- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Humanity Books (20 Mar 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1573928194
- ISBN-13: 978-1573928199
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.3 x 2.1 cm
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
1,386,926 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #35 in Books > History > Europe > Russia > Communism in Russia
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..". extraordinarily timely and necessary ... essential to anyone wishing to analyse capitalism today."
Product Description
In this classic exposition of Marxist thought, Raya Dunayevskaya, with clarity and great insight, traces the development and explains the essential features of Marx's analysis of history. Using as her point of departure the Industrial and French Revolutions, the European upheavals of 1848, the American Civil War, and the Paris Commune of 1871, Dunayevskaya shows how Marx, inspired by these events, adapted Hegel's philosophy to analyse the course of history as a dialectical process that moves 'from practice to theory'. The essence of Marx's philosophy, as Dunayevskaya points out, is the human struggle for freedom, which entails the gradual emergence of a proletarian revolutionary consciousness and the discovery through conflict of the means for realising complete human freedom. But freedom for Marx meant freedom not only from capitalist economic exploitation but also from all political restraints. Continuing her historical analysis, Dunayevskaya reveals how completely Marx's original conception of freedom was perverted through its adaptations by Stalin in Russia and Mao in China, and the subsequent erection of totalitarian states. The exploitation of the masses persisted under these regimes in the form of a new 'state capitalism'. Yet despite the profound derailment of Marxist political philosophy in the twentieth century, Dunayevskaya points to developments such as the Hungarian revolt of 1956, and the Civil Rights struggles in the United States as signs that the indomitable quest for freedom on the part of the downtrodden cannot be forever repressed. The Hegelian dialectic of events propelled by the spirit of the masses thus moves on inexorably with the hope for the future achievement of political, economic, and social freedom and equality for all.
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Essential for understanding Marxism
26 Sep 2011
Format:Paperback
This is the founding document of Marxist-Humanism, written in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and before the great upheavals of the 1960's. Reading it is essential in understanding that time and why the revolutions of the masses failed during that period. What was missing from the intellectual movements influencing the masses at that point was not the "right plan", but the right philosophy of revolution which posits the masses as the agents in their own struggle for freedom.
The structure of the book is chronological, as the title states. Beginning from the period of the bourgeois revolutions, it leads up to the 1950's tracing how "post-Marx Marxism" lost its way in fetishizing vanguards, bureaucratic structures, and other un-dialectical constructs that they placed before the masses of oppressed people fighting for liberation. The main lesson of the book is not that intellectuals and Marxists need to come up with a means to create socialsim, but that the movement of the masses for liberation is socialism, and that one cannot substitute the actions of individuals from some vague collective determined from the top down.
In this age of capitalist crisis, this book needs to be seriously contemplated so that a new philosophy of liberation can lead humankind to cast off the shackles of capitalism.
The structure of the book is chronological, as the title states. Beginning from the period of the bourgeois revolutions, it leads up to the 1950's tracing how "post-Marx Marxism" lost its way in fetishizing vanguards, bureaucratic structures, and other un-dialectical constructs that they placed before the masses of oppressed people fighting for liberation. The main lesson of the book is not that intellectuals and Marxists need to come up with a means to create socialsim, but that the movement of the masses for liberation is socialism, and that one cannot substitute the actions of individuals from some vague collective determined from the top down.
In this age of capitalist crisis, this book needs to be seriously contemplated so that a new philosophy of liberation can lead humankind to cast off the shackles of capitalism.
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