Reflections on the Marxist theory of history

Reflections on the Marxist theory of history PDF Author: Paul Blackledge
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847791344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
A decade after Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘End of History’, anti-capitalist demonstrators at Seattle and elsewhere have helped reinvigorate the Left with the reply ‘another world is possible’. More than anyone else it was Marx who showed that slogans such as this were no utopian fantasies, and that capitalism was just as much a historical mode of production, no more natural and certainly no less contradictory, than were the feudal and slave modes which proceeded it. Paul Blackledge opens this study with a defence of the Marxist approach to the study of history against what he argues as being the naive empiricism of traditional historians and the relativism of the postmodernists. He moves on to outline Marx and Engels analyses of concrete historical processes and their critiques of the alternative historiographic methodologies of their contemporaries. He then discusses neglected historical works produced by Marxists in the half-century or so after Marx and Engels’ deaths. Two central chapters survey recent Marxist debates on, first, the nature of modes of productions, including slave, feudal and tributary systems, and the revolutionary transitions between them; and, second, the methodological debate over the issue of structure and agency in the movement of history. Finally, he shows the political relevance of these debates through a concluding survey of competing Marxist attempts to periodise the present, postmodern, conjuncture. This book should be read by historians, students of cultural, social and political theory and anti-capitalist activists.

Reflections on the Marxist theory of history

Reflections on the Marxist theory of history PDF Author: Paul Blackledge
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847791344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
A decade after Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘End of History’, anti-capitalist demonstrators at Seattle and elsewhere have helped reinvigorate the Left with the reply ‘another world is possible’. More than anyone else it was Marx who showed that slogans such as this were no utopian fantasies, and that capitalism was just as much a historical mode of production, no more natural and certainly no less contradictory, than were the feudal and slave modes which proceeded it. Paul Blackledge opens this study with a defence of the Marxist approach to the study of history against what he argues as being the naive empiricism of traditional historians and the relativism of the postmodernists. He moves on to outline Marx and Engels analyses of concrete historical processes and their critiques of the alternative historiographic methodologies of their contemporaries. He then discusses neglected historical works produced by Marxists in the half-century or so after Marx and Engels’ deaths. Two central chapters survey recent Marxist debates on, first, the nature of modes of productions, including slave, feudal and tributary systems, and the revolutionary transitions between them; and, second, the methodological debate over the issue of structure and agency in the movement of history. Finally, he shows the political relevance of these debates through a concluding survey of competing Marxist attempts to periodise the present, postmodern, conjuncture. This book should be read by historians, students of cultural, social and political theory and anti-capitalist activists.

How to Change the World

How to Change the World PDF Author: Eric J. Hobsbawm
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300178255
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 551

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The ideas of capitalism's most vigorous and eloquent enemy have been enlightening in every era, the author contends, and our current historical situation of free-market extremes suggests that reading Marx may be more important now than ever. Hobsbawm begins with a consideration of how we should think about Marxism in the post-communist era, observing that the features we most associate with Soviet and related regimes--command economies, intrusive bureaucratic structures, and an economic and political condition of permanent was--are neither derived from Marx's ideas nor unique to socialist states. Further chapters discuss pre-Marxian socialists and Marx's radical break with them, Marx's political milieu, and the influence of his writings on the anti-fascist decades, the Cold War, and the post--Cold War period. Sweeping, provocative, and full of brilliant insights, How to Change the World challenges us to reconsider Marx and reassess his significance in the history of ideas."--Publisher's website.

Toward Forever

Toward Forever PDF Author: Tony McKenna
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1789043581
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art is a diverse, colourful and eclectic set of essays of historical and cultural analyses. From the genesis of Islam as a social movement, to an account of Goya's art in the context of feudal absolutism and the Napoleonic wars, to The Da Vinci Code, and much more besides. McKenna is a classical Marxist not shy of addressing popular culture, past and present, works often ignored by other Marxist critics increasingly confined to Academia and its high-brow concerns.

