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The “List Critique” is the most explicit work Karl Marx wrote on nationalism. This work actually remained unknown until it appeared in a Soviet historical journal in 1971, long after he died. Conventional Marxian scholarship has tackled Marx's stand on nation and nationalism, however problems still remain despite its wide acceptance. In Marx's view, modern society consisted of two classes: the capitalists and the industrial workers. The theories and practices plus the Industrial Revolution all added to one process and that was the rise of capitalism. Meanwhile, the doctrine of the list was a contrast to everything that was taking place in society. The list called for the unification of all classes of a nation against other nations. Friedrich Meinecke pointed out the wave of nationalism while Marxism postulated the formation of the proletariat as a force that transcended national identities. Thus, Marxism viewed nationalism as the enemy.

The chapter discusses Marx's views on competition when it came to Germany's future. Marx perceived nationalism as a bourgeois ideology. He thought that the “List Critique” served as a spokesman for the German bourgeoisie. The “List Critique” provided a detailed elaboration of the Marxian position on the German Question by focusing specifically on German nationalism. The List represented the aim of the German bourgeois and that was to establish the domination of capitalism. It clearly shows how Marx was merciless in his assessment of the German bourgeoisie. He thought that nationalism was for the interest of the bourgeoisie and that “national liberation” stood in the way of the real one.

This chapter focuses on the issues of urban identity, essentialism, and Marxian class analysis. It shows that the notion of identity is best viewed primarily as hybrid, overlapping, and undecidable and explains that the notion of hybrid identities offers a more compelling alternative to the liberal, communitarian, or Marxian perspectives on the possibilities of the liberating power of identity in the city. It considers the work of Manuel Castells as successive attempts to develop a non-essentialist or nonreductive account of urban identity or urban agency and traces the effect of essentialist assumptions on his attempt to escape the class reductive aspects of Marxian theory.

This chapter examines John Dewey's liberalism, arguing that his social and political theory expressed the self-understanding of modern society—“modern” being no more precise in its denotation than “postmodernist,” but certainly meaning at different times both the society that lived off and built on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the society that came into existence with the capitalist Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After expounding on Dewey's views on the demands of modernity, the chapter considers his belief in the need for industrial democracy as a complement to political democracy. It also discusses postmodernist bourgeois liberalism, Dewey's views on idealism and naturalism, his Democracy and Education and its references to freedom and equality, and the impact of World War I on Dewey's poise. Finally, it describes Dewey's non-Marxian radicalism and argues that Dewey was a philosopher rather than a political activist.

This chapter deals specifically with unresolved issues that emerged in studies of peasant societies worldwide by using a Marxian approach to clarify and specify the relevance of the concept of rent to an understanding of peasants. Peasant studies in American anthropology have taken two different approaches. This study focuses on an approach that departs from the study of the material, economic, and political processes at work in peasant life, and aims at constructing a political economy of peasantry. It discusses mechanisms linking cultivators to economy and polity, to market and state. Significant variations in the peasant condition could be accounted for by the different ways in which rent was assigned and transferred. Rent undergoes a change of function. Peasants—in exchange for their personal freedom and the right to private property—must pay taxes to the state.

This chapter argues that self-appropriation, from below, can be fruitfully complimented by a prophetic Berriganian theology of liberation from above. Marsh’s formula to express this relationship is that intellectual, moral, and religious conversion should lead to radical political conversion. To further deepen and enrich the relationship between self-appropriation and liberation, Marxian social theory is used to understand and criticize capitalism, imperialism, and militarism. Marsh further stresses that the events of Catonsville can serve to bring into question an overly comfortable relationship of Catholic universities and Catholic academics to the secular city. In such accommodation, is the academic mission compromised? How freely and comprehensively can the desire to know operate when it is constrained by the goals and practices of empire?

This chapter introduces the Chinese Marxian statistics of population, which was formed by Liu Zheng. It discusses the senior generation of leaders who assumed power during the early post-Mao years and their views on the population question. Next, the chapter studies the rocky history of population studies during the Maoist years, and also outlines the making of the problem–solutions–costs construct.

