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.

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.

Although Friedrich Engels was Marx7;s intellectual partner, he has been one of the most neglected of the major socialist thinkers. This major book aims neither to defend Engles or debunk him, but rather to engage with his thought in order to offer a critical assessment of the philosophy, social theory, and politics of Marxism. S.H. Rigby shows how many of the key issues of Marxist thought, such as Marxism7;s debt to Hegelianism, the nature of historical materialism and the relationship between class and gender, were most explicitly dealt with Engels, rather than by Marx himself. He examines Engels7; contribution to the genesis of Marxism in the years before 1848, and examines the extent to which Engles7; later writings departed for his and Marx7;s outlook of the 18407;s, He asks whether Marx shared Engels7; intellectual development, questions recent attempts to divorce the views of Marx from those of Engels, and criticizes those Marxists who have used Engels as a scapegoat in order to avoid a confrontation with problems that lie at the very heart of Marxism.

This comprehensive work examines the complex transformation of the Iraqi Communist Party from vanguard actor under Iraq's conservative monarchy to rearguard lackey under US occupation. Born in the interlude between two world wars, the Communist Party of Iraq was fostered by Iraq's embryonic intelligentsia as an approach to national liberation during the period of British domination. Driven underground or into exile by successive waves of Baathist repression beginning in 1963, the party's leadership became progressively dependent on and subservient to the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the party's irrelevance to Iraq's sociopolitical dynamics, reform efforts were thwarted by the old-guard leadership, and in the mid-1970s the party fragmented. With the fall of the Hussein regime and the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, the remnants of the party's old guard connected with the US-installed government and became part of the US project in Iraq.

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.

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.

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.

Unlike most books, which treat labor, Socialist and Communist history separately and view French Marxism as a self-contained philosophical phenomenon, " Marxism and the French Left" offers a refreshingly different approach to the subject. Judt emphasizes the complex and interwoven themes that unify the topics of his essays to construct a distinctive and original interpretation of French left-wing politics over the past 150 years.

"A well-informed and persuasive reinterpretation of the old French Left that is now receding beyond recall, except for historians."--"Times Literary Supplement"

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.

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.

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 Middle East seems to be in perpetual crisis. One might expect a plethora of Marxist analyses of Israel and Palestine. Yet in the literature on Israel and Palestine there are hardly any studies of class, relations of production, or the relationship between the political and economic balance of forces over time. This edited volume brings a diverse array of Marxist-influenced interpretations of the present conjuncture in Israel and Palestine. The collection includes works by luminaries of social theory, such as Noam Chomsky and Fred Jameson, as well as leading scholars of Palestine (Raja Khalidi, Sherene Seikaly, and Orayb Aref Najjar) and Israel (Jonathan Nitzan, Nitzan Lebovic and Amir Locker-Biletzki). It comprises the first-ever collection of Marxist-influenced writings on Palestine and Israel, and the relationship between them. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism.

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.

Robert J. Alexander traces organized labor from its origins in colonial Cuba, examining its evolution under the Republic, noting the successive political forces within it and the development of collective bargaining, culminating after 1959 in its transformation into a Stalin-model labor movement. In Castro's Cuba, organized labor has been subordinate to the Party and government and has been converted into a movement to control the workers and stimulate production and productivity instead of being a movement to defend the interests and desires of the workers.

Starting with the organization of tobacco workers and a few other groups in the last years of Spanish colonial rule, Robert J. Alexander traces the growth of the labor movement during the early decades of the republic, noting particularly the influence of three political tendencies: anarchosyndicalists, Marxists, and independents. He examines the generally unfavorable attitudes of early republican governments to the labor movement, and he discusses the first central labor body, the CNOC, which was at first under anarchist influence, and soon captured by the Communists. The role of the CNOC vis-a-vis the Machado dictatorship, including the deal with Machado in 1933 is also discussed. Alexander then looks at the unions during the short Grau San Martine nationalist regime of 1933 and the near-destruction of organized labor by the Batista dictatorship of 1934-1937; the revival of the labor movement after the 1937 deal of the Communists with Batista and the establishment of the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Cuba, as well as the struggles for power within it, resulting in a split in the CTC in 1947, with the dominance of the Autentico-party controlled group. During this period regular collective bargaining became more or less the rule. He then describes the deterioration of the Confederacion of Trabajadores de Cuba under the Batista dictatorship of 1952-1959. Alexander ends with a description of organized labor during the Castro regime: the early attempt of revolutionary trade unionists to establish an independent labor movement, followed by the Castro government's seizure of control of the CTC and its unions, and the conversion of the Cuban labor movement into one patterned after the Stalinist model of a movement designed to stimulate production and productivity--under government control--instead of defending the rights and interests of the unions' members.

Based on an extensive review of Cuban materials as well as Alexander's numerous interviews, correspondence, and conversations with key figures from the late 1940s onward, this is the most comprehensive English-language examination of organized labor in Cuba ever written. Essential reading for all scholars and students of Cuban and Latin American labor and economic affairs as well as important to political scientists and historians of the region."

*Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Prize, 2019* *Shortlisted for the Isaac Deutscher Prize 2019* Why Marxism? Why today? In the first introduction to Marxist literary criticism to be published in decades, Barbara Foley argues that Marxism continues to offer the best framework for exploring the relationship between literature and society. She lays out in clear terms the principal aspects of Marxist methodology - historical materialism, political economy and ideology critique - as well as key debates, among Marxists and non-Marxists alike, about the nature of literature and the goals of literary criticism and pedagogy. Foley examines through the empowering lens of Marxism a wide range of texts: from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey; from Frederick Douglass's 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' to Annie Proulx's 'Brokeback Mountain'; from W.B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming' to Claude McKay's 'If We Must Die'.

This introduction to the politics of poststructuralism focuses on two interrelated themes: the culture of Western Marxism and contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Poststructuralism is not a form of anti-Marxism, Peters argues; indeed, poststructural philosophers view themselves in some kind of relationship to the legacy of Marx. Either they have been Marxist or still view themselves as Marxist. In a post-Marxist era they have invented new ways of reading and writing Marx. Peters critically engages neoliberalism, an ideology that is committed to the revitalization of homo economicus and neoclassical economics. This book is a deconstruction of neoliberalism, considered as a world-historical political project aimed at a form of globalisation.

Seeking Freedom and Justice for Hungary is the story of the vigorous Catholic worker movement developed in Hungary after the devastations of World War I, unique in the history of twentieth-century Europe. It emerged from the revival of the institution founded by Adolph Kolping, a contemporary of Karl Marx in Germany, to seek a Christian solution to the worker crisis brought on by the Industrial Revolution. The Hungarian plan envisioned a strong middle class of independent entrepreneurs and an economic system between Marxism and the monopolistic capitalism then dominant in Europe. It was reaching maturity when halted by Germany's invasion of Hungary in 1944 and then destroyed by subsequent Soviet occupation and Communist rule. The story is told through the life of its national leader, John Madl-Mike, whose experiences enabled him later in the United States to make original observations on American capitalism with vital support for the anti-Communist cause. Book includes a 16-page photospread of historical illustrations.

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.

Although Marx's writings on social transformation figured prominently in the global Left imagination for more than 150 years, by the late 20th century the relevance of Marxism was under question by both the Left (including Marxists) and the Right. Its revival in the second decade of the 21st century is finding new sources of inspiration and creativity from movements that believe that "another world is possible" through democratic, egalitarian, and ecological alternatives to capitalism built by ordinary people. The Marxism of many of these movements is not dogmatic or prescriptive, but open, searching, utopian. It revolves around four primary factors: the importance of democracy for an emancipatory project, the ecological limits of capitalism, the crisis of global capitalism, and the learning of lessons from the failures of Marxist-inspired experiments. This edited book introduces some contemporary approaches to Marxism. It shows how the 21st century has seen enormous creativity from movements that seek to overcome the weaknesses of the past by forging fundamentally new approaches to politics that draw inspiration from Marxism along with many other anticapitalist traditions such as feminism, ecology, anarchism, and indigenous traditions. Featuring leading thinkers from the Left, the book offers provocative ideas on interpreting our current world and will serve as an excellent reference book to introduce a new way of thinking about Marxism to students and scholars in the field.

Seeking Freedom and Justice for Hungary is the story of the vigorous Catholic worker movement developed in Hungary after the devastations of World War I, unique in the history of twentieth-century Europe. It emerged from the revival of the institution founded by Adolph Kolping, a contemporary of Karl Marx in Germany, to seek a Christian solution to the worker crisis brought on by the Industrial Revolution. The Hungarian plan envisioned a strong middle class of independent entrepreneurs and an economic system between Marxism and the monopolistic capitalism then dominant in Europe. It was reaching maturity when halted by Germany's invasion of Hungary in 1944 and then destroyed by subsequent Soviet occupation and Communist rule. The story is told through the life of its national leader, John Madl-Mike, whose experiences enabled him later in the United States to make original observations on American capitalism with vital support for the anti-Communist cause. Book includes a 16-page photospread of historical illustrations.

For some time there has been no direct critique of Marx's ideas from those who value the position he most harshly attacked, bourgeois capitalism. The few who did criticize Marx were economists such as Thomas Sowell, Eugen Boehm-Bawerk, and Ludwig von Mises. Others attacked Marx's ideas, but did not actually defend the concept of capitalism. In 1987, shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, David Conway published his Farewell to Marx, which offered a philosophical critique of Marx. This work, however, developed, in part, from a position that uncritically embraces economism, or what the author calls the "homo economicus conception of human life." In Revisting Marxism, Tibor Machan contrasts Marx's historicist collectivism with a neo-Aristotelian individualism as presented by, among others, David L. Norton and Ayn Rand. It criticizes Marxism based on this position, the one he most directly disparaged. Also included in this volume is an exchange between the author and the late Sidney Hook, perhaps the most sympathetic social democratic champion of Marx's ideas.

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.