Magical Marxism

Magical Marxism PDF Author: Andy Merrifield
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745330600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Following his hugely popular book, The Wisdom of Donkeys, Andy Merrifield breathes new life into the Marxist tradition. Magical Marxism demands something more of traditional Marxism -- something more interesting and liberating. It asks that we imagine a Marxism that moves beyond debates about class, the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In escaping the formalist straitjacket of orthodox Marxist critique, Merrifield argues for a reconsideration of Marxism and its potential, applying previously unexplored approaches to Marxist thinking that will reveal vital new modes of political activism and debate. This book will provoke and inspire in equal measure. It gives us a Marxism for the 21st century, which offers dramatic new possibilities for political engagement.

Magical Marxism

Magical Marxism PDF Author: Andy Merrifield
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745330600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Following his hugely popular book, The Wisdom of Donkeys, Andy Merrifield breathes new life into the Marxist tradition. Magical Marxism demands something more of traditional Marxism -- something more interesting and liberating. It asks that we imagine a Marxism that moves beyond debates about class, the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In escaping the formalist straitjacket of orthodox Marxist critique, Merrifield argues for a reconsideration of Marxism and its potential, applying previously unexplored approaches to Marxist thinking that will reveal vital new modes of political activism and debate. This book will provoke and inspire in equal measure. It gives us a Marxism for the 21st century, which offers dramatic new possibilities for political engagement.

Merleau-Ponty and Marxism

Merleau-Ponty and Marxism PDF Author: Barry Cooper
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 144263765X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Influenced by Kojève's interpretation of Hegel as well as his direct political experience of the second world war, Maurice Merleau-Ponty abandoned the religious and philosophical position he had assumed in the 1930s and turned to Marxism. This is the first critical study of the French philosopher's political ideas and the context in which they evolved. In its origin and its development, Merleau-Ponty's political thought expressed a subtle dialectic between ongoing political events and the apparent truths of Marx's analysis. With the onset of the cold war, the discovery of the Soviet concentration camps, the repression of Eastern Europe, the Algerian crisis, and the founding of the Fifth Republic, Merleau-Ponty began to take a critical look at Marx's ideas of the genesis of humanism in the light of these disturbing political realities. His reconsideration of the basis of Marxism and his conclusion that it had lost contact with history led to a fundamental reorientation of his attitudes. No longer sympathetic to the use of violence to end violence, he criticized Sartre's external justification of communist violence as 'magical' and advocated instead a new liberalism combining parliamentary democracy with an awareness of the social problems of industrial capitalism. Barry Cooper's study of this important contemporary thinker gives context for an understanding of Merleau- Ponty's politics and, in so doing, brings together the complex issues and ideas that have shaped modern European political and philosophical thought.

The Politics of the Encounter

The Politics of the Encounter PDF Author: Andy Merrifield
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820345814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The Politics of the Encounter is a spirited interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The city, writes Andy Merrifield, remains "important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics." And yet, he notes, more than forty years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced the powerful ideas that still undergird much of our thinking about urbanization and urban society. Merrifield rethinks the city in light of the vast changes to our planet since 1970, when Lefebvre's seminal Urban Revolution was first published. At the same time, he expands on Lefebvre's notion of "the right to the city," which was first conceived in the wake of the 1968 student uprising in Paris. We need to think less of cities as "entities with borders and clear demarcations between what's inside and what's outside" and emphasize instead the effects of "planetary urbanization," a concept of Lefebvre's that Merrifield makes relevant for the ways we now experience the urban. The city—from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street—seems to be the critical zone in which a new social protest is unfolding, yet dissenters' aspirations are transcending the scale of the city physically and philosophically. Consequently, we must shift our perspective from "the right to the city" to "the politics of the encounter," says Merrifield. We must ask how revolutionary crowds form, where they draw their energies from, what kind of spaces they occur in—and what kind of new spaces they produce.

Marx, Dead and Alive

Marx, Dead and Alive PDF Author: Andy Merrifield
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583678816
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
A contemporary interrogation of Marx’s masterwork Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, fake news and endless sleights of the economic and political hand. And yet, contends Andy Merrifield, as our modern lives become ever more mist-enveloped, the works of Marx can help us penetrate the fog. In Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London graveside—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity. Bolstering his argument with fascinating examples of literature and history, from Shakespeare and Beckett, to the Luddites and the Black Panthers, Merrifield demonstrates how Marx can reveal our individual lives to us within a collective perspective—and within a historical continuum. Who we are now hinges on who we once were—and who we might become. This, at a time when our value-system is undergoing core “post-truth” meltdown.

