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27 years of teaching social and cultural theory to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of British Columbia have shaped the way I think about challenging works like Marx’s Capital. I’ve come to approach the classics of sociology not just as systematic scientific treatises, but also as literary works with a beginning, middle, and end, and as political projects designed to seize upon the power of words for practical purposes.
This book rocked my theory-world when I finally settled down to read it, long after it was first published and everybody was talking about it. Besides developing Marx’s idea of the ‘metabolic rift’ in the social-natural metabolism, brought on by the industrial revolution, it also traces Marx’s inspiration in the soil sciences of his day, ancient materialist philosophies of nature, and the disregard or distortion of Marx’s ecology during the Soviet era and in the West.
Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis. Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature. Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus,…
27 years of teaching social and cultural theory to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of British Columbia have shaped the way I think about challenging works like Marx’s Capital. I’ve come to approach the classics of sociology not just as systematic scientific treatises, but also as literary works with a beginning, middle, and end, and as political projects designed to seize upon the power of words for practical purposes.
This really engaging book shows how Capital, Volume 1is implicitly modelled on Dante’s Inferno, from the way Marx stages the descent (katabasis) into the hell of the 19th-century factory to the division of the French and English translations into 33 chapters, mirroring the 33 cantos of Dante’s famous poem. Roberts almost makes you forget you’re reading political theory, an effect Marx was aiming for in trying to reach his socialist and working-class audiences.
Marx's Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers' movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante's Inferno, and how Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers' emancipation to the secret depths of…
27 years of teaching social and cultural theory to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of British Columbia have shaped the way I think about challenging works like Marx’s Capital. I’ve come to approach the classics of sociology not just as systematic scientific treatises, but also as literary works with a beginning, middle, and end, and as political projects designed to seize upon the power of words for practical purposes.
As an academic, I was at first skeptical about reading a comic version of Marx’s masterpiece, but Smith and Evans brilliantly manage to be both entertaining and enlightening, hilariously funny as well as dead serious. Even if you’re not familiar with any of the key concepts, you’ll get a lot out of the way they combine simple descriptions with the illustrations, and the updated edition really resonates with the financial crises we’ve experienced in the last couple of decades.
Karl Marx did not write Das Kapital for the bookshelves of economists and philosophers. It is economics for working people, from their viewpoint and history. It is the classic masterpiece of revolutionary working-class politics. Here, David Smith and Phil Evans explode the myth of difficulty haunting Marx's Kapital.
Since before I was a teenager, I have been painfully aware of two things: the society I am living in is an extremely racist one, and capitalism fosters egotism, greed, selfishness, and a degradation of what is best in life. Ever since then I have been pursuing the goal of envisioning, and in some way advancing, an alternative to both (which in my view are related). I have suggested these five books because they have given me much inspiration for pursuing this goal, difficult as it surely is. I hope they will prove to be for you as well.
This book, published in 2010, focuses on a much-neglected dimension of Marx’s work—his writings in defense of anti-colonial movements in Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere as well as his support for anti-racist movements in the U.S.
In contrast to claims that Marx was a class reductionist whose body of thought was incapable of accounting for issues of race and ethnicity, this work shows how he overcome many of the Eurocentric biases found in his earliest writings as he engaged in a systematic study of the non-Western world in the last decades of his life.
This a book that will change your view of what Marx was about from top to bottom.
In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx's writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical…
I lived in the former Soviet Union for ten years, primarily in Moscow, the home of many a brutal tyrant. My obsession with dictator literature began after I discovered that Saddam Hussein had written a romance novel, following which I spent many years reading the literary output of all of the 20th century’s most terrible tyrants, from Mussolini to Stalin to the Ayatollah Khomeini. This monumental act of self-torture resulted in my critically acclaimed book The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, And Other Catastrophes of Literacy.
If How to be a Dictator gives you an overview of the great tyrants of the 20th century, then Service’s biography of Joseph Stalin provides a close analysis of one of the great monsters of the 20th century. Everybody knows about Hitler’s terrible crimes, but Stalin’s are less familiar, due to a mystifying reluctance on the part of several generations of educators to teach “the youth” about the USSR. What I especially admire about Service’s book is that he really engaged with Stalin’s own writings (which are awful) and so he provides a lot of insight into the ideas that drove this ex-seminarian as he transformed himself into the supreme leader of the largest country in the world. The Stalin that ultimately emerges from this portrait is no raving lunatic but rather a highly intelligent and profoundly evil man who is completely in control of himself. Chilling.
Overthrowing the conventional image of Stalin as an uneducated political administrator inexplicably transformed into a pathological killer, Robert Service reveals a more complex and fascinating story behind this notorious twentieth-century figure. Drawing on unexplored archives and personal testimonies gathered from across Russia and Georgia, this is the first full-scale biography of the Soviet dictator in twenty years.
Service describes in unprecedented detail the first half of Stalin's life--his childhood in Georgia as the son of a violent, drunkard father and a devoted mother; his education and religious training; and his political activity as a young revolutionary. No mere messenger for…
I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the concept of time, history, and politics. My first publications were in the philosophy of history. I started by translating some Left Hegelians. Then I moved toward Kant and Benjamin. My research background was constituted by the attempt to liberate Marxism from any kind of teleological philosophy of history. Recently, I began digging into concrete historical cases to extract political and legal categories. I’m interested in the reactivation of past possibilities to reconfigure the present and open alternative futures. I am now fortunate to teach courses on Temporalities and History in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC.
The style of this book is clear, direct, and energetic.
Bensaid's book addresses the ideas of Karl Marx, demonstrating their continuing relevance in the contemporary world. It explores how Marx's theories can be applied to analyze and understand the complex dynamics of capitalist societies, making it a valuable resource for those seeking insights into our time's economic, social, and political issues.
