![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Marxism & Communism
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.
Offering an alternative exploration of the subject, 'Marxism in Dark Times' anchors its investigation of Marxism in the conceptual spheres of humanism, democracy and pluralism. Its essays question the stereotyped, positivist notion of the theory as practised by the exponents of official Marxism, highlight the legacy of the suppressed voices in the Marxist tradition, and provide new insights into reading Marxism in the twenty-first century--affording new perspectives on Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, David Ryazanov and the Frankfurt School. They seek to review the phenomenon of 'Perestroika, ' explore the new historiography on Comintern, and examine the relation between Marxism and postmodernism. With its wide-ranging provision of materials--some translated here into English from German and Russian for the first time--this collection offers a pioneering English assessment of some of the most debatable issues in contemporary Marxism.
Within the span of a generation, Nazi Germany's former capital, Berlin, found a new role as a symbol of freedom and resilient democracy in the Cold War. This book unearths how this remarkable transformation resulted from a network of liberal American occupation officials, and returned emigres, or remigres, of the Marxist Social Democratic Party (SPD). This network derived from lengthy physical and political journeys. After fleeing Hitler, German-speaking self-professed "revolutionary socialists" emphasized "anti-totalitarianism" in New Deal America and contributed to its intelligence apparatus. These experiences made these remigres especially adept at cultural translation in postwar Berlin against Stalinism. This book provides a new explanation for the alignment of Germany's principal left-wing party with the Western camp. While the Cold War has traditionally been analyzed from the perspective of decision makers in Moscow or Washington, this study demonstrates the agency of hitherto marginalized on the conflict's first battlefield. Examining local political culture and social networks underscores how both Berliners and emigres understood the East-West competition over the rubble that the Nazis left behind as a chance to reinvent themselves as democrats and cultural mediators, respectively. As this network popularized an anti-Communist, pro-Western Left, this book identifies how often ostracized emigres made a crucial contribution to the Federal Republic of Germany's democratization.
This book is a sociological study of how economic reforms, started in the late 1970s, have affected people's life in China. The book is based upon the author's recent research projects conducted in mainland China. The unique feature of the book is not only based upon qualitative analysis but also quantitative data, the integration of which can enhance readers' understanding of current social and political developments in post-Mao China. In particular, the book aims to depict a context and sociological framework for the analysis of the dynamic and interactive processes between economic, social and political fronts.
The Being and Event trilogy is the philosophical basis of Alain Badiou's entire oeuvre. It is formed of three major texts, which constitute a kind of metaphysical saga: Being and Event (1988). ), Logics of the Worlds (2006) and finally The Immanence of Truths, which he has been working on for 15 years. The new volume reverses the perspective adopted in Logics of Worlds. Where in that book, Badiou saw fit to analyze how truths, qua events, appear from the perspective of particular worlds that by definition exclude them, in The Immanence of Truths Badiou asks instead how the irruption of truths transforms the worlds within which they by necessity must arise. An emphasis on regularity and continuity has given way to an attempt, one unquestionable in its philosophical power and implications, to formalize rupture and reconfiguration. The Being and Event trilogy is a unique and ambitious work that reveals how truths can be at once context-specific and universal, situational and eternal.
" Marx After Marxism" encourages readers to understand Karl Marx
in new ways, unencumbered by political Marxist interpretations that
have long dominated the discussions of both Marxists and
non-Marxists. This volume gives a broad and accessible account of
Marx's philosophy and emphasizes his relationship to Hegel. Marxism has always claimed and still claims a privileged
relation to Marx's theories. It typically presents a view of Marx
that is widely accepted by Marxists, non-Marxists, and even
anti-Marxists, unfortunately without careful scrutiny. This book
argues that political Marxist influence obscures, transforms,
distorts, and renders inaccessible Marx's basic philosophical
insights. It concentrates on recovering Marx's philosophical ideas
not in opposition to, but rather within, the larger Hegelian
framework. Now that we have seen the end of political Marxism's peak global influence, it is possible, for perhaps the first time, to depict Marx as a philosopher who began to think within, and remained within, the German philosophical tradition.
