Jack Hayward
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199216314
- eISBN:
- 9780191712265
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199216314.003.0011
- Subject:
- Political Science, European Union
Weak party and trade union organizations have been fragmented by fascination with revolutionary rhetoric despite recourse in practice to reformism. Following a contrast between anarchist outsiders ...
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Weak party and trade union organizations have been fragmented by fascination with revolutionary rhetoric despite recourse in practice to reformism. Following a contrast between anarchist outsiders and Radical insiders, the vicissitudes of partisan French socialism are recounted. The secular decline of the sectarian Communist Party has coincided with the collapse of Marxism's ideological hegemony.Less
Weak party and trade union organizations have been fragmented by fascination with revolutionary rhetoric despite recourse in practice to reformism. Following a contrast between anarchist outsiders and Radical insiders, the vicissitudes of partisan French socialism are recounted. The secular decline of the sectarian Communist Party has coincided with the collapse of Marxism's ideological hegemony.
Donald Markwell
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780198292364
- eISBN:
- 9780191715525
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198292364.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
Keynes’s approach to inter-war economic and political problems was as a liberal thinker seeking a middle way between laissez-faire and Marxian socialism, as an economist increasingly dissatisfied ...
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Keynes’s approach to inter-war economic and political problems was as a liberal thinker seeking a middle way between laissez-faire and Marxian socialism, as an economist increasingly dissatisfied with existing theory in the face of massive and enduring unemployment, and as an idealist exponent of a rule of law in international politics. This chapter surveys Keynes’s inter-war writings, especially from 1922, on international monetary issues and investment abroad; international trade; population pressure; economic threats to domestic order; ‘the middle way’; the mature liberal institutionalism of The General Theory; and international political issues, reflecting his idealism. It traces Keynes’s thinking especially through such works asA Tract on Monetary Reform(1923), his 1920s pamphlets on liberalism and other issues,A Treatise on Money(1930), early 1930s writings on the Depression and protection including his 1933 article on national self-sufficiency, andThe General Theory(1936).Less
Keynes’s approach to inter-war economic and political problems was as a liberal thinker seeking a middle way between laissez-faire and Marxian socialism, as an economist increasingly dissatisfied with existing theory in the face of massive and enduring unemployment, and as an idealist exponent of a rule of law in international politics. This chapter surveys Keynes’s inter-war writings, especially from 1922, on international monetary issues and investment abroad; international trade; population pressure; economic threats to domestic order; ‘the middle way’; the mature liberal institutionalism of The General Theory; and international political issues, reflecting his idealism. It traces Keynes’s thinking especially through such works asA Tract on Monetary Reform(1923), his 1920s pamphlets on liberalism and other issues,A Treatise on Money(1930), early 1930s writings on the Depression and protection including his 1933 article on national self-sufficiency, andThe General Theory(1936).
Ira Katznelson
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780198279242
- eISBN:
- 9780191601910
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198279248.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
Defeated in the East and discredited in the West, Marxism has broken down as an ideology and as a guide to governance. However, for all its flaws, it remains an important tool for understanding and ...
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Defeated in the East and discredited in the West, Marxism has broken down as an ideology and as a guide to governance. However, for all its flaws, it remains an important tool for understanding and raising questions about key aspects of modern life. In Marxism and the City, Ira Katznelson critically assesses the scholarship on cities that has developed within Marxism in the past quarter century to show how some of the most important weaknesses in Marxism as a social theory can be remedied by forcing it to engage seriously with cities and spatial concerns. He argues that such a Marxism still has a significant contribution to make to the discussion of historical questions such as the transition from feudalism to a world composed of capitalist economies and nation‐states and the acquiescence of the western working classes to capitalism. Katznelson demonstrates how a Marxism that embraces complexity and is open to engagement with other social–theoretical traditions can illuminate understanding of cities and of the patterns of class and group formation that have characterized urban life in the West.Less
Defeated in the East and discredited in the West, Marxism has broken down as an ideology and as a guide to governance. However, for all its flaws, it remains an important tool for understanding and raising questions about key aspects of modern life. In Marxism and the City, Ira Katznelson critically assesses the scholarship on cities that has developed within Marxism in the past quarter century to show how some of the most important weaknesses in Marxism as a social theory can be remedied by forcing it to engage seriously with cities and spatial concerns. He argues that such a Marxism still has a significant contribution to make to the discussion of historical questions such as the transition from feudalism to a world composed of capitalist economies and nation‐states and the acquiescence of the western working classes to capitalism. Katznelson demonstrates how a Marxism that embraces complexity and is open to engagement with other social–theoretical traditions can illuminate understanding of cities and of the patterns of class and group formation that have characterized urban life in the West.
