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Hilferding’s last theoretical text (1940; published only in 1954) provides an insight into the creativity, as well as into the limitations, of Hilferding’s approach. While he shows himself, indeed, aware of the major challenges confronting Marxism in its crisis in the 1930s, he has an overwhelming tendency to look for solutions in the context of the academic mainstream. Still, his reflections do present a substantial challenge to the Marxist mainstream, which deserves to be taken up and properly answered.

The late US social theorist Erik Olin Wright has been one of the protagonists of Analytical Marxism. As such he has been active in a project of liberating Marx from the shackles of Hegelianism (inc...

This text proposes to overcome the wide-spread error of dismissing Marx’s critique of all materialism before him as being reductionist and therefore philosophically and scientifically unacceptable. Instead, it attempts to create a non-reductionist understanding and practice of materialism in philosophy — especially by referring to key contributions by Althusser and Bhaskar and by criticizing the ‘materialist illusion’ of the early Marx — thereby articulating another key element of the ‘finite Marxism’ defended by the author. Frieder Otto Wolf, ‘Materialism against Materialism: Taking up Marx’s Break with Reductionism’, in Materialism and Politics, ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 277–92

International audience; Democracy and Brazil: Collapse and Regression discusses the de-democratization process underway in contemporary Brazil. The relative political stability that characterized domestic politics in the 2000s ended with the sudden emergence of a series of massive protests in 2013, followed by the controversial impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. In this new, more conservative period in Brazilian politics, a series of institutional reforms deepened the distance between citizens and representatives. Brazil's current political crisis cannot be understood without reference to the continual growth of right-wing and ultra-right discourse, on the one hand, and to the neoliberal ideology that pervades the minds of large parts of the Brazilian elite, on the other. Twenty experts on Brazil across different fields discuss the ongoing political turmoil in the light of distinct problems: geopolitics, gender, religion, media, indigenous populations, right-wing strategies, and new forms of coup, among others. Updated analyses enriched with historical perspective help to illuminate the intricate issues that will determine the country's fate in years to come. Democracy and Brazil: Collapse and Regression will interest students and scholars of Brazilian politics and history, Latin America, and the broader fields of democracy studies.

The post-face underlines that contemporary Brazil has to be understood as an example of broader, and no doubt complex, problematics – the emergence of 21st-century socialism in Latin America, and its historical failure. It proposes to understand the emergence of the Workers’ Party (PT) as a new political subject in its underlying ambiguity between left-wing patronage and a politics of transformation. In so doing, this collection of essays achieves a breakthrough beyond the mere phenomenal description and statistical analysis so dear to mainstream political science – and creatively addresses the difficulties involved in applying Marx’s critical theory of the domination of the capitalist mode of production in modern bourgeois societies. By a differentiated and combined approach to analysis and intervention it manages to go beyond mere analysis to the first steps of a strategic deliberation. Therefore, it provides an excellent starting point for further inquiry into the structural determinants of the historical defeat of the Left, and not only the Brazilian Left, at the beginning of this century, but also a positive entry towards renewing a more radical debate around left-wing strategies of transformation in Brazil and beyond.

This chapter aims to make reading the third volume of Capital a challenge and a productive resource for contemporary debates. To do so, it combines a careful consideration of the sources made available by the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) edition with an insistent interrogation of Marx’s reasons for not finishing Capital in the ‘aesthetic form’ he originally planned. From here, it goes on to look at the reception of Capital and its third and concluding volume, in particular, in Marxist politics (singling out the theoretical efforts of Lenin and Gramsci). The work ‘invested’ in order to make Capital in its entirety, as presented in a theoretically integrated way in Volume III, useful for a politics of overcoming the domination of capital is then discussed, while focusing on the relation of science and politics. This is then turned into an appeal to present debates making full use of the scientific and analytical resources Capital as a whole still has to offer. In this way, we hope to address an invitation—to readers, but also to our authors—to continue the debate on how to scientifically grasp the structures, mechanisms and tendencies of the domination of the capitalist mode of production, and how to make use of such insights to turn anti-capitalist struggles into a forceful reality again.

This conviction of mine [i.e. that a reading of the history of Italian Marxisms should be given which is different from that underlying Cristina Corradi’s book (Corradi, Storia dei marxismi in Italia, 2005)] is based, indeed, on the very distinction between Marxists and Marxians, which I consider to be decisive. This distinction is not chronological, as if in the 1970s everybody was a Marxist, while after that, out of the blue, the Marxians arrived and were welcomed. The truth is that such an authentically Marxian thread has, in fact, existed, and is defined by some crucial aspects. First, by a return to Marx’s original problems, which had been buried by Marxism: those linked to the monetary constitution of surplus value and those referring to the re-linking of (new) value to (living) labour. And then, [second,] the absence [in Marx] of any separation between the ‘economic’ sides of these problems and those problems concerning their ‘philosophical’ and ‘sociological’ foundations. Finally, the attempt of taking up the enterprise of the critique of political economy again, in a non-dogmatic and non-repetitive way. This thread dates back, however, and has a long history throughout the twentieth century. In order to bring to light the traces of this development, it is necessary to read the history of the discussion on Marx in a very different way from that practised until now.

However considerable his powers of self-reflection, Marx was no more able to look over his own shoulders than other humans before and after him. Historical experience with the continued reading of ...

The European Left will have to undergo a deep sea-change, in order to really come into existence. It is attempted to outline the underlying trends of the post-neoliberal situation, to grasp the creativity of European popular struggles, and to describe the strategical tasks by the solution of which another new European left could begin to create itself, in changing the societal development of European integration.

This paper, first, traces some main alleys for re-thinking the very underlying notions with which we tend to think about the situation with regard to the large enlargement of 2004, especially critically reflecting upon the conventional notions of 'transition' and 'transformation'. Second, it proceeds to developing some new questions to be asked on the basis of renewed underlying notions of political interventions into variegated concrete historical processes, especially concerning the specific historical paths of development of the respective countries before, during, and after their period of Soviet dominance. Third, it presents some arguments, why these variegated situations in the history of new member countries or future accession countries present, at once, a specific challenge and a significant chance for an approach in terms of a complex and integrated strategy of sustainable development, allowing for many specific strategies to be implicit in one overarching and second order strategy defining a practice of governance for sustainable development. On this basis it outlines a new approach to what it calls the task of a second order governance, defining a sustainability strategy to identify - to 'unearth' and to 'revive' - those innovative lines and traditions within the CEE and CIS countries which are specifically related to such an attitude of looking for windows of opportunity for concrete moves approaching objectives of sustainable development - i.e., for looking systematically and comprehensively for constructive alternatives to the unilateralism of the leading powers and hegemonic strata which have defined the simplified models in place.