The 1943 battle to free the Soviet Black Sea port of Novorossiisk from German occupation was fought from the beach head of Malaia zemlia, where the young Colonel Leonid Brezhnev saw action. Despite widespread scepticism of the state's appropriation and inflation of this historical event, the heroes of the campaign are still commemorated in Novorossiisk today by an amalgam of memoir, monuments and ritual. Through the prism of this provincial Russian town, Vicky Davis sheds light on the character of Brezhnev as perceived by his people, and on the process of memory for the ordinary Russian citizen. Davis analyses the construction and propagation of the local war myth to link the individual citizens of Novorossiisk with evolving state policy since World War II and examines the resultant social and political connotations. Her compelling new interdisciplinary evidence reveals the complexity of myth and memory, challenging existing assumptions to show that there is still scope for the local community - and even the individual - in memory construction in an authoritarian environment. This book represents a much-needed departure from the study of myth and memory in larger cities of the former Soviet Union, adding nuance to the existing portrait of Brezhnev and demonstrating the continued importance of war memory in Russia today.
The current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture-that is, the logic of the capitalist system-is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out-of-the-mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. Their thinking had the following common keywords: contradiction, fetishism as a process and the notion of spell and all its implications. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.
Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry's oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading critic of the post-structuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by bringing critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book's aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry's formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second, to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry's work. It provides a critical overview of Parry's key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity." The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.
Henry Heller's short account of the history of capitalism combines Marx's economic and political thought with contemporary scholarship to shed light on the current capitalist crisis. It argues that capitalism is an evolving mode of production that has now outgrown its institutional and political limits. The book provides an overview of the different historical stages of capitalism, underpinned by accessible discussions of its theoretical foundations. Heller shows that capitalism has always been a double-edged sword, on one hand advancing humanity, and on the other harming traditional societies and our natural environment. He makes the case that capitalism has now become self-destructive, and that our current era of neoliberalism may trigger a transition to a democratic and ecologically aware form of socialism.
This book arose out of a friendship between a political philosopher and an economic sociologist, and their recognition of an urgent political need to address the extreme inequalities of wealth and power in contemporary societies. It provides a new analysis of what generates inequalities in rights to income, property and public goods in contemporary societies. By critiquing Marx's foundational theory of exploitation, it moves beyond Marx, both in its analysis of inequality, and in its concept of just distribution. It points to the major historical transformations that create educational and knowledge inequalities, inequalities in rights to public goods that combine with those to private wealth. It argues that asymmetries of economic power are inherently gendered and racialized, and that forms of coercion and slavery are deeply embedded in the histories of capitalism. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities -- .
This book examines the societal dynamics of memory politics in Russia. Since Vladimir Putin became president, the Russian central government has increasingly actively employed cultural memory to claim political legitimacy and discredit all forms of political opposition. The rhetorical use of the past has become a defining characteristic of Russian politics, creating a historical foundation for the regime's emphasis on a strong state and centralised leadership. Exploring memory politics, this book analyses a wide range of actors, from the central government and the Russian Orthodox Church, to filmmaker and cultural heavyweight Nikita Mikhalkov and radical thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin. In addition, in view of the steady decline in media freedom since 2000, it critically examines the role of cinema and television in shaping and spreading these narratives. Thus, this book aims to gain a better understanding of the various means through which the Russian government practices its memory politics (e.g., the role of state media) and, on the other hand, to sufficiently value the existence of alternative and critical voices and criticism that existing studies tend to overlook. Contributing to current debates in the field of memory studies and of current affairs in Russia and Eastern Europe, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of Russian Studies, Cultural Memory Studies, Nationalism and National Identity, Political Communication, Film, Television and Media Studies.
Few thinkers have been declared irrelevant and out of date with such frequency as Karl Marx. Hardly a decade since his death has gone by in which establishment critics have not announced the death of his theory. Whole forests have been felled to produce the paper necessary to fuel this effort to marginalize the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto. And yet, despite their best efforts to bury him again and again, Marx's specter continues to haunt his detractors more than a century after his passing. As another international economic collapse pushes ever growing numbers out of work, and a renewed wave of popular revolt sweeps across the globe, a new generation is learning to ignore all the taboos and scorn piled upon Marx's ideas and rediscovering that the problems he addressed in his time are remarkably similar to those of our own. In this engaging and accessible introduction, Alex Callinicos demonstrates that Marx's ideas hold an enduring relevance for today's activists fighting against poverty, inequality, oppression, environmental destruction, and the numerous other injustices of the capitalist system.
