Capitalism and Theory: Selected Writings of Michael Kidron

Capitalism and Theory: Selected Writings of Michael Kidron PDF

Author: Michael Kidron

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2018-09-11

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1608469263

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An inspiring speaker and brilliantly sophisticated theorist, Michael Kidron was a leading figure in the International Socialist tradition from the 1950s until his death in 2003. Never satisfied with merely restating the assumed tenets of Marxism, Kidron insisted that theory must evolve alongside a changing world &mdash an iconoclastic orientation which led him to clash with others on the left, including the British Communist Party and, later, the Socialist Workers Party itself under the leadership of Kidron's long-time comrade Tony Cliff. This undoctrinaire commitment to theoretical openness was also evident in Kidron's period as an editor with Pluto Books in the 1970s and 1980s, when the publisher became a crucial forum for developing socialist ideas and bringing them to a wider audience. Selected Writings collects a number of Kidron's most important essays: 'Reform and Revolution' offers a critique of post-war social democracy, written several decades before its collapse into neoliberalism; 'The Permanent Arms Economy' succinctly lays out what is perhaps Kidron's best-known theoretical contribution; 'Black Reformism' both provides an analysis of the imperialism of Kidron's day, and attacks the then-common assumption that Third World revolutions opened a road to world socialism. In recognition of Kidron's commitment to constantly re-examining theory, this volume also includes his 1977 essay 'Two Insights Don't Make a Theory', in which he criticises and updates his own earlier work in light of historical developments. Edited and introduced by Richard Kuper, who worked alongside Kidron at Pluto, this volume is the best introduction to one of the most original Marxist thinkers of recent times.

Between Capitalism and Community

Between Capitalism and Community PDF

Author: Michael A. Lebowitz

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Published: 2021-02-01

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1583678867

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Connects the Marxist construct of capitalism to systems of community In this book, Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning, Beyond Capital. Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences that are central to Marx’s analysis. In taking this approach, Marx tended to obscure not only the centrality of capital’s “immanent drive” and “constant tendency” to divide the working class but also the political economy of the working class (“social production controlled by social foresight”). In Between Capitalism and Community, Lebowitz demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community. Whereas Marx’s intellectual construct of capitalism treats it as an organic system that reproduces its premises of capital and wage-labor (including a working class that looks upon the requirements of capital “as self-evident natural laws”), Lebowitz argues that the struggle of workers in common and activities based upon solidarity point in the direction of the organic system of community, an alternative system that produces its own premises, communality, and recognition of the needs of others. If we are to escape the ultimate barbarism portended by the existing crisis of the earth system, the subordination of the system of capitalism by that of community is essential. Since the interregnum in which capitalism and community coexist is marked by the interpenetration and mutual deformation of both sides within this whole, however, the path to community cannot emerge spontaneously but requires a revolutionary party that stresses the development of the capacities of people through their protagonism.

The Border Crossed Us

The Border Crossed Us PDF

Author: Justin Akers Chacón

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1642594814

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The aggressive exploitation of labor on both sides of the US-Mexico border has become a prominent feature of capitalism in North America. Kids in cages, violent ICE raids, and anti-immigrant racist rhetoric characterize our political reality and are everyday shaping how people intersect at the US-Mexico border. As activist-scholar Justin Akers Chacón carefully demonstrates, however, this vicious model of capitalist transnationalization has also created its own grave-diggers. Contemporary North American capitalism relies heavily on an inter-connected working class which extends across the border. Cross-border production and supply chains, logistics networks, and retail and service firms have aligned and fused a growing number of workers into one common class, whether they live in the US or Mexico. While money moves without restriction, the movement of displaced migrant workers across borders is restricted and punished. Transborder people face walls, armed agents, detention camps, and a growing regime of repressive laws that criminalize them. Despite the growth and violence of the police state dedicated to the repression of transborder populations—the migra-state—migrant workers have been at the forefront of class struggle in the United States. This timely book persuasively argues that labor and migrant solidarity movements are already showing how and why, in order to fight for justice and re-build the international union movement, we must open the border.

What Was Neoliberalism?

What Was Neoliberalism? PDF

Author: Neil Davidson

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2023-10-24

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1642599425

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Eminent scholar-activist Neil Davidson’s brilliance is on full display in this posthumous work, a timely and prescient introduction to the neoliberal era. While it is widely agreed that neoliberalism arose in the wake of the global economic crisis of the 1970s, there remains much debate about how to understand its significance and even how to define it. Is it best seen as an ideology of free market fundamentalism, a series of policy decisions gutting the public sector and breaking unions, or as an era of capitalist development with its own logic Bringing his considerable intellectual breadth and characteristic generosity to bear on this question, Neil Davidson shows that to truly appreciate what is unique about neoliberalism, and what marks it out as a continuation of capitalism more generally, it is necessary to examine its social dimensions. What Was Neoliberalism? holds fast to Davidson’s conviction that thoroughly understanding the past means being better prepared for the struggles of the future.

Selected Essays of Nigel Harris

Selected Essays of Nigel Harris PDF

Author: Nigel Harris

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9004291334

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Nigel Harris’s Selected Essays: From National Liberation to Globalisation presents an encompassing overview of the work of one of the most prolific and insightful Marxist economists of the second half of the twentieth century.

Radical Chains

Radical Chains PDF

Author: Chris Nineham

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2023-05-26

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1789049369

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At a time of almost unimaginable inequality, the mainstream still tries to ignore class. Radical Chains: Why Class Matters argues that denial of class is no coincidence but in fact central to the system's survival. Exploring largely ignored histories of struggle and challenging the many myths about class today, Radical Chains puts forward the case that it is time to place class once again at the centre of emancipatory politics.

Stolen

Stolen PDF

Author: Grace Blakeley

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1912248409

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A must-read polemic about why the 'recovery' from the 2007-08 crash mostly benefited the 1%, and how democratic socialism can save us from a new crash and climate catastrophe. For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, booming banks, rising house prices and cheap consumer goods propped up living standards in the rich world. Thirty years of rocketing debt and financial wizardry had masked the deep underlying fragility of finance-led growth, and in 2008 we were forced to pay up. The decade since has witnessed all kinds of morbid symptoms, as all around the rich world, wages and productivity are stagnant, inequality is rising, and ecological systems are collapsing. Stolen is a history of finance-led growth and a guide as to how we might escape it. We've sat back as financial capitalism has stolen our economies, our environment and even the future itself. Now, we have an opportunity to change course. What happens next is up to us.

Making History

Making History PDF

Author: Alex Callinicos

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2004-07-01

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 9047404769

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This republication gives a new generation of readers access to an important intervention in Marxism and social theory. Making History is about the question of how human agents draw their powers from the social structures they are involved in.

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