Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Worldwide political changes since 1990 have driven a re-evaluation of Marxism, a renaissance in Marx-studies, and a renewed interest in his lifelong intellectual partner and personal friend Friedrich Engels. In Terrell Carver’s 30^th anniversary edition of his pioneering biographical study of the ‘junior partner’ – which still remains the only one to balance Engels’s pre-Marx, with-Marx, and post-Marx writings, giving a rounded view of his life and thought – Carver adopts a comparative and critical approach, neither taking the ‘perfect partnership’ as a given, nor presuming that all the intellectual fireworks were Marx’s. Engels’s famously ‘bourgeois’ class position and ‘champagne socialist’ lifestyle emerge as resolutions rather than contradictions – they provided opportunities for activist writing and politicking that would not otherwise occur. This study is driven by questions that readers might like to ask about Engels, rather than by the sheer weight of archival materials and stereotypical framing. A newly written introduction provides reflections on how politics since the 1990s has brought Marx, Engels, and Marxisms back to life, and how publication of the Marx-Engels ‘collected works’ in a definitive edition, and in English translation, have promoted interpretive innovation. Engels himself did his best to establish his own biographical narrative. This book enables readers to assess that dominating view for themselves.

This book addresses the question of what socialism is according to fundamental values rather than institutions. Arguing that Marxist socialism is not only more gradual but also more radical than how it is usually understood, this book shows that socialism extends liberalism by inheriting and furthering liberal justice, including fundamental human rights. Simultaneously, socialism ultimately rejects liberalism because it does not consider liberal values, such as liberty and equality, society’s primary principles. Satoshi Matsui offers a new theory: alienation has two dimensions. Marxists seek to rectify policies that violate justice in a capitalist society, and injustice in capitalism is alienation’s first dimension. From a communist society’s perspective, however, justice itself is an alienated idea and the second dimension of alienation. Marx’s theory of alienation does not deny the liberal theory of justice but is rather a universal system that encompasses it. By fundamentally reexamining Marxism, this volume provides a basic guideline for overcoming capitalist society and constructing a communist society.

This book provides a concise overview of Marx’s philosophy and political economy, tracing various changes of his theoretical views over time through his practical and theoretical engagements with contradictions of capitalism from the unique perspective of Japanese Marxism. While it offers an objective introduction to Marx’s critique of capitalism, Sasaki uniquely pays particular attention to the concept of “metabolism,” whose disruption under the capitalist mode of production causes exhaustion of labour-power as well as natural resources. Sasaki reconstructs Marx as a revolutionary thinker, whose devoted his entire life for the sake of establishing a more free and equal society beyond capitalism. Sasaki’s book shows that Marx’s passion for the socialist revolution in his last years is recorded in his late excerpt notebooks that become available through the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.

This edited volume traces the development of the Marxian theory of finance in Japan. Japanese Marxists have long been engaged in this field of study, yet their achievements are hardly known in other languages. Japanese Discourses on the Marxian Theory of Finance brings together in English for the first time six core essays essential to the understanding of the history and development of Japanese Marxian economics. Part I considers the so-called Uno-Miyake debate, which shaped the direction of the research in postwar Japan. Part II includes the three core essays influenced by Uno, including an essay by Shigekatsu Yamaguchi, who introduced a new method to systematically deal with “credit creation” which must be duly taken into consideration if scholars are to analyze today’s “financialization." Finally, the last two essays follow from Yamaguchi’s influential theory to consider the relation of banking with the capital market to complete the theory of finance in Marxian economics. 

While the deepening structural crisis of capitalism in the 21st century has led to a revival of interest in Marx all over the world, Marx’s life-long comrade Frederick Engels has largely remained marginalized. To commemorate the bicentenary of Engels birth, this edited collection aims to rectify this gap in academic scholarship by gathering a diverse group of scholars to consider the legacy of Engels’s thought and work and critically examine his theoretical relevance in today’s world. The contributors of this volume provide new, stimulating reading of Engels’s works to revive some of Engels’s key ideas. The Legacy of Engels in the 21st Century integrates the most recent discoveries and achievements of Marxian scholarship, employing the historical-critical method developed in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe to shed light on the forgotten aspects of Engel's critique of capitalism and vision of postcapitalism. 

This book explores how Marx envisaged society after capital(ism) by a close examination of the idea of socialism in the text(s) of Capital. Going beyond Marx’s critique of the Gotha Programme, Paresh Chattopadhyay challenges those who leave Capital aside in discussions of socialism in Marx’s works on the grounds that it is uniquely preoccupied with the critical analysis of capitalism. Instead, Chattopadhyay shows how Marx, in Capital, considered capitalism as a simple transitional society preparing the advent of socialism envisioned as an association of free and equal individuals. 

This book analyses the development of Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) as an outstanding Marxist thinker and socialist politician in the era of imperialism and revolution. Identifying the driving force behind Luxemburg’s development as the deep unity between her passionate, emphatic life and her political and theoretical work, the authors retrace the inner dynamics of its different stages while highlighting the deep rupture caused by the experience of the Russian Revolution. On the basis of new publications of her Polish works and other writings, Luxemburg's strategic approaches are located in an Eastern European context. The authors discuss Luxemburg’s unique analyses of the first experiments in socialist participation in government, of the first Russian revolution and of the forms of accumulation of capital to outline the foundations of her novel understanding of both democratic-socialist revolution and of a society that would point beyond social democracy as well as Bolshevism – a vision that will gain new significance in the twenty first century. This book looks upon the lasting heritage of Rosa Luxemburg as the groundbreaking thinker of the unity between democracy and socialism.

