As the author of the ground-breaking work of Marxist political economy, Finance Capital, and a leader in the German Social Democratic Party, Rudolf Hilferding was a dominant intellectual and political figure in the history of European socialism from its halcyon days in the pre-1914 era until its collapse in the 1930s. This collection of his previously unpublished correspondence allows readers to trace the evolution of Hilferding’s thought as socialism’s fortunes declined and his own fate became precarious. It shows how, in the face of rising Stalinism and fascism, democracy remained at...

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) was one of the best-known Marxist scholars active in the second half of the twentieth century. A leading member of the Fourth International, his books on capitalist economics, bureaucracies in the workers’ movement and on power and socialist strategy were translated into many languages. Democratic self-organisation of workers was a red thread that ran through all of his thinking. In Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy, Manuel Kellner presents the first and until now only comprehensive overview of Mandel’s theoretical and political contributions, arguing that his...

In theorising on the causes, preconditions, dynamics and internal conflicts of the Greek Revolution of 1821, the analysis of Milios tackles the issue of bourgeois revolutions in general. Additionally, his investigation of the historical emergence and the limits of the Greek nation calls forth the broader theoretical and historical question of the economic, political, and ideological presuppositions of nation-building. The book illustrates how nationalism brings the masses to the political forefront, which the capitalist state then incorporates into its apparatuses as ‘sovereign people’....

Despite the collapse of Soviet-style socialism, the spectre of Marx still haunts the French imagination. This is no accident, in a country whose intellectual life and political history have long been marked by his multiple presences. This volume offers a historical and sociological insight into the way his thought has been received in the French context, from his own lifetime to the present. Analysing Marx’s place and influence in the French intellectual, political and artistic debate – across the political spectrum and even in the French-speaking colonial world – it helps us...

By digging through the stratigraphy of the history of ideas we can find within and beyond Marxism an ‘aleatory current’ that values the role of chance in history. Using this perspective, the book builds a case for a historical materialism that is stripped of all teleology. Starting in the ancient Mediterranean with Epicurus, it traces the history of conceiving history as plural up to Marxism and modern science. It shows that concrete historical ‘worlds’ such as ancient Mesoamerica and Eurasia cannot be reduced to a single template. Affirming the potentiality of a future non-capitalist...

In these innovative essays on poetry and capitalism, collected over the last fifteen years, Christopher Nealon shines a light on the upsurge of anticapitalist poetry since the turn of the century, and develops fresh ways of thinking about how capitalist society shapes the reading and the writing of all poetry, whatever its political orientation. Breaking from half a century of postmodernist readings of poetry, and bypassing the false divide between formalist and historicist criticism, these essays chart a path toward a new Marxist poetics.

To this day, there persists a widespread assumption that 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 Adorno’s theoretical development. On the basis of relevant and largely unpublished textual sources, this book refutes this thesis while showing that the centre of Adorno’s critical theory of society is occupied by a critique not only of political economy, but of economy in general.

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. Born in 1901, he died in 1998, so his life was coterminous with the century and a dramatic embodiment of its vicissitudes. This book is record of his contribution to...

In Rescuing 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.

Environmental degradation, crises in care and the predations of finance capital impose new challenges to human reproduction. It is imperative to understand their roots in capitalism. But how best to do so? This book develops the concept of ‘immanent externalities’ to grasp the non-capitalist life processes produced by – and necessary for – capitalist reproduction. Immanent Externalities thus considers the category of reproduction by means of a philosophical re-reading of the three volumes of Marx’s Capital. In doing so, the book locates capitalism’s fundamental contradiction as...