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Morals Also Have Two Genders
“In a talk entitled ‘Women – Victims or Culprits?’, at the first West Berlin People’s University in 1980, I attempted to construct a theory of the process of women’s socialization. My chief concerns were to show the role played by women themselves in reproducing their own oppression, and . . .” read more
Karl Marx’s Children
“In the winter of 1845–6, during which Marx worked with Engels on The German Ideology, Mrs Marx’s brother, the unsatisfactory Edgar, came to stay with the family in Brussels. Though she had disclaimed tender feelings for him, and disapproved of this inveterate sponger of no settled occupation at . . .” read more
Narcissism and the Family: A Critique of Lasch
“A crucial question for feminists is whether the gendered subjectivity of today really does follow the model of patriarchal authority elaborated in psychoanalytic theory. Juliet Mitchell has probably provided the best-known claim for the validity of psychoanalysis as the key to understanding how feminity and masculinity are acquired. . . .” read more
Marxism, Structuralism and Literary Analysis
“Recent events in Cambridge, of which some of you may have heard, have persuaded me to bring forward some material which I was preparing for a course of five lectures in the autumn. Because the material was originally conceived on that scale, the prospect for this crowded hour . . .” read more
Sociology, Liberalism and the Radical Right
“Ronald Reagan is the first American president of the twentieth century whose political origins do not lie in the broad consensual centre of American politics. Only time will tell whether Reagan will remain true to his oft-expressed conservative beliefs or whether, for the sake of political peace, his . . .” read more
The Idealism of American Criticism
“From the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, American literary theory fell under the sway of a curious hybrid of critical technocracy and Southern religious-aesthetic conservatism known as the ‘New Criticism’. Offspring of the failed Agrarian politics of the 1930s, and aided by the collapse of a Stalinised Marxist . . .” read more
'Teachers, Writers, Celebrities': Intelligentsias and Their Histories
“The appearance of Regis Debray’s Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France was a major cultural event in France. Critical reaction was instant and passionate; the book was soon a talking-point and—on a scale appropriate to a book of its kind—a best-seller. But if the public evidence pointed straightforwardly to . . .” read more
Biology and the Crisis of the Human Sciences
“The starting point of all radical reflection upon epistemology must be the recognition that in matters of philosophy we are still living in the 1930s. When I say ‘we’, I naturally mean, first of all, ‘we’ philosophers. It is impossible to ignore the fact that the fundamental problematics . . .” read more
Class Struggles in El Salvador
“The military coup in El Salvador of October 15th 1979 provoked a new and remarkable twist in the bloody social conflicts which have wracked this Central American republic. The former dictator, General Humberto Romero, was replaced by a junta which proclaimed the need for sweeping reforms and which . . .” read more
The Politics of Austro-Marxism
“Today Austro-Marxism is experiencing a certain renaissance, after being forgotten for several decades. Nor is this renewed interest confined to the German-speaking world, where the writings of Otto Bauer, Max Adler and Karl Renner have been reprinted, let alone simply Austria, where the Social-Democratic leaders now appeal more . . .” read more
An Address on German Democracy to the Citizens of New York
“You are surprised, ladies and gentlemen, at much of what you have heard from West Germany of late; and because you would like to know how things stand with regard to liberty and social control, to the democratic rule of law, and police repression in that part of . . .” read more
Problems of Materialism
“There are inevitable difficulties in any serious materialism. In its earliest phases it has a comparative simplicity of definition, since it rests on a rejection of presumptive hypotheses of non-material or metaphysical prime causes, and defines its own categories in terms of demonstrable physical investigations. Yet such definitions . . .” read more
Marxism in Literary Criticism
“Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology is a work of major importance. Its range includes the conventionally separate fields of poetics (the specificity of literary discourse and the character and conditions of literary value); ‘literary criticism’ (the analysis and judgment of particular works); literary history; and the sociology of . . .” read more
'Aesthetics and Politics'
“The historic debates of the 1930s between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno have now been assembled into a single volume, with an Afterword by Fredric Jameson. Readers of nlr have already had a foretaste of its contents: Brecht’s sardonic deflation of . . .” read more
Irrationalism and Marxism
