Books in the Historical Materialism series

Suvin's 'X-Ray' of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism

Many academics have dismissed Marx's ideas because of his obscure method of inquiry. This book goes firmly against that current.

Forty years of research in historiography and marxism focused on the concept of 'modes of production.'

Activity Theory and 'Creative' Soviet-Marxism are still overlocked by contemporary theorists. This volume is a correction to this tragic omission.

Zheng Chaolin helped found the Chinese Communist Party’s European branch in Paris in 1922 and its Trotskyist Opposition in Shanghai in 1931. He held the world record in political imprisonment – seven years under Chiang Kai-shek (as a revolutionary) and 27 under Mao (as a ‘counterrevolutionary’), thus beating by a year Auguste Blanqui’s previous record. After joining the revolution in his teens, his commitment never wavered. His life – which spanned from 1901 to 1998 – was coterminous with the century and a dramatic embodiment of its vicissitudes. The writing collected in this book reflects that, and provides an indispensable record of his contribution to revolutionary thought in China.

That the idea of world revolution was crucial for the Bolshevik leaders in the years following the 1917 revolution is a well-known fact. But what did the party's rank and file make of it? How did it resonate with the general population? And what can a social history of international solidarity tell us about the transformation of Soviet society from NEP to Stalinism?The Charism of World Revolution undertakes the first in-depth analysis of the discourses and practices of internationalism in early Soviet society during the years of revolution, civil war and NEP, using forgotten archival materials and contemporary sources. What emerges is a well rounded and inspiring portrait that will help today's readers concretize what internationalism in an era of global struggle looked like.

InRescuing Autonomy from Kant, James Furner argues that Marxism's relation to Kant's ethics is not one of irrelevance, complementarity or incompatibility, but critique. Although Kant's formulas of the categorical imperative presuppose a belief in God that Kant cannot motivate, the value of autonomy can instead be grounded by appeal to an antinomy in capitalism's basic structure, and this commits us to socialism.

The Communist Women's Movement (CWM), virtually unknown today, was the world's first truly international revolutionary organisation of women. Formed in 1920, the CWM mapped out a programme for women's emancipation; participated in struggles for women's rights; and worked to advance women's participation in the Communist movement.The present volume, part of a series on the Communist International in Lenin's time, contains proceedings and resolutions of CWM conferences, along with reports on its work around the world. Most of the contents here are published in English for the first time, with almost half appearing for the first time in any language.

"She burst across the revolutionary sky like a blazing meteor, dazzling all in her path," Trotsky wrote. For the poet Boris Pasternak, she was Lara, the heroine of his novel Doctor Zhivago. Commissar, revolutionary fighter, espionage agent, journalist, Larisa Reisner (1895âEUR"1926) was a model for the 'new woman' of the Russian Revolution, and one of its most popular and brilliant writers, whose works were published in mass editions and read by millions. In this sweeping biography, Cathy Porter sets her life against the backdrop of the world-shaking events of 1917. Drawing on material recently released from the Soviet archives, Porter tells Reisner's story through the memories of those close to her, her own voluminous writings, and her six booksâEUR"published for the first time together with this biography.

Written at the height of the purges, but unpublished for decades, Megrelidze's text is arguably the most significant, erudite and wide-ranging work of Marxist philosophy written in the USSR at the time. Discussing the emergence and development of human consciousness from the origins of humanity to the rise of capitalism, Megrelidze discusses the major achievements of contemporary cognitive science, sociology, philosophy and linguistics in the light of the works of Marx and Engels that were being published at the time. Far from the rigidities of official 'diamat', the book illuminates the important debates in Soviet intellectual life that led to the works of figures such as Vygotsky and members of the 'Bakhtin Circle'.

Subject of numerous interpretations and studies, the vicissitudes of the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research nevertheless still contain some little-known sagas. One of these less discussed stories is the human and scientific relationship that bound philosopher Max Horkheimer and economist Friedrich Pollock for over fifty years. Based on texts and letters translated here into English for the first time, as well as some previously unpublished documents, For Nonconformism reconstructs the crucial moments in the friendship between the two scholars with an engaging narrative style and unwavering philological accuracy. Nicola Emery accompanies readers through a tour of the two friends and intellectuals' 'nonconformism' and their search for an alternative life-form that led to the birth of Frankfurt critical theory.

In contrast to the traditional Marxist interpretation of emerging capitalism and its revolutionary bourgeoisie, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France shows that commodified labor, fundamental to the existence of a capitalist bourgeoisie, did not take shape in eighteenth-century France. Through the revolutionary period, the mass of the population consisted of peasants and artisans in possession of land and workshops, all embedded in autonomous communities. The old regime bourgeoisie and nobility thus developed within the absolutist state in order to have the political means to impose feudal forms of exploitation on the people. These class relations, and not those offered in the traditional interpretation, gave rise to the crisis of 1789 and the revolutionary conflicts of the 1790s

What do struggles over pipelines in Canada, housing estates in France, and shantytowns in Martinique have in common? In Urban Revolutions, Stefan Kipfer shows how these struggles force us to understand the (neo-)colonial aspects of capitalist urbanization in a comparatively and historically nuanced fashion. In so doing, he demonstrates that urban research can offer a rich, if uneven, terrain upon which to develop the relationship between Marxist and anti-colonial intellectual traditions. After a detailed dialogue between Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, Kipfer engages creole literature in the French Antilles, Indigenous radicalism in North America and political anti-racism in mainland France.

