Marx for Our Times

Marx for Our Times
Author: Daniel Bensaïd
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1789601797

The end of Soviet Socialism signalled to some observers that the ghost of Marx had finally been laid to rest. But history's refusal to grind to a halt and the global credit crisis that began in 2008 have rekindled interest in capitalism's most persistent critic. Written during the mid-nineties, a period of Western complacency and neo-liberal reaction, Marx for Our Times is a critical reading of dialectical materialism as a method of resistance. Without denying the contradictory character of Marx's thought, and with a sensitivity to the plurality of theories it has inspired, Daniel Bensaid sets out to discover what in Marx remains dynamic and relevant in our era of accelerating economic change. Marx's theory emerges, not as a doctrinal system, but as an intellectual tool of social struggle and global transformation in a world where capital continues to dominate social relations.

Time in Marx

Time in Marx
Author: Stavros Tombazos
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-11-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9004256261

This book demonstrates that the basic concepts of the three volumes of Capital come under different categories of time: "time of production" in the first volume is linear, “time of circulation” in the second is circular, while in the third volume “organic time” is the unity of the two. Capitalist relations emerge as a definite organisation of social time that obeys its own intrinsic criteria and operates as an autonomous, social subject. Reading Capital from this perspective, it becomes possible to restore its dialectical (Hegelian) logic – not in order to reveal the “real” Marx, but as a means to contribute to the understanding of the real, capitalist world with its present-day fetishes, its explosive contradictions and its ever deeper crises.

The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx

The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx
Author: Alex Callinicos
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2012-01-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1608461653

An accessible introduction to the author of Capital and coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, with a focus on his relevance in today’s world. Few thinkers have been declared irrelevant and out-of-date with such frequency as Karl Marx. Hardly a decade has gone by since his death in which establishment critics have not announced the death of his theory. And yet, despite their best efforts to bury him, Marx’s specter continues to haunt his detractors more than a century after his passing. As the boom and bust cycle of global capitalism continues to widen inequality around the world, a new generation is discovering that the problems Marx addressed in his time are remarkably similar to those of our own. In this engaging and accessible introduction, Alex Callinicos demonstrates that Marx’s ideas hold an enduring relevance for today’s activists fighting against poverty, oppression, environmental destruction, and the numerous other injustices of the capitalist system.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx
Author: Francis Wheen
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393049237

Looks at the life of the father of Communism focusing primarily on the human side of the man rather than his works.

The Unfinished System of Karl Marx

The Unfinished System of Karl Marx
Author: Judith Dellheim
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2018-04-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3319703471

This book examines what we can gain from a critical reading of Marx's final manuscript and his conclusion of the "systematic presentation" of his critique, which was the basis for Engels's construction of the third volume of his infamous 'Capital'. The text introduces the reader to a key problem ́of Marx's largely implicit epistemology, by exploring the systematic character of his exposition and the difference of this kind of 'systematicity' from Hegelian philosophical system construction. The volume contributes to establishing a new understanding of the critique of political economy, as it has been articulated in various debates since the 1960s - especially in France, Germany, and Italy - and as it had already been initiated by Marx and some of his followers, with Rosa Luxemburg in a key role. All the chapters are transdisciplinary in nature, and explore the modern day relevance of Marx's and Luxemburg's theoretical analysis of the dominance of the capitalist mode of production.

A World to Win

A World to Win
Author: Sven-Eric Liedman
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 902
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1786635062

Karl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite 200 years having passed since his birth, his burning condemnation of capitalism remains of immediate interest. Now, more than ever before, Marx's texts can be read for what they truly are. In addition to providing a living picture of Marx the man, his life, and his family and friends - as well as his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels - Sweden's leading intellectual historian Sven-Eric Liedman, in this major new biography, shows what Karl Marx the thinker and researcher really wrote, demonstrating that this giant of the nineteenth century can still exert a powerful attraction for the inhabitants of the twenty-first.

Marx and Freud in Latin America

Marx and Freud in Latin America
Author: Bruno Bosteels
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1844678474

This book assesses the untimely relevance of Marx and Freud for Latin America, thinkers alien to the region who became an inspiration to its beleaguered activists, intellectuals, writers and artists during times of political and cultural oppression. Bruno Bosteels presents ten case studies arguing that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theatre, film—more than any militant tract or theoretical essay, can give us a glimpse into Marxism and psychoanalysis, not so much as sciences of history or of the unconscious, respectively, but rather as two intricately related modes of understanding the formation of subjectivity.

Cyber-Marx

Cyber-Marx
Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780252067952

In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

Marx, Dead and Alive

Marx, Dead and Alive
Author: Andy Merrifield
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2020-11-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1583678816

A contemporary interrogation of Marx’s masterwork Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, fake news and endless sleights of the economic and political hand. And yet, contends Andy Merrifield, as our modern lives become ever more mist-enveloped, the works of Marx can help us penetrate the fog. In Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London graveside—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity. Bolstering his argument with fascinating examples of literature and history, from Shakespeare and Beckett, to the Luddites and the Black Panthers, Merrifield demonstrates how Marx can reveal our individual lives to us within a collective perspective—and within a historical continuum. Who we are now hinges on who we once were—and who we might become. This, at a time when our value-system is undergoing core “post-truth” meltdown.

The Working Class from Marx to Our Times

The Working Class from Marx to Our Times
Author: Marcelo Badaró Mattos
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2022-04-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030973557

This book reviews Marx's contributions to the debate on the working class. The first part of the work presents the synthesis of the main contributions of Marx and Engels (and 20th century Marxist writers) to the understanding of social classes, the class struggle, and the working class. The remaining parts present exercises of dialogue between Marx's and Marxists’ discussions on the working class, presented in the first part, and empirical elements of class reality today, as well as debates in the social sciences and historiography on the same issues. The thesis defended in the book is simple: the "working class,” also called the "proletariat,” as it appears in the work of Karl Marx, had and has validity as an analytical category for the understanding of social life under capitalism. Nevertheless, Marx’s discussion on the issue is complex and the category “working class” in his approach is wider than many Marxists have presented it.