First published in 1977. This book describes the growth of revolutionary organisations in Britain from 1900 onwards. It shows that there was an indigenous movement that developed quite independently from the left in other countries, although its basic outlook was remarkably similar to that of the Bolsheviks in Russia. The study concentrates the activities of the Socialist Labour Party, a small group of dedicated revolutionaries, whose impact on working-class politics had not been fully recognised. The most controversial section of the book deals with the Russian influence on the machinations that led to the formation of the British Communist Party. It is critical of Lenin, who sometimes gave advice on the basis of insufficient knowledge, and of Comitern agents, like Theodore Rothstein, with dubious political backgrounds. This title will be of great interest to students of politics, philosophy, and history.

The publication of the first three volumes of Open Marxism in the 1990s has had a transformative impact on how we think about Marxism in the twenty-first century. 'Open Marxism' aims to think of Marxism as a theory of struggle, not as an objective analysis of capitalist domination, arguing that money, capital and the state are forms of struggle from above and therefore open to resistance and rebellion. As critical thought is squeezed out of universities and geographical shifts shape the terrain of theoretical discussion, the editors argue now is the time for a new volume that reflects the work that has been carried out during the past decade. Emphasising the contemporary relevance of 'open Marxism' in our moment of political and economic uncertainty, the collection shines a light on its significance for activists and academics today.

This book examines decision-making at the highest level of the Soviet political system, from the conclusion of Stalin's power in 1927 until his death in 1953. It explores the nature of the Stalin dictatorship in terms of a broader comparative understanding of dictatorial regimes. It examines the way the decision-making process operated, and the informal mechanisms of power. It explores the patterns of decision-making in different policy fields, drawing on new archival sources.

The decade of the 1980s began in China with great expectations of the societal benefits of modernisation, and ended with gunfire in Tiananmen Square. This book, first published in 1991, presents essays that explore the political and economic reform policies that emerged in post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping. In general, they conclude that the advent of partial marketization and structural reform tended to magnify structural contradictions rather than solve them.

This book, first published in 2001, uses key oral histories to confirm and explain the professional and private lives of post-1949 Chinese intellectuals through the focal point of Chen Renbing, a man personally criticised by Mao Zedong. Intellectuals have faced unique perils in modern Chinese history, thousands of whom were targeted by Mao. Mao's Prey provides invaluable insight into their experiences and fates.

This book, first published in 1980, addresses the questions raised by the death of Mao Zedong and the arrest of the 'Gang of Four'. Was China reverting to a capitalist form of development, and abandoning Mao's policies? Was China's leadership remaining loyal to Mao's strategy but correcting damage done by the 'Gang of Four'? The essays in this book analyse these questions and illustrate differences in interpretation amongst the post-Mao leadership. Individual chapters deal with disagreements over political line, the role of the CCP, economic policy and industrial management, policy towards the rural sector, controversies over the role of art and literature, the nature and function of the education system and the incorporation of China into the international economy.

The 'end of history' has not taken place. Ideological and economic crisis and the status quo of neoliberal capitalism since 2008 demand a renewed engagement with Marx. But if we are to effectively resist capitalism we must truly understand Marx: Marxism today must theorise how communication technologies, media representation and digitalisation have come to define contemporary capitalism. There is an urgent need for critical, Marxian-inspired knowledge as a foundation for changing the world and the way we communicate from digital capitalism towards communicative socialism and digital communism. Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism does exactly this. Delving into Marx's most influential works, such as Capital, The Grundrisse, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, Christian Fuchs draws out Marx's concepts of machinery, technology, communication and ideology, all of which anticipate major themes of the digital age. A concise and coherent work of Marxist media and communication theory, the book ultimately demonstrates the relevance of Marx to an age of digital and communicative capitalism.

Forty years after his death, Mao remains a totemic, if divisive, figure in contemporary China. Though he retains an immense symbolic importance within China's national mythology, the rise of a capitalist economy has seen the ruling class become increasingly ambivalent towards him. And while he continues to be a highly visible and contentious presence in Chinese public life, Mao's enduring influence has been little understood in the West. In China and the New Maoists, Kerry Brown and Simone van Nieuwenhuizen look at the increasingly vocal elements who claim to be the true ideological heirs to Mao, ranging from academics to cyberactivists, as well as at the state's efforts to draw on Mao's image as a source of legitimacy. This is a fascinating portrait of a country undergoing dramatic upheavals while still struggling to come to terms with its past.

