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Rational Choice Marxism

“There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth None of them along the line know what any of it is worth” read more

Pynchon’s Aesthetic Radicalism

“Terry Eagleton’s recent article on ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’ (nlr 152) concludes one of its sections with the following sweeping, brilliant statement: ‘The autonomous, self-regarding, impenetrable modernist artefact, in all its isolated splendour, is the commodity as fetish resisting the commodity as exchange, its solution to reification . . .” read more

Restructuring the State

“This article contrasts two strategic options for the Labour Party and the Left in the approach to the next election in Britain. One, the option chosen by the Labour leadership, is to seek to recapture the votes lost to the Alliance parties since 1981 by occupying their political . . .” read more

International Communism in the Heyday of Stalin

“Serious scholarship on the history of Communist Parties has been experiencing a major upswing. Literature was never exactly in short supply. But its value was invariably vitiated by the ingenuousness of its bias, in which the official apologetics of the Communist Parties’ own accounts was matched by the . . .” read more

Eagleton and English

“The publication of The Function of Criticism in 1984, Terry Eagleton’s fourth book in four years, consolidated his reputation—recognized on both the Left and the Right—as the most prominent and prolific Marxist literary theorist currently writing in this country. The character of such a reputation is, however, inevitably . . .” read more

Thatcherism and the Politics of Hegemony: A Reply to Stuart Hall

“We are glad that Stuart Hall regards our article in nlr 147 as a significant contribution to contemporary debates on Thatcherism. In that article we examined his work on authoritarian populism (hereafter ‘AP’), sketched an alternative approach to Thatcherism in terms of its two-nations effects, and outlined . . .” read more

Historical Materialism, Answer to Marxism’s Crisis

“Has any period since Marx’s death been marked by weaker conviction among Marxists than our own? Doubts and doubters have been with us for as long as Marxism itself, but those of today no longer face a compelling politicaltheoretical field of force, dominated by an individual, movement, party, . . .” read more

A Difference of Needs

“‘It’s terrific!’, announced the publishers prior to the appearance of Michael Ignatieff’s new book. It seemed, at the time, an unlikely epithet for a work on so sober a topic as human need, but it has proved curiously apt: highly polished, clever, readable and just a trifle precious, . . .” read more

Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

“In his article ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (NLR 146), Fredric Jameson argues that pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate mode of postmodernist culture. ‘Pastiche’, he writes, ‘is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language; but it is . . .” read more

Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism

“It has become customary for historians to speak about the death of the Victorian Age in 1914, or the reign of a politico-monetary Long Sixteenth Century persisting well into the middle of the calendrical 17th century. By the same token, there are innumerable incitements in contemporary cultural, if . . .” read more

Marx’s Concept of Human Nature

“In this novel treatment of an old topic, Norman Geras has found himself facing in two diametrically opposite directions: within the Marxist tradition, there are those who wish to deny legitimate room for any concept of human nature; and there are others who, so far from wishing to . . .” read more

The Myth of Germany’s Missing Revolution

“It is now over half a century since Hitler came to power in Germany, inaugurating twelve years of bloodshed and destruction without parallel in human history. Throughout this period the Nazi phenomenon has posed a major challenge to human understanding. Why should fascism, in such an extreme, racist . . .” read more

Jameson and Post-Modernism

“Perry Anderson in his Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) has pointed out that, because of the general debilitation of a Stalinized socialist culture in Russia and the absence of any significent working-class audience here, the most gifted of Western Marxist thinkers directed their attention away from class action . . .” read more

The British Women’s Movement

“A complete overview of British feminism would require a book rather than an essay. Within the context of a brief history of the movement we therefore aim in this article at an assessment of the developments within one section of the movement, socialist feminism, since the second half . . .” read more

Chinese Communism and Democracy

“Just a few years ago many socialists in the West saw China as the stronghold of true socialism in the world and Mao Zedong as its wise leader. Now China has few such ‘foreign friends’ and Mao-bashing has taken over from Mao-worship, with some of yesterday’s main worshippers . . .” read more

Class in Marx’s Conception of History, Ancient and Modern

“It is both an honour and a pleasure for me to be speaking here today. It is an honour to have been asked to give the annual lecture in memory of Isaac Deutscher, a man who always resolutely pursued his own line of thought with the greatest courage, . . .” read more

