Dissident Marxism

Dissident Marxism
Author: David Renton
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1848136501

We are witnessing the birth of a new politics -- anti-capitalist, libertarian and anti-war. But where do today's dissidents come from? Dissident Marxism argues that their roots can be found in the life and work of an earlier generation of socialist revolutionaries, including such inspiring figures as the Soviet poet Mayakovsky, the Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch, Communist historians Edward Thompson and Dona Torr, the Egyptian surrealist Georges Henein, American New Left economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, advocates of Third World liberation including Walter Rodney and Samir Amin, Harry Braverman, the author of Labor and Monopoly Capital, and David Widgery, the journalist of the May '68 revolts. What these writers shared was a commitment to the values of socialism-from-below, the idea that change must be driven by the mass movements of the oppressed. In a world dominated by slump, fascism and war, they retained a commitment to total democracy. Dissident Marxism describes the left in history. Some readers will enjoy it as a history of revolutionary socialism in the years between Stalin's rise and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others will find here a challenging thesis -- that the most enduring of left-wing traditions, and highly relevant to the times we live in today, were located in a space between the New Left and Trotskyism. Dissident Marxism explores the lives and thinking of some of the most creative and striking members of the twentieth century left, and asks if the new anti-capitalist movement might provide an opportunity for just such another left-wing generation to emerge?

Dissident Marxism and Utopian Eco-Socialism in the German Democratic Republic

Dissident Marxism and Utopian Eco-Socialism in the German Democratic Republic
Author: Alexander Amberger
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004687866

Rudolf Bahro, Wolfgang Harich and Robert Havemann were probably the best-known critics of the DDR’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. Yet they saw themselves as Marxists, and their demands extended far beyond a democratisation of real socialism. When environmental issues became more important in the West in the 1970s, the Party treated it as an ideological manoeuvre of the class enemy. The three dissidents saw things differently: they combined socialism and ecology, adopting a utopian perspective frowned upon by the state. In doing so, they created political concepts that were unique for the Eastern Bloc. Alexander Amberger introduces them, relates them to each other, and poses the question of their relevance then and now.

Main Currents of Marxism

Main Currents of Marxism
Author: Leszek Kołakowski
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 1324
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780393060546

The commanding study of Marxism, now in one masterful volume with a new preface and epilogue by the author.

The Romance of American Communism

The Romance of American Communism
Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 178873551X

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.

Black Marxism

Black Marxism
Author: Cedric J. Robinson
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0141996781

'A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of Black radical thought' Cornel West 'Cedric Robinson's brilliant analyses revealed new ways of thinking and acting' Angela Davis 'This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle' Any struggle must be fought on a people's own terms, argues Cedric Robinson's landmark account of Black radicalism. Marxism is a western construction, and therefore inadequate to describe the significance of Black communities as agents of change against 'racial capitalism'. Tracing the emergence of European radicalism, the history of Black African resistance and the influence of these on such key thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, Black Marxism reclaims the story of a movement.

The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Post-communism in Eastern Europe

The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Post-communism in Eastern Europe
Author: Raymond C. Taras
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2015-02-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317454782

The history of reform movements in postwar Eastern Europe is ultimately ironic, inasmuch as the reformers' successes and defeats alike served to discredit and demoralize the regimes they sought to redeem. The essays in this volume examine the historic and present-day role of the internal critics who, whatever their intentions, used Marxism as critique to demolish Marxism as ideocracy, but did not succeed in replacing it. Included here are essays by James P. Scanlan on the USSR, Ferenc Feher on Hungary, Leslie Holmes on the German Democratic Republic, Raymond Taras on Poland, James Satterwhite on Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Tismaneanu on Romania, Mark Baskin on Bulgaria, and Oskar Gruenwald on Yugoslavia. In concert, the contributors provide a comprehensive intellectual history and a veritable Who's Who of revisionist Marxism in Eastern Europe.

The Primacy of Politics

The Primacy of Politics
Author: Sheri Berman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2006-08-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139457594

Political history in the industrial world has indeed ended, argues this pioneering study, but the winner has been social democracy - an ideology and political movement that has been as influential as it has been misunderstood. Berman looks at the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today and shows how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, Fascism and National Socialism by solving the central challenge of modern politics - reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy. Bursting on to the scene in the interwar years, the social democratic model spread across Europe after the Second World War and formed the basis of the postwar settlement. This is a study of European social democracy that rewrites the intellectual and political history of the modern era while putting contemporary debates about globalization in their proper intellectual and historical context.

Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory

Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory
Author: Robert Paul Resch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 436
Release: 1992
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780520060821

The writings of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and his associates have figured prominently in the development of contemporary social theory. The Althusserian school of Structural Marxism is a startlingly original synthesis of Marxism and Modernism, which has produced a large body of work that extends across the human sciences and the humanities to engage a wide variety of cultures, theoretical problems, and political issues. Despite the fact that Althusser himself is widely recognized as a major figure, the breadth, coherence, and achievements of Structural Marxism as a whole have gone largely unrecognized. In this, the most systematic and wide-ranging assessment of Structural Marxism in any language, Resch provides a comprehensive and thematic introduction to the work of Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Emmanuel Terray, Terry Eagleton, G�ran Therborn, Ren�e Balibar, Perry Anderson, Pierre-Philippe Rey, Michel P�chaux, Guy Bois, and others. Resch's sympathetic and critical study demonstrates the enormous significance of Althusser's modernist renewal of Marxist social theory and its ongoing challenge to post-Marxist movements such as postmodernism and neo-liberalism.

Marxism in Britain

Marxism in Britain
Author: Keith Laybourn
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2006-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134351658

Based on the Communist Party archives at Manchester, this book examines the decline of Marxism in Britain over the last sixty years.