A major intervention into the place of Marxist political economy in the work of celebrated critical theorist Theodor Adorno.To this day, there persists a widespread assumption that Theodor Adorno's references to Marx-and especially to Marx's critique of political economy-represent a relic from an early and short-lived stage of the great Frankfurt School critical theorist's intellectual development. In this book, on the basis of relevant and largely unpublished textual sources, Adorno scholar Dirk Braunstein powerfully refutes this thesis and shows that Adorno's critical theory of society is centrally concerned with a critique not only of political economy, but of economy in general.

Evgeny A. Preobrazhensky was Russia’s foremost economist in the 1920s. This volume editorially reconstructs his theory of socialist industrialisation in an agrarian country and relates it to previous socialist theories and to issues of political struggle, culture and communist morality. The editors create a unique portrait of Preobrazhensky as an economist and social theorist, assess the viability of NEP as a model of economic growth, and identify the fault lines that contributed to the split in the Trotskyist Opposition and its defeat in the struggle against Stalin.The bulk of the work included in this volume consists of the important An Attempt to Provide a Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy, while the material in Volume III focuses on concrete analysis.

The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy examines the formative years of the classic social thinker once called the 'bourgeois Marx,' specifically focusing on his relationship to the foremost working-class organization of his time. Offering groundbreaking insights, Victor Strazzeri argues that Weber's early engagement with the standpoint of the rural worker - not his later study of the ethics of ascetic Protestant entrepreneurs - first convinced him of the central role of culture in human agency. The crisis of liberalism in a rapidly modernising, conflict-ridden Imperial Germany embarking on colonial expansion is cast as the decisive setting for the genesis of Weberian social thought, with the rising labour movement, in turn, serving as the young Weber's little-known yet crucial interlocutor.

"In this ground breaking contribution to Marxist economic theory, Peter H. Jones provides a comprehensive analysis of profit rates in the lead up to the Great Recession. The Falling Rate of Profit and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 develops a new interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value rooted in non-equilibrium, and applies this theory to US national accounting data. In so doing Jones shows that, when measured correctly, the profit rate falls in the lead up to the Great Recession due to the rising organic composition of capital--the primary reason for crises in Marx's own account. From there Jones also details a new theory of finance, showing how cycles in the profit rate relate to stock market booms and slumps, and movements in the interest rate. He then discusses the implications of this analysis, and Marx and Engels' work generally, for a democratic socialist strategy." --

In a seemingly offhand, often overlooked comment, Karl Marx deemed 'human corporeal organisation' the 'first fact of human history'. Following Marx's corporeal turn and pursuing the radical implications of his corporeal insight, this book undertakes a reconstruction of the corporeal foundations of historical materialism.Part I exposes the corporeal roots of Marx's materialist conception of history and historical-materialist Wissenschaft. Part II attempts a historical-materialist mapping of human corporeal organisation. Suggesting how to approach human histories up from their corporeal foundations. Part III elaborates historical-materialism as 'corporeal semiotics'. And Part IV, a case study of Marx's critique of capitalist socio-economic and cultural forms, reveals the corporeal foundations of that critique and the corporeal depth of his vision of human freedom and dignity.

Louis Althusser argued that Marx initiated a transformation of philosophy, a new way of doing philosophy. This book follows that provocation to examine the way in which central Marxist concepts and problems from primitive accumulation to real abstraction animate and inform philosophers from Theodor Adorno to Paolo Virno. While also examining the way in which reading Marx casts new light on such philosophers as Spinoza. At the centre of this transformation is the production of subjectivity, the manner in which relations of production produce ways of thinking and living.

It is often asserted that postmodernism emerged from 'leftist' Nietzsche-interpretations, but this claim and its implications are rarely explored. Deconstructing Postmodernist Nietzscheanism investigates how Deleuze and Foucault read Nietzsche and apply a hermeneutics of innocence to his philosophy that erases the elitist, anti-democratic, and anti-socialist dimensions. In a clear and incisive analysis, Rehmann shows that this misreading also affects their own theory and impairs the ability to develop a radical critique from it. Thus the late Foucault's turn to self-care techniques merges a neo-Nietzschean approach with the ideologies of neoliberalism. Rehmann's critique is not directed against the endeavor to take suggestions from some of Nietzsche's astute intuitions, but rather against the near universal tendency to use him as a symbolic capital without admitting his hierarchical obsession and other political flaws. This book is an updated and extended version of Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus: Deleuze and Foucault. Eine Dekonstruktion, originally published in German by Argument Verlag GmbH.

