This collection is designed to answer the demands of students and socialists, teachers and interested readers, for a comprehensive critique of the major schools of European Marxism since the October Revolution. It is composed of a series of carefully documented essays setting out the theories of the major thinkers of the tradition, and submitting them to searching criticism.Essays include critiques of Lukács by Gareth Stedman Jones and Michael Löwy; a survey of the Frankfurt School by Göran Therborn; an assessment of the legacy of Gramsci, by John Merrington; exposition and criticism of the work of Sartre by André Gorz and Ronald Aronson; major assessments of Althusser by Norman Geras and André Glucksmann and a wide-ranging interview with the Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti that provides an overview of Western Marxism.
Ernest Mandel's book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of ';historic compromise' and ';union of the people' today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of contemporary Eurocommunism are the ';bitter fruits of socialism in one country' in the USSR.Mandel's book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF's theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a wholediscussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizational attitudes of the CPSU to the Western parties, and the emergence of major dissident currents in Eastern Germany sympathetic to Eurocommunism.From Stalinism to Eurocommunism represents the first systematic and comprehensive critique from the Marxist Left of the new strategy of Western Communism. It can be read as a barometer of the storms ahead in the European labour movement.
A work of criticism on the cultures of imperialism. Fundamental to the editors' conceptualization is the premise that while colonialism may be a thing of the past for the majority of the world's people, its legacies in political, economic and ideological structures continue to shape the world.
The author charts the developments in feminist film theory, drawing on both recent and classic films, from the mainstream and alternative cinema. She also attempts to demystify current methods of analysis, including semiotic and psychoanalytical approaches.
This text provides an explanation of the political correctness argument: how it emerged and how right-wing pundits have used it to undermine contemporary criticism. In a series of essays, Berube examines such issues as the current state of cultural studies and the significance of postmodernism.
An attempt to resolve long-standing problems in contemporary class theory. The text brings together major critics of the author's work, and Wright's own responses and reformulation in the light of the criticisms.
Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, this prize-winning author offers reflections on how the history of white racism continues to have impact on political and social life today. His previous book, "The Wages of Whiteness" won the Merle Curti Prize for Social History in 1991.
This fully updated edition of Red Brotherhood at War – the most comprehensive account of events since 1975 in Indochina – explains why communist victory did not usher in a period of peace based on proletarian internationalism. While victorious revolutionaries in Vietnam and Laos strengthened their special relationship, Vietnam’s relations with fraternal Cambodia and China deteriorated into full-scale war. The Vietnamese overthrow of Pol Pot’s regime in 1979 was condemned by the West, which joined with China to support the Khmer Rouge-dominated anti-Vietnamese resistance in Cambodia. An inter-communist war thus became one of the focal points of the New Cold War in the 1980s.This complex and paradoxical tangle of events is skilfully analysed by Evans and Rowley in their frank and lively book. Drawing on a wide range of sources and first-hand research, this new edition has been thoroughly revised to chart the interaction between Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and the changing configuration of regional and great-power politics up to the present day.
The stories behind the inequality crisis-a forty-year investigation by In These Times
Classic study of Jewish libertarian thought, from Walter Benjamin to Franz KafkaTowards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the ';tikkoun': redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of ';elective affinity' to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukcs.
Essays on Judaism in the modern world, from philosophy and history to art and politicsIn these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with a calm clear-sightedness. As a historian he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding; as a philosopher he writes of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the ';remnants of a race'; after Hitler, as well as of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel, of the Six-Day War, and of the perils ahead.
Moving stories of life in a country enduring an ongoing crisis
Why should we have to ';Keep Calm and Carry On'? In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a ';make do and mend' aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prosewith subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prizeshortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cookingHatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.
The brilliant family memoir of the much-beloved poet and political campaigner
How Jeremy Corbyn, the radical left candidate for the Labour leadership, won twiceand won bigIn the 2017 general election, Jeremy Corbyn pulled off an historic upset, attracting the biggest increase in the Labour vote since 1945. It was another reversal of expectations for the mainstream media and his ';soft-left' detractors. Demolishing the Blairite opposition in 2015, Corbyn had already seen off an attempted coup. Now, he had shattered the government's authority, and even Corbyn's most vitriolic critics have been forced into stunned mea culpas. For the first time in decades, socialism is back on the agendaand for the first time in Labour's history, it defines the leadership. Richard Seymour tells the story of how Corbyn's rise was made possible by the long decline of Labour and by a deep crisis in British democracy. He shows how Corbyn began the task of rebuilding Labour as a grassroots party, with a coalition of trade unionists, young and precarious workers, students and ';Old Labour' pugilists, who then became the biggest campaigning army in British politics. Utilizing social media, activists turned the media's Project Fear on its head and broke the ideological monopoly of the tabloids. After the election, with all the artillery still ranged against Corbyn, and with all the weaknesses of the Left's revival, Seymour asks what Corbyn can do with his newfound success.
