Marx For The 21st Century

This groundbreaking collection surveys current research on Marx and Marxism from a variety of perspectives. Setting forward an unconventional range of questions for discussion, the book develops key ideas, such as the theory of history, controversies about justice and the latest textual scholarship on The German Ideology. Written by Japanese scholars, the volume affords western readers a glimpse for the first time, of the results of many years’ debates and discussion. Following the long tradition of Japanese interest in Marx, the book draws on the relationship between that and radical changes in local political context, as well as the economic and political development represented by Japan. Over the course of the chapters, Marx is rescued from ‘orientalism’, evaluated as a socialist thinker, revisited as a theorist of capitalist development and heralded as a necessary corrective to modern economics. Of particular interest are the major scholarly revisions to the ‘standard’ historical accounts of Marx’s work on the Communist Manifesto, his relationship to the contemporary theories of Louis Blanc and P.J. Proudhon, and new information about how he and Engels worked together. This landmark work opens up a world of Japanese critical engagement and lively scholarship that will appeal to anyone interested in Marx and Marxism.

In Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century, authors reflect on, and offer radical arguments regarding, the crucial importance of Marx, critical theory, and critical pedagogy in the 21st century. The essays represent various disciplines while commenting broadly on the need for an engaged, radical critique of the neoliberal paradigm.

This book introduces Marx as a political philosopher to the 21st-century reader. Equal parts comprehensive, accessible, and engaging, it presents an unconventional reinterpretation of class struggle. Maffettone sheds light on Marx the individual, the intellectual, the political leader and icon, and links his lasting legacy to contemporary theories of justice. As one of the most prominent intellectual presences in history, Marx should not be read as a theorist of communism and socialism. Rather, he was, is, and shall remains today and remain for the foreseeable future, a radical critic of liberalism and capitalism. Within this innovative interpretive framework, he must be kept absolutely present in the analysis of contemporary politics. Under such premise, the volume explores Marx’s life, his thoughts, his most important writings, his works on historical materialism and economic theory with a focus on concepts of labor, commerce, capitalism, and surplus. The book also includes discussions on the Manuscripts of 1844, the Manifesto of 1848, and a brief critical summary of Capital. A truly definitive work on the "phenomenon" that is Marx, this critical introduction will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers of political science, modern history, cultural studies, social anthropology, political philosophy, critical theory, justice, and economics, as well as appeal to the general reader.

The current resurgence of Marxism is based on new sources of inspiration and creativity from movements that seek democratic, egalitarian and ecological alternatives to capitalism. The Marxism of many of these movements is neither dogmatic nor prescriptive, but rather, open, searching, utopian. It revolves around four primary factors: the importance of democracy for an emancipatory project; the ecological limits of capitalism; the crisis of global capitalism; and the learning of lessons from the failures of Marxist-inspired experiments. Marxisms in the Twenty-First Century challenges vanguardist Marxism featured in South Africa and beyond. Featuring leading thinkers from the Left, the book offers provocative ideas on interpreting our current world and serves as an excellent introduction to new ways of thinking about Marxism to students and scholars in the field. Many anti-capitalist traditions and themes - including democracy, globalisation, feminism, critique and ecology inform and shape the contributions in this volume.

This book testifies that the economic thinking of Karl Marx is still valid for the 21st century, introducing readers to unknown materials buried in archives which portray Marx's attitudes to democracy.

This book demonstrates the continuing relevance of Marx’s critique of the capitalist system, in which value is simply equated with market price. It includes chapters specifically on the environment and financialisation, and presents Marx’s qualitative theory of value and the associated concept of fetishism in a clear and comprehensive manner. Section I demonstrates how fetishism developed in Marx’s writing from a journalistic metaphor to an analytical device central to his critique. In Section II, commodity fetishism is distinguished from other forms: of money, capital and interest-bearing capital. There follows an analysis of Marx’s complex attempt to distinguish his argument from that of Ricardo, and Samuel Bailey. The section ends with a discussion of the ontological status of value: as a social rather than a natural phenomenon. Section III considers the merits of understanding value by analogy with language, and critically assesses the merits of structural Marxism. Section IV challenges Marx’s emphasis solely on production, and considers also exchange and consumption as social relations. Section V critically assesses recent Marx-inspired literature relating to the two key crises of our time, finance and the environment, and identifies strong similarities between the key analytical questions that have been debated in each case.

Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century is a ground-breaking work that highlights the resurgence and insurgence of Marxism and decolonization, and the ways in which decolonization and decoloniality are grounded in the contributions of Black Marxism, the Radical Black tradition, and anti-colonial liberation traditions. Featuring leading and young scholars and activists, this book is a practical scholarly intervention that shows how democratic Marxism and decoloniality might converge to provoke planetary decolonization in the 21st century. At the centre of this process, enabled by both increasing human entanglements and the resilience of racism, the volume's contributors analyse converging forces of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-patriarchy, anti-sexism, Indigenous People’s movements, eco-feminist formations, and intellectual movements levelled against Eurocentrism. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and intellectuals interested in Marxism, decolonization, and transnational activism.

This edited volume takes a close look at Nicos Poulantzas’s thought as a means of understanding the dynamics of the capitalist, neoliberal state in the 21st century. Nicos Poulantzas has left us with one of the most sophisticated theories of the state in the second half of the 20th century. Poulantzas’s influential theory draws inspiration from Marx, Lenin, Weber, and Foucault, among other thinkers, conceiving of the relationship between capitalism and the state as particularly original. This book aims to use Poulantzas’s theory of the capitalist state in order to understand important political and economic trends that have taken place since Poulantzas’s death in 1979. By entering into a dialogue with current Marxist and critical research in diverse fields such as political science, philosophy, sociology, history, and geography, this volume purports to evaluate the actuality of Poulantzas’s thought.