Robert Biel's Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement traces the history of Eurocentric--and anti-Eurocentric--currents in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, arguing that this distortion was key to the development and spread of revisionism, and ultimately to the failures of the communist project, in the 20th century. A work of intellectual history, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement explores the relationship between Eurocentrism, alienation, and racism, while tracing the different ideas about imperialism, colonialism, "progress", and non-European peoples as they were grappled with by revolutionaries in both the colonized and colonizing nations. Teasing out racist errors and anti-racist insights within this history, Biel reveals a century-long struggle to assert the centrality of the most exploited within the struggle against capitalism. The roles of key figures in the Marxist-Leninist canon--Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao--within this struggle are explored, as are those of others whose work may be less familiar to some readers, such as Sultan Galiev, Lamine Senghor, Lin Biao, R.P. Dutt, Samir Amin, and others. In pursuit of the anti-racist and anti-colonial goal, Biel has made an important contribution to understanding the development of Marxist thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, with strategic implications for our current revolutionary project.

In our 21st century, the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are still widely taught, hotly debated, and adapted to different political and sociological contexts and theories. Today the “spectre of communism” haunts not only Europe, as assumed by the authors of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, but the world as a whole. After Marxism achieved statehood on the ruins of the Tsarist Empire as the consequence of the Russian Revolution in October 1917, revolutionary independence movements in Asia, Africa, and the Americas introduced new and varied readings of the socialist classics in the 20th century. This collection of articles, by contributors from across the globe, discusses Marxism based on Marx’s and Engels’s ideas and œuvre from transnational perspectives that connect Germany and Europe for example with Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Russia, and Turkey. With a critical postcolonial approach, the pluriversal debates look at the heritage of Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) in the context of histories of resistance, analytical thought, theory building, a latent Eurocentric outlook, and the ‘discursive monument’ Marxism.

Eurocentrism influences virtually all established historical writing. With the rise of Prussia and, by extension, Europe, eurocentrism became the dominant paradigm for world history. Employing the approaches of Gramsci and Foucault, Peter Gran proposes a reconceptualization of world history. He challenges the traditional convention of relying on totalitarian or democratic functions of a particular state to explain and understand relationships of authority and resistance in a number of national contexts. Gran maintains that there is no single developmental model but diverse forms of hegemony that emerged out of the political crisis following the penetration of capitalism into each nation. In making comparisons between seemingly disparate and distinctive nations and by questioning established canons of comparative inquiry, Gran encourages people to recognize the similarities between the West and non-West nations.

Salah M. Hassan schlägt in seinem Text eine Neubetrachtung des afrikanischen Marxismus vor, mit der er gleichzeitig eine Befreiung Marx', eines für das 20. Jahrhundert einflussreichsten politischen Denkers, vom Eurozentrismus bezweckt. Während der Entkolonisierung und der Befreiungsbewegung in Afrika und anderen Teilen der Dritten Welt in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts, die mit den Anfängen der documenta zusammenfielen, wurde die Ideologie des Marxismus zur intellektuellen Leitkultur. Als Beispiele für die Innovationskraft und Kreativität des afrikanischen/schwarzen Marxismus, die in der gegenwärtigen Forschung nur wenig berücksichtigt werden, führt Hassan Texte zweier Schlüsselfiguren zusammen: die politische Verteidigungsrede By Virtue of Marxism, Your Honor (1956) von Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub (1927–1971), dem Gründer der Sudanesischen Kommunistischen Partei, der 1971 zusammen mit anderen führenden Mitgliedern der Partei hingerichtet wurde, sowie den Brief an Maurice Thorez (1956) von Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), dem martiniquinischen Philosophen, Dichter und Kritiker, in dem er die Gründe für seinen späteren Austritt aus der Kommunistischen Partei Frankreichs darlegt. Salah M. Hassan ist Goldwin Smith Professor, Direktor des Institute for Comparative Modernities sowie Professor der African and African Diaspora Art History an der Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; er ist Mitglied des Honorary Advisory Committee der dOCUMENTA (13).

This book offers a novel account of how the Chinese Communist Party has achieved rapid economic growth while preserving political stability. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and challenging existing paradigms of political economy, it sheds light on the financial foundations of China's evolving authoritarian capitalism.

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.