When cowboys were workers and battled their bosses
A pioneering book that shows how the two great themes of classic science, order and chaos, are being reconciled in a new and unexpected synthesis.
Who were the Frankfurt SchoolBenjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimerand why do they matter today?In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century.Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. Benjamin, with his last great workthe incomplete Arcades Projectin his suitcase, was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France. On the other side of the Atlantic, Adorno failed in his bid to become a Hollywood screenwriter, denounced jazz, and even met Charlie Chaplin in Malibu.After the war, there was a resurgence of interest in the School. From the relative comfort of sun-drenched California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin.By taking popular culture seriously as an object of studywhether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerismthe Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Che's death a new edition of the bestselling graphic biography
A major new exploration of the refugee crisis, focusing on how borders are formed and policedForty thousand people have died trying to cross between countries in the past decade, and yet international borders only continue to harden. The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union; the United States elected a president who campaigned on building a wall; while elsewhere, the popularity of right-wing antimigrant nationalist political parties is surging. Reece Jones argues that the West has helped bring about the deaths of countless migrants, as states attempt to contain populations and limit access to resources and opportunities. ';We may live in an era of globalization,' he writes, ';but much of the world is increasingly focused on limiting the free movement of people.' In Violent Borders, Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and the dire consequences for countless millions. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slum dwellings in the ailing decolonized world, the wealthy travel without constraint, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. With the growth of borders and resource enclosures, the deaths of migrants in search of a better life are intimately connected to climate change, environmental degradation, and the growth of global wealth inequality. Newly updated with a discussion of Brexit and the Trump administration.
Author of the influential Relational Aesthetics examines the dynamics of ideology Leading theorist and art curator Nicolas Bourriaud tackles the excluded, the disposable and the nature of waste by looking to the future of artthe exform. He argues that the great theoretical battles to come will be fought in the realms of ideology, psychoanalysis and art. A ';realist' theory and practice must begin by uncovering the mechanisms that create the distinctions between the productive and unproductive, product and waste, and the included and excluded. To do this we must go back to the towering theorist of ideology Louis Althusser and examine how ideology conditions political discourse in ways that normalize cultural, racial and economic practices of exclusion.
Extrastatecraftis the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century. Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraft will change how we think about citiesand, perhaps, how we live in them.
A fascinating account of the friendship between two of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth centuryGermany in the mid 1920s, a place and time of looming turmoil, brought together Walter Benjaminacclaimed critic and extraordinary literary theoristand Bertolt Brecht, one of the twentieth century's most influential playwrights. It was a friendship that would shape their writing for the rest of their lives.In this groundbreaking work, Erdmut Wizisla explores what this relationship meant for them personally and professionally, as well as the effect it had on those around them. From the first meeting between Benjamin and Brecht to their experiences in exile, these eventful lives are illuminated by personal correspondence, journal entries and private miscellanyincluding previously unpublished materialsdetailing the friends' electric discussions of their collaboration. Wizisla delves into the archives of other luminaries in the distinguished constellation of writers and artists in Weimar Germany, which included Margarete Steffin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Hannah Arendt. Wizisla's account of this friendship opens a window on nearly two decades of European intellectual life.
A founding text of transnational feminismFor twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of women's movements in Asia and the Middle East. In this engaging and well-researched survey, Kumari Jayawardena presents feminism as it originated in the Third World, erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality. Journalist and human rights activist Rafia Zakaria's foreword to this new edition is an impassioned letter in two parts: the first to Western feminists; the second to feminists in the Global South, entreating them to use this ';compendium of female courage' as a bridge between women of different nations.Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World was chosen as one of the top twenty Feminist Classics of this Wave, 19701990, by Ms. magazine, and won the Feminist Fortnight Award in the UK.
The Voice of Witness book series takes a humanizing, literary approach to oral history to illuminate the stories of people impacted by injustice across the world.
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