Articles tagged “Anderson; Kevin”

Celebrating the Centenary of Raya Dunayevskaya  (1910-1987)

Video of meeting at Loyola University Chicago featuring presentations by Peter McLaren (UCLA), David Schweickart (Loyola University), Sandra Rein (University of Alberta), Ba Karang (West Africa), Kevin Anderson (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Peter Hudis (Loyola University). We have also posted the written texts or summaries for some of the presentations.

A report from the successfully concluded Founding Conference of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, Chicago, July 3-4, 2010

The views set out in our Statement of Principles and our commitment to the dialectics of revolution place us in conflict with the dominant philosophical perspectives, even on the Left. Two of these dominant perspectives on the Left are:  (1) the tradition of democracy and civil society that emerged in the 1980s as a rejection of revolution and of Marxism and with which are associated thinkers like Jürgen Habermas; (2) the traditions of autonomous Marxism and postcolonialism, which are associated with thinkers like Antonio Negri and Edward Said.   The first of these trends is influential in the mass democratic movement in Iran today, while the second is influential in the anti-globalization movement. — Editors

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well.

In the Grundrisse (1857-58), Marx sketches a multilinear theory of history. This marks an important turn in his thought. These themes are taken up again and developed further in Capital, Vol. I (1872-75), but as a theorization of contemporary possibilities rather than past history.

Given the importance of the events in Iran to the worldwide movement for human emancipation, I would like to call attention to the Iranian American translator Frieda Afary’s blog, “ Iranian Progressives in Translation .” In recent weeks, Iranian Progressives in Translation has featured the voices of feminist, gay, youth, and Marxist thinkers and activists. While we have already reprinted some of these translations on our website, I would like urge our readers to visit this website directly. Its statement of purpose reads: “This site is devoted to publishing English translations of statements or articles by progressive Iranian thinkers and activists who may not be widely known internationally but offer important ideas.”