This book advances an original conception of the relationship between state and corporate power in the United States. Using what he terms an Institutional Marxist framework, Maher argues that, far from passively responding to interest group pressures, the state has been a key agent in politically mobilizing business, and has played an active role in the organization of lobbying groups. Such business associations do not merely express the pre-existing interests of their corporate members, but are also mechanisms through which the state organizes the political power of the capitalist class. They form part of what the author refers to as an integral state—a wider network of state power which traverses and interpenetrates the state bureaucracy, the legislature, the industrial policy apparatus, and corporate governance. Based on extensive archival research, this book tracks the role of the General Electric Company as a pillar of the integral state in the United States from the finance capital period (1880 to 1930), through the managerial period (1930-1979), to the restructuring leading up to the age of neoliberalism (1979-present).

This book outlines essential issues of Antonio Gramsci’s thought, from his relationship to other political thinkers, including Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and Machiavelli; the development of his key conceptual categories; and the applicability of those categories in contemporary contexts. The author demonstrates how Gramsci’s revolutionary strategy begins with the knowledge of the subaltern classes’ common sense, and their elements of rebellion, in order to establish a dialectical relationship between intellectuals and the masses. That relationship promotes collective intellectual progress, ultimately leading to an effective philosophy of praxis, founded on labor and a new hegemony. The book demonstrates that Gramsci’s thought offers possibilities for understanding the serious crises of today.

This book mediates between postcolonial positions that criticize Marxist approaches (and Marx’s writings) for their Eurocentrism and defenders of Marx, who claim that this accusation is a myth. In different contributions to this volume, Kolja Lindner pleads for a differentiated assessment of the whole of Marx’s work, including less known manuscripts, and a theoretical reconstruction of various elements that have come into the focus of postcolonial critique: ethnocentrism, Orientalism, false universalism and the oblivion of modernity’s global entanglement. Against this background, two opportunities simultaneously arise: Marx’s Eurocentrism can be deconstructed and his growing awareness of global developments and cosmopolitan struggles established.

This book is a complete presentation of the most important themes of Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theory, and of its relevance for the understanding of the modern society. After an Introduction, which traces Adorno’s biographical and intellectual profile, the book is structured in three parts. The first is devoted to theoretical philosophy, and in particular to the concepts of philosophy, negative dialectics and metaphysics, and his aim is to clarify the Adornian understanding of such difficult concepts. The second is devoted to the main themes of Adorno’s social theory: the concept of domination, the relationship with Marxism, the theory of the decay of the individual, the critique of mass manipulation. The third part is devoted to aesthetics and culture criticism, and entails a conclusion in which the author outlines a confrontation between the Adornian and the Habermasian critique of modernity.      

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 20^th 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.

The theory of alienation occupies a significant place in the work of Marx and has long been considered one of his main contributions to the critique of bourgeois society. Many authors who have written on this concept over the 20^th century have erroneously based their interpretations on Marx’s early writings. In this anthology, by contrast, Marcello Musto has concentrated his selection on the most relevant pages of Marx’s later economic works, in which his thoughts on alienation were far more extensive and detailed than those of the early philosophical manuscripts. Additionally, the writings collated in this volume are unique in their presentation of not only Marx’s critique of capitalism, but also his description of communist society. This comprehensive rediscovery of Marx’s ideas on alienation provides an indispensable critical tool for both understanding the past and the critique of contemporary society.

This book analyses multiple facets of Kracauer’s work, comprehending the essayistic, narrative, philosophical, theoretical and critical writings, and putting special emphasis on some aspects: the phenomenology of metropolis, the theory of historiographic method, the reflections on the crisis of the subject and the emergence of a new subjectivity, the new forms of perception and aesthetic behaviour in late capitalism, the function of critic-intellectuals, the sociology of the middle classes, the theory of fascism, the aesthetical and sociological reflections on literary genres, the politicization of melancholy. An original feature of this book is the attention it pays to the links between Kracauer’s theoretical and critical writings and the traditions of heterodox Marxism, against a habitual tendency to obliterate the political (and emancipatory) dimension in the German author.

This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary and international revaluation of Friedrich Engels as much more than “junior partner” to Karl Marx or “second fiddle” in the Marxist orchestra. The nineteen critical essays in this collection are the work of scholars from Germany, USA, UK, Italy, China, India, Mexico and the Philippines. Together they present and evaluate archival material and scholarly commentary that covers epistemology, political economy, political theory, gender studies, cultural studies, political geography, philosophy of social science and sociological studies of class-conflict. Students, activists and specialists will find fresh consideration of familiar works, such as The Condition of the Working Class in England, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and The Dialectics of Nature. They will also be able to explore Engels’s less familiar pamphleteering, literary criticism and political commentary through detailed contextualization and careful analysis. Friedrich Engels for the 21^st Century: Perspectives and Problems is unique in putting different intellectual and political receptions of Engels’s work into productive conversation, particularly from non-Anglophone scholars, translated here into English. Readers will appreciate why Engels has been so widely celebrated some two hundred years after his birth.  

