These essays are a unique introduction to the Marxist philosphy of socialism but they will also inspire and educate those who are already familiar with Marxism. Originally written for the socialist organisations in Germany and Turkey during the last year of Cliff's life, they cover an enormous range of topics: the Russian Revolution, the struggle against facism, myths and realities of globalisation, the need for a Revolutionary Party, and whether revolution is still possible today.
In the midst of a worldwide social crisis, Marxism has apparently lost momentum and, in many quarters, has been abandoned as obsolete. Cyril Smith reinstates Marx's work as a relevant source of inspiration, arguing that the Marxist tradition has essentially ignored the fundamental ideas of the man himself.
This collection investigates the "state of play" in studies informed by Marxism. Among other contributions, it includes an essay on state theory by Bob Jessop, a discussion of fundamental socialist values using analytical Marxism by Alan Carling.
Neither of the founders and none of the subsequent leaders of the Communist movement ever wrote a full analysis of what he expected the future society to be. Throughout the vast literature of Marxism there is nothing in general or detail which devotes itself to this goal as such. There are several obvious reasons for this: Marxists, having excoriated utopian, Le. , pre-Marxist, socialism for its idealism and chimeras, for not being based on the only scientific analysis of society, historical materialism, have sedulously avoided going beyond that analysis themselves. The dynamic of this materialism is, consistently, self-restrictive, non-mechanistic, zeitgebunden; it develops the past in terms of actions and counteractions in social time, and sees naturallaw at work in each stage of social-economic organization - Le. , in history. It sees the exhaustion of an era in the completion of its logic and the unconscious creation of its successor. Therefore the discarding of capi talism as historically depleted and the rise of socialism-communism as the next stage, the next logic and law of economic development, are forecast. This is the given, the premise, the Naturnotwendigkeit of material society, the reason of social efficiency and of course one of the data of capitalism. According to E. H.
The Strange Death of Marxism seeks to refute certain misconceptions about the current European Left and its relation to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties that existed in the recent past. Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices. Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the emphasis on the specifically American roots of the European Left. Gottfried examines the multicultural orientation of this Left and concludes that it has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. It does, however, owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Europe. American culture and American political reform have foreshadowed related developments in Europe by years or even whole decades. Contrary to the impression that the United States has taken antibourgeois attitudes from Europeans, the author argues exactly the opposite. Since the end of World War II, Europe has lived in the shadow of an American empire that has affected the Old World, including its self-described anti-Americans. Gottfried believes that this influence goes back to who reads or watches whom more than to economic and military disparities. It is the awareness of American cultural as well as material dominance that fuels the anti-Americanism that is particularly strong on the European Left. That part of the European spectrum has, however, reproduced in a more extreme form what began as an American leap into multiculturalism. Hostility toward America, however, can be transformed quickly into extreme affection for the United States, which occurred during the Clinton administration and during the international efforts to bring a multicultural society to the Balkans. Clearly written and well conceived, The Strange Death of Marxism will be of special interest to political scientists, historians of contemporary Europe, and those critical of multicultural trends, particularly among Euro-American conservatives.
