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'For students approaching the issues for the first time, there is no better text to introduce them to the heart of the problem as perceived by socialists, as well as illustrating how a good debate can be organised and presented.' - Book Notes, Europe-Asia Studies
"How can anyone claim to really understand our Constitution without
knowing what these critical traditions had to say?" -Michael
Wallace, Professor of History, John Jay College. "A real
contribution to the subject of democracy and liberalism." -John
Ehrenberg. "Does a marvelous job of returning the Constitution to
its proper sphere, the product of the rough and tumble of
politics." - Malcom M. Feely, author of Judicial Policy Making and
the Modern State. "The United States Constitution is a provocative
book, much needed for overdue rethinking on the Constitution proper
and its amendments. By making available "the underside of criticism
and protest that has accompanied the Constitution from its
inception" the book cuts through a mountainous mass of conventional
bombast, one-sided versions and outright fabrications regarding the
Constitution. In clarifying what makes the Constitution's clock
tick, the book lives up to its subtitle. -Ira Gollobin, National
Emergency Civil Rights Committee NEVER BEFORE ASSEMBLED IN A SINGLE
VOLUME-the major writings on the Constitution from six critical
traditions. Here is THE OTHER SIDE in most of the key disputes over
the Constitution from 1789 to the present, the side that was barely
heard during the recent Bicentennial celebrations. Yet, it was
often the popular side, raising many troublesome questions about
the nature of American democracy that still remain to be answered.
Now that the applause has subsided, every fair- minded person will
want to know what these critics of the Constitution have to say
about who did, and is still doing, what to whom, and why. Section 1
outlines the main events and problems that led up to and
contributed to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in
1787. Section 2 concentrates on what actually happened at the
convention. Section 3 deals with the two-hundred-year history of
interpretations and amendments that followed. Section 4 offers a
number of ideas that should prove helpful in constructing the
adequate theory of the Constitution that still eludes us.
Skillfully woven into one volume the forty contributors include
voices as varied as those of Gore Vidal, I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader,
E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, Sheldon S. Wolin, Joan Hoff, Karl Marx,
Jackson Turner Main, Charles A. Beard, and W.E.B. Du Bois
joined--perhaps surprisingly--by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and Thurgood Marshall.
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Jonathan Birnbaum is the editor of Racial Profiling (forthcoming)
and the co-editor of Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black
Struggle (also available from NYU Press). His work has appeared in
the Guardian, New Politics, Socialism and Democracy, New Political
Science, and other publications. Bertell Ollman, one of America's
most prominent Marxist scholars, is a Professor of Politics at New
York University. He is the author of Alienation, Dialectical
Investigations, and How to Take an Exam . . . And Remake the World.
Authored by a famous professor who reveals the inner secrets of his
trade, How to Take an Exam... interplays two totally disparate
subjects, then brings them together in a revealing indictment of
"higher" education and the world it produces. A delightful tour de
force that entertains while it educates.
Bertell Ollman has been hailed as "this country's leading authority
on dialectics and Marx's method" by Paul Sweezy, the editor of
Monthly Review and dean of America's Marx scholars. In this book
Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical
method. Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to
analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism.
Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so
that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or
to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of
the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been
more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the
writings of any other major thinker. In putting Marx's philosophy
of internal relations and his use of the process of
abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the
center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method
that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear, and eminently useful.
Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant
in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying
out the steps in Marx's method he makes it possible for a reader to
put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also
convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and
humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so.
In "BallBuster? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman, Bertell
Ollman recounts the challenges of finding American distribution for
his revolutionary board game, Class Struggle (more than 250,000
copies sold). His misadventures explode the myth of capitalism,
showing the struggles small-business owners face. This revised
edition updates readers on what has happened in Ollman's life and
work since 1983. Ollman finds himself questioning his role as a
Marxist professor in a capitalist society. He ponders whether he is
winning or losing, and if he will make it out of the jungle of
capitalist business with his socialist principles still intact.
Marx's approach to analyzing society and especially his critique of
capitalist society, continues to influence the work of a large
number of scholars world-wide. Unfortunately, there are relatively
few clear accounts of what this approach is and how to put it to
use. And, despite the many attempts to use Marx's method to study a
variety of subjects, there are relatively few that can serve as
useful models. In the present volume, the internationally renowned
Marxist scholar, Bertell Ollman, and the social theorist Kevin B.
Anderson, have brought together a sampling of the best writings of
the past hundred years that illustrate and critique Marx's method
as well as explain what it is and how to put it to work. Anyone
wishing to understand better Marx's dialectical method (along, of
course, with the theories created with its help), or to revise this
method or to criticize it, or to use it in their own work will find
this collection invaluable.
This volume contains the first complete translations of Wilhelm
Reich's writings from his Marxist period. Reich, who died in 1957,
had a career with a single goal: to find ways of relieving human
suffering. And the same curiosity and courage that led him from
medical school to join the early pioneers of Freudian
psychoanalysis, and then to some of the most controversial work of
this century-his development of the theory of the orgone-led him
also, at one period of his life, to become a radical socialist. The
renewed interest in Reich's Marxist writings, and particularly in
his notions about sexual and political liberation, follows the
radical critiques of Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon and Paul
Goodman, the political protest movements toward personal liberation
in the present decade.
Revised throughout with an entirely new chapter, "In Defense of Internal Relations," and with replies to critical comments on the 1st edition, which the N.Y. Review of Books called "a remarkable book...brilliant and illuminating."
With today's conservative mood on university and college
campuses, academics and students will find "The Left Academy" a
useful reference to the current state of Marxist thought. This book
explores Marxism in the social sciences and applied sociology
fields such as social work and health. "The Left Academy" features
essays that analyze the state of Marxism in various academic
disciplines by a well-known scholar in that discipline. In addition
to the essays, this third volume includes a summary of
Marxism--where it stands today and where it may go in the future.
Students, academics, and general readers will find the book
thought-provoking.
With today's conservative mood on university and college
campuses, academics and students will find The Left Academy a
useful reference to the current state of Marxist thought. This book
explores Marxism in the social sciences and applied sociology
fields such as social work and health. "The Left Academy" features
essays that analyze the state of Marxism in various academic
disciplines by a well-known scholar in that discipline. In addition
to the essays, this third volume includes a summary of
Marxism--where it stands today and where it may go in the future.
Students, academics, and general readers will find the book
thought-provoking.
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