This book is an anthology of the writings of Jean Jaurès, a central figure of French socialism in the period leading up to World War I, who was born in 1859 and died in 1914, a few days before the outbreak of the conflict. Jaurès is one of the most celebrated politicians in France. His writings in this anthology touch on the subjects dear to him, which are then some of the great political themes of his time. In this book are writings on war and pacifism, on colonialism and anti-colonialism, and on the central themes of socialism of the time, such as reformism and revolution. Despite Jaurès's notoriety in France, he is not well known abroad. This book, a corpus of his emblematic writings, aims, to make Jaurès known to those who do not know him outside of France.

This book argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation.

This book analyzes how the Second International reacted to international diplomatic crises and what was the attitude of French, German and Italian socialists between 1889 and 1915, the year in which Italy entered the World War. This book shows that the Second International became over the years more and more involved in the fight against war and learnt to respond to situations of diplomatic crisis. An example of this is the fact that its last congress before the outbreak of the First World War, the Basel Congress of 1912, was nothing less than a great international socialist demonstration of opposition to war. However, the fact that France, Germany or Italy were involved in a diplomatic crisis hindered the International's ability to respond effectively to it. For all these factors, the attitude of the International is very different from one crisis to another.

Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci are two of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20^th century. This book explores the similarities and the differences between their philosophical and political theories. The first and second chapters deal with a still under-investigated aspect of Trotsky’s thought, i.e. his reflections on the issue of hegemony. The third chapter focuses on Gramsci’s critique of Trotsky in his Prison Notebooks, analysing Gramsci’s knowledge of Trotsky’s positions as well as the scope and limits of Gramsci’s critique. The fourth chapter consists of a critical rereading of Perry Anderson's essay Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, originally published in 1976 and republished in 2017 and an analysis of the book Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism by Emanuele Saccarelli. The result is an investigation that offers new insight into both Trotsky’s and Gramsci’s thought, while proposing a new point of view from which to interpret revolutionary theory and strategy in the contemporary scenario. One of the main topics addressed throughout the three essays is the specific position of the problem of hegemony in a theory of permanent revolution, demonstrating that Trotsky had a particular understanding of the question of hegemony and that Gramsci, in turn, introduced a concept of hegemony that is closely associated with an idea of permanent revolution, such that the dynamics of the relationship between democratic struggles and socialist struggles presented in both theories are very similar.

Following Marx’s own itinerary from Paris to London, from politics to the critique of political economy, The Marx of Communism delves into a creatively unfolding international debate on the democracy-communism relation, while supporting a 21^st century communism as a social alternative to capitalism. Taking into consideration Marx’s analysis of communism both as a movement and a social formation, this study focuses on the dialectics of transition from capitalism to communism. Dealing with communism as the outcome of a long-term cultural and political process, the author defends Marxian communism as the open-ended constitution of a self-governed demos, whose citizens create their own way of life on the ground of a stateless and classless society. From this point of view, the end of the state does not mean the end, but the revival of politics in terms of a communist bios. Reshaping their collective and personal values and setting limits to the production/technology dynamics of their economy, this book argues, the citizens of a communist polis form a promising antithesis to the private individuals of a capitalist society.

Considering the history of workers' and socialist movements in Europe, Frontier Socialism focuses on unconventional forms of anti-capitalist thought, particularly by examining several militant-intellectuals whose legacy is of particular interest for those aiming for a radical critique of capitalism. Following on the work of Michael Löwy, Quirico & Ragona identify relationships of “elective affinity” between figures who might appear different and dissimilar, at least at first glance: the German Anarchist Gustav Landauer, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the German communist Paul Mattick, the Italian Socialist Raniero Panzieri, the Greek-born French euro-communist Nikos Poulantzas, the German-born Swedish Social Democrat Rudolf Meidner, and the French social scientist Alain Bihr as well as two historical struggle experiences, the Spanish Republic and the Italian revolutionary group “Lotta continua”. Frontier Socialism then analyzes these thinkers' and experiences’ respective paths to socialism based on and achieved through self-organization and self-government, not to build a new tradition but to suggest a path forward for both research and political activism.

This book provides analytical arguments that demonstrate the necessity to go beyond not only mainstream economics but also, and especially, the capitalist economy itself. It provides a radical critique of mainstream economics, comparing it to an unscientific form of single thought, and applies this criticism to the specific fields of growth, development, the institutions, defense, or the environment. It targets both neoclassical economics and reformist “soft heterodox” currents, from neoinstitutionalists to neo-Keynesians—including Thomas Piketty or Amartya Sen, among others. In doing so, it rejects Keynes’ theories of money, the crisis, and the state. It then offers a Marxist interpretation of the current crisis of capitalism, considering it as a systemic crisis without solutions internal to its own logic and dynamics, and emphasizes the links between this capitalist crisis and imperialist wars, and the destruction of the environment and natural resources by capital. The book concludes by arguing that we must find the necessary theoretical and practical alternatives in a Marxist perspective, advocating for socialist transitions away from the capitalist economy to protect humanity and the environment.