Mikhail Tomsky (1880-1936) was one of the most important and influential leaders of the early Soviet Union. This first English-language biography of Tomsky reveals his central role in all the key developments in early Soviet history, including the stormy debates over the role of unions in the self-proclaimed workersâEUR(TM) state. Charters WynnâEUR(TM)s compelling account illuminates how the charismatic Tomsky rose from an impoverished working-class background and years of tsarist prison and Siberian exile to become both a Politburo member and the head of the trade unions, where he helped shape Soviet domestic and foreign policy along generally moderate lines throughout the 1920s. His failed attempt to block StalinâEUR(TM)s catastrophic adoption of forced collectivization would tragically make Tomsky a prime target in the Great Purges.

Fred Orton's teaching and writing has always combined theoretical and formal-which is to say structural-analysis with historical research and reflection. This collection of essays brings together some of his most decisive contributions to thinking about fine art practice and rethinking the theory and methods of the social history of art. In this collection Orton brilliantly moves from Paul Cezanne to Jasper Johns, from the American cultural critic Harold Rosenberg to a discussion of Marx and Engels' notion of ideology. What emerges is more than an anthology, this collection offers a vivid demonstration of the way theory can work to generate new interpretations and unsettle old ones.

Originally founded as the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, during the 1980's Marxism Today was transformed into a 'glossy' left magazine of immense influence on the British Left. Inspired by Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism, H.F. Pimlott explores the connections between political practice and cultural form as she assesses the publication’s successes and failures. This analysis touches on Marxism Today's political and cultural critiques of Thatcherism and the Left—especially those authored by Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbawm—its innovative publicity and marketplace distribution, relationships with the national UK press, cultural coverage, design and format, and writing style.In a political landscape where an emerging left is striving to find its voice, Wars of Position offers insights for contemporary media activists and challenges the neglect of the left press by media scholars.

In a seemingly offhand, often overlooked comment, Karl Marx deemed 'human corporeal organisation' the 'first fact of human history'. Following Marx's corporeal turn and pursuing the radical implications of his corporeal insight, this book undertakes a reconstruction of the corporeal foundations of historical materialism.Part I exposes the corporeal roots of Marx's materialist conception of history and historical-materialist Wissenschaft. Part II attempts a historical-materialist mapping of human corporeal organisation. Suggesting how to approach human histories up from their corporeal foundations. Part III elaborates historical-materialism as 'corporeal semiotics'. And Part IV, a case study of Marx's critique of capitalist socio-economic and cultural forms, reveals the corporeal foundations of that critique and the corporeal depth of his vision of human freedom and dignity.

Still the only full-length study of the achievements and limitations of Lenin's extensive writings on Hegel, Hegel, Lenin, and Western Marxism has become a minor classic. In a full critical account, Anderson's book connects Lenin's 'dialectics' to his renowned writings on imperialism, anti-colonial movements, and the state. From there Anderson takes up the extensive debates over Lenin's engagement with Hegel among Marxists as wide ranging as Georg Lukacs, Henri Lefebvre, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Lucio Colletti, and Louis Althusser. This updated and expanded edition also includes a comprehensive new introduction by the author, assessing Lenin's relevance for today's world.

Karel Kosík (1926-2003) reputation as a creative thinker is owed largely to his philosophical 'blockbuster' Dialectics of the Concrete, first published in Czechoslovakia in 1963. In reintroducing Kosik's philosophy to English-speaking readers, Kosik's work is shown to be important not only as a leading intellectual document of the Prague Spring, but also as an original theoretical contribution with international impact that sheds light on the meaning of labour and praxis, cognition and economic structure, and revolution and the crises of modernity.Contributors include: Ian Angus, Siyaves Azeri, Vit Bartos, Jan ¿erny, Joseph Grim Feinberg, Diana Fuentes, Gabriella Fusi, Tomas Hermann, Tomas H¿ibek, Xiaohan Huang, Peter Hudis, Petr Kužel, Ivan Landa, Michael Lowy, Jan Mervart, Anselm K. Min, Tom Rockmore, Francesco Tava, and Xinruo Zhang.

The second of three volumes in this comprehensive study of social security in the Balkan states.Social security is presented from a broad perspective as a mechanism that addresses human needs, provides protection against social risks, reduces social tensions and secures peace. Various sectors of social policy, pension systems, health care systems, disability insurance, labor policy as well as social risks, such as poverty and unemployment, have been analyzed from historical, economic, political, sociological and security perspective. This book offers recommendations for improving the level of social security in the region.This volume focuses on the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Montenegro.Contributors are: Maja Bacovi¿, Agata Domachowska, Dorota Domalewska, Tomasz Ferfecki, Afet Mamuti, Katerina Mitevska Petrusheva, Natalija Periši¿, Kire Sharlamanov, Katerina Veljanovska Blazhevska, and Marzena ¿akowska.