The end of Soviet Socialism signalled to some observers that the ghost of Marx had finally been laid to rest. But history's refusal to grind to a halt and the global credit crisis that began in 2008 have rekindled interest in capitalism's most persistent critic. Written during the mid-nineties, a period of Western complacency and neo-liberal reaction, Marx for Our Times is a critical reading of dialectical materialism as a method of resistance. Without denying the contradictory character of Marx's thought, and with a sensitivity to the plurality of theories it has inspired, Daniel Bensaid sets out to discover what…
One of my long-standing interests, as a political philosopher, has been to examine the deployment of state power and the state forms (what I call states of affairs) the capitalist mode of production takes in order to preserve its economic order. Since I completed my doctorate, which was on the articulation of settler-colonial power in relationship to remaining settler states, I have largely been invested in thinking politics: how dominant politics maintain the current order, how counter-hegemonic politics disrupt this order.
Considering the legal apparatus as part of the state, Pashukanis puts forward the “commodity-form” theory of law in order to conceptualize the apotheosis of law under and fundamental to capitalism. Following Lenin, and against the claims of many of his Soviet philosopher contemporaries, Pashukanis argues that the withering away of the state should also imply the withering away of law. In making this argument he also examines the construction of legal relations and the legal subject. Pashukanis’ analysis has been revisited and revived in critical legal studies giving rise to scholarly studies such as China Miéville’s Between Equal Rights—which is how I initially discovered it, being a fan of Miéville’s fiction!
E. B. Pashukanis was the most significant contemporary to develop a fresh, new Marxist perspective in post-revolutionary Russia. In 1924 he wrote what is probably his most influential work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. In the second edition, 1926, he stated that this work was not to be seen as a final product but more for "self-clarification" in hopes of adding "stimulus and material for further discussion." A third edition was printed in 1927.Pashukanis's "commodity-exchange" theory of law spearheaded a perspective that traced the form of law, not to class interests, but to capital logic itself. Until his…
I’m an assistant professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. I’m interested in automation because discussions about it often tend towards ridiculous hyperbole or acritical boosterism. Whether it’s killer robots that terminate humanity or “ethical” AI which raises all boats, discussions about the social implications of contemporary machines often neglect to include the critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production. I don’t think the two can be studied in isolation from one another.
Ramtin’s bizarrely underread book may be read as a sequel to Braverman. This is the first Marxist text to engage directly and in a sustained manner with the concept of automation. Automation is distinguished from mechanization, a history is provided, and great attention to technical detail is evident. Ramtin also explores the (contentious) argument that automation must ultimately lead to the collapse of capitalism.
The computer has already revolutionized many aspects of our working lives. How far has this revolution yet to run? Will human labour no longer be needed in the future? And if so, what will be the effect on the development of our society? Ramin Ramtin explores these questions in his study of the computer. He considers how the micro-chip may eventually have repercussions that go beyond easing the office work-load and argues convincingly that technological change will affect our political as well as our economic systems. Marxian theory is used to explain the nature and character of technology and challenge…
I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the concept of time, history, and politics. My first publications were in the philosophy of history. I started by translating some Left Hegelians. Then I moved toward Kant and Benjamin. My research background was constituted by the attempt to liberate Marxism from any kind of teleological philosophy of history. Recently, I began digging into concrete historical cases to extract political and legal categories. I’m interested in the reactivation of past possibilities to reconfigure the present and open alternative futures. I am now fortunate to teach courses on Temporalities and History in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC.
This text, along with Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, introduces the notions of historical mutiversum and temporal strata.
Bloch develops these concepts to rethink the Marxist theory of history in relation to anticolonial struggles. He questions the idea of progress without abandoning it. Instead, he revisits progress from the perspective of complementary differentiations. This a crucial text for thinking about the plurality of times without falling into cultural relativism.
It is always better to take your reader straight to the point and spare him a long preamble. This is particularly advisable when the book itself is offered as an introduction. If it takes a long time to get to the matter, the mind tends to refuse what is really needful. This work consists largely of material first delivered as lec tures. If the spoken word can still be heard (where it should be heard), well and good. It helps if you tell someone the way as well as point it out; yet…
I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the concept of time, history, and politics. My first publications were in the philosophy of history. I started by translating some Left Hegelians. Then I moved toward Kant and Benjamin. My research background was constituted by the attempt to liberate Marxism from any kind of teleological philosophy of history. Recently, I began digging into concrete historical cases to extract political and legal categories. I’m interested in the reactivation of past possibilities to reconfigure the present and open alternative futures. I am now fortunate to teach courses on Temporalities and History in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC.
I could have mentioned other books written by E.P. Thompson. Each of his books has influenced my work.
Customs and Tradition contains "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism." This brilliant and elegantly written essay shows how capitalism, to impose itself, had to modify the experience of time. This change occurred through numerous conflicts with the traditions and customs of the working classes.
E.P. Thompson teaches us to consider the political importance and emancipatory potential of these struggles and not to leave "tradition" and its energy to the right.
E.P. Thompson taught me to look at these conflicts not just as forms of resistance, but as tensions between mutually incompatible legal systems. A useful corrective to Foucault.
Customs in Common is the remarkable sequel to E.P. Thompson's influential, landmark volume of social history, The Making of the English Working Class. The product of years of research and debate, Customs in Common describes the complex culture from which working class institutions emerged in England a panoply of traditions and customs that the new working class fought to preserve well into Victorian times.
In a text marked by both empathy and erudition, Thompson investigates the gradual disappearance of a range of cultural customs against the backdrop of the great upheavals of the eighteenth century. As villagers were subjected to…
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