" A] surprisingly moving story." The New Yorker

"Bogdanov's novels reveal a great deal about their fascinating author, about his time and, ironically, ours, and about the genre of utopia as well as his contribution to it." Slavic Review

"Bogdanov's imaginative predictions for his utopia are both technological and social... Even more farsighted are his] anxious forebodings about the limits and costs of the utopian future." Science Fiction Studies

"The contemporary reader will marvel at Bogdanov's] foresight: nuclear fusion and propulsion, atomic weaponry and fallout, computers, blood transfusions, and (almost) unisexuality." Choice

A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873 1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist."

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen major advances in recent years. While machines were always central to the Marxist analysis of capitalism, AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Contemporary machine-learning AI allows machines to increasingly approach human capacities for perception and reasoning in narrow domains. This book explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through the lenses of different theoretical concepts, including surplus-value, labour, the general conditions of production, class composition and surplus population. It argues against left accelerationism and post-Operaismo thinkers, asserting that a deeper analysis of AI produces a more complex and disturbing picture of capitalism's future than has previously been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI represents an ultimate weapon for capital. It will render humanity obsolete or turn it into a species of transhumans working for a wage until the heat death of the universe; a fate that is only avoidable by communist revolution.

This book argues that capitalism cannot be said to be truly democratic and that a system of producer cooperatives, or democratically managed enterprises, is needed to give rise to a new mode of production that is genuinely socialist and fully consistent with the ultimate rationale underlying Marx's theoretical approach. The proposition that firms should be run by the workers on their own was endorsed by John Dewey, the greatest social thinker of the twentieth century, but is also shared by Marxists such as Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Angelo Tasca, Antonio Gramsci and Richard Wolff. This book explores the history of this argument, taking into account concepts from economic and political thought including historical materialism, cooperation, utopianism and economic democracy. The book will be of significant interest to scholars and students of political economy, Marxism, socialism, history of economic thought and political theory.

Paul Wetherly provides a restatement and defence of the classical Marxist theory of the state, developing an analytical approach that draws on G.A. Cohen's functional interpretation of Marx's theory of history. Instrumentalist and structuralist arguments are conceived as related causal mechanisms within the functional approach, and the principle of economic determination is shown to be consistent with the relative autonomy of the state as an institution with its own interests and capacities. This old-fashioned interpretation is defended against rival approaches within contemporary Marxism, notably Jessop's strategic relational approach.

Originally published in 1952. This book collects numerous works on the revival of Spinoza scholarship in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 30's, including the emergence of conflicting Marxist schools of Spinoza interpretation. This work includes translations by Kline of seven major articles on Spinoza published from 1923-1932, with a lengthy introduction providing contextual references. These developments were generally unknown outside of Russia due to lack of prior translations into a Western European language. The Marxist view of Spinoza represents a break not only with the dominant traditions of Western scholarship, but also with those critical and negative views of pre-Revolutionary Russia. This book provides both the study of Spinoza in Soviet philosophy, and of Soviet philosophy through Spinoza.

This book provides an up-to-date reading of Capital Volume I, emphasizing the relevance of Marx's analysis to everyday twenty-first century struggles. Harry Cleaver's treatise outlines and critiques Marx's analysis chapter by chapter. His unique interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value reveals how every theoretical category of Capital designates aspects of class struggle in ways that help us resist and escape them. At the same time, while rooted within the tradition of workerism, he understands the working class to include not only the industrial proletariat but also unwaged peasants, housewives, children and students. A challenge to scholars and an invaluable resource for students and activists today.

Science fiction and socialism have always had a close relationship. Many sf novelists and filmmakers are leftists. Others examine explicit or implicit Marxist concerns. As a genre, sf is ideally suited to critiquing the present through its explorations of the social and political possibilities of the future. This is the first collection to combine analyses of sf literature and films within a broader overview of Marxist theory and critical perspectives on the genre. Covering a rich variety of examples from Weimar cinema to mainstream Hollywood films, and novelists from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken MacLeod and Charles Stross, this is an indespensible insight into how Marxism and science fiction go hand-in-hand.