This book clarifies the quantitative relationship between time, money, and labor productivity from the perspective of Marxian labor theory of value. The book is divided into four main parts. Part I introduces the relationship between time and money in the context of Marxian value theory. Part II explores the theory of labor exploitation. Part III turns to analysis of the rate of profit, which is a primary characteristic of classical and Marxian economics. Part IV is devoted to suggesting a new research direction in light of the main conceptual innovation of the book.

In this book, translated into English for the first time, Lelio Demichelis takes on a modern perspective of the concept/process of alienation. This concept—much more profound and widespread today than first described and denounced by Marx—has largely been forgotten and erased. Using the characters of Narcissus, Pygmalion and Prometheus, the author reinterprets and updates Marx, Nietzsche, Anders, Foucault and, in particular, critical theory and the Frankfurt School views on an administered society (where everything is automated and engineered, manifest today in algorithms, AI, machine learning and social networking) showing that, in a world where old and new forms of alienation come together, man is increasingly led to delegate (i.e. alienate) sovereignty, freedom, responsibility and the awareness of being alive.

This book will offer a full reconstruction of the history of Theoretical Marxism in Italy between 1895 and 1935, based on a rigorous philological method. The starting term (1895) is marked by the publication of Antonio Labriola's first essay on historical materialism (In memory of Communist Manifesto); the final term coincides with the conclusion of the "Prison Notebooks" written by Antonio Gramsci. This book analyses the original character of the Marxist philosophy in Italy, which emerged by distinguishing itself from the "orthodoxy" of the Second and Third International. By delineating a significant chapter in the history of Marxism, the book will also propose a specific contribution to the history of Italian Philosophy, which is here studied in relation to the developments of European philosophy, beyond the traditional subdivisions of Positivism, Idealism and Marxism.

This book investigates a central chapter in the history of 20th century intellectualism: the commitment to the communist ideal and the Soviet Union. Focusing on Argentina, whose communist party was among the most important in Latin America, Petra engages with the current literature on Western communism in order to conduct an exhaustive study of the intellectuals, cultural organizations, publications, and debates within Argentine communism in the decades following World War II. Based on rigorous archival research from diverse sources, Petra’s book distances itself from existing teleological visions and institutional approaches to the communist world, offering instead a complex framework in which multiple contexts, scales, and actors frame the larger problem: the intellectual commitment to a political project that brooked no dissent. Intellectuals and Communist Culture also addresses the emergence of Peronism, a crucial movement in Argentine political life to this very day, thus offering an important chapter on Latin American political and intellectual history and an invaluable contribution to the global history of the international communist movement.

This book approaches migration from Marxist feminist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial perspectives. The present conditions of transnational migration, best described as a kind of social expulsion, include migrant caravans and detained unaccompanied children in the United States, thousands of migrant deaths at sea, the razing of self-organized refugee camps in Greece, and the massive dispersal of populations within and between countries. Placing patriarchal capitalism, imperialism, racialization, and fundamentalisms at the center of the analysis, Marxism and Migration helps build a more coherent and historically-informed discussion of the conditions of migration, resettlement, and resistance. Drawing upon a range of academic disciplines and diverse geopolitical regions, the book rethinks migrations from the vantage point of class struggle and seeks to ignite a more robust discussion of critical consciousness, racialization, militarization, and solidarity.

This book presents a global overview of racism against immigrants within and in the name of the welfare state. Rich in documents and historical perspective, it analyses politics, practices, and discourses of welfare racism through the exam of discriminatory laws, measures and speeches by institutional actors, public figures, and organizations.
The strength and persistence of this form of racism are due to several factors, including racism’s structural position in modern society, a colonial root of welfare state, the intrinsic limits of social rights in capitalism, and punitive migration policies. 
An instrument of selection, exclusion and stigmatisation, welfare racism is a distinguishing feature of anti-immigrant institutional policies, which became specially aggressive in the neoliberal era with the dismantling of the welfare state and social rights.
Integrating perspectives from Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, welfare racism results a global and structured phenomenon concerning world labour as a whole, producing inequalities and division in the working class.

This edited collection evaluates the relationship between Marxism and religion in two ways: Marxism’s treatment of religion and the religious aspects of Marxism. Its aim is to complicate the superficial understanding of Marxism as a simple rejection of religion both in theory and practice. Divided into two parts (Theory and Praxis), this book brings together the three different themes of Marxism, religion, and emancipation for the first time. The first part explores the more theoretical discussions regarding the relationship between Marxism and various themes (or currents) within religious thought, to highlight points of compatibility as well as incompatibilities/conflicts. The studies in the second part of the collection refer to how Marxist ideas are received in different parts of the world. They show that as soon as Marxism arrives in a new place, the theory interacts and bonds with a pre-existing stock of ideas, each changing the other reciprocally.

