Kevin B. Anderson – författare

This book examines the possibilities – and realities – of positive, humanist change and revolution that have burst forth in the first decades of this century.

Kevin B. Anderson critically examines the revolutions, uprisings, social movements, and forms of national resistance that have arisen across the Middle East and North Africa, Sudan, South Africa, Ukraine, and France in the past 15 years, providing a salient snapshot of geopolitical and social events in a way that is both timely and in-the-moment. The book represents an effort to analyze world events, especially revolutions and radical movements, in a dialectical manner, combining contemporary analysis of the class, gender, and ethnic dimensions of these upheavals with theoretical and historical reflection that engages Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and other thinkers in the Marxian tradition.

A Political Sociology of Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Resistances is an important resource for researchers and current affairs opinion leaders, as well as a key text for courses in social change, political sociology, social movements, and contemporary social theory.

This book examines the possibilities – and realities – of positive, humanist change and revolution that have burst forth in the first decades of this century.

Kevin B. Anderson critically examines the revolutions, uprisings, social movements, and forms of national resistance that have arisen across the Middle East and North Africa, Sudan, South Africa, Ukraine, and France in the past 15 years, providing a salient snapshot of geopolitical and social events in a way that is both timely and in-the-moment. The book represents an effort to analyze world events, especially revolutions and radical movements, in a dialectical manner, combining contemporary analysis of the class, gender, and ethnic dimensions of these upheavals with theoretical and historical reflection that engages Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and other thinkers in the Marxian tradition.

A Political Sociology of Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Resistances is an important resource for researchers and current affairs opinion leaders, as well as a key text for courses in social change, political sociology, social movements, and contemporary social theory.

It is important to see both Marx’s brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.