Marxist Theory in Japan: A Critical Overview

Gavin WALKER I. To summarise the reception history of Marx in Japan is no small task.1 In fact, it is essentially impossible to give an adequate overview of one of the deepest, most prolific, and most variegated linguistic repositories of the Marxist tradition. Although it remains remarkably little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual

Marxism and Photography: A Reading Guide

Steve Edwards 1   Photography is a particularly unstable object of study, located somewhere between painting and film, art, science and labour. In addition, Marxist concepts – commodity, class and ideology – have shaped much academic historiography, without the studies produced being consciously Marxist. For instance, how is one to characterise a work as significant

Origins of the French Fifth Republic: A Reading Guide

Grey Anderson (An earlier version originally published at: http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-les-origines-de-la-ve-republique/) On 13 May 1958, settler riots in Algiers precipitated a seizure of power in the Algerian capital by French army officers. The putschists formed a Committee of Public Safety and demanded the government in Paris be dissolved and replaced by a new one – committed to

Marxism, Space and a Few Urban Questions: A Rough Guide to the English Language Literature

(Originally published in French: http://revueperiode.net/sur-la-production-de-lespace-et-quelques-questions-urbaines-tour-dhorizon-de-la-litterature-anglophone/ ) Stefan Kipfer Introduction Starting in the late 1960s, ‘radical geography’ became a crucial avenue of intellectual innovation in contemporary Marxism. For a generation, its basic orientation was two-fold: (1) politicise ‘space’ by challenging the stranglehold of specialists (architects, urban planners, designers, military planners, regional and development officials) in the

Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide

Daniel Hartley (First published in French at: http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-critique-litteraire-marxiste/) Marxist literary criticism investigates literature’s role in the class struggle. The best general introductions in English remain Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2002 [1976]) and, a more difficult but foundational book, Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form (Princeton UP, 1971). The best anthology in English remains

Borderland Marxism and Russia’s Revolutionary Periphery: A Reading Guide

Eric Blanc (Originally published in http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-aux-marges-de-la-revolution-ru…) Introduction I wrote my forthcoming book, Revolutionary Social Democracy: Marxist Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) (Brill Publisher, Historical Materialism Book Series, 2019), to examine the development of revolutionary politics in Russia from an empire-wide perspective. By expanding our geographic scope to include the imperial borderlands, the book seeks

Marxism & Latin America: Jeffery R. Webber

This piece was first published in French at http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-marxisme-et-amerique-latine/ Any periodization of the flow patterns of Latin American Marxism will by necessity involve schematic simplification and the muffling of anomalous eddies that break up and run against the strongest currents. Nonetheless, there are few other ways forward in a reading guide. An initial gestation phase of

Merchant Capital: Jairus Banaji

This piece was originally published in French at http://revueperiode.net/breve-bibliographie-annotee-sur-le-capitalisme-marchand/ In Marx the longest stretch of text that deals with merchant’s capital occurs in Part 4 of volume 3 of Capital. (pp. 379–455 of the Penguin edition). It is crucial to see at the outset that Marx treats commercial capital (one of the two essential forms

Marx, Engels & Theology: Roland Boer

The Marxism and religion debate has returned with renewed vigour of late. We need to remind ourselves that by ‘religion’, Marx and Engels usually meant the dominant form of religion in Europe: Christianity, although they also discuss Judaism. On this question, the full range of texts by Marx and Engels on theology are rarely discussed.

Ecology & Marxism: Andreas Malm

This piece was originally published in French at http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-le-marxisme-ecologique/ 1. Starting off Many people on the Left – myself included – were for a long time in the habit of shrugging off issues of ecology as secondary matters, peripheral to the real struggle. Indifference or lukewarm commitment to environmentalism sometimes still characterise Marxist intellectuals (consult, for

Queer Marxism: Peter Drucker

This piece was originally published in French at http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-pour-un-marxisme-queer/ Queer Marxism has been founding a body of theory synthesizing Marxist concepts like class, reification and totality with concepts from other paradigms like performativity, homonationalism and intersectionality. The roots of queer Marxism go back to the first interactions between socialist movements and homosexual emancipation (explored in the

Marxism & Cinema: Daniel Fairfax

This piece was originally published in French at http://revueperiode.net/guide-de-lecture-marxisme-et-cinema/. “Of all the arts,” Vladimir Lenin reportedly claimed, “the most important for us is the cinema.” An invention of the modern bourgeoisie, cinema is the only art form whose genesis is contemporaneous with that of capitalism, and over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,