bolshevism as a historical force, and the course of Soviet history, but, most of all, it will revolutionise the conventional interpretations of Lenin.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Part One of this book examines the social-state, neoliberal, catalytic-state, and democratic-cosmopolitan models of globalisation. Each necessarily tends to function in a manner contradicting essential claims made by its leading advocates. This “immanent contradiction” provides a theoretical warrant for moving to a new position, addressing the shortcomings of the previous framework. The first three chapters of Part Two are devoted to a Marxian model of capitalist globalisation, in which the irresolvable contradictions and social antagonisms of the capitalist global order are explicitly recognised. The final chapter is devoted to a Marxian model of socialist globalisation, in which those contradictions and antagonisms are overcome, bringing the systematic dialectic of globalisation to a close.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book uncovers the historical preconditions for the explosive revival of utopian literature at the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, and excavates its ideological content. It marks a contribution not only to the literary and cultural history of the late-Victorian period, and to the expanding field of utopian studies, but to the development of a Marxist critique of utopianism. The book is particularly concerned with three kinds of political utopia or anti-utopia, those of 'state socialism', feminism, and anti-communism (the characteristic expression of this last example being the cacotopia). After an extensive contextual account of the politics of utopia in late-nineteenth century England, it devotes a chapter to each of these topics before developing an original reinterpretation of William Morris's seminal Marxist utopia, News from Nowhere.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book critically examines existing theories of international law and makes the case for an alternative Marxist approach. China Miéville draws on the pioneering jurisprudence of Evgeny Pashukanis linking law to commodity exchange, and in turn uses international law to make better sense of Pashukanis. Miéville argues that despite its advances, the recent ‘New Stream’ of radical international legal scholarship, like the mainstream it opposes, fails to make sense of the legal form itself. Drawing on Marxist theory and a critical history of international law from the sixteenth century to the present day, Miéville seeks to address that failure, and argues that international law is fundamentally constituted by the violence of imperialism.
Book
Ahead of Publication
On 12 October 1923, Grigory Zinoviev, president of the Communist International wrote the following in Pravda:
The German events are developing with the inexorability of fate. The path which it took the Russian Revolution twelve years to cover, from 1906 to 1917, will have taken the German Revolution five years, from 1918 to 1923. … The proletarian revolution is knocking at Germany’s door; you would have to be blind not to see it. … Very soon, everyone will see that this autumn of 1923 is a turning-point, not just for the history of Germany, but for the history of the whole world.
In fact, far from being on the point of triumphing, the German Revolution was on the verge of an irredeemable disaster which would soon inflict terrible consequences on Germany and the world.
In this magisterial work, first published 1971 and still unsurpassed, Pierre Broué meticulously reconstitutes the six decisive years during which — between ‘ultra-leftism and ‘opportunism’, ‘sectarianism’ and ‘revisionism’, ‘activism’ and ‘passivity’ — the German revolutionaries attempted to begin a new chapter in the history of the proletariat.
The German events are developing with the inexorability of fate. The path which it took the Russian Revolution twelve years to cover, from 1906 to 1917, will have taken the German Revolution five years, from 1918 to 1923. … The proletarian revolution is knocking at Germany’s door; you would have to be blind not to see it. … Very soon, everyone will see that this autumn of 1923 is a turning-point, not just for the history of Germany, but for the history of the whole world.
In fact, far from being on the point of triumphing, the German Revolution was on the verge of an irredeemable disaster which would soon inflict terrible consequences on Germany and the world.
In this magisterial work, first published 1971 and still unsurpassed, Pierre Broué meticulously reconstitutes the six decisive years during which — between ‘ultra-leftism and ‘opportunism’, ‘sectarianism’ and ‘revisionism’, ‘activism’ and ‘passivity’ — the German revolutionaries attempted to begin a new chapter in the history of the proletariat.
Book
Ahead of Publication
Making History is about the question - central to social theory - of how human agents draw their powers from the social structures they are involved in. Drawing on classical Marxism, analytical philosophy, and a wide range of historical writing, Alex Callinicos seeks to avoid two unacceptable extremes - dissolving the subject into an impersonal flux, as poststructuralists tend to - and treating social structures as the mere effects of individual action (for example, rational-choice theory). Among those discussed are Althusser, Anderson, Benjamin, Brenner, Cohen, Elster, Foucault, Giddens, Habermas, and Mann. Callinicos has written an extended introduction to this new edition that reviews developments since Making History was first published in 1987. This republication gives a new generation of readers access to an important intervention in Marxism and social theory.
Book
Ahead of Publication
The Capitalist Cycle is a translation of a previously unknown work in Marxist economic theory. Originally published in 1928, this rediscovered work is one of the most creative essays witten by a Soviet economist during the first two decades after the Russian Revolution. Following the dialectic of Hegel and Marx, Maksakovsky aims to provide a 'concluding chapter' for Marx's Capital. The book examines economic methodology and logically reconstructs Marx's analysis into a comprehensive and dynamic theory of cyclical economic crises. The introductory essay by Richard B. Day situates Maksakovsky's work within the Hegelian and Marxist philosophical traditions by emphasizing the book's dialectical logic as well as its contribution to economic science.
Book
Ahead of Publication
This book proposes a Marxist analysis of young Marx's intellectual evolution, from left neo-Hegelianism to his new philosophy of praxis. It distinguishes itself from most other books on the early Marx by its object - the theory of (proletarian) revolutionary self-emancipation - and its method: to understand the movement of Marx's political and philosophical ideas in relation to the most radical currents in the labour movement of his time (beginning with Chartism and the uprising of the Silesian weavers in 1844). The central theoretical argument of the author is that Marx's philosophy of praxis - first formulated in the Thesis on Feuerbach - is at the same time the founding stone of a new world view, and the methodological basis for the theory of revolutionary self-emancipation.
For the paperback version of this title, please go to http://www.cbsd.com/detail.aspx?Inventory=17323
For the paperback version of this title, please go to http://www.cbsd.com/detail.aspx?Inventory=17323