“How should the philosophies of crisis be combated? For some time, Communists have had to pay rather more systematic attention to a number of ideological themes whose contemporary weight cannot be put down to chance. In the economic field, the phenomenon involves such notions as ‘the limits of . . .” read more
The Alternative in Eastern Europe
“I would like to start by discussing my book’s point of departure and purpose. Its original title was ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Socialism as it Actually Exists’—perhaps somewhat old-fashioned. Now this is simply the subtitle. It is deliberately reminiscent of Marx’s celebrated analysis of social formations, . . .” read more
The Workers Councils: the Second Prague Spring
“Although a great deal has been written and spoken about the Prague Spring, it has tended to focus on politics in the narrow sense of the term (democratic freedoms, relations with the Soviet Union, flags, tanks and blood) rather than on what François Châtelet has called ‘the political’—that . . .” read more
Marxism: Theory of Proletarian Revolution
“The real originality of Marx and Engels lies in the field of politics, not in economics or philosophy. They were the first to discover the historical potential of the new class that capitalism had brought into existence—the modern proletariat, a class that could encompass a universal liberation from . . .” read more
Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams
“It is difficult to see criticism as anything but an innocent discipline. Its origins seem spontaneous, its existence natural: there is literature, and so—because we wish to understand and appreciate it—there is also criticism. Criticism as a handmaiden to literature—as a shadowing of literature, a ghostly accomplice which, . . .” read more
The Modern Janus
“The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure. It may have had others as well, and some of these have been more debated: Marxism’s shortcomings over imperialism, the State, the falling rate of profit and the immiseration of the masses are certainly old battlefields. Yet none of . . .” read more
Feyerabend and Bachelard: Two Philosophies of Science
“In 1934 when Gaston Bachelard published his Nouvel Esprit Scientifique and Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung appeared few philosophers would have dissented from the view that science develops in a linear or monistic fashion, so as to leave meaning and truth-value unchanged, on the basis provided by common . . .” read more
Marxism and the Dialectic
“In this essay, I shall attempt to clarify somewhat a question discussed in my interview with New Left Review—although one that is very difficult to deal with briefly: the problem of the difference between ‘real opposition’ (Kant’s Realopposition or Realrepugnanz) and ‘dialectical contradiction’. Both are instances of opposition, . . .” read more
Introduction to Goldmann
“By the time of his death, in the autumn of 1970, Lucien Goldmann’s standing as a Marxist theorist had noticeably begun to diminish. The reasons for this were both theoretical and political. European Marxist thought in the 1960s was characterized by the rapid, ebullient development of theoretical currents . . .” read more
The Marxist Aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell
“For British intellectuals, the years after the economic catastrophe of 1929 were a devastating experience. Before their incredulous gaze, the old revenants of European history—mass action and the threat of revolution—turned to trouble the serenity of life under the Constitution. The certitudes of liberalism seemed unequal to these . . .” read more
Considerations on Materialism
“Perhaps the sole characteristic common to all contemporary varieties of Western Marxism is, with very few exceptions, their concern to defend themselves against the accusation of materialism. Gramscian or Togliattian Marxists, Hegelian-Existentialist Marxists, Neo-Positivizing Marxists, Freudian or Structuralist Marxists, despite the profound dissensions which otherwise divide them, are . . .” read more
A Critique of Political Ecology
“As a scientific discipline, ecology is almost exactly a hundred years old. The concept emerged for the first time in 1868 when the German biologist, Ernst Haeckel, in his Natural History of Creation, proposed giving this name to a sub-discipline of zoology—one which would investigate the totality of . . .” read more
Immigration under Capitalism
“The authors of Immigrant Workers begin by observing that ‘The race relations approach has dominated research on immigration in Britain’. This approach has been mainly liberal in outlook, and frequently followed American models; ‘few British social scientists have paid any attention to . . . immigrants in the . . .” read more
The Working Class and the Birth of Marxism
“The theory of historical materialism makes it possible to situate Marxism itself—just as much as market economics or normative sociology—in relation to capitalist development and the bourgeois revolution. Historical materialism emerged in the second half of the 1840s, in the heartlands of industrial capitalism. Its birthplaces were the . . .” read more
The Politics of Subjectivity
