Marxisms in the 21st century - Crisis, critique and struggle (Electronic book text)

Although Marx’s writings on social transformation figured prominently in the global Left imagination for more than 150 years, by the late twentieth century the relevance of Marxism was under question by both the Left (including Marxists) and Right. Its revival in the second decade of the twenty-first century is finding new sources of inspiration and creativity from movements that believe that ‘another world is possible’ through democratic, egalitarian and ecological alternatives to capitalism built by ordinary people. The Marxism of many of these movements is not dogmatic or prescriptive, but open, searching, utopian. It revolves around four primary factors: the importance of democracy for an emancipatory project; the ecological limits of capitalism; the crisis of global capitalism; and the learning of lessons from the failures of Marxist-inspired experiments. This edited book introduces some contemporary approaches to Marxism. It shows how the twenty-first century has seen enormous creativity from movements that seek to overcome the weaknesses of the past by forging fundamentally new approaches to politics that draw inspiration from Marxism along with many other anti-capitalist traditions such as feminism, ecology, anarchism and indigenous traditions. Featuring leading thinkers from the Left, it offers provocative ideas on interpreting our current world and will serve as an excellent reference book to introduce a new way of thinking about Marxism to students and scholars in the field.