Browse results

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 20 items for :

  • Social Sciences x
  • Upcoming Publications x
  • Search level: All x
Clear All
In Communes and Conflict, Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers explore the urban rebellions that regularly erupted in Flanders between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. They analyse not only how these rebellions were sparked and repressed, but also how they shaped the culture and identity of Flemish townspeople. Drawing from a wide range of theoretical methods and concepts, including those of discourse analysis, semiotics, speech acts, collective memory and material cultural studies, the authors return to key Marxist questions on ideology, labour and class interest to map the perspectives of the rebels, the urban patriciate and the Flemish and Burgundian nobility.
Author:
The book offers a critical account of how utopian thinking became defeated as a tool of philosophy whose explicit objective has been to not only analyse but emancipate the world. While such philosophy was originally inseparable from ideas of a radically better society it aimed to realise, many of its most influential practitioners today object to the use of utopian ideas. Countering this scepticism, the book argues in favour of utopian thinking. By elucidating a concept of utopia freed of its alleged pitfalls, the book contends that utopian thinking indeed presents an important resource for achieving emancipatory social goals.
Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement
Author:
Ontologies of Violence provides a new paradigm for understanding the concept of violence through comparative interpretations of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, philosophical theologians in the Mennonite pacifist tradition, and Grace M. Jantzen’s feminist philosophy of religion. By drawing out and challenging the remarkably similar priorities shared by its three sources, and by challenging the assumption that differences necessarily lead to displacement, Ontologies of Violence provides a critical theory of violence by treating it as a diagnostic concept that implies the violation of value-laden boundaries.
Local Interactions in an Ottoman Countryside (1839-1923)
This book traces the history of everyday relations of Greek-Orthodox Christians and Muslims of Cappadocia, an Ottoman countryside inhabited by various ethno-religious groups, either sharing the same settlements, or living in neighbouring villages. Based on Ottoman state archives, testimonies collected by the Centre of Asia Minor Studies, and various pre-1923 hand-written and printed sources mostly in Ottoman- and Karamanli-Turkish, and Greek, the study covers the period from 1839 to 1923 and proposes an anthropological perspective on everyday cross-religious interactions. It focuses on questions such as identification and mapping of communities, sharing of space and resources, use of languages, and religiosity in the context of conversions and of shared sacred spaces and beliefs to investigate everyday realities of a multireligious rural society which disappeared with the fall of the Empire.
Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism, 1884–1921
Author:
Raising the Red Flag explores the origins of the British Marxist movement from the creation of the Social Democratic Federation to the foundation of the Communist Party.

It tells a story of rising class struggle, the founding of the Labour Party, the fight against World War One, the Russian Revolution, and the explosive year of 1919.

The book also uses new archival sources to re-examine Marxist organisations such as the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, and Sylvia Parkhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation.

Above all, this is the story of men and women who fought to liberate the working class from capitalism through socialist revolution.
Volume Editor:
Author:
Phenomenal waste has surfaced as the social form and substance of value. In capital’s totalizing process, which commodifies all that comes in its way, wasting classes consume the wasted classes. This book addresses the metamorphosis of value into waste and it focuses on wars as industries of perfect waste. Whereas wasted man is visibly the prevalent commodity on sale, this central element in the commodity relation is rarely mentioned. In line with this, the book examines how waste, as a surrogate value, eludes the crises of capital and maintains its resilience.
Social Capital and Civic Association or Class Struggle?
Raju J Das, Jamie Gough and Aram Eisenschitz provide a Marxist critique of new social democracy as the dominant contemporary strategy for local economic and social development. In both the global North and South, new social democracy seeks to develop social capital, strengthen civil society, build not-for-pro¬fit enterprises, encourage self-help, and foster community ties. It seeks participatory forms of local politics to achieve a local class consensus. It promises to improve people's economic and social conditions in the face of neoliberal capitalism, and to empower them. The authors argue that this strategy is severely limited by, and internalises, its capitalist environment. They show that social enterprise can be developed in socialist ways, and contribute to a local politics based in class struggle. But social capital cannot replace the struggle of the exploited and oppressed against capitalism and for a socialist society, a strategy which the authors outline for the local scale.