The Rhetoric of Experience

“Reading Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory is not unlike attending a particularly good series of introductory lectures: a revelation of new and startlingly intelligible terrain if you know little about its subject; pleasurable and still illuminating if you are already familiar with it. The book’s witty, lucid attack (especially . . .” read more

The Peace Movement and Socialism

“In 1980, confronting a new upsurge of militarism, a number of us joined forces to launch an appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament. This began with a warning: ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in history’, it said. There is a good deal of new evidence to show . . .” read more

The Prospects of Labour and the Transformation of Advanced Capitalism

“Even a pair of very myopic eyes are sufficient to discern the mood of the Left today, particularly the Socialist Left, in the countries of advanced capitalism. The general picture is one of gloom, with some extra-dark strokes over the British Isles, some pale-pink touches where holding operations . . .” read more

Power and Subjectivity in Foucault

“The ‘philosophy of desire’ developed by Jean-Fraçois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze in the period from the late 1960s to the mid-70s can be seen as the attempt, within post-structuralism, to affirm the independent force of an ‘inner nature’—that ‘transitivism of a spontaneous aesthetic’ to which Discours, Figure refers—against . . .” read more

Marxism and Demography: A Response

“Wally Seccombe’s ‘Marxism and Demography’ provides a welcome and insightful synthesis of Marxist perspectives and recent advances in demography and family history. Seccombe rightly takes Marxist theory to task for relying on a sterile refutation of long-discarded Malthusian theory in place of addressing the material realities of changing . . .” read more

On the Political Economy of the Socialist Transformation

“There are many questions which refuse a reassuring answer. This is no less true within socialist theory. The issue of whether socialists and Marxists should work within the Labour Party has preoccupied the British Left throughout this century. The Social Democratic Federation decided to disaffiliate in the early . . .” read more

A Socialist Consideration of Kleinian Psychoanalysis

“This article may be best introduced autobiographically, since the general project it touches, the relationship between psychoanalytic and political theory, isn’t one that I think has often been very fruitfully pursued from the point of view in which I am interested, and may seem unpromising at the outset. . . .” read more

Roots of British Communism

“The historiography of the British labour movement in the twentieth century has been dominated by a Whiggish concern with the rise and consolidation of the Labour Party and the emergence of trade unionism as an estate of the realm. Even Marxist historians have found it difficult to escape . . .” read more

The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism

“The intention of Marxism is to provide a theoretical foundation for interpreting the world in order to change it. This is not an empty slogan. It has—or ought to have—a very precise meaning. It means that Marxism seeks a particular kind of knowledge, one which is uniquely capable . . .” read more

The North Korean Enigma

“North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (dprk), is an isolated enigma in Northeast Asia. No state in the world lives with such a wide gap between its own self-image and self-presentation as a socialist ‘paradise on earth’ and the view of most of the rest . . .” read more

The House of Windsor

“Genuine socialists have always detested the Windsor monarchs. They appear to confront a nation sucked into helpless crown-worship, without a single ounce of decent republicanism in its make-up. While they dream of communism, the country has not advanced out of this old feudal rhapsody. The ‘serious’ bourgeois Sunday . . .” read more

The Barren Marriage of American Labour and the Democratic Party

“On the eve of the New Deal’s inauguration in the winter of 1933 the auto industry in Detroit was stunned by an energetic and well-planned walkout at the Briggs Auto plant. Following three and a half years of nearly catastrophic unemployment and paralyzed inaction by the American Federation . . .” read more

The Moment of 'Scrutiny'

“In 1968, Perry Anderson drew attention to the bizarre role and status of literary criticism in the ‘national culture’; in a context in which the social sciences and historical disciplines were inhibited by a largely imported positivism, it seemed to offer itself as the only field in which . . .” read more

The New Left and the Present Crisis

“This paper is a reflection on the present condition of the Left, and on its recent history. It is meant to address our current situation, and indeed to suggest action, but I have not found it possible to do this without thinking about previous initiatives of the earlier . . .” read more

Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization

“Comrades, we need a cogent theoretical and class analysis of the present war crisis. Yes. But to structure an analysis in a consecutive rational manner may be, at the same time, to impose a consequential rationality upon the object of analysis. What if the object is irrational? What . . .” read more