Joseph V. Femia
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198279211
- eISBN:
- 9780191713842
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198279213.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
The collapse of the Soviet Union apparently sounded the death knell for Marxism as a blueprint for social change. Why has this doctrine—the repository of so many hopes and dreams—failed in its grand ...
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The collapse of the Soviet Union apparently sounded the death knell for Marxism as a blueprint for social change. Why has this doctrine—the repository of so many hopes and dreams—failed in its grand ambition to liberate the human race from poverty and oppression? Through a critical and systematic analysis of what Marx and his disciples had to say about democracy, the book tries to shed light on the reasons for this failure. It explores the bewildering variety of Marxist attitudes to democracy and relates this diversity to Marxism's inconsistent goals: active political participation and all‐embracing central planning, human emancipation and collective submission to the dialectical ‘truths’ of history. The book explains why Marxism's internal contradictions have always, in practice, been ‘solved’ through the imposition of despotic modes of government. Marxism's tragic flaw, it is concluded, is its unwillingness to recognize the distinctiveness and independence of the individual.Less
The collapse of the Soviet Union apparently sounded the death knell for Marxism as a blueprint for social change. Why has this doctrine—the repository of so many hopes and dreams—failed in its grand ambition to liberate the human race from poverty and oppression? Through a critical and systematic analysis of what Marx and his disciples had to say about democracy, the book tries to shed light on the reasons for this failure. It explores the bewildering variety of Marxist attitudes to democracy and relates this diversity to Marxism's inconsistent goals: active political participation and all‐embracing central planning, human emancipation and collective submission to the dialectical ‘truths’ of history. The book explains why Marxism's internal contradictions have always, in practice, been ‘solved’ through the imposition of despotic modes of government. Marxism's tragic flaw, it is concluded, is its unwillingness to recognize the distinctiveness and independence of the individual.
Ira Katznelson
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780198279242
- eISBN:
- 9780191601910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198279248.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This introductory chapter starts by discussing the vast array of definitions and typologies of the city and the many specifications of the objects of urban studies (geography, sociology, politics, ...
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This introductory chapter starts by discussing the vast array of definitions and typologies of the city and the many specifications of the objects of urban studies (geography, sociology, politics, urban economics, etc.) that are symptomatic of uncertainty not only as to whether the social sciences possess the necessary tools to analyse cities, but also as to whether the city, both as an empirical and theoretical concept, constitutes a coherent entity. It is suggested that a critique is needed of the tradition in Western social theory that tries to apprehend the partial elements of the city within an approach that treats modernity in terms of differentiation, and that Marxism's claim that it can illuminate studies of the city is precisely because it uses wide‐spanning and comprehensive concepts and hypotheses about the shape of history. The next section of the chapter looks at the differences between Marxism and the differentiation approaches to cities in the company of Max Weber, whose analysis was grounded in the large‐scale processes that underpin urban development; it also discusses the views of some of his contemporaries. The final section examines the specific content of Marxist social theory/analysis that stresses social processes and relationships, and counterposes the differentiation problematic in the analysis of cities. It also discusses the urban omissions within Marxism, and work done later (in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, and David Harvey) that reinvigorated the urban conversation within Marxism.Less
This introductory chapter starts by discussing the vast array of definitions and typologies of the city and the many specifications of the objects of urban studies (geography, sociology, politics, urban economics, etc.) that are symptomatic of uncertainty not only as to whether the social sciences possess the necessary tools to analyse cities, but also as to whether the city, both as an empirical and theoretical concept, constitutes a coherent entity. It is suggested that a critique is needed of the tradition in Western social theory that tries to apprehend the partial elements of the city within an approach that treats modernity in terms of differentiation, and that Marxism's claim that it can illuminate studies of the city is precisely because it uses wide‐spanning and comprehensive concepts and hypotheses about the shape of history. The next section of the chapter looks at the differences between Marxism and the differentiation approaches to cities in the company of Max Weber, whose analysis was grounded in the large‐scale processes that underpin urban development; it also discusses the views of some of his contemporaries. The final section examines the specific content of Marxist social theory/analysis that stresses social processes and relationships, and counterposes the differentiation problematic in the analysis of cities. It also discusses the urban omissions within Marxism, and work done later (in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, and David Harvey) that reinvigorated the urban conversation within Marxism.
