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Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution
  • Language: en

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution

In this book, Maria Chehonadskih unsettles established narratives about the formation of a revolutionary canon after the October Revolution. Displacing the centre of gravity from dialectical materialism to the rapid dissemination, canonisation and decline of a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism, she explores how this tendency, overshadowed by official historiography, establishes a new attitude to modernity and progress, nature and environment, agency and subjectivity, party and class, knowledge and power. The book traces the adventure of the synthesis of empiricism and Marxism across philosophy, science, politics, art and literature from the 1890s to the 1930s, offering a radical rethinking of the true scope and scale that the main proponent of Empirio-Marxism, Alexander Bogdanov, had on the post-revolutionary socialist legacies. Chehonadskih draws on both key and forgotten figures and movements, such as Proletkult, Productivism and Constructivism, filling a gap in the literature that will be particularly significant for Marxism, continental philosophy, art theory and Slavic studies specialists.

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 282

Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution

In this book, Maria Chehonadskih unsettles established narratives about the formation of a revolutionary canon after the October Revolution. Displacing the centre of gravity from dialectical materialism to the rapid dissemination, canonisation and decline of a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism, she explores how this tendency, overshadowed by official historiography, establishes a new attitude to modernity and progress, nature and environment, agency and subjectivity, party and class, knowledge and power. The book traces the adventure of the synthesis of empiricism and Marxism across philosophy, science, politics, art and literature from the 1890s to the 1930s, offering a radical rethinking of the true scope and scale that the main proponent of Empirio-Marxism, Alexander Bogdanov, had on the post-revolutionary socialist legacies. Chehonadskih draws on both key and forgotten figures and movements, such as Proletkult, Productivism and Constructivism, filling a gap in the literature that will be particularly significant for Marxism, continental philosophy, art theory and Slavic studies specialists.

Comrade
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 177

Comrade

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2019-10-01
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  • Publisher: Verso Books

When people say “comrade,” they change the world In the twentieth century, millions of people across the globe addressed each other as “comrade.” Now, among the left, it’s more common to hear talk of “allies.” In Comrade, Jodi Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relationship of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended. Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterized by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm. Considering the egalitarianism of the comrade in light of differences of race and gender, Dean draws from an array of historical and literary examples such as Harry Haywood, C.L.R. James, Alexandra Kollontai, and Doris Lessing. She argues that if we are to be a left at all, we have to be comrades.

Stalin Era Intellectuals
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 253

Stalin Era Intellectuals

This book focuses on the extent to which Soviet scholars and cultural theoreticians were able to act autonomously during the Stalin era. The authors question how we should consider certain intellectual achievements which took place despite the pressure of Stalinism, and how best to recognise and describe such achievements. The chapters in this book offer suggestions for new interpretations on Soviet philosophy of science and humanities, linguistics, philosophy, musicology, literature and mathematics from the point of view of general cultural theory. In this way, they challenge the received image of the Stalin-era humanities which reduces them into mere propaganda. Intended for scholars of Russian and Soviet studies, this book will dispel many received views about the character of Stalinism and Soviet culture. Chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, 10 and 13 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Russia that We Have Lost
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 208

The Russia that We Have Lost

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the tsar of Russia and established a new, communist government, one that viewed the Imperial Russia of old as a righteously vanquished enemy. And yet, as Pavel Khazanov shows, after the collapse of Stalinism, a reconfiguration of Imperial Russia slowly began to emerge, recalling the culture of tsarist Russia not as a disgrace but as a glory, a past to not only remember but to recover, and to deploy against what to many seemed like a discredited socialist project. Khazanov's careful untangling of this discourse in the late Soviet period reveals a process that involved figures of all political stripes, from staunch conservatives to avowed intelligen...

Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 187

Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital

Chapter 1 is the most important chapter in Capital, as well as the most difficult and the most controversial. An influential interpretation of Chapter 1 in recent decades has been the so-called “value-form interpretation” of Marx’s theory in general and Chapter 1 in particular. The most important proponent of the value-form interpretation today, both in Germany and in the English-speaking world, is Michael Heinrich, and Heinrich’s work has emphasized the first chapter. Heinrich’s latest book in English is a detailed commentary of the first seven chapters of Volume 1 of Capital. The publication of an English translation of Heinrich’s book is an important event in Marxian scholarship and it is important to critically engage with this important book in order to advance our understanding of this critical foundational chapter. This book emphasizes the quantitative issue of whether the magnitude of value and socially necessary labour-time are determined in production or also depend on exchange and demand, which has been the main issue in the controversy over the value-form interpretation.

The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 303

The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx

This book reconstructs the concept of the individual in Marx as the key to a fresh interpretation of Marxian philosophy. Marx moved from an examination of the contingency and indeterminacy of individual consciousness in his early years to a critique of the atomistic individual and materialised social relations in his later years. His thought proposes that ‘real individuals’ are the basis for an understanding of human society that promotes the emancipation of humankind. Marx’s philosophy has often been misunderstood as lacking a concept of the individual. In China, this misunderstanding not only relates to cultural and linguistic particularities (the word ‘individual’ is seldom used in Chinese), but also relates to a misleading view of socialism and communism. This book helps remedy this misunderstanding and draws important comparisons and contrasts between Marx’s concept of the individual with that of liberalism, and between Western and Eastern Marxism.

Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 278

Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism

This book engages with the diverse traditions within non-Western Marxisms, as they emerge across the Global South, positioning itself against calls for a “pure” Marxism. The author views Marxism as a conceptual “field,” similar to electromagnetic or gravitational fields, where bodies and objects impact other bodies and objects without necessarily coming in contact with them. So too, in the “field” of Marxism, people behave in specific ways and deploy languages and concepts with their own specific inflections and accents. While rejecting the view of Marxism as an inherently European and fully-formed doctrine that is corrupted by contact with alien contexts, Nigam simultaneously ac...

Riot. Strike. Riot
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 241

Riot. Strike. Riot

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2019-06-11
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  • Publisher: Verso Books

Award winning poet Joshua Clover theorises the riot as the form of the coming insurrection Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century. It returned to prominence in the 1970s, profoundly changed along with the coordinates of race and class. From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued ...

State Socialism in Eastern Europe
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 346

State Socialism in Eastern Europe

This volume brings together a diverse set of scholars to address the long theoretical, conceptual and political debate on the interpretation of “actually existing” socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. While the major paradigms – totalitarianism, neo-totalitarianism, revisionism, post-revisionism, modernization, and the world-system analysis – are well known in the Western (English-language) literature, the concept of state socialism, which has strong theoretical roots in Hungary (going back to the works of György Lukács and István Mészáros) received less international attention. This book contributes to a productive discussion about viable alternatives to capitalism...