Bøger i Historical Materialism serien

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.

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.

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 physics to historiography.One of the major contributions to scholarship on Marx, Engels and nineteenth-century science, Liedman's work is here presented in English translation and with a new preface by the author.

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.

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.

Despite their many disagreements when it comes to the subject of capitalism, Marxist and market-liberal perspectives seem to agree about one thing: the economic structures of capitalist market society have made direct violence against the person not only superfluous, but economically counterproductive. Heide Gerstenberger's Market and Violence does not contest the thesis that there has been, in many places, a decline in the use of violence in the pursuit of profit. But it demolishes the assumption that this can be put down to the evolution of economic rationality.By means of a deep engagement with the concrete historical reality of capitalist economies, Gerstenberger establishes that, wherever capitalism has been tamed, this has been achieved only by a combination of energetic social contestation and political intervention. First published in German in 2018, the present English-language edition makes a sweeping history of capitalist violence by one of the preeminent theorists of capitalist society working today available to a wider readership.Winner of the 2023 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Capital is a chameleon that assumes different guises while maintaining the same logic, exploiting crisis as an opportunity for regeneration. Yet each transformation opens a passage for radical conflict and new revolutionary theories and subjects. This is particularly true of the critical passage from the 1920s to the 1930s, which Giacomo Marramao presents as an incandescent laboratory of theoretical and practical transformations and fierce confrontations. Moving from Austro-Marxism to Frankfurt School Critical Theory, from Hilferding to Grossmann, and Max Weber to Carl Schmitt, The Bewitched World of Capital shows how 'the Political' was remade in the passage from free-market capitalism to mass society, throwing new light on forms of domination and conflict that also traverse our present.

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.

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 bulk of the work included in this volume consists of Preobrazhensky's Concrete Analysis of the Soviet Economy, which supplements his theoretical inquiry published in Volume II. A number of appendices present Preobrazhensky's analysis of the NEP and his correspondence with Trotsky alongside extensive contributions by the volume's editors and translators.

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.

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

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.

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'.

"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 (1895-1926) 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 books-published for the first time together with this biography.