Ira Katznelson
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780198279242
- eISBN:
- 9780191601910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198279248.003.0003
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
The most important urban studies within Marxism since the 1960s are examined by looking at the work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells, the three most influential recent students of ...
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The most important urban studies within Marxism since the 1960s are examined by looking at the work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells, the three most influential recent students of Marxism and the city, who, through the study of the city, have introduced space into the core of one or more of Marxism's three projects. By examining their work, it is possible to assess the current status of the respatialized Marxism they have tried to fashion, and this post‐1960s Marxism of the city has shown how Marxist social theory can powerfully illuminate things urban, and also how an explicitly urban focus can strengthen Marxism as social and empirical theory. The work accomplished in the past quarter‐century has treated Marx's project of understanding epochal change mainly as background to more current events, although it has successfully elaborated and deepened his project of the analysis of capitalism as an economic system. However, in spite of much effort, it has contributed only unsteadily to Marx's project of a social theory for capitalist societies. The limitations of these Marxist urban studies are identified as being due principally to a certain narrowness of subject matter, a lack of engagement with history, and a restrictive treatment of the issues central to, but difficult for, Marxist social theory: base and superstructure, structure and agency, and causal determination, which neither Harvey nor Castells tackled persuasively in their later work in the 1980s.Less
The most important urban studies within Marxism since the 1960s are examined by looking at the work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells, the three most influential recent students of Marxism and the city, who, through the study of the city, have introduced space into the core of one or more of Marxism's three projects. By examining their work, it is possible to assess the current status of the respatialized Marxism they have tried to fashion, and this post‐1960s Marxism of the city has shown how Marxist social theory can powerfully illuminate things urban, and also how an explicitly urban focus can strengthen Marxism as social and empirical theory. The work accomplished in the past quarter‐century has treated Marx's project of understanding epochal change mainly as background to more current events, although it has successfully elaborated and deepened his project of the analysis of capitalism as an economic system. However, in spite of much effort, it has contributed only unsteadily to Marx's project of a social theory for capitalist societies. The limitations of these Marxist urban studies are identified as being due principally to a certain narrowness of subject matter, a lack of engagement with history, and a restrictive treatment of the issues central to, but difficult for, Marxist social theory: base and superstructure, structure and agency, and causal determination, which neither Harvey nor Castells tackled persuasively in their later work in the 1980s.
Ira Katznelson
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780198279242
- eISBN:
- 9780191601910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198279248.003.0006
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
For Marxism, the main issues of social theory within the industrial phase of capitalism focus on the formation of working classes, and this subject is best treated, in significant measure, as an ...
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For Marxism, the main issues of social theory within the industrial phase of capitalism focus on the formation of working classes, and this subject is best treated, in significant measure, as an urban one. The spatial requirements of industrial capitalism shaped nineteenth‐century cities – their patterns of growth, interconnections, built environments, and social geographies – and, in turn, the experience of such cities, and attempts to make sense of their properties, were decisive elements in the early histories of Western working classes. The cost to Marxism of its neglect of cities is especially pronounced with regard to these issues, and the new urban Marxism of the 1970s and 1980s has been important precisely because of its attempts to put an end to the tradition's urban and spatial elisions – what Marxist social theory badly requires but has never secured is the systematic inculcation of an urban–geographical imagination into the analysis of working‐class formation. This chapter sketches an example of such an effort, which entails three related steps: a specification of the structural determinants of city growth and development; a presentation of the spatial configurations characteristic of these new spaces; and a systematic, contingent, and comparative account of how the new working classes made sense of these spaces in the different Western countries. It does so by comparing and contrasting the cases of working‐class formation in nineteenth‐century England and the United States, although most of the discussion of spatial reorganization focuses on English cities.Less
For Marxism, the main issues of social theory within the industrial phase of capitalism focus on the formation of working classes, and this subject is best treated, in significant measure, as an urban one. The spatial requirements of industrial capitalism shaped nineteenth‐century cities – their patterns of growth, interconnections, built environments, and social geographies – and, in turn, the experience of such cities, and attempts to make sense of their properties, were decisive elements in the early histories of Western working classes. The cost to Marxism of its neglect of cities is especially pronounced with regard to these issues, and the new urban Marxism of the 1970s and 1980s has been important precisely because of its attempts to put an end to the tradition's urban and spatial elisions – what Marxist social theory badly requires but has never secured is the systematic inculcation of an urban–geographical imagination into the analysis of working‐class formation. This chapter sketches an example of such an effort, which entails three related steps: a specification of the structural determinants of city growth and development; a presentation of the spatial configurations characteristic of these new spaces; and a systematic, contingent, and comparative account of how the new working classes made sense of these spaces in the different Western countries. It does so by comparing and contrasting the cases of working‐class formation in nineteenth‐century England and the United States, although most of the discussion of spatial reorganization focuses on English cities.
