Investigating 20th century Chinese ideology through the two main elements of passionate belief and cultivation of rage, this timely book examines how Maoist thinking has influenced Western politics. Tracing the origins of Maoist ideas in Western politics, David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith expertly apply the principles of strategic theory to provide an understanding of how Mao's ideas made their way from China into Western societies where they exert a profound and little understood impact on contemporary political conduct. The book offers critical insights into key theoretical discourses and their practical applications, including: Maoism, Orientalism and post-colonial discourse theory, Maoism and the mind, and Maoism and the politics of passion. Forward-thinking in its approach, it addresses the important question of where Maoism will end, analysing the trajectory that Maoism is likely to take and what the cumulative impact of it upon Western societies may be. This invigorating read will be a fascinating resource for scholars of political theory and history wishing to gain an insight into the impact of Maoist ideas in the West. It will also provide students of international politics and international studies with a much greater understanding of China's revolutionary thinking in world politics. 'This insightful volume exposes the influence of Maoism on left wing intellectuals in the West. Jones and Smith reveal how not just Mao's thought but the anti-democratic and often inhumane practices that came to be associated with China's Cultural Revolution are today being rehabilitated in woke form. This superb book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what lies behind today's dominant political trends.' - Joanna Williams, Founder and Director of Cieo, UK

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.

By drawing on the opposing ideas of Carl Jung and Karl Marx, James Driscoll's develops fresh perspectives on urgent contemporary problems. Jung and Marx as thinkers, Driscoll contends, carry the projections of archetypal complexes that go back to the hostile Old Testament brothers Cain and Abel, whose enduring tensions shape our postmodern era. Because Marxism elevates the group over the individual, it is made to order for bureaucrats and bureaucracy's patron archetype, Leviathan. Jungian individuation offers a corrective rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic's affirmation of the ultimate value of free individuals. Although Marxism's promise of justice gives it demagogic appeal, the party betrays that promise through opportunism and a primitive ethic of retribution. Marxism's supplanting the Judeo-Christian ethic with bureaucracy's "only following orders," Driscoll maintains, has created the moral paralysis of our time. As Jung and writers like Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elias Canetti have warned us, the influence of our ever-expanding bureaucracies is a grave threat to the survival of civilized humanity. The primary issues Driscoll addresses include the natures of justice and the soul, individuation and freedom, and mankind's responsibilities within the planetary ecology. Religion, ethics, economics, science, class divisions, immigration, financial fraud, abortion, and affirmative action are also explored in his analysis of the powerful archetypes moving behind Jung and Marx.

Marx's early work is well known and widely available, but it usually interpreted as at best a kind of stepping-stone to the Marx of Capital. This book offers something completely different; it reconstructs, from his first writings spanning from 1835 to 1846, a coherent and well-rounded political philosophy. The influence of Engels upon the development of that philosophy is discussed. This, it is argued, was a philosophy that Marx could have presented had he put the ideas together, as he hinted was his eventual intention. Had he done so, this first Marx would have made an even greater contribution to social and political philosophy than is generally acknowledged today. Arguments regarding revolutionary change, contradiction and other topics such as production, alienation and emancipation contribute to a powerful analysis in the early works of Marx, one which is worthy of discussion on its own merits. This analysis is distributed among a range of books, papers, letters and other writings, and is gathered here for the first time. Marx's work of the period was driven by his commitment to emancipation. Moreover, as is discussed in the conclusion to this book, his emancipatory philosophy continues to have resonance today. This new book presents Marx in a unique, new light and will be indispensable reading for all studying and following his work.