Combined and Uneven Apocalypse

Combined and Uneven Apocalypse PDF Author: Evan Calder Williams
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1846947731
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
From the repurposed rubble of salvagepunk to undead hordes banging on shopping mall doors, from empty waste zones to teeming plagued cities, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse grapples with the apocalyptic fantasies of our collapsing era. Moving through the films, political tendencies, and recurrent crises of late capitalism, Evan Calder Williams paints a black toned portrait of the dream and nightmare images of a global order gone very, very wrong. Situating itself in the defaulting financial markets of the present, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse glances back toward a messy history of zombies, car wrecks, tidal waves, extinction, trash heaps, labour, pandemics, wolves, cannibalism, and general nastiness that populate the underside of our cultural imagination. Every age may dream the end of the world to follow, but these scattered nightmare figures are a skewed refraction of the normal hell of capitalism. The apocalypse isn''t something that will happen one day: it''s just the slow unveiling of the catastrophe we''ve been living through for centuries. Against any fantasies of progress, return, or reconciliation, Williams launches a loathing critique of the bleak present and offers a graveside smile for our necessary battles to come.

Marxism and Urban Culture

Marxism and Urban Culture PDF Author: Benjamin Fraser
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191586
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Marxism and Urban Culture is the first volume to reconcile social science and humanities perspectives on culture. Covering a range of global cities—Bologna, Buenos Aires, Guatemala City, Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mahalla al-Kubra, Mexico City, Montreal, Osaka, Strasbourg, Vienna—the contributions fuse political and theoretical concerns with analyses of urban cultural practices and historical movements, as well as urban-themed literary and filmic art. Conceived as a response to the persistent rift between disciplinary Marxist approaches to culture, this book prioritizes the urban problematic and builds implicitly and explicitly on work by numerous thinkers: not only Karl Marx but also David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich Engels and Antonio Gramsci, among others. Rather than reanimate reductive views either of Marx or of urban theory, the chapters in Marxism and Urban Culture speak broadly to the interdisciplinary connections that are increasingly the concern of cultural scholars working across and beyond the boundaries of geography, sociology, history, political science, language and literature fields, film studies, and more. A foreword written by Andy Merrifield (the author of Metromarxism) and an introduction by Benjamin Fraser (the author of Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience) situate the book’s chapters firmly in interdisciplinary terrain.

A People's Guide to Capitalism

A People's Guide to Capitalism PDF Author: Hadas Thier
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642592188
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A lively, accessible, and timely guide to Marxist economics for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%. Economists regularly promote Capitalism as the greatest system ever to grace the planet. With the same breath, they implore us to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the “experts.” Despite the efforts of these mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory. “Thier’s urgently needed book strips away jargon to make Marx’s essential work accessible to today’s diverse mass movements.” —Sarah Leonard, contributing editor to The Nation “A great book for proletarian chain-breaking.” —Rob Larson, author of Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley “Thier unpacks the mystery of capitalist inequality with lucid and accessible prose . . . . We will need books like A People’s Guide to help us make sense of the root causes of the financial crises that shape so many of our struggles today.” —Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership “Ranging from exploitation at work to the operations of modern finance, this book takes the reader through a fine-tuned introduction to Marx’s analysis of the modern economy . . . . Thier combines theoretical explanation with contemporary examples to illuminate the inner workings of capitalism . . . . Reminds us of the urgent need for alternatives to a crisis-ridden system.” —David McNally, author of Blood and Money

Imagining Education

Imagining Education PDF Author: Kevin R. Magill
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1681237482
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Given the current social climate this book interrogates capitalism’s relationships to and influence on education. More importantly, this book is part of a greater effort to re?humanize society by generating dialogue, encouraging solidarity and providing analyses of power and avenues for agency in supporting a life beyond the logic of the state and its implied structure, global neoliberal capitalism. The authors speak to the conceptual and material manifestations of neoliberalism that order education. Imagining education is an informed public working against what is understood as self?interest, a reconsideration of a world beyond ideology; popular education aiding social transformation for community, a move away from divisiveness and social struggle. We do not offer easy answers to the problems of global neoliberal capitalism in education, instead the authors in this book offer frameworks for contextualizing neoliberalism, its history, and what education might be on the day after the end of capitalism. This is the rupture of the rationality of global neoliberal capitalism where we examine the potentialities of a world beyond the capitalist organization of consciousness.

The Political Unconscious

The Political Unconscious PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions. The Political Unconscious is a masterly introduction to both the method and the practice of Marxist criticism. Defining a mode of criticism and applying it successfully to individual works, it bridges the gap between theoretical speculation and textual analysis.

All That Is Sacred Is Profaned

All That Is Sacred Is Profaned PDF Author: Rhyd Wildermuth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781732552333
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
An introductory text to Marxism for Pagans, and an introductory text to Paganism for Marxists.