Kevin B. Anderson - Böcker

In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and Le Monde. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In this important and controversial account, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson illuminate Foucault's support of the Islamist movement. They also show how Foucault's experiences in Iran contributed to a turning point in his thought, influencing his ideas on the Enlightenment, homosexuality, and his search for political spirituality.Foucault and the Iranian Revolution informs current discussion on the divisions that have reemerged among Western intellectuals over the response to radical Islamism after September 11. Foucault's provocative writings are thus essential for understanding the history and the future of the West's relationship with Iran and, more generally, to political Islam. In their examination of these journalistic pieces, Afary and Anderson offer a surprising glimpse into the mind of a celebrated thinker.

In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and Le Monde. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. In this important and controversial account, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson illuminate Foucault's support of the Islamist movement. They also show how Foucault's experiences in Iran contributed to a turning point in his thought, influencing his ideas on the Enlightenment, homosexuality, and his search for political spirituality.Foucault and the Iranian Revolution informs current discussion on the divisions that have reemerged among Western intellectuals over the response to radical Islamism after September 11. Foucault's provocative writings are thus essential for understanding the history and the future of the West's relationship with Iran and, more generally, to political Islam. In their examination of these journalistic pieces, Afary and Anderson offer a surprising glimpse into the mind of a celebrated thinker.

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.

Raya Dunayevskaya is hailed as the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the United States. In this new collection of her essays co-editors Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson have crafted a work in which the true power and originality of Dunayevskaya's ideas are displayed. This extensive collection of writings on Hegel, Marx, and dialectics captures Dunayevskaya's central dictum that, contrary to the established views of Hegelians and Marxists, Hegel was of signal importance to the theory and practice of Marxism. The Power of Negativity sheds light not only on Marxist-Humanism and the rooting of Dunayevskaya's Marxist-Humanist theories in Hegel, but also on the life of one of America's most penetrating and provocative critical thinkers.

This book presents for the first time the correspondence during the years 1954 to 1978 between the Marxist-Humanist and feminist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-87) and two other noted thinkers, the Hegelian Marxist philosopher and social theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and the psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm (1900-80), both of the latter members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. In their introduction, editors Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell focus on the theoretical and political dialogues in these letters, which cover topics such as dialectical social theory, Marxist economics, socialist humanism, the structure and contradictions of modern capitalism, the history of Marxism and of the Frankfurt School, feminism and revolution, developments in the USSR, Cuba, and China, and emergence of the New Left of the 1960s. The editors’ extensive explanatory notes offer helpful background information, definitions of theoretical concepts, and source references. Among the thinkers discussed in the correspondence – some of them quite critically-- are Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset. As a whole, this volume shows the deeply Marxist and humanist concerns of these thinkers, each of whom had a lifelong concern with rethinking Marx and Hegel as the foundation for an analysis of capitalist modernity and its forces of opposition.

Marx's approach to analyzing society and especially his critique of capitalist society, continues to influence the work of a large number of scholars world-wide. Unfortunately, there are relatively few clear accounts of what this approach is and how to put it to use. And, despite the many attempts to use Marx's method to study a variety of subjects, there are relatively few that can serve as useful models. In the present volume, the internationally renowned Marxist scholar, Bertell Ollman, and the social theorist Kevin B. Anderson, have brought together a sampling of the best writings of the past hundred years that illustrate and critique Marx's method as well as explain what it is and how to put it to work. Anyone wishing to understand better Marx's dialectical method (along, of course, with the theories created with its help), or to revise this method or to criticize it, or to use it in their own work will find this collection invaluable.

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.

Among the major Marxist thinkers of the period of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg stands out as one who speaks to our own time. Her legacy grows in relevance as the global character of the capitalist market becomes more apparent and the critique of bureaucratic power more widely accepted within the movement for human liberation. The Rosa Luxemburg Reader will be the definitive one-volume collection of Luxemburg's writings in English translation. Unlike previous publications of her work from the early 1970s, this volume includes substantial extracts from her major economic writings-above all, The Accumulation of Capital (1913)-and from her political writings, including Reform or Revolution (1898), the Junius Pamphlet (1916), and The Russian Revolution (1918). The Reader also includes a number of important texts that have never before been published in English translation, including substantial extracts from her Introduction to Political Economy (1916), and a recently-discovered piece on slavery.With a substantial introduction assessing Luxemburg's work in the light of recent research, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader will be an indispensable resource for scholarship and an inspiration for a new generation of activists.

Still the only full-length study of the achievements and limitations of Lenin's extensive writings on Hegel, Hegel, Lenin, and Western Marxism has become a minor classic. In a full critical account, Anderson's book connects Lenin's 'dialectics' to his renowned writings on imperialism, anti-colonial movements, and the state. From there Anderson takes up the extensive debates over Lenin's engagement with Hegel among Marxists as wide ranging as Georg Lukacs, Henri Lefebvre, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Lucio Colletti, and Louis Althusser.This updated and expanded edition also includes a comprehensive new introduction by the author, assessing Lenin's relevance for today's world.

In his late writings, Marx went beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts. Kevin Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx's Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on Russia, India, Ireland, Algeria, Latin America, and ancient Rome. These texts, some of them only now being published, provide evidence for a change of perspective, away from Eurocentric worldviews or unilinear theories of development. As Anderson shows, the late Marx elaborated a truly global, multilinear theory of modern society and its revolutionary possibilities.

From her account of state capitalism (part of her socio-economic critique of Stalinism, fascism, and the welfare state), to her writings on Rosa Luxemburg, Black and women’s liberation, and labor, we are offered indispensable resources for navigating the perils of sexism, racism, capitalism, and authoritarianism.