The Communist Party appeared a hundred years ago on the French political and social scene. According to opinions and moments, it has been the party of Moscow, of those shot, of the working class, of the union of the left, the party of the foreigner or that of the nation. It has been underground, in government, in town halls, in factories or in the streets. Some considered it too revolutionary, others not enough. More than others, it aroused passions, positive or negative. It attracted many and repelled just as many. After the fall of the USSR, it decided to remain a communist party, while many others gave it up. But it no longer has the place it once had, in reality as in the imagination. This book does not intend to judge, but to provide keys to understanding. It is based on a considerable number of archives that are now available and is an ordered and distanced look at an object that is not lacking in complexity and no doubt even in mystery. 

This book has been translated from French to English thanks to a financial help from the Gabriel Péri Foundation and the LIR3S UMR Cnrs 7366 of Dijon.

This book redefines the relationship between Marxism and history. At its roots, Marxism was aimed at analyzing society in order to change it, reflecting on the past to create the ‘poetry of the future.’ No single event of the past was as important to early Marxists as the French Revolution of 1789. Studying the varying uses of the history of that past event among Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and prominent European Marxists before 1914 (Karl Kautsky, V.I. Lenin, and others), this book argues that we should take the historiography of concrete past events seriously. It was not only an auxiliary element of Marxism, but a core constitutive element in its formation. Thus, this book calls for transcending traditional approaches to Marxism as a fixed set of social theories combined with strategies for the present and future. Important to students of Marxism, the labor movement, and the French Revolution alike, this study contains refreshing perspectives on the interplay between past, present, and future and on the role of states, social classes, socio-economic determination, and political organization in history.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of historical and international debates on the theory of “labor money” or “labor notes.” These debates exist in a triangular context of market socialism, communism (community-based socialism), and local currency, joining numerous socialists, anarchists, and Marx and Engels. Labor note theory encompasses theoretical, ideological, and practical doctrines aimed at designing a fair and desirable labor-based market or non-market economy by reforming the monetary and credit system. This theory was considered an unfeasible utopian idea in the context of orthodox Marxism, which is typically based on a historical study of surplus value doctrines. However, this book eschews Marx’s critique of “labor money” that limits the debate regarding a concrete alternative society, and instead proposes practical and gradual approaches to social reform by scrutinizing the primary sources of labor money theories and practical experiences and reconstructs their theoretical relationships.

Marx, Spinoza and Darwin presents a common thread in its argument: it shows how these authors—certainly with differences among themselves—consolidated a field of investigation that does not resort to transcendent or religious premises in approaching the phenomena they analyze. Thus, when Spinoza declared that the “will of God” is the “sanctuary of ignorance,” when Marx provocatively maintained that “criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,” or when Darwin polemicized against a millennial creationist approach, all were taking a stand that invited us to view our world through a secular and immanent lens. In addition to this common thread, Martins discusses other issues present in the works of these thinkers, for instance the space that exists for human subjectivity from a Marxist perspective (which is not to be confused with philosophical “objectivism”): men and women are encouraged to act in the world. With this conceptual background, the concluding chapters of the book address the proliferation of some less examined Christian fundamentalisms in contemporary world, presenting an explanatory hypothesis for the phenomenon.

This book offers the first realist reconstruction of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Reading Marx through a realist lens enables us to make sense of the connections between (1) Marx’s positive concept of freedom, rooted in a theory of human development, (2) his understanding of alienation as diagnosing capitalist unfreedom, and (3) his conceptions of democracy and socialism, respectively, as the cures for this unfreedom. Along the way, it discusses and responds to some of Marx’s most insightful critics, such as Max Weber and Friedrich Hayek. This clarifies Marx’s ideas for a new generation of political thinkers; explains the challenge they pose to contemporary debates about freedom, democracy, and future economic institutions; and demonstrates that these ideas remain both defensible and compelling.

Marx's masterpiece Capital (Das Kapital) ignored or misread as well as selectively and creatively interpreted by the generation of social scientists that came after him. Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel attempt to supplement what they call ‘historical materialism’ or to engage in debates about ‘socialism’ through their readings of The Communist Manifesto and occasional Capital. Although these and other classical sociologists did not have access to most of Marx’s published and unpublished works as we do today, each is concerned with revising and refining Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy. Despite their differences with Marx and with one another, they share his concern with how empirically detailed and scientifically valid knowledge of the social world may inform historical struggles for a more human world. This commitment can be called ‘Faustian’, after the title character of the poet J. W. von Goethe’s tragic epic of modernity, insofar as Marx and the classical sociologists hope to translate theory into practice while making a pact or wager with the diabolical social, political, and economic forces of the modern world.

This book analyses contemporary capitalism from Brazil and from the Marxian critique of political economy, particularly; the co-dependency of wealth and poverty and of civilization and barbarism; the current tendency towards capital over-accumulation and the specific form assumed by the capitalist crisis in recent decades; the financialisation process of capital accumulation, its effects on the world of labour; and the place that the state assumes in this broad process. Current trends toward increasing social inequality, impoverishment of large sections of the population, precariousness of labour and rising unemployment, environmental destruction, the spread of austerity policies and the suppression of social policies, the rise of the far right (together with the strengthening of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, political and religious fanaticism and all manner of intolerance, etc.), low economic growth, the primacy of the financial dimension of capital accumulation, all need to be understood in their multiple and complex articulations, as fundamental and inherent elements of contemporary capitalism, associating empirical analysis with conceptual construction. Because they are strictly contradictory processes, a dialectical approach is required that reclaims the Marxian legacy, and aims to contribute to updating it, seeking to bring new and relevant elements to the Marxist debate, based on a specific interpretation of Marx's work, and as an immediate empirical basis the Brazilian reality.

