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Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology (New Critical Theory)
Eduardo Mendieta; Enrique Dussel Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0847697770 |
Book Description
Enrique Ambrosini Dussel is and has been one of the most prolific Latin American philosophers of the last 100 years. This is the definitive English language collection of Dussel's enormous body of work in ethics, economics, history, and liberation theology.Customer Reviews:
Theorizing Liberation from the Underside of Modernity.......2006-02-20
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The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond
Boris Groys Manufacturer: Princeton University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0691055963 |
Book Description
As communism collapses into ruins, Boris Groys provokes our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists' demands that art should move from depicting to transforming the world. The revolutionaries of October 1917 promised to create a society that was not only more just and more economically stable but also more beautiful, and they intended that the entire life of the nation be completely subordinate to Communist party leaders commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single "artistic" whole out of even the most minute details. What were the origins of this idea? And what were its artistic and literary ramifications? In addressing these issues, Groys questions the view that socialist realism was an "art for the masses." Groys argues instead that the "total art" proposed by Stalin and his followers was formulated by well-educated elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the future-oriented logic of avant-garde thinking. After explaining the internal evolution of Stalinist art, Groys shows how socialist realism gradually disintegrated after Stalin's death. In an undecided and insecure Soviet culture, artists focused on restoring historical continuity or practicing "sots art," a term derived from the combined names of socialist realism (sotsrealizm) and pop art. Increasingly popular in the West, sots-artists incorporate the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrate its similarity to supposedly opposing myths.
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Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse
Antonio Negri Manufacturer: Autonomedia ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 093675625X |
Book Description
A key figure in the Italian Autonomia Movement reads Marx's Gründrisse, developing the critical and controversial theoretical apparatus that informs the zero-work strategy and other elements so crucial to this new and heretical tendency in Marxist theory. A challenge to both capitalist and socialist apologists for waged slavery.Customer Reviews:
An entire course taught by Toni Negri!.......2003-08-12
Through these lectures Negri provides a very unorthodox, very sophisticated and politically powerful reading of Marx. Ultimately, you must understand Negri's reading of Marx to fully understand Negri's own theoretical analyses, developed most recently in 'Politics of Subversion,' 'Labor of Dionysus,' 'Empire,' and 'Time for Revolution.' ('Empire' was co-written by Michael Hardt, and LD includes some early essays by Negri and a book-length analysis co-authored by Negri & Hardt.)
Negri is not an orthodox Marxist. He speaks openly of communism, but of communism here and now, of communism as an ongoing revolutionary process -- not as a state or government or even as an "economic system." As far as I know, he was never a member of the CP, and never embraced "state socialism" or the so-called communism of the USSR or PRC.
Nor is Negri a terrorist, as the Italian state charged. Indeed, his criticism of terrorism is the sharpest criticism and most coherent critique of terrorism I have ever read. See 'Communists Like Us: New Lines of Alliance' for an example of his writing on the subject. And for a courtroom transcript, see the (nicely-bound!) Red Notes collection of Negri's writings, 'Revolution Retrieved.' In that transcript, you see that Negri's criticism of terrorism actually get used as evidence against him, in an unbelievable echo from Orwell's '1984.' (Sadly, it is all too easy to imagine Ashcroft making the very same argument today.)
In any case, if you're up for a college course on the Grundrisse, taught by Negri, read this book! And/or, if you really want to understand Negri's theoretical framework, and his analysis of capitalism, then read this book!
My only criticism is with the binding. Like so many books today, the binding breaks all too easily. And due to the nature of this book's content, if you really put it to use, you will be referring to the book again and again as you read 'The Grundrisse' and other related books and writings. Just to understand Negri in this book, it takes some repeated reading of sections. So treat the book carefully. It does, however, have a great cover design, and a great choice of blurbs on the back.
A final note to the folks at Autonomedia, if you're reading this: it's great that you've published this, and that you continue to do so. But really, better binding would be much appreciated. I've went through two copies myself. If you'd like to see an example of excellent binding in paperback book, see the Red Notes book of Negri's writings. If you could do something like that -- with nicely-sewn signatures -- even in just a limited run, say for a deluxe edition of MBM, I suspect people would buy it. Hell, I would cherish it.