This chapter introduces Liang Zhongtang, one of the specialists who, during the late 1970s, voiced concern about what might happen if the one-child policy became political reality. The first part focuses on Liang's life story, tracing the imprint of Maoist politics on his intellectual training, professional location, and personal experiences. This is then followed by a study on the practices whereby he created a distinctive Marxian humanism of population. Finally, the chapter compares the three sciences of population, as well as the larger intellectual frameworks, political values, and visions of state–science–society interrelations that these embodied.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about cities and city life. This volume specifically addresses the potential of cities to offer men and women the ability to comprehend and master the complex, multicultural realities of the modern world. It discusses the Marxian urban theory or Marxian urbanism and comments on the works of some of the most significant theorists of Marxian urban theory including Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Ira Katznelson. It also examines the inadequacies of the most important responses to the critique of class reductionism and proposes alternate ways of seeing identity, structure, and space that avoid these shortcomings.

This chapter examines the work of David Harvey concerning urban theory. It identifies the place that Harvey's reaffirmation of classical Marxism occupies within the discourse of Marxian urbanism and analyzes Harvey's interpretation of urban conflict through his theory of urban-based movements as displaced class struggles. This chapter argues that by discounting the political and institutional salience of the distinction between workplace and residential community Harvey's model has two principal drawbacks. The chapter also considers Claus Offe's analysis of the two logics of collective action in the context of the problems of trade-union politics when faced with the expansion and differentiation of their traditional constituencies.

This chapter examines the work of Ira Katznelson in the context of a Marxian framework for the problems of identity, space, and structure. It explains that Katznelson's effort to develop a framework for Marxian urban theory took the specificity of the U.S. socio-political structure as a crucial ingredient for avoiding the pitfalls found in the work of Manuel Castells and David Harvey, and the most systematic and nuanced attempt to link class and space within the Marxian framework. It explores the history and place of Marxist and socialist discourse in American political culture and comments on the debates over the peculiarly limited nature of urban policy making in American cities and the relative absence of working-class-based urban movements and agendas.

This chapter focuses on Gilles Deleuze's view on the concepts on the life and in control societies. It explains that Deleuze has provided historical reconstruction of the passage of disciplinary societies to societies of control by setting out from the dynamics of difference and repetition, thereby generating new interpretations of the birth and development of capitalism. It discusses Marxian analysis of the capital-labour relation and highlights the usefulness of Deleuzian interpretation of Michel Foucault in analysing the dynamics of difference and repetition.

This chapter discusses the esthetics in Soviet operas, with particular emphasis on Kirill Molchanov's Zori zdes' tikhiye (The Dawns Are Quiet Here). The American première of The Dawns Are Quiet Here was held at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in July 1975. The opera derives its inspiration from the “Great Patriotic War” of 1941–45, and the Tolstoyan roots of “socialist realist” esthetics can be observed in it. The precedents of social realist esthetics of Soviet art and literature can be found in the late esthetic tracts of Leo Tolstoy, particularly in his insistence upon the preeminence of moral import as a criterion of esthetic worth. All art, Tolstoy asserted, must contain the Good and the Important. If these are present, a given work is “moral” and satisfies one of Tolstoy's three criteria for consideration as art, the other two being intelligibility and sincerity. The chapter argues that the socialist realist esthetics was not rooted in the Marxian esthetics, and discusses the impact of socialist realist esthetics in Molchanov's opera.

Compared with all other forms of socialism, Marxian socialism was the natural outcome of the historical laws of class struggle and revolution that Karl Marx assumed he had discovered. Marx's socialism was utopianism in which a sophisticated theory of social and economic development reinforced the earlier ideal of a stateless collectivism with complete distributive justice. Marx incorporated in his thought the full importance of economic development through technical progress and industrialization, the first philosopher in history to do so. According to Marxism, economic development provided the material prerequisites to ensure the effective socialist redistribution of wealth in the name of justice. This developmental function was supposed to be the distinctive work of capitalism rather than the responsibility of socialism. A new kind of socialist ideal—production socialism—was envisioned as a replacement for capitalism in terms of accumulating capital and developing the productive forces of society. In Russia, production socialism formed the foundation of the Communists' betrayal of democratic and egalitarian ideals as well as their creation of the so-called bureaucratic state capitalism.

This introductory chapter argues that what has come to be called the Marxian tradition takes shape around a long series of disavowals of Karl Marx's critical-political project. It takes Marx and his closest readers to have had their critical-political project in all its radicality in mind: as an account of wild mediation with every bit of edge ground into it. Because it does not sit well with mechanisms of capture, of value-production, of universal translation, of disciplinarization; with mechanisms that link, however dialectically, the “world” with the “local;” this project has remained a peripheral, contested, mostly unrecognized aspect of the Marxian tradition.