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In his book, Rudolf Hilferding. The Tragedy of a German Social Democrat, William Smaldone sums up: ‘The tragedy in Hilferding‘s life lay in his adherence to a political outlook that was incompatible with German reality in 1933’ (Smaldone 1998, 8). Although this may certainly be true, in this, Rudolf Hilferding did not differ from many others, and Smaldone’s book itself ultimately says much more about Hilferding’s actual tragedy: the talented economist and social democratic politician died in the hell of GESTAPO imprisonment and also played a part in the rise to power of those he had identified as mortal enemies early on, and who were able to maintain that power for many years.

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 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.