Series: Historical Materialism

Taking an analytic and historical approach, this work develops and defends Althusserian critical theory. This theory, it is argued, produces knowledge of how a particular class of people, in a particular time, in a particular place, is dominated, oppressed, or exploited. Moreover, without relying on a general notion of human emancipation, concrete critical theory can suggest political means for the...

Since the Cold War, most historians have set up an opposition between the 'American' and 'international' aspects of early American Communism. Communist International And U.S. Communism, 1919-1929 examines the development of the Communist Party in its first decade, from 1919 to 1929. Using the archives of the Communist International, this book, in contrast to previous studies, argues that the International...

From the Vanguard to the Margins is dedicated to the work of the late British historian, Dr Mark Pittaway (1971-2010), a prominent scholar of post-war and contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Breaking with orthodox readings on Eastern bloc regimes, which remain wedded to the 'totalitarianism' paradigm of the Cold War era, the essays in this volume shed light on...

A magisterial, definitive account of the upheavals in Germany in the wake of the Russian revolution. Broue meticulously reconstitutes six decisive years, 1917-1923, of social struggles in Germany. the consequences of the defeat of the German revolution had profound consequences for the world.

In Global Political Economy and the Modern State System, Tobias ten-Brink contributes to an understanding of the modern state system, its conflicts, and its transformation. In contrast to the political attractiveness of optimistic theoretical approaches to globalisation, this book demonstrates how an analytical approach rooted in Global Political Economy (GPE) helps to explain both the tendencies towards integration and towards...

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is one of the most-translated Italian authors of all time. After WWII, his thought became influential and remained relevant for decades. Today it is generally agreed that his Marxism has highly original and personal features, as confirmed by the fact that his international influence has continued to grow since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gramsci and...

Bryan D. Palmer reinterprets the history of labour and the left in the United States during the 1930s through a discussion of the emergence of Trotskyism in the most advanced capitalist country in the world. Focussing on James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, Palmer builds on his previously published and award-winning book, James P. Cannon and the Origins...

Through a discussion of current perspectives in the philosophy of history—especially with a critical approach to Paul Ricœur's work—and a rigorous reading of Karl Marx's oeuvre, Karl Marx, Historian of Social Times and Spaces proposes a novel interpretation of Marx's concept and method of historical knowledge. In this sense, the examination of Marx's concepts of social space and social time...

Perhaps no philosopher is more of a conundrum than Nietzsche, the solitary rebel, poet, wayfarer, anti-revolutionary Aufklärer, and theorist of aristocratic radicalism. His accusers identify in his 'superman' the origins of Nazism, and thus issue an irrevocable condemnation; his defenders pursue a hermeneutics of innocence founded ultimately in allegory. In a work widely regarded as the most important contribution to...

Prophets Unarmed is an authoritative sourcebook on the Chinese Communist Party's main early opposition, the Chinese Trotskyists, who emerged from the Chinese Communist Party in reaction to its 1927 defeat. In spite of being Trotskyism's main section outside Russia, they were crushed by Stalin in Moscow and by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong in China, thus becoming China's most persecuted...

Bolivia witnessed a left-indigenous insurrectionary cycle between 2000 and 2005 that overthrew two presidents and laid the foundation for Evo Morales to become the country's first indigenous president. Building on the theoretical traditions of Marxism and indigenous liberation, Red October: Left-indigenous Struggles In Modern Bolivia provides an analytical framework for understanding the fine-grained sociological and political nuances of recent Bolivian...

Revisiting Gramsci's Notebooks offers a rich collection of historical, philosophical, and political studies addressing the thought of Antonio Gramsci, one of the most significant intellectuals of the twentieth century. Based on thorough analyses of Gramsci's texts, these interdisciplinary investigations engage with ongoing debates in different fields of study. They are exciting evidence of the enduring capacity of Gramsci's thought to...

Revolutionary Marxism in Spain 1930-1937 examines the impact of Trotsky's political thought upon those Spanish communists who dissented from the 'general line' laid down by Moscow. It explores the political ideas of leading Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM) figures, Andreu Nin and Joaquin Maurin, and their complex relationship with Trotsky. The contention is that the POUM owed far more...

Through extensive archival research in eight different languages, Revolutionary Social Democracy introduces readers to the politics and practices of socialists in Tsarist Russia's imperial borderlands. These parties fought for democracy and workers' power across the entire span of the Russian Empire—from the factories of Warsaw, to the oil fields of Baku, to the autonomous parliament of Finland. Eric Blanc's incisive...

