This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

Much attention has been directed to the pivotal debates of the 1930s amongst four luminaries of German Marxist culture -- between George Lukacs and Bertolt Brecht, which focused on realism in literature, and between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, which dealt with avant-garde and mass culture in capitalist society. "Marxism and Modernism" gives these wide-ranging controversies their most intensive treatment to date, analyzing them in terms of the major challenge to a Marxist aesthetics in this century: the interpretation of the formal and historical meaning, and social value, of cultural modernism. The intellectual developments of each of these four influential writers are examined, along with their responses to fascism and Stalinism, and their varying relations to the many strands of Marxist thought and modernist aesthetics. -- From publisher's description.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

A concentrated study of the relationships between modernism and transformative left utopianism, this volume provides an introduction to Marx and Marxism for modernists, and an introduction to modernism for Marxists. Its guiding hypothesis is that Marx's writing absorbed the lessons of artistic and cultural modernity as much as his legacy concretely shaped modernism across multiple media.

In this illuminating and concise collection of readings, Karl Marx emerges as the first theorist to give a comprehensive social view of the birth and development of capitalist modernity that began with the Second Industrial Revolution and still exists today.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.