In the midst of a worldwide social crisis, Marxism has apparently lost momentum and, in many quarters, has been abandoned as obsolete. Cyril Smith reinstates Marx's work as a relevant source of inspiration, arguing that the Marxist tradition has essentially ignored the fundamental ideas of the man himself.

The Strange Death of Marxism seeks to refute certain misconceptions about the current European Left and its relation to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties that existed in the recent past. Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices. Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the emphasis on the specifically American roots of the European Left. Gottfried examines the multicultural orientation of this Left and concludes that it has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. It does, however, owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Europe. American culture and American political reform have foreshadowed related developments in Europe by years or even whole decades. Contrary to the impression that the United States has taken antibourgeois attitudes from Europeans, the author argues exactly the opposite. Since the end of World War II, Europe has lived in the shadow of an American empire that has affected the Old World, including its self-described anti-Americans. Gottfried believes that this influence goes back to who reads or watches whom more than to economic and military disparities. It is the awareness of American cultural as well as material dominance that fuels the anti-Americanism that is particularly strong on the European Left. That part of the European spectrum has, however, reproduced in a more extreme form what began as an American leap into multiculturalism. Hostility toward America, however, can be transformed quickly into extreme affection for the United States, which occurred during the Clinton administration and during the international efforts to bring a multicultural society to the Balkans. Clearly written and well conceived, The Strange Death of Marxism will be of special interest to political scientists, historians of contemporary Europe, and those critical of multicultural trends, particularly among Euro-American conservatives.

Explores Marx’s attitude to “developing” societies. Includes translations of Marx’s notes from the 1880s, among the most important finds of the last century.

A quarter-century after its first publication, A Shopkeeper's Millennium remains a landmark work--brilliant both as a new interpretation of the intimate connections among politics, economy, and religion during the Second Great Awakening, and as a surprising portrait of a rapidly growing frontier city. The religious revival that transformed America in the 1820s, making it the most militantly Protestant nation on earth and spawning reform movements dedicated to temperance and to the abolition of slavery, had an especially powerful effect in Rochester, New York. Paul E. Johnson explores the reasons for the revival's spectacular success there, suggesting important links between its moral accounting and the city's new industrial world. In a new preface, he reassesses his evidence and his conclusions in this major work.

In this excellent study of Karl Marx's thought, Cyril Smith takes a long and winding route that starts with classical world thought. When he arrives at the door to Marx's pantheon we see that, with the significant yet largely overlooked example of Spinoza, most thinkers—and especially Western ones—are opposed to essential aspects of democracy. In Marx and the Future of the Human Cyril Smith explains that Karl Marx, more than any other thinker, is misrepresented by what has come to be understood as 'Marxism.' Marxism has developed into, among other things, a method for analyzing capitalism, a way of looking at history, and a way to theorize the role of the working class in a future society. Marx, however, speaks about a conception of human life that was absent during his lifetime and remains absent today. Marx sought 'the alteration of humans on a mass scale:' economics, politics, daily lived-life, and spiritual life. In discussing Marx and spirituality, Cyril Smith relates Marx to the thought of William Blake. Someone coming to Marx for the first time as well as the seasoned scholar can read this book. Marx and the Future of the Human is a book rife with thoughtful and creative connections written by someone who has spent most of his life close to the spirit of Karl Marx's thought.

In today’s vernacular, Marx ‘outed’ capitalism well over a century ago; however, his explanation has been both ignored and misinterpreted by not only his detractors but also by many socialists and even a considerable number of Marxists as well. Today we are experiencing the full impact and suffering the repercussions of capitalism’s inherent need to grow and become, more than ever before, a fully internationalized and integrated system of socioeconomic control and domination—the global system that many commentators have suddenly remembered Marx and Engels (1848) presciently forecasted in the Communist Manifesto. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy was triumphantly proclaimed. The Cold War was over, and we were promised a lasting peace. As we entered the third millennium, the promise of peace was brutally dashed, and humanity now appears to have entered a state of permanent war. We have just witnessed the near total collapse of the global financial system and are continuing to experience, as we will for years to come, the collateral damage this crisis has caused. Problems we were facing before the current crisis will be exacerbated—escalating social and economic divisions, jobless growth, injustice, and oppression together with an environment in varying stages of degradation. Daily, on television news, we are bombarded by the schizoid media images of capitalism’s extremes: the ravaged faces and wasted bodies of some of the thousands suffering famine, or the millions living in the world’s slums, followed within a blink of the eye by the gleaming, yet vacuous, smile and sumptuously adorned figure of some extravagant, wealthy individual who is one of the select members of the global upper class. Are we becoming conditioned to accept such contrasts and regard them as normal and inevitable at a time when we have the potential to eliminate scarcity and eradicate human deprivation? The author argues that revolutionary critical education is needed to inform and form a social movement capable of challenging and then transforming capitalism. She also offers an accessible account of Marx’s dialectical critique and exposé of capitalism, clearly demonstrating the real enemy that should be the focus of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization struggles. This is an account that explains why our focus should not be on greedy, individual capitalists, Wall Street financial institutions, particular multinational corporations, national governments, or even their handmaiden institutions, such as, the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc. but instead the global network of capitalist socioecomomic relations and consequent habituated human practices in which we are all involved. These together with the historically specific form of capitalist wealth are the real enemy—the essence of capitalism—that must be abolished in order for humanity to have any hope of social and economic justice in the future.