A decade after Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘End of History’, anti-capitalist demonstrators at Seattle and elsewhere have helped reinvigorate the Left with the reply ‘another world is possible’. More than anyone else it was Marx who showed that slogans such as this were no utopian fantasies, and that capitalism was just as much a historical mode of production, no more natural and certainly no less contradictory, than were the feudal and slave modes which proceeded it. Paul Blackledge opens this study with a defence of the Marxist approach to the study of history against what he argues as being the naive empiricism of traditional historians and the relativism of the postmodernists. He moves on to outline Marx and Engels analyses of concrete historical processes and their critiques of the alternative historiographic methodologies of their contemporaries. He then discusses neglected historical works produced by Marxists in the half-century or so after Marx and Engels’ deaths. Two central chapters survey recent Marxist debates on, first, the nature of modes of productions, including slave, feudal and tributary systems, and the revolutionary transitions between them; and, second, the methodological debate over the issue of structure and agency in the movement of history. Finally, he shows the political relevance of these debates through a concluding survey of competing Marxist attempts to periodise the present, postmodern, conjuncture. This book should be read by historians, students of cultural, social and political theory and anti-capitalist activists.

Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art is a diverse, colourful and eclectic set of essays of historical and cultural analyses. From the genesis of Islam as a social movement, to an account of Goya's art in the context of feudal absolutism and the Napoleonic wars, to The Da Vinci Code, and much more besides. McKenna is a classical Marxist not shy of addressing popular culture, past and present, works often ignored by other Marxist critics increasingly confined to Academia and its high-brow concerns.

A penetrating reassessment of Marxist thought and its relevance today, by a world-renowned historian of Marxism

This textbook examines Marxism’s enormous impact on the way historians approach their subject. Tackling current historiographical questions in an accessible way, the author offers a clear introduction to Marxist views of history, key Marxist historians and thinkers, and the relevance of Marxist theory and history to students’ own work. This is a concise, thorough overview of an important area of historiography. The second edition incorporates significant new developments in research, including Marxist contributions to the emergence of global, maritime and transnational history; the discovery of Marx’s ecologism and the historical critique of fossil capitalism as a source of environmental disaster; a reassessment of gender oppression through social reproduction theory; and the contribution of Marxism to debates on race, Eurocentrism and whiteness.

This selection of Alasdair MacIntyrea (TM)s early writings on Marxism and ethics aims both to fill a gap in the academic literature on MacIntyrea (TM)s ethical theory, and to offer a contribution to more recent debates on the ethics of revolution.

China has always been something of a mystery to Westerners. For one genera-tion, Mao Zedong and his followers were simple "agrarian reformers," while for another they were the "communist emperor and his blue ants." In the 1970s, some of the finest Sinologists believed there was much the United States could learn from Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with regard to bureaucracy, criminal justice, health care, and mass education. By the 1980s, those same theo-rists asserted that Maoism was nothing more than a feudal fascism and had abso-lutely nothing positive to teach. Marxism, China, and Development provides a plausible explanation of these developments that have had such a powerful effect on the people of China for the past half century.The author describes and explains the strange collection of beliefs that made up the Marxism of Mao Zedong. He seeks to understand why the communist leader-ship of China, like that of the USSR, tried to spur economic growth by abandoning the market modalities common to developed economies. A. James Gregor's con-ceptual framework is both original, and makes more comprehensible the history of Marxism and the history of China. Among the major topics he covers are imperi-alism, political democracy, economics, and alternatives to Maoism and Marxism for China.While it is unlikely that our understanding of so complex a series of events as modern Chinese history will soon become less controversial, Marxism, China, and Development's clear, concise explanations will clarify some perplexing areas, and make the new turns in Chinese political economy more understandable. This is a monumental effort at theory construction that will be of interest to political scien-tists, economists, sociologists, and Sinologists.