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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Marxism & Communism
Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's
celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many - they are few!' This idea of
the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that
cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and
political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They
raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in
contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist
philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and
value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist
thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and
emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics,
crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their
recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the
world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking
series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical
constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional
vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from
its 'voiding' to a '(non)emergence'), crowds, necropolitics, and
the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The
contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and
emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna
Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin
Halligan, Marc James Leger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano
Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.
With an introduction by Dr. Laurence Marlow. A spectre is haunting
Europe (and the world). Not, in the twenty-first century, the
spectre of communism, but the spectre of capitalism. Marx's
prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has
proved inaccurate, and he did not foresee the tyrannies which have
ruled large parts of the globe in his name. Indeed, he would have
been appalled if he had witnessed them. But his analysis of the
evils and dangers of raw capitalism is as correct now as when it
was written, and some of his suggestions (progressive income tax,
abolition of child labour, free education for all children) are now
accepted with little question. In a world where capitalism is no
longer held in check by fear of a communist alternative, The
Communist Manifesto (with Socialism Utopian and Scientific,
Engels's brief and clear exposition of Marxist thought) is
essential reading. The Condition of the Working Class in England in
1844 is Engels's first, and probably best-known, book. With Henry
Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, it was and is the
outstanding study of the working class in Victorian England.
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