In 1980, Polish workers astonished the world by demanding and winning an independent union with the right to strike, called Solidarity. It was the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. Jack M. Bloom's Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution explains how this happened, from the imposition of Communism to its end, based on 150 interviews with...

In contrast to the traditional Marxist interpretation of emerging capitalism and its revolutionary bourgeoisie, State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France shows that commodified labour, 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...

In The Corporation, Law, and Capitalism, Grietje Baars offers a radical Marxist perspective on the role of law in the global political economy. Closing a major gap in historical-materialist scholarship, Baars demonstrates how the corporation, capitalism's main engine from city-state and colonial times to the present multinational, is a masterpiece of legal technology. The symbiosis between law and capital becomes...

The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender brings together many of Himani Bannerji's English writings over a long period of teaching and research in Canada and India. Bannerji creates an interdisciplinary analytical method and extends the possibilities of historical materialism by predominantly drawing on Marx, Gramsci, and Dorothy Smith. Essays here instantiate Marx's general proposition that while...

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...

In this important book, influential historian Mark Bojcun explores the social democratic workers' movement in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire and its impact on the course of the 1917 Revolution. By focusing on the sections of the labour movement built by the Ukrainian, Jewish, and Russian parties, Bojcun sheds new light on the way they each confronted national...

This ground-breaking history of the General Jewish Labour Bund in migration investigates how the organisation transformed itself from a revolutionary protagonist in early twentieth-century Russia to a socialist institution of secular Jewish life and yidishkayt for Jews in North and South America. By following thousands of activists' paths from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the working-class Yiddish neighbourhoods of...

In The Weight of the Printed Word, Steve Wright explores the creation and use of documents as a key dimension in the activities of Italian workerists during the 1960s and 1970s. From leaflets and newspapers to books, internal documents and workers' enquiries, the operaisti deployed a wide variety of printed materials in their efforts to organise among new subjectivities of...

In Towards a Productive Aesthetics: Contemporary and Historical Interventions in Blake and Brecht, Keith O'Regan mobilises a constellative approach to compare the political-aesthetic strategies of William Blake (1757-1827) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). O'Regan traces two similar trajectories in each author's work: an exploration of how capitalist domination defines conjunctures, and an investigation of how historical figures, themes, and terrains illustrate...

In this collection, British and Argentinian historians analyse the Asiatic, Germanic, peasant, slave, feudal, and tributary modes of production by exploring historical processes and diverse problems of Marxist theory. The studies treat an array of pre-capitalist social formations, including medieval Iceland and Norway, Byzantium, the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt, medieval León and Castile, and the Castilian later Middle Ages. By...

Empiriomonism is Alexander Bogdanov's scientific-philosophical substantiation of Marxism. In Books One and Two, he combines Ernst Mach's and Richard Avenarius's neutral monist philosophy with the theory of psychophysical parallelism and systematically demonstrates that human psyches are thoroughly natural and are subject to nature's laws. In Book Three, Bogdanov argues that empiriomonism is superior to G. V. Plekhanov's outdated materialism and...

Lise Vogel revisits classical Marxian texts, tracking analyses of the woman question in socialist theory and drawing on central theoretical categories of Marx's Capital to open up an original theorisation of gender and the social production and reproduction of material life. Includes Vogel's article, Domestic Labor Revisited which extends and clarifies her main theoretical innovations.

Karel Kosik (1926-2003) gained a reputation as a creative thinker largely due to his philosophical 'blockbuster' Dialectics of the Concrete, first published in Czechoslovakia in 1963. In reintroducing Kosik's philosophy to English-speaking readers, his work is highlighted not only as a leading intellectual document of the Prague Spring but also as an original theoretical contribution with international impact. It sheds...

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...

What is the nature of the laws that Marx and Engels sought to formulate for the development of capitalism? How to understand and judge Engels's attempt to formulate a general philosophy and worldview? These are the questions highlighted in this magnificent work that situates Marx and Engels's writing against the background of the entire nineteenth-century world of scientific problems, from...

This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth reappraisal of the relation between Marx's economic theory in Capital and Hegel's Logic by leading Marxian economists and philosophers from around the world. The subjects dealt with include: systematic dialectics, the New Dialectics, materialism vs. idealism, Marx's 'inversion' of Hegel, Hegel's Concept logic, Hegel's Essence logic, Marx's levels of abstraction of capital in...

The German Left and Aesthetic Politics examines the articulation of contending materialist aesthetic practices within the ideological fractures of the German Left between the Second and Third International. It is hinged on the major literary critical contributions of Franz Mehring, representative of the Second, and Karl Wittfogel and Georg Lukacs representing the Third. Both parties focussed on the bourgeois revolutionary...