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Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post Modernism and Beyond (Key Contemporary Thinkers)
Douglas Kellner Manufacturer: Stanford University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0804717389 |
Customer Reviews:
Critical but excellent.......2004-11-23
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Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class
Michael A. Lebowitz Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0333964292 |
Book Description
A completely reworked edition of his classic volume, Michael Lebowitz's Beyond Capital explores one of the great debates among Marx scholars, that of the implications of Marx's uncompleted works. Lebowitz focuses on the side of the workers, which, he argues, was not developed in Marx's Das Kapital and which was to be the subject of his intended book on wage-labor. Beyond Capital criticizes the one-sidedness of much of Marxist thought and argues that Marx's political economy of the working class and the way in which human beings produce themselves through their struggles are central for going beyond capital.Customer Reviews:
Brilliant and devastating.......2006-05-12
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Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition
Istvan Meszaros Manufacturer: Monthly Review Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0853458812 Release Date: 2000-12-01 |
Book Description
"Not only profound in its analysis, but also so passionately inspired by sympathy for the downtrodden and their struggle for liberation. . ."
--Daniel Singer, The Nation
"This is an important book, heavy in size and tone. It belongs in every serious library."
--Choice
Customer Reviews:
our instrumentality in the sickness of the totality.......2000-04-16
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Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter With Marx And Freud (Continuum Impacts)
Erich Fromm Manufacturer: Continuum International Publishing Group ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 082641897X |
Customer Reviews:
A wise book by a truly productive and wonderful human being........1999-06-30
A wise book by a truly productive and wonderful human being........1999-06-30
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Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (Critics of the Twentieth Century)
Renate Holub Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0415075106 |
Book Description
Antonio Gramsci examines the influential work of the great Italian thinker. Renate Holub seeks to reclaim Gramsci from classical Marxism, and instead places him in the broad European critical context--alongside the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and sociolinguistics. This book points to Gramsci's affinities with the cultural theories inscribed in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Bloch, Brecht, Benjamin). It also establishes affinities between Gramsci's linguistic and phenomenological forms of knowledge.
Placing Gramsci in this broader context evokes the immense conceptual and methodological complexity of his work, a complexity Holub discusses in terms of "differential pragmatics." It is this very complexity which is, the author claims, relevant today when constructing our own critical theories. Faced with the transnationalization of capital, the centralization of monetary and economic power, and the decentralization of production processes, a critical theory today must investigate, in the context of information technology, the possibilities of alternative positions to such an order. Gramsci's methodological itineraries are more useful, this book argues, than other critical theories in developing ways of seeing and doing that are commensurate with the complexities of this era.
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Above and Beyond: From Soviet General to Ukrainian State Builder (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Publications)
Kostiantyn P. Morozov , and Sherman W. Garnett Manufacturer: Harvard University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0916458776 |
Book Description
Above and Beyond is the first book to appear in the West by a major Ukrainian independence figure and is the first by a former Soviet general to discuss the inner workings of the USSR's military. Morozov provides behind-the-scenes insights on Yeltsin, Kuchma, Dudaev, and other important players still active today. His book will firmly alter our perception of the USSR and its demise, the Soviet military machine, and the rise of modern, independent Ukraine.In September 1991 Major General Kostiantyn Morozov informed the Soviet Armed Forces Command that he was no longer a Soviet general, but the new Ukrainian Minister of Defense. He then set out to create the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF), mounting a brilliant campaign to remove from Ukraine military personnel who were not Ukrainian citizens and not loyal to the new Ukrainian state, taking over the Ukrainian-based assets, nuclear and otherwise, of the Soviet Army, and firmly grounding the idea of an independent UAF in the public mind. Within a year of assuming his post, he was overseeing the second-largest army in Europe and the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The shock waves of his efforts would eventually lead Vladimir Zhirinovsky to put Morozov at the top of his "hit list" of those responsible for destroying the USSR.
Morozov guided his forces through a minefield of intrigues as various figures sought to undermine the UAF and subordinate it to the armed forces of the CIS and, therefore, to Russia. He stood as an important figure in the political landscape for his blunt candor and total devotion to Ukrainian sovereignty. This was especially remarkable because Morozov was ethnically half-Russian (or so he thought), spoke no Ukrainian, and came from the eastern part of Ukraine, long believed to be faithful to Russia and Soviet rule.
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Beyond Beijing: Liberalization and the Regions in China (Routledge Studies in China in Transition, 2)
Dali L. Yang Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0415145015 |
Book Description
There are wide disparities of wealth between the different regions of China. The result has been increased tension between ethnic groups and serious divisions between China's provinces. This book offers a balanced assessment of the dynamics and consequences of the decentralization of power and resources in post-Mao China. The author argues that increasing decentralisation has unleashed much competition and emulation among local governments. He discusses also the impact on regional disparities and cleavages, and government efforts to address regional disparities. This book is an authoritative study of an issue that will remain highly visible on China's political agenda for the foreseeable future.
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