Eminent Italian historian Giovanni Levi once notably remarked that “no one is a Marxist anymore,” pointing to a paradox in Italian cultural history. While what is called "Marxism" was supposedly hegemonic over Italian culture, and especially history writing, for decades in the postwar period, it then seems to have suddenly disappeared.  

This study questions such a vision of a monolithic and hegemonic Marxism. It starts from the most effective anecdote to all ideologising narratives—that is, research into the texts themselves. It sees the Marxist historiography of the post-1945 period as a "history in the making," in which references to Marxian theory were a fundamental factor driving historiographical innovation. This allows the book to bring to light a highly original experience in the development of historiography, based on the long Italian tradition of reflection on historical knowledge.

This book presents a Marx that is in many ways different from the one popularized by the dominant currents of twentieth-century Marxism. The dual aim of this edited volume is to contribute to a new critical discussion of some of the classical themes of Marx’s thought and to develop a deeper analysis of certain questions to which relatively little attention has been paid until recently.

Contributions of globally renowned scholars, from nine countries and multiple academic disciplines, offer diverse and innovative perspectives on Marx’s points of view about ecology, migration, gender, the capitalist mode of production, the labour movement, globalization, social relations, and the contours of a possible socialist alternative. 

The result is a collection that will prove indispensable for all specialists in the field and which suggests that Marx’s analyses are arguably resonating even more strongly today than they did in his own time.

This book investigates communism in Marx’s writings, incorporating a consideration of communist politicity. The author outlines the arguments by which it is possible to sustain—from Marx—the idea that human emancipation against capital also means the elimination of the State, the public, and the political dimension of praxis. He also posits that the concrete tasks of the “management of the common” in a communist society require political mediations that allow us to confront the difference inherent to the personality of freely associated producers, as well as the ontological finitude from which no technical power can evade. Finally, assuming Marx as a starting point whose work remains an inescapable source for “thinking communism,” the book proposes a research agenda from Marx and beyond to continue in this imperative task.

Levy del Aguila Marchena is Senior Professor and Chair of the Department of Management Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He has published extensively on Marx, political philosophy, and applied ethics.

This book offers a reading of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s engagement with the idea and practice of socialism in India by linking it to his lifelong political and philosophical concerns: the annihilation of the caste system, untouchability and the moral and philosophical systems that justify either. Rather than view his ideas through a socialist lens, the author suggests that it is important to measure the validity of socialist thought and practice in the Indian context, through his critique of the social totality. The book argues its case by presenting a broad and connected overview of his thought world and the global and local influences that shaped it. The themes that are taken up for discussion include: his understanding of the colonial rule and the colonial state; history and progress; nationalism and the questions he posed the socialists; his radical critique of the caste system and Brahmancal philosophies, and his unusual interpretation of Buddhism.

This book makes a relevant contribution to a Marxist critical explanation of social conflicts, social movements and protests. There is abundant literature on social conflict and social movements from Marxist perspectives. However, rigorous criticism, both theoretical and methodological, is scarce. The objective of this volume is the collection of works developing a critical reflection on the categories of theories about contentious collective action and social movements from a Marxist perspective. In order to better understand these phenomena and go beyond their mere case description, the theory needs to be improved. To that end, the book also promotes the debate between Marxisms and the collective action and new social movements in a renewed way. Here different Marxist arguments consider not only their methodological and ideological bias, but also the specific conceptual contributions of those theories.

This book reconstructs and compares the social theories of modernity of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, two classic thinkers in German social thought. The author focuses on five main topics: the historical-sociological method through which they investigate modernity; how are the concepts of history and society possible; the consequences of modern metropolis on the construction of individual subjectivity; the aestheticization of everyday life caused by the expansion of commodity culture; and the female culture as a counter-power to the domination of masculine objective culture. In the decades since Simmel and Benjamin, urban reality has undergone profound changes and we may even question the very existence of the subject of analysis: what is the city, the metropolis in today’s context of globalization and capital flows? Simmel’s and Benjamin’s metropolis has thus become an “endless city," beyond the physical and geographical confines of urban reality.

This book deals with a central aspect of Marx’s critique of society that is usually not examined further since it is taken as a matter of course: its scientific claim of being true. But what concept of truth underlies his way of reasoning which attempts to comprehend the social and political circumstances in terms of the possibility of their practical upheaval? In three studies focusing specifically on the development of Marx’s scientific critique of capitalist society, his journalistic commentaries on European politics, and his reflections on the organisation of revolutionary subjectivity, the authors carve out the immanent relation between the scientifically substantiated claim to truth and the revolutionary perspective in Marxʼs writings. They argue that Marx does not grasp the world ‘as it is’ but conceives it as an inverted state which cannot remain what it is but generates the means by which it can eventually be overcome. This is not something to be taken lightly: Such a concept has theoretical, political and even violent consequences—consequences that nevertheless derive neither from a subjective error nor a contamination of an otherwise ‘pure’ science. By analyzing Marx’s concept of truth the authors also attempt to shed light on a pivotal problematique of any modern critique of society that raises a reasoned claim of being true.