Wide-ranging and richly researched, this is the first sourcebook to reconstruct the tumultuous history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Drawing together over one hundred and fifty documents-including party statements, press releases, published correspondence, reviews, poems, cartoons and articles-it presents a detailed portrait of the party, its abiding concerns and its many contradictions from the 1920s to the 1980s. It samples voices from the full spectrum of the party's diverse personnel, from longstanding party leaders (Harry Pollitt, Rajani Palme Dutt), to prominent twentieth-century British intellectuals (E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm), to significant cultural figures (Jack Lindsay, Alan Bush, A.L. Lloyd). Balanced, comprehensive and framed by Callaghan and Harker's detailed introductions, British Communism: A documentary history is not only a valuable addition to the historiography of Communism, but to the study of twentieth-century Britain. -- .
Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism's relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism's degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism's plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.
Interest in the study of Marx's thought has shown a revival in recent years, with a number of newly established academic societies, conferences, and journals dedicated to discussing his thought. This book brings together distinguished and up-and-coming scholars to provide a major re-evaluation of historical issues in Marx scholarship and to connect Marx's ideas with fresh debates in contemporary Anglo-American social and political philosophy. Among the topics discussed are Marx's relationship to his philosophical predecessors-including Hegel, the young Hegelians, and the utopian socialists-his concept of recognition, his critique of liberalism, and his views on the good life. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students interested in Marx, Hegel, the history of political thought, and social and political philosophy.
Marxism, Psychology and Social Science Analysis applies Marxist theory, psychology, and the work of Lucien Seve to specific research in the social sciences. It shows in practical terms what guidance can be offered for social scientific researchers wanting to incorporate Seve's view of personality into their work. Providing case studies drawn from different social sciences that give the book significant breadth of scope, Roche reviews the impact of "Taking Seve Seriously" across the study of international relations theory, economics, law, and moral philosophy. The book begins by placing the work of Lucien Seve in context and considers the development of psychology in relation to Marxism, before going on to summarise the work of Seve in relation to the psychology of personality. It considers the opportunities for refreshed research in social relations based on developments by Seve, before examining Marxist biography and the implications of Seve's views. The book also includes chapters on the social discount rate, on constructivism in international relations, on the concept of promising in moral philosophy and the Marxist conception of individual responsibility. It addresses not only how research should be carried out differently, but whether utilising the theoretical framework of other writers, even non-Marxists, can deliver a similar outcome. With its use of five distinct case studies to analyse the work of Lucien Seve, this unique book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychology, philosophy and social sciences.
Frank Pearce was the first scholar to use the term 'crimes of the powerful.' His ground-breaking book of the same name provided insightful critiques of liberal orthodox criminology, particularly in relation to labelling theory and symbolic interactionism, while making important contributions to Marxist understandings of the complex relations between crime, law and the state in the reproduction of the capitalist social order. Historically, crimes of the powerful were largely neglected in crime and deviance studies, but there is now an important and growing body of work addressing this gap. This book brings together leading international scholars to discuss the legacy of Frank Pearce's book and his work in this area, demonstrating the invaluable contributions a critical Marxist framework brings to studies of corporate and state crimes, nationally, internationally and on a global scale. This book is neither a hagiography, nor a review of random areas of social scientific interest. Instead, it draws together a collection of scholarly and original articles which draw upon and critically interrogate the continued significance of the approach pioneered in Crimes of the Powerful. The book traces the evolution of crimes of the powerful empirically and theoretically since 1976, shows how critical scholars have integrated new theoretical insights derived from post-structuralism, feminism and critical race studies and offers perspectives on how the crimes of the powerful - and the enormous, ongoing destruction they cause - can be addressed and resisted.