The Problem of Reformism and Marx’s Theory of Fetishism

“The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between two apparently contradictory elements in Marx’s thought; namely, his belief that proletarian revolutionary consciousness will develop in a relatively straightforward way under capitalism, and his argument, in his later economic writings, that the fetishised nature of capitalist . . .” read more

The Fine Arts after Modernism

“The London art community is very like a gymnasium. Every time you enter into discourse with your colleagues you first have to take a look around and see what posture everyone is adopting today. The collapse of the central, modernist consensus has led to exceptional enthusiasm among those . . .” read more

Slavery in Human History

“What is slavery? How do we identify a slave formation or society? What do we mean when we say that a given society was based on slavery? Is there such a thing as a Slave Mode of Production? It is remarkable that after nearly a century and a . . .” read more

Literature of Revolution

“Are we sensible enough of all the sources of our own literary heritage? The question is suggested to me by some of the writings of the young Trotsky. Upon reading them, it is quickly evident, even from the accessible fraction of a much larger output belonging to the . . .” read more

The Travail of Latin American Democracy

“The shifting complexity of Latin American politics baffles the observer, frustrates the theoretician and challenges both the committed endurance and the tactical subtlety of the revolutionary. Continent of military coups and dictators—but also of (male) bourgeois democracies as old or even older than some West European or North . . .” read more

Our Debt to Sraffa

“Italian Communists are joined to Sraffa by an ineradicable political and human debt of gratitude. It is hard for us even to grasp his full significance for Gramsci: the role he played during Gramsci’s long years in fascist jails is a priceless and crucial element in our own . . .” 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

The Modes of Production Controversy

“Marxist writing on development and underdevelopment, which barely a decade ago was largely confined to the shrill critiques of a few voices crying in the wilderness, seems well and truly now to have ‘taken off’. Indeed, the growth of this new (or rediscovered) paradigm has been such that . . .” read more

Some Reflections on 'The Break-up of Britain'

“Nationalism has been a great puzzle to (non-nationalist) politicians and theorists ever since its invention, not only because it is both powerful and devoid of any discernible rational theory, but also because its shape and function are constantly changing. Like the cloud with which Hamlet taunted Polonius, it . . .” read more

The Twilight of the British State

“‘External conflicts between states form the shape of the state. I am assuming this “shape” to mean—by contrast with internal social development—the external configuration, the size of a state, its contiguity (whether strict or loose), and even its ethnic composition . . . We must stress that in . . .” read more

Romanticism, Utopianism and Moralism: The Case of William Morris

“Over the past two decades, my study of William Morris has come to be recognized as a ‘quarry’ of information, although in one or two instances it appears that it was a suspect quarry, to be worked surreptitiously for doctoral advancement. One ought not to object to this: . . .” 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

Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism

“The centrality of the town-country relation in the transition to capitalism in the West and more basically the equation of urbanism with capitalism and progress were already explicitly formulated in the earliest theories of the origins of capitalism—those of 18th-century political economy. For the proponents of the new . . .” read more

The Test in Portugal

“The Military revolt which seized Lisbon and overthrew the Caetano government on 25 April 1974 toppled in a morning the most long lived fascist State in history and one of the most stable capitalist regimes anywhere this century. By the same stroke it set the stage for the . . .” 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

The Coming Crisis of Radical Sociology

“What is sociology? The textbook myth is that it is ‘the scientific study of society’. But this is a notion that few sociologists would straightforwardly defend. If it is not this, however, what is it? There is no easy answer. In fact there is a large question-mark, presently . . .” read more

The Laws of Uneven Development

“Before answering Martin Nicolaus’s critique of ‘Where is America going?’, the origins and intended function of that article should be explained. It is the transcript of a speech given to a seminar of Finnish students at Helsinki, in the framework of a symposium on ‘American imperialism today’. It . . .” read more

Limits of British Anthropology

“Anthropological studies in Britain grew up in the context of European, and especially British colonialism as a part of the colonial situation. Anthropologists for the most part did not question the colonial situation and the fact that they participated in it by investigating subjugated peoples. As they took . . .” read more

Two Tactics

“the four firsts: ‘First place must be given to man in handling the relationship between man and weapons; to political work in handling the relationship between political and other work; to ideological work in relation to routine tasks of political work; and in ideological work to the . . .” read more