An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, "The Road to Serfdom" has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944--when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program--"The Road to Serfdom" was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, "The Road to Serfdom" garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, "Reader's Digest" published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century.
With this new edition, "The Road to Serfdom" takes its place in the series "The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek." The volume includes a foreword by series editor and leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardizedand corrected Hayek's references and added helpful new explanatory notes. Supplemented with an appendix of related materials ranging from prepublication reports on the initial manuscript to forewords to earlier editions by John Chamberlain, Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself, this new edition of "The Road to Serfdom" will be the definitive version of Friedrich Hayek's enduring masterwork.

First published in 1977. Ethics is the most practical branch of philosophy: its immediate concern is with people's actions. Yet most philosophers do little to relate ethics intelligibly to the human situation. In this inquiry into the nature of ethics, William Ash draws on the relevant works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin to present the theory and practice of Marxist ethics. He offers an explanation of the moral aspect of Marx's dictum: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.' The book includes, perhaps for the first time in so considered a form, an assessment of Mao Tsetung's contribution to Marxist moral philosophy, together with the ethical implications of such developments in social practice as the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The author deals with the question of value by analysing the concept of 'good'; with the question of claims on people and things by analysing the concept of 'right'; with the question of the limits and scope of freedom of choice and action by analysing the concept of 'ought'.' Clearly written in order to 'de-mystify' the subject, the book challenges readers to test the author's enlightened, Marxist approach in terms of the ethical ordering of their own society.

First published in 1990. The individual's obligation to obey the law, the state and the government is a fundamental part of contemporary political theory. The contributors to this volume, drawn from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, political science and law, take a fresh look at the dilemmas of political obligation. They discuss the extent to which we should allow the need for conformity to override individual liberties, and ask whether individualism is indeed feasible without a highly developed sense of the 'public interest' or the 'common good'. The contrast between individualism and communitarianism is examined throughout the book. The contributors also look at the various means through which the state can coerce or persuade the individual to be obedient. The emphasis throughout this collection is on the substantive problems themselves, rather than on the way these issues have been addressed in the history of political thought. The book offers a number of different perspectives on political obligation, and will be valuable to students of moral, political, social and legal philosophy.

A. Kiarina Kordela steps beyond extant commentaries on Marx's theory of commodity fetishism-from A. Sohn-Rethel to L. Althusser, E. Balibar, Slavoj Zizek, and others-to show that in capitalism value is the manifestation of the homology between thought and being, while their other aspect-power-is foreclosed and becomes the object of biopower. Using monistic Marxian/Lacanian structuralism as an alternative to dominant models from Plato and Kant to phenomenological accounts, deconstruction, and other contemporary approaches, Kordela expertly argues that Marx's theory of commodity fetishism is a reformulation of the Spinozian thesis that thought (mind) and things (bodies or extension) are manifestations of one and the same being or substance. Kordela's link between Spinoza and Marx shows that being consists of two aspects, value and power, the former leading to structuralist thought, the latter becoming the object of contemporary biopower. Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan intervenes between two dominant lines of thought in the reception of Marx today: on the one hand, an approach that relates Marxian thought to psychoanalysis from a Hegelian/dialectical perspective and, on the other hand, an approach that links Marxism to Spinozian monism, at the total exclusion of psychoanalysis. This book will interest scholars and researchers who study Marxism, (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, ontology, epistemology and theories of representation, theoreticians of cultural studies and comparative literature, aesthetic theory, including the relation of art to economy and politics, and biopolitics.

In the economic debate, power is defined and studied mainly as an interpersonal relation occurring out of perfect competition. This is a consequence of the combination of methodological individualism and the assumption of competition as a natural and everlasting coordinating mechanism, operating without any sort of coercion. This methodology, however, is not adequate to analyze the forms of social coercion that characterize capitalism. Economics and Power criticizes the main theories of power developed in economic literature, analyzing ultraliberal contractualism to radical political economics, and ultimately suggesting a Marxist conception of power and coercion in capitalism. Palermo's ontological argument is rooted in the philosophy of 'critical realism'.This unique volume presents his main finding as being that the essential coercive mechanism of capitalism is competition. Capitalist power is not caused by a lack of competition, but by the central role it plays in this mode of production. Following this, the chapters reconstruct a Marxian conception of power where it is analyzed as a social relation and argues that perfect competition does in fact exist under the disguise of capitalist power. This book criticizes the construct of power and the underlying ideas surrounding perfect competition. This book is of interest to those who study political economy, as well as economic theory and philosophy.