Using Marxist and Polanyian frameworks, this book examines the structural and discursive transformation that can explain the polarization of migration debates and within the rise of nationalist anti-migrant discourses in Europe with a special attention to Eastern Europe and Hungary. It goes beyond the mainstream explanations of these phenomena that uses nationalist propaganda as causal factors and instead argues that the rise of anti-immigration currents cannot be understood without a dialectical and historical analysis of the material and discursive transformations, most importantly marketization and related reification. Drawing from thinkers such as Lukács, Polanyi, and Gramsci as well as diverse empirical sources including demographic studies, historical modelling, and discourse analyses, Migration Turn and Eastern Europe is a unique and rigorous study of one of the most pressing and puzzling political and sociological questions of our time.

Chapter 1 is the most important chapter in Capital, as well as the most difficult and the most controversial. An influential interpretation of Chapter 1 in recent decades has been the so-called “value-form interpretation” of Marx’s theory in general and Chapter 1 in particular.  The most important proponent of the value-form interpretation today, both in Germany and in the English-speaking world, is Michael Heinrich, and Heinrich’s work has emphasized the first chapter. Heinrich’s latest book in English is a detailed commentary of the first seven chapters of Volume 1 of Capital. The publication of an English translation of Heinrich’s book is an important event in Marxian scholarship and it is important to critically engage with this important book in order to advance our understanding of this critical foundational chapter. This book emphasizes the quantitative issue of whether the magnitude of value and socially necessary labour-time are determined in production or also depend on exchange and demand, which has been the main issue in the controversy over the value-form interpretation.

This book offers a reassessment politics against the predominating economicist approach to historical materialism within contemporary Marxism. Boito draws on the structural interpretation of Marxism inspired by Althusser’s works of the mid-1960s and, especially, by Poulantzas’ Political Power and Social Classes. The volume aims to demonstrate the role of the political dimension (together with the economy) and, to a further extent, to contribute to renew contemporary Marxist political theory. The chapters cover topics such as: the nature of political power; the structure and functions of the state; the role of politics in historical change; political crises; and the political formation of the working class. The book highlights the role of political structures and practices in the reproduction of economic and social relations and also in the process of historical change. The aim of the book is to contribute to the renewal of Marxist thought, breaking with the economicist conception that dominated it throughout the last century, and finally meeting the demands of the socialist struggle in the 21st century.

This book reconstructs the concept of the individual in Marx as the key to a fresh interpretation of Marxian philosophy. Marx moved from an examination of the contingency and indeterminacy of individual consciousness in his early years to a critique of the atomistic individual and materialised social relations in his later years. His thought proposes that ‘real individuals’ are the basis for an understanding of human society that promotes the emancipation of humankind. Marx’s philosophy has often been misunderstood as lacking a concept of the individual. In China this misunderstanding not only relates to cultural and linguistic particularities (the word ‘individual’ is seldom used in Chinese), but also relates to a misleading view of socialism and communism. This book helps remedy this misunderstanding and draws important comparisons and contrasts between Marx’s concept of the individual with that of liberalism, and between Western and Eastern Marxism.

This book provides the first coherent Marxist analysis of the central importance of housing in the social reproduction of capitalism as a whole. Rather than consigning housing to the sidelines, Berry argues that the circulation of capital and revenues though housing and the built environment helps explain how the capital-labour relation constrains housing outcomes while also being reproduced on an extended scale. He shows how housing is provided by the intervention of building, property and interest-bearing capital fractions; how the land question can be explained by a theory of urban land rent, drawing on Marx's categories of differential and monopoly rent; how housing is vital to the extended reproduction of labour power, while also creating a semi-separate sphere of 'home' in which gender and demographic factors overlay and accentuate social class position. The modes, impact and drivers of state intervention in housing provision are seen to modify the patterns and pace of capital circulation through housing and the urban built environment with implications for shifts in class fragmentation and power relations.

This book engages with the diverse traditions within non-Western Marxisms, as they emerge across the Global South, positioning itself against calls for a “pure” Marxism. The author views Marxism as a conceptual “field”, similar to electromagnetic or gravitational fields, where bodies and objects impact other bodies and objects without necessarily coming in contact with the. So too, in the “field” of Marxism, people behave in specific ways and deploy languages and concepts with their own specific inflections and accents. While rejecting the view of Marxism as an inherently European and fully-formed doctrine that is corrupted by contact with alien contexts, Nigam simultaneously acknowledges the residual force of certain elements of the theory and the gravitational pull that the authoritative figures continue to have on the evolution of the field in non-Western contexts. He argues that since a large part of Marxism’s earthly journey was undertaken in the Global South, it is that experience that needs to be rendered legible, by setting aside the conceptual lens of Western Marxism that repeatedly misreads such experience. Ultimately, the book invites a fruitful and challenging re-examination of a variety of phenomena arising from the contemporaneous co-existence of pre-capitalist and capitalist social relations that have been an inextricable part of the majority of the world—what the author terms “untimely encounters.”

