Articles tagged “Marx; Karl”

A tribute to the Chinese philosopher and journalist Wang Ruoshui (1926-2002), who was persecuted from the 1960s onwards for defending socialist humanism.  He came under particular attack in the 1980s for arguing that alienation existed under “socialism” in China. Later coming into contact with US Marxist-Humanists, Wang wrote the preface to the 1999 Chinese translation of Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom — Editors

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A review of Georg Lukacs’s recently discovered manuscript, published as Tailism and the Dialectic. This previously unpublished book was written as a defense of Lukacs’s  History and Class Consciousness (1923) in response to attacks on it from within the Communist International by Abram Deborin and Laszlo Rudas. Originally composed in 1925 or 1926, Lukacs’s Tailism is somewhat of a disappointment in that it reduces the concept of subjectivity to a defense of the vanguard party. At the same time, Lukacs continues in muted form his earlier critique of Engels’s scientism and the book contains some brilliant insights on Hegel. It is unfortunate that philosophers like Slavoj Zizek and Trotskyist writers like Jonathan Rees have embraced Tailism uncritically today, using it to attack Rosa Luxemburg for having criticized Lenin’s single-party state — Editors

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Karl Marx penned his CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM 125 years ago. This anniversary, however, is not the main reason to study this document. Rather, the need to seriously grapple with it today is occasioned by our desire to work out an alternative to capital. The question to be posed here is: how can we be convinced, and in turn convince others, that a new society based on a conscious collective effort to reevaluate and satisfy human needs can prevail over the current trampling of humanity and the environment at the service of the self-expansion of value?

Is it possible to ameliorate the debilitating impact of globalization by forcing capital to become democratically accountable? Should we instead be aiming for the ABOLITION of capital? And if we favor the latter, how are we to project this concretely?

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This article argues that while the limitations of Hegel’s political reconciliation with existing reality has long been evident, the depth of Marx’s challenge to capital cannot be fully comprehended, let alone restated for today, without a re-encounter with Marx’s rootedness in and transcendence of Hegel’s concept of absolute negativity. The need to go beyond critiques of private property and the market by projecting ground for the negation of capital creates a compulsion to return to Hegel at his most ‘abstract’ level — the Absolute.

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This article originally appeared in Capital & Class, No. 70, Spring 2000

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Captains of industry sweated as they waited for computer clocks to roll over to the 21st century, a symbol of the social contradictions besetting capitalism.

This critique of Istvan Meszaros’s Beyond Capital (1995) interrogates Meszaros’s relationship to Lukács and to Hegel and Marx, while discussing the possibility of an emancipatory alternative to capitalism.

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Originally appeared in Socialism & Democracy 11:1, January 1997