Lenin's What Is To Be Done (1902) has long been seen as the founding document of 20th-century revolutionaries, revealing Lenin's elitist and manipulative attitude towards workers. Lih uses hitherto unavailable contextual information to fundamentally challenge this reading.

What is money? What is capital? Christopher J. Arthur brilliantly tackles these fundamental questions at a deep philosophical level in The Spectre of Capital. He argues that the modern world is ruled by an unseen force, the spectre of capital. This insight is rooted in a strikingly original combination of the ideas of Marx and Hegel. Arthur presents the most...

The essays collected within this text engage with the Marxist notion of a 'mode of production', the emergence of the medieval relations of production, the origins of capitalism, the dichotomy between free and unfree labour, and essays in agrarian history. Together, the insightful and thought-provoking texts within Theory As History demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory within history and of...

The influence of Antonio Gramsci's thought is exceeded only by the diverse interpretations to which it has been subjected. Claimed by disparate schools of thought, Gramsci's writing has influenced scholars ranging from Michel Foucault to Noam Chomsky. In The Gramscian Moment, Peter D. Thomas compellingly argues that Gramsci is best understood as deepening the classical Marxist tradition. His significance derives...

Based on hundreds of archival documents, Christina Petterson offers an in-depth analysis of the community building process and individual and collective subjectification practices of the Moravian Brethren in eighteenth-century Herrnhut, Eastern Germany, between 1740 and 1760. The Moravian Brethren are a Protestant group, but Petterson demonstrates the relevance of their social experiments and practices for early modernity by drawing out...

Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: Jose Mart, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and three Caribbean authors who engaged with them. These three interlocutors—the Cuban poet, essayist, and revolutionary Jose Mart (1853-1895); the Trinidadian activist, historian, and cultural critic C.L.R. James (1901-1989); and the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000)—all saw in the famous American...

Unable to analyse the dynamics of specific forms of social labour in the US, most US civil war historians have ignored its deep social roots. To search out these roots, Post applies the theoretical insights from the transition debate to the historical literature on the US to produce a new analysis on the origins of American capitalism. In American Road...

In 2010, Greece entered a period of extreme austerity measures, but also of intense struggles and protests. Social and political crisis led to tectonic shifts in the political landscape and the rise to power of SYRIZA. Despite the impressive level of resistance expressed through the 2015 referendum, the Troika of the European Union (EU), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and European...

The German Left and the Weimar Republic illuminates the history of the political left by presenting a wide range of documents on various aspects of socialist and communist activity in Germany. Separate chapters deal with the policy of Social Democracy and the attempts of the Communist Party to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Later chapters discuss social issues, in particular questions...

The German-Austrian social theorist and philosopher Leo Kofler (1907-1995) represents what Oskar Negt once called unmutilated, living Marxism. Throughout his life, he dealt with issues of history and modernity, Marxist philosophy, and the critique of ideology, philosophical anthropology, and aesthetics. In this volume, author and Kofler biographer Christoph Jnke elucidates the contours of his philosophy of praxis, traces an arc...

The legacy of the relationship between African American writers and Communism in the US is a contested one. In Bitter with the Past but Sweet with the Dream, Cathy Bergin argues that in three novels, by seminal mid-century authors (Richard Wright, Chester Himes and Ralph Ellison), Communism is not dismissed as incapable of meeting the demands of black political identity,...

In this ground-breaking study, leading Gramsci scholar Guido Liguori unearths the philological pathways through which the Sardinian Communist's thinking developed. Liguori 'excavates' the Prison Notebooks by examining Gramsci's relation to other thinkers, and concludes his study with a discussion of the metaphors used by Gramsci. What emerges is the image of a thinker more widely known than he is understood....

Long awaited, this volume offers the first full English language translation of Henryk Grossman's The Law of Accumulation. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises was Henryk Grossman's most important, influential, and also most denounced work. As official Communist economic thought was petrifying, to comply with the needs of the Stalinist...

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 workers' state. Charters Wynn's compelling account illuminates how the charismatic Tomsky rose...

A key contribution to post-war Marxist thinking, finally back in print. Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour is one of the major texts of post-war Marxist theory. A tremendous influence on the central figures of the Frankfurt School, with ongoing relevance to current debates about value, abstraction, and domination, Sohn-Rethel's ideas are here presented at their fullest scope and with...

Over a decade ago, Foster and Burkett introduced a revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx's thought, demonstrating that Marx's concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. In this volume, Marx And The Earth, Foster and Burkett expand on this analysis in the process of responding to recent...

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. It also examines the way in which reading Marx casts new light...