“The intensive and extensive interest in psychology is too vast to characterize; it includes those who seek relief from a malaise with society as well as disenchanted radicals who seek an alternative to the impoverishment of past political praxis; and this only begins the list. The very size . . .” read more
Bolivia: Military Nationalism and the Popular Assembly
“On 7 October 1970 President Ovando was overthrown by a triumvirate representing the three branches of the armed forces, headed by General Miranda. Then, in a remarkable political action, General Torres proclaimed resistance to this junta, called on the workers, and made himself President. The triumvirate managed to . . .” read more
The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: an Evaluation
“Nearly half a century after its original publication in Germany, Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness has at last become available in English. Those who now read the book for the first time may find its contents surprising. For the notoriety of this forbidden volume of the early . . .” read more
Jurgen Habermas: A New Eclecticism
“Jürgen Habermas is at present the most celebrated of the successors of the Frankfurt School and the only one as yet well-known outside the Federal German Republic. In an article in nlr 63, I discussed the work of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, the original nucleus of the . . .” read more
Sexual Oppression and Political Practice
“The problematic of Reimut Reiche’s Sexuality and Class Struggle is still largely foreign to socialist thought in Britain. In Germany, however, the necessity for Marxists to supplement their revolutionary theory in the light of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was already made clear by the rise of Hitlerism. . . .” read more
Confronting Defeat: The German Communist Party
“Hermann Weber has added about nine hundred pages to the already long bibliography of German Communist history, with his massive work Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus. The first question prospective readers will ask is: did he have to? The answer, on the whole, is yes. These two volumes . . .” read more
Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Marcuse
“1. A vision dominates Marcuse’s career, explaining both his hope and his despair. It derives from German Philosophy of History, from which he appropriated the conviction that the history of humanity can be read as the result of a great project, drafted and executed by a single agency, . . .” read more
Avineri’s View of Marx
“The May events in France last year detonated in England an explosion of Marxian literature. Within 12 months several important texts have been newly translated, others brought out in cheap editions. So far the field has been heavily dominated by work of neo-Hegelians within the Marxist tradition: the . . .” read more
Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
“Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) came from a Jewish bourgeois family. Born in Berlin, he spent his childhood there, studied philosophy in Freiburg, Munich and Bern, and after the First World War worked as a literary critic and essayist in Berlin and Frankfurt. When the Nazis came to power in . . .” read more
Presentation of Adorno
“The following essay on the relation of sociology and psychology should serve as a long overdue introduction of the work of Theodor Adorno to an English audience. While the English reader will be familiar with the writings of Herbert Marcuse (cf. nlr 30 and 45), who, along . . .” read more
Literature between Myth and Politics
“If socialist literature is to give a fuller and more comprehensive interpretation of reality than all other schools, it must systematically demythologize the countless myths that cover up man’s alienation in capitalist society. At the same time it must examine critically how far and under what conditions the . . .” read more
Introduction to Habermas
“In nlr 67 Göran Therborn argued that Jürgen Habermas, ‘the most celebrated of the successors of the Frankfurt School’, had elaborated a theory which represented a ‘development away from the Marxist positions of the founders of the School’. Habermas claimed to re-state what was valid in Marx . . .” read more
Introduction to Adorno
“The largely posthumous publication of his later writings has made Walter Benjamin perhaps the most influential Marxist critic in the German-speaking world, after the Second World War. The major works of his mature period have recently become available in English for the first time, with the translation of . . .” read more
Introduction to Della Volpe
“In the 19th century, the father of Italian Marxism was Labriola, who corresponded with Engels and Plekhanov. After the formation of the Third International, its historical centre became Gramsci. Both were in different ways profoundly influenced by the Hegelian tradition which had become naturalized in Italy after the . . .” read more
Introduction to Colletti
“Lucio Colletti, the Italian philosopher and political theorist, is a pupil of the late Galvano Della Volpe, whose interpretation of Marxism he has developed and extended in a number of important essays, including introductions to the Italian translations of Il’ienkov’s Dialectic of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s . . .” read more