Ira Katznelson
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780198279242
- eISBN:
- 9780191601910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198279248.003.0007
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
Section I of this chapter discusses how, by not embarking on the journey linking city space, capitalist development, and class formation, Marxism denied itself a critical dimension in the material ...
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Section I of this chapter discusses how, by not embarking on the journey linking city space, capitalist development, and class formation, Marxism denied itself a critical dimension in the material analysis both of the target it wished to confront and of the class it expected to be the agent of this successful engagement. Section II looks at how the separation between the social classes within the new social geography of the capitalist city in the nineteenth century helped assure the residential propinquity of members of the working class, as well as their isolation from other classes. However, with the elaboration of new networks made possible by the nationalization of labour markets, there was a growing sense that working classes shared a fate that transcended given localities, while advances in communications and transportation made the ties between class and space more complicated and tentative. Analyses are included of this break in working‐class history given in the work of Krishan Kumar and Craig Calhoun, and by Olivier Zunz and Richard Oestreicher in their studies of Detroit at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sections III–V show that the relationship of Marxism and the city and urban space now stands on unsure ground, since it is the politics and viability of class itself as the dominant form of collective identity that is currently under challenge; the discussion given here draws on the work of Mark Gottendiener and Eric Hobsbaum within the new urban Marxism.Less
Section I of this chapter discusses how, by not embarking on the journey linking city space, capitalist development, and class formation, Marxism denied itself a critical dimension in the material analysis both of the target it wished to confront and of the class it expected to be the agent of this successful engagement. Section II looks at how the separation between the social classes within the new social geography of the capitalist city in the nineteenth century helped assure the residential propinquity of members of the working class, as well as their isolation from other classes. However, with the elaboration of new networks made possible by the nationalization of labour markets, there was a growing sense that working classes shared a fate that transcended given localities, while advances in communications and transportation made the ties between class and space more complicated and tentative. Analyses are included of this break in working‐class history given in the work of Krishan Kumar and Craig Calhoun, and by Olivier Zunz and Richard Oestreicher in their studies of Detroit at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sections III–V show that the relationship of Marxism and the city and urban space now stands on unsure ground, since it is the politics and viability of class itself as the dominant form of collective identity that is currently under challenge; the discussion given here draws on the work of Mark Gottendiener and Eric Hobsbaum within the new urban Marxism.
Chris Wickham (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264034
- eISBN:
- 9780191734601
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264034.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
Since 1989, there have been many claims that Marxist approaches to history are out of date, but history has not stopped, and historical change continues to need explanation. There is still plenty of ...
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Since 1989, there have been many claims that Marxist approaches to history are out of date, but history has not stopped, and historical change continues to need explanation. There is still plenty of space for structural analysis of how history in all periods develops, and a Marxism un-linked to the Soviet past offers to many the most rigorous of these approaches. This volume explores from a wide variety of perspectives what Marxism has done for history-writing, and what it can, or cannot, still do. Eight historians and social scientists give their perspectives, both from Marxist and from non-Marxist positions, on history and what role Marxist analysis has in it.Less
Since 1989, there have been many claims that Marxist approaches to history are out of date, but history has not stopped, and historical change continues to need explanation. There is still plenty of space for structural analysis of how history in all periods develops, and a Marxism un-linked to the Soviet past offers to many the most rigorous of these approaches. This volume explores from a wide variety of perspectives what Marxism has done for history-writing, and what it can, or cannot, still do. Eight historians and social scientists give their perspectives, both from Marxist and from non-Marxist positions, on history and what role Marxist analysis has in it.
Johanna Malt
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199253425
- eISBN:
- 9780191698132
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253425.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such ...
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In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.Less
In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.