Theories heralding the rise of network governance have dominated for a generation. Yet, empirical research suggests that claims for the transformative potential of networks are exaggerated. This topical and timely book takes a critical look at contemporary governance theory, elaborating a Gramscian alternative. It argues that, although the ideology of networks has been a vital element in the neoliberal hegemonic project, there are major structural impediments to accomplishing it. While networking remains important, the hierarchical and coercive state is vital for the maintenance of social order and integral to the institutions of contemporary governance. Reconsidering it from Marxist and Gramscian perspectives, the book argues that the hegemonic ideology of networks is utopian and rejects the claim that there has been a transformation from 'government' to 'governance'. This important book has international appeal and will be essential reading for scholars and students of governance, public policy, human geography, public management, social policy and sociology.

Why does 1968 matter today? The authors of this volume believe that it is a crucial point of reference for current developments, especially the 'illiberal turn' both in Europe and America. If we want to understand it, we need to look back into 1968 - the year that founded the cultural and political order of today's world. The book consists of the following four sections: '1968 and transnationality', '1968 and the transformation of meanings', 'Artistic representations of 1968', and '1968 and the European contemporaity'. This is followed by an afterword from the significant keynote speaker at the conference Unsettled 1968: Origins - Myth - Impact in June 2018 in Tubingen, Germany: Irena Grudzinska-Gross, herself a Polish '68er', reflects upon the conference and leaves remarks on her 50 years of engagement with what happened in 1968.

First published in 1984. This study critically examines the conceptions of social class employed by Marx and by modern Marxist writers, to probe their problematic areas and to propose certain modifications to those conception. The author also tests the conclusions deriving from this theoretical reflection against the task of analysing some aspects of the development of class relations in a particular social formation in Britain. This title will be of interest to students of philosophy and politics.

This collection explores key themes in the contemporary critique of political economy, in honour of the work and practice of Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis - two of the most significant contemporary theorists of capitalism and anti-capitalism, whose contributions span half a century of struggle, crisis and debate. Drawing together a collection of essays that assess Federici and Caffentzis's contributions, offering critical and comradely reflections and commentary that build on their scholarship, this volume acts as a guide to their work, while also taking us beyond it. The book is organised around five key themes: revolutionary histories, reproduction, money and value, commons, and struggles. Ultimately, the book shines light on the continuing relevance of Caffentzis and Federici's work in the twenty-first century for understanding anti-capitalism, 'primitive accumulation' and the commons, feminism, reproductive labour and Marx's value theory.

Faced with a new crisis of capitalism, many scholars are now looking back to the author whose ideas were too hastily dismissed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the last decade, Marx's Capital has received renewed academic and popular attention. It has been reprinted in new editions throughout the world and the contemporary relevance of its pages is being discussed again. Today, Marx's analyses are arguably resonating even more strongly than they did in his own time and Capital continues to provide an effective framework to understand the nature of capitalism and its transformations. This volume includes the proceedings of the biggest international conference held in the world to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Capital's publication. The book is divided into three parts: I) "Capitalism, Past and Present"; II) "Extending the Critique of Capital"; III) "The Politics of Capital". It contains the contributions of globally renowned scholars from 13 countries and multiple academic disciplines who offer diverse perspectives, and critical insights into the principal contradictions of contemporary capitalism while pointing to alternative economic and social models. Together, they reconsider the most influential historical debates on Capital and provide new interpretations of Marx's magnum opus in light of themes rarely associated with Capital, such as gender, ecology, and non-European societies. The book is an indispensable source for academic communities who are increasingly interested in rediscovering Marx beyond 20th century Marxism. Moreover, it will be of great appeal to students, as well as established scholars interested in critique of capitalism and socialist theory.