Marxism and History

Marxism and History PDF Author: Matt Perry
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030695115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
This textbook examines Marxism’s enormous impact on the way historians approach their subject. Tackling current historiographical questions in an accessible way, the author offers a clear introduction to Marxist views of history, key Marxist historians and thinkers, and the relevance of Marxist theory and history to students’ own work. This is a concise, thorough overview of an important area of historiography. The second edition incorporates significant new developments in research, including Marxist contributions to the emergence of global, maritime and transnational history; the discovery of Marx’s ecologism and the historical critique of fossil capitalism as a source of environmental disaster; a reassessment of gender oppression through social reproduction theory; and the contribution of Marxism to debates on race, Eurocentrism and whiteness.

Marx’s Experiments and Microscopes

Marx’s Experiments and Microscopes PDF Author: Paul B. Paolucci
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004413863
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Marx’s Experiments and Microscopes: Modes of Production, Religion, and the Method of Successive Abstractions, Paul B. Paolucci examines how Marx brought conventional scientific practice together with dialectical reason to produce his unique approach to sociological research. Though scholars often interpret his work through either a dialectical framework or as an aspirant scientific contender, less common are demonstrations of how Marx brought these two forms of inquiry together in ways as familiar to the conventional scientist as they are to the experienced Marxian scholar. The book elaborates on how Marx used a method successive abstractions in his study of modes of production as well as how to apply that method to studies in political economy and the sociology of religion.

Marxism, China & Development

Marxism, China & Development PDF Author: Gregor
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412828155
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
China has always been something of a mystery to Westerners. For one generation, Mao Zedong and his followers were simple "agrarian reformers," while for another they were the "communist emperor and his blue ants." In the 1970s, some of the finest Sinologists believed there was much the United States could learn from Maos Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with regard to bureaucracy, criminal justice. health care, and mass education. By the 1980s, those same theorists asserted that Maoism was nothing more than a feudal fascism and had absolutely nothing positive to teach. Marxism, China. and Development provides a plausible explanation of these developments that have had such a powerful effect on the people of China for the past half century.

Marxism and Ethics

Marxism and Ethics PDF Author: Paul Blackledge
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143843992X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
Marxism and Ethics is a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the rich and complex history of Marxist ethical theory as it has evolved over the last century and a half. Paul Blackledge argues that Marx's ethics of freedom underpin his revolutionary critique of capitalism. Marx's conception of agency, he argues, is best understood through the lens of Hegel's synthesis of Kantian and Aristotelian ethical concepts. Marx's rejection of moralism is not, as suggested in crude materialist readings of his work, a dismissal of the free, purposive, subjective dimension of action. Freedom, for Marx, is both the essence and the goal of the socialist movement against alienation, and freedom's concrete modern form is the movement for real democracy against the capitalist separation of economics and politics. At the same time, Marxism and Ethics is also a distinctive contribution to, and critique of, contemporary political philosophy, one that fashions a powerful synthesis of the strongest elements of the Marxist tradition. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's early contributions to British New Left debates on socialist humanism, Blackledge develops an alternative ethical theory for the Marxist tradition, one that avoids the inadequacies of approaches framed by Kant on the one hand and utilitarianism on the other.

Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory

Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory PDF Author: Paul Blackledge
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438476892
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this comprehensive overview of Friedrich Engels's writings, Paul Blackledge critically explores Engels's contributions to modern social and political theory generally and Marxism specifically. Through a careful examination both of Engels's role in the forging of Marxism in the 1840s, and his contributions to the further deepening and expansion of this worldview over the next half century, Blackledge offers a closely argued and balanced assessment of his thought. This book challenges the long-standing attempt among academic Marxologists to denigrate Engels as Marx's greatest mistake, and concludes that Engels was a profound thinker whose ideas continue to resonate to this day.

Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism

Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism PDF Author: Paul Blackledge
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004166211
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 507

Get Book Here

Book Description
This selection of Alasdair MacIntyrea (TM)s early writings on Marxism and ethics aims both to fill a gap in the academic literature on MacIntyrea (TM)s ethical theory, and to offer a contribution to more recent debates on the ethics of revolution.

Reflections on a Ravaged Century

Reflections on a Ravaged Century PDF Author: Robert Conquest
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393320862
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
A look at the twentieth century examines the factors and events that have sent millions to their deaths, discussing the philosophies that have caused so much conflict, as well as what the future may hold for the human race.