![]() ![]() This is a collection of essays of paramount importance written by one of the most noteworthy authorities on Marx and Hegel within the field of Western Marxism. But the work’s greatest value surely lies with its powerful reminder that “the pull of the universal, of the emancipatory future, is always there, even if for the moment driven deep down, beneath the surface of society.” Tony Smith in Science and Society 85(4), 539-41, October 2021 The exemplary clarity of the writing will make this collection especially valuable to newcomers to Marxian theory, and to anyone curious about Hegel’s relationship to Marxism. Anderson’s Dialectics of Revolution remains not only highly contemporary but also a very critical contribution to Marxist theory in general. The book lays forward an important contribution toward analyzing contemporary society through a vantage point informed by the “whole of Marx,” without descending into the simplistic idealism-materialism duality debate. … The originality of Anderson’s writings collected in the volume stems from his deep-rooted conviction regarding the importance of the dialectical mode of thinking. The most interesting part of his critiques and appreciations of thinkers is that throughout the course of the book, Anderson never really criticizes merely for the sake of critiquing but instead keeps referring the reader back to his primary agenda, which forms the vantage point through which he is looking at the ideas- Dialectics. He also takes up positions regarding prominent social thinkers of the contemporary era, which include Pierre Bourdieu, Giles Deleuze, and Antonio Negri among others. Beginning from Hegel, Anderson extends the discussion to Marx and then further on to Marcuse and Lukács. Kevin Andersons’s latest offering, Dialectics of Revolution, brings forward diverse perspectives on the concept of dialectics that have been discussed over the past two centuries. As a whole, the book offers a discussion of major themes in the dialectics of revolution that still speak to us today at a time of radical transformation in all spheres of society and of everyday life. The book also takes up the dialectic in global, intersectional settings via a reconsideration of the themes of Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, where nationalism, race, and colonialism were theorized alongside capital and class as key elements in Marxist dialectical thought. In addition, key critics of Hegel and dialectics like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty, are themselves analysed and critiqued from a twenty-first century dialectical perspective. Dunayevskaya’s intersectional revolutionary dialectics is also treated extensively, especially its focus on a dialectics of revolution that avoids class reductionism, placing gender, race, and colonialism at the center alongside class. Major but neglected works on Hegel and dialectics written under the impact of the struggle against fascism like Lukács’s The Young Hegel and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution are given full critical treatment. In these essays, particular attention is given to Lenin’s encounter with Hegel and its impact on the critique of imperialism, the rejection of crude materialism, and more generally, on world revolutionary developments. The essays cover the dialectics of revolution in a variety of settings, from Hegel and the French Revolution to dialectics today and its poststructuralist and pragmatist critics. Anderson, a well-known scholar-activist in the Marxist-Humanist tradition. This book collects four decades of writings on dialectics, a number of them published here for the first time, by Kevin B.
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