This book brings together Marxian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the hegemonic form of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class and 'world of the third,' where ‘world of the third’ is the “inappropriate(d) outside” of hegemonic forms of capitalist development in the global South. The authors counterpose ‘the world of the third’ to the mainstream notion of the “third world,” seen as a "lacking other" in desperate need of aid or humanitarianism. Thus, for them, the hegemonic form of global capital is engendered through the foregrounding of the 'poor,' 'victim' third world and the foreclosure of the non-capitalist ‘world of the third.’ Building on what they characterize as an “ab-original” reading of Marxian historical materialism and the Lacanian real, the authors seek to conceptualize a counter-hegemonic revolutionary subject as a basis for postcapitalist alternatives to the hegemonic form of global capital.

This book represents a valuable contribution to the history of the Socialist Second International and, more generally, of European socialism between the Great Depression of the 1880s and WWI. It comes to fill a gap in the scholarship, insofar as it investigates the history of the Socialist Youth International. During the first phase of the making of socialist parties, this organization was in charge of the political and cultural education of the proletarian youth. Capitalizing on an approach based on social, quantitative and political history, and on an analysis of mentalities and languages, the book reconstructs the many-sidedness of the “school of recruits” of the social-democratic and revolutionary movements. The working conditions of youth in Europe, its unionization and economic struggles, the fight against militarism, the pedagogical work, the internationalism and the commitment to maintain peace, and the attitude of young militants towards Bolshevik revolution are some of the themes investigated in the book. It also clarifies the role and the engagement with the issue of the new generation shown by prominent figures of Marxism such as Karl Liebknecht, Jean Jaurès, Henri De Man, Willi Münzenberg, Henriette Roland Holst, and Robert Danneberg. Finally, the book constitutes also a page of European social and political history, reconstructed through the history of the various youth socialisms and their relationship with the Marxist tradition.

This volume brings together a diverse set of scholars to address the long theoretical debate on the interpretation of “actually existing” socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. While the major paradigms—totalitarianism, neo-totalitarianism, revisionism, post-revisionism, modernization, and the world-system analysis—are well known in the Western (English-language) literature, the concept of state socialism, which has strong theoretical roots in Hungary (going back to the works of György Lukács and István Mészáros) received less international attention. This book contributes to a productive discussion about viable alternatives to capitalism by introducing and theoretically elaborating on the concept of state socialism, highlighting the historical significance of Hungary’s experiment with the “new economic mechanism” of 1968, providing a common ground for “old” and “new” generation of anti-systemic thinkers in order to go beyond Cold War simplifications and ideological divides, and opening a discussion about anti-capitalist alternatives, which are relevant today for the global left. 

This book proposes to lay the foundation of a process of radical transformation of the labour institutions, in order to put it at the service of the democratization of society and not of capitalist accumulation. Using an empirical analysis of the contemporary world of work, Alexis Cukier examines the democratic meaning of today’s critique of work organization and questions the theoretical models (linked to class struggles and to industrial democracy) to conceive of a „democratic work.“ Considering in particular historical experiments (cooperatives, self-management, worker’s councils) that try to realize here and now democracy at work, this book also analyzes the political issue of „democratic work“ in relation to issues such as labour law, feminist struggles and political ecology. Ultimately, this book proposes some institutional paths that could overtake the divide between the rights of the citizens and the rights of the workers, arguing finally: if we really want to radicalize democracy, we should begin with democratizing work. 

This book discusses Marx’s relations with Russia, which have always been ambivalent. In his youth, and indeed a good way into the 1860s, Marx might even be called a “Russophobe.” Around 1870, however, his views on Russia undergo a change; he becomes acquainted with a new kind of Russian radical and revolutionary movement and begins to study Russian. It becomes clear that Marx begins to feel that Russia is some kind of a “touchstone” for his theories. Offering a new and original interpretation of Marx’s theoretical development, Marx’s Russian Moment analyzes the following themes: Marx’s concept of ideology (as developed in the German Ideology) and its fortunes in Russia; Marx’s encounter with Bakunin and Russian nihilism; Marx’s and Engels’s studies of primitive societies; Engels’s views of the developmental perspectives of small Slavic nations; and Marx’s views on Finland, the Russian Grand Duchy. Considering these topics as “case studies,” Oittinen argues that Marx’s encounter with Russia substantially influenced Marx’s (and Engels’s) views not just on current political and economic matters but also on a philosophical and methodological level.

This book provides renewed reflection and critical discussion on John Holloway's political and theoretical thought. Two decades ago, in Change the World without Taking Power, Holloway set out on a path that he followed a decade later in Crack Capitalism and continues to walk today with his new book, Hope in Hopeless Times. The contributions in this volume critically analyze his innovative attempt to rethink the meaning and dynamics of revolution in the conditions of contemporary capitalism. More than ten years after the publication of Crack Capitalism, this volume aims to question Holloway's attempt, as well as his theoretical foundations in his original rereading of Marxism and Critical Theory and their relations with the characteristics adopted by the anti-capitalist struggles during the last two decades. Its authors, from different geographies, traditions, and scientific disciplines, establish throughout its pages a fruitful dialogue convened by Holloway's innovative ideas.