Book Description
Examining the writings of Marx and Engels on primitive societies and drawing attention to inconsistencies in their analysis of pre-capitalist societies, this study proceeds to evaluate the anthropological theories of the successors of Marx and Engels as well as linking the controversies
concerning anthropology among Marxists and among Soviet anthropologists to the political evolution of Marxism. The book concludes with an exploration of the renewed interest in Marxist concepts displayed by contemporary American, British, and French anthropologists. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
According to Nimtz, no two people contributed more to the struggle for democracy in the nineteenth century than Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Presenting the first major study of the two thinkers in the past twenty years and the first since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book challenges many widely held views about their democratic credentials and their attitudes and policies on the peasantry, the importance of national self-determination, the struggle for women's equality, their so-called Eurocentric bias, political and party organizing, and the possibility for socialist revolution in an overwhelmingly peasant and underdeveloped country like late-nineteenth-century Russia. ... Read more

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Self-organization of the working class
In the endless denunciations of totalitarianism even as neo-liberalism demolishes the achievements of a century of labor, we forget that it was the self-organization of the working class that spearheaded the real emergence of democracy and universal suffrage. This book attempts to demonstrate that Marx and Engels were the leading protagonists in that process. The book surveys the whole drama from the 1840's to the final period of Engels and German Social democracy, stressing the activist political role of Marx, whose passive British museum life as an uninvolved philosopher is exposed as the myth it is. Curiously mordant is the comparison of the reactions of Marx and Engels compared to that of Tocqueville to the period of revolution in 1848 and the coming of Napoleon. Tocqueville is seen for who he was then, not the author of his famous book, and now the democrat, Marx the svengalian. It seems hopeless to ever set any of this straight.This book presents a clear snapshot of the full sequence of events.
This reviewer has also reviewed "The Myth of the Proletariat". This commentary is a useful response to the thesis of that work. ... Read more

Book Description
It is reported that the moment anyone talked to Marx about morality, he would roar with laughter. Yet, plainly, he was fired by outrage and a burning desire for a better world. This paradox is the starting point for Marxism and Morality.Discussing the positions taken by Marx, Engels, and
their descendants in relation to certain moral issues, Steven Lukes addresses the questions on which Marxist thinkers and actors have taken a number of characteristic stands as well as other questions--personal relations and the moral virtues of the individual, for example--on which Marxism falls
silent. A provocative exploration of the gray area where Marxism and morality meet, this book argues that Marxism makes a number of major moral claims and that its appeal has always been, in large part, a moral one. ... Read more

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The moral blindness of Marxism
Steven Lukes, somewhat well-known popular philosophical author and also editor of the series "Marxist introductions", addresses perhaps one of the most difficult issues in the Marxist tradition: the problem of Marxism and ethics.

According to Lukes, the book is intended as "a contribution to socialist free-thinking", and in this case the contribution consists of making clear what the problem of moral blindness in Marxism is, what effect it has had on the various people who have discussed issues of morality within Marxism, and how Marxism cannot avoid a better elucidation of these issues if it is to be at all convincing. Lukes is very critical but in my view deservedly so - even the most superficial glance at the history of socialist politics will make clear the degree to which the problem of ethics in politics is in particular need of urgent resolution.

Lukes uses mostly the texts of Marx and Engels themselves, in all their contradictions, to posit what he calls the paradox of morality in Marxism: namely that on the one hand the goal of socialism is to be a supremely ethical one, based on the perfectionist and optimist conception of liberty inherent in Marxism, and that on the other hand every ethical theory and issue is downplayed or ridiculed by Marx and Engels as "so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush so many bourgeois interests". Neither Marx nor Engels were at all consistent in their views on ethics, as Lukes shows, and even the question whether their condemnation of capitalism is or is not one with an ethical component is insoluble due to the contradictions in their texts.

The middle part of the book is really a sideline, in which Lukes establishes exactly what this conception of liberty is in Marxism, to show the aim of the movement to have the aforementioned high ethical level. He does this quite well, emphasising the way in which morality provides a problem even here, because it is never clear how the collectivist view of society and the Aristotelian view of human development are to be reconciled in actual policy in the future, leading most Marxists to shelve questions about the future society altogether as premature and utopian. This in turn causes many people to wonder why the sacrifices they are expected to make in the here and now for this future society are worth it, and how they know that they are worth it.

The meat of the problem in modern Marxism, as real political movement, is discussed by Lukes by way of assessing the various views of fellow travellers and former fellow travellers on the horrors of Stalinism. The major problem of Marxism is shown to be that of the means-ends relation, and how and when 'revolutionary violence' and similar things can be justified. Brecht, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Koestler, Trotsky and Lukács all provide different perspectives on this problem, most of them even changing their own views (usually towards a more liberal position) during their lives. This discussion is very interesting and serves excellently to show the possible conclusions about the means-ends relation that a Marxist could draw from the tradition, as well as how different these conclusions can be without any one of them being prima facie more based in the 'canon' than another. Clearly Marxism misses still a good tradition in normative ethics, which (and I say this as someone thorougly skeptical in ethical issues) is clearly a major gap in any major political movement.

Marx wrote that "mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve". But as Lukes shows, this task has not at all been solved yet, despite the whole Leninist experience worldwide showing that the task has certainly been set. Who will solve this for us? ... Read more

Book Description

For the first time, the brilliant voice of one of the outstanding intellectuals in Cuba is brought to readers outside Latin America. Armando Hart had a close ideological identification with Che Guevara and here considers the relevance of Marxism today.

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The meaning of 'democracy'
This work is an essential history of the usage of the term 'democracy' as this crystalized in the era of the 1840's leaving Marx and Engels stranded with a series of acute but now misleading assertions and critiques of its meaning and actual content. The more is thepity since these views of Marx and Engels were at the onset far more democratic than those who fixed the word's meaning. Small wonder a legacy of bitterness festers here. To this is added the unfortunate confusion over the term, 'dictatorship of the proletariat, and the thinking of Marx is indeed ambiguous in thisregard. The perceptions of those passing through the revolutions of 1848 are hard to reconstruct, as the brief alliance of classes led to the victory of one and the betrayal of the rest. This factor is what isresponsible for the mistruct of 'democracy so-called'in the name of democracy in Marx and Engels, in a period before universal suffrage was an intrinsic part of the word 'democracy'. ... Read more

Product Description
Toward the end of a distinguished scholarly career in the field of political science, Alfred G. Meyer wrote two books that were never published. The first was a biography of Friedrich Engels and the second was a memoir that looked back on his life and career. The reaction of prospective publishers to the Engels biography was that it was neither fish nor fowl not rigorous enough from a scholarly point of view, yet too academic to appeal to a general readership. The memoir also posed similar problems. It was lively and entertaining, full of sharply drawn, humorous observations of the people he met during his life, yet overall dominated by his intellectual curiosity. It was an intellectual autobiography in brief, a document that was illuminating to his friends and associates, but that did not quite give an account of the true stirrings that animated his nature. This volume merges the two manuscripts, by taking the chapters of his memoir that focused on his career as a political scientist and juxtaposing them with the Engels biography. The result is a radically new experiment in portraiture an intellectual self-portrait of a scholar rendered by means of the picture he drew of his historical subject. ... Read more