In the years since Stalin's death, his profound influence upon the historical development of Communism has remained elusive and in need of interpretation. Stalinism, as his system has become known, is a phenomenon which embraced all facets of political and social life. While its effect upon the Soviet Union and other nations today is far less than it was while Stalin lived, it is by no means dead. In this landmark volume some of the world's foremost scholars of the subject, in a concerted group inquiry, present their interpretations of Stalinism and its influence on all areas of comparative Communist studies from history and politics to economics, sociology, and literary scholarship. The studies contained in this volume are an outgrowth of a conference on Stalinism held in Bellagio, Italy, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. In his major contribution to this book, Leszek Kolakowski calls Stalinism "a unified state organism facing atom-like individuals." This extraordinary volume, augmented by a revealing new introduction by the editor, Robert C. Tucker, can be seen as amplifying that remark nearly a half century after the death of Joseph Stalin himself. Contributors to this work are: Wlodzimierz Brus, Katerina Clark, Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Erlich, Leszek Kolakowski, Moshe Lewin, Robert H. McNeal, Mihailo Markovic, Roy A. Medvedev, T. H. Rigby, Robert Sharlet, and H. Gordon Skilling. Robert C. Tucker's principle work on Stalin has been described by George F. Kennan as "the most significant single contribution made to date, anywhere, to the history of Soviet power."
In mid-1989, the Bulgarian communist regime seeking to prop up its legitimacy played the ethnonational card by expelling 360,000 Turks and Muslims across the Iron Curtain to neighboring Turkey. It was the single largest ethnic cleansing during the Cold War in Europe after the wrapping up of the postwar expulsions ('population transfers') of ethnic Germans from Central Europe in the latter half of the 1940s. Furthermore, this expulsion of Turks and Muslims from Bulgaria was the sole unilateral act of ethnic cleansing that breached the Iron Curtain. The 1989 ethnic cleansing was followed by an unprecedented return of almost half of the expellees, after the collapse of the Bulgarian communist regime. The return, which partially reversed the effects of this ethnic cleansing, was the first-ever of its kind in history. Despite the unprecedented character of this 1989 expulsion and the subsequent return, not a single research article, let alone a monograph, has been devoted to these momentous developments yet. However, the tragic events shape today's Bulgaria, while the persisting attempts to suppress the remembrance of the 1989 expulsion continue sharply dividing the country's inhabitants. Without remembering about this ethnic cleansing it is impossible to explain the fall of the communist system in Bulgaria and the origins of ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav wars. Faltering Yugoslavia's future ethnic cleansers took a good note that neither Moscow nor Washington intervened in neighboring Bulgaria to stop the 1989 expulsion, which in light of international law was then still the legal instrument of 'population transfer.' The as yet unhealed wound of the 1989 ethnic cleansing negatively affects the Bulgaria's relations with Turkey and the European Union. It seems that the only way out of this debilitating conundrum is establishing a truth and reconciliation commission that at long last would ensure transitional justice for all Bulgarians irrespective of language, religion or ethnicity.
In Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian questions the claims of Western Marxism and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union and bolster the belief that capitalism remained dominant in the contest over progress. This book deprovincializes Marx and the West's cultural turn by returning to the theorist's earlier explanations of capital's origins and development, which followed a trajectory beyond Euro-America to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marx's expansive view shows how local circumstances, time, and culture intervened to reshape capital's system of production in these regions. His outline of a diversified global capitalism was much more robust than was his sketch of the English experience in Capital and helps explain the disparate routes that evolved during the twentieth century. Engaging with the texts of Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and other pivotal theorists, Harootunian strips contemporary Marxism of its cultural preoccupation by reasserting the deep relevance of history.
Originally published in 1981 Practice and Progress is a collection examining the changes that have occurred in the theories, methodologies and practices of sociology, in the institutional and educational setting of the subject, and in British society. The themes pursued include the professionalization of sociology its development and standing in the universities; the impact on it of Marxism and feminism and the major debates over positivism and empiricism, quantitative methods, linguistic analysis; and numerous other crucial methodological and theoretical concerns. |
You may like...
Emotional Cognitive Neural Algorithms…
Leonid Perlovsky, Ross Deming, …
Hardcover
R4,023
Discovery Miles 40 230
A Survey on Coordinated Power Management…
Thant Zin Oo, Nguyen H. Tran, …
Hardcover
R3,281
Discovery Miles 32 810
|