The definitive study of the mutation of a political movement. Following the locust years of the neo-liberal revolution, social democracy was the great victor at the fin-de-siecle elections. Today, parties descended from the Second International hold office throughout the European Union, while the Right appears widely disorientated by the dramatic “modernisation” of a political tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. The focal point of ...
A serious and measured exposition of the terms on which arguments for socialist strategy currently move. This first modern study provides an original and balanced perspective of a theorist whom Lenin referred to as both ‘master of Marxism’ and ‘renegade’. Examining Kautsky’s political thought over a period stretching from the Paris Commune to the Second World War, the author argues for the consistency with which Kautsky developed his positions ...
The characteristic form taken by English Marxism since the war has been the study of history. No writer exemplifies its achievements better than Edward Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class is probably the most influential single work of historical scholarship by a socialist today. An editor of The New Reasoner in 1957–59, a founder of the New Left in 1960, now an eloquent champion of civil rights, Thompson has most recently arouse ...
This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the East in the early 1920s. It focuses particularly on the work of Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism fro ...
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 ...
Exploring the connections between class, ideology and politics. In this classic study, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, Ellen Wood provides a critical survey of influential trends in “post-Marxist” theory. Challenging their dissociation of politics from class, she elaborates her own original conception of the complex relations between class, ideology and politics. In the process, Wood explores the links between socialism and democr ...
How Marxist thought evolved in the seventies and early eighties. What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? In the Tracks of Historical Materialism looks at some of the paradoxes in the evolution of Marxist thought in this period. It starts by considering the remarkable and variegated growth of ...
How do mass protests become an organized activist collective? Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state—such as in the Occupy movement in New ...
The writings of the computer genius and Internet hacktivist whose tragic suicide shook the world In January 2013, Aaron Swartz, under arrest and threatened with thirty-five years’ imprisonment, committed suicide. He was twenty-six. But in his short life he had changed the world: reshaping the Internet, questioning our assumptions about intellectual property, and creating some of the tools we use in our daily online lives. He was also a leading ...
