Marxisms in the 21st Century: Crisis, critique and struggle

Michelle Williams · Vishwas Satgar

Dec 2013 · NYU Press

About this ebook

The current resurgence of Marxism is based on new sources of inspiration and creativity from movements that seek democratic, egalitarian and ecological alternatives to capitalism. The Marxism of many of these movements is neither dogmatic nor prescriptive, but rather, 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. Marxisms in the Twenty-First Century challenges vanguardist Marxism featured in South Africa and beyond. Featuring leading thinkers from the Left, the book offers provocative ideas on interpreting our current world and serves as an excellent introduction to new ways of thinking about Marxism to students and scholars in the field. Many anti-capitalist traditions and themes - including democracy, globalisation, feminism, critique and ecology inform and shape the contributions in this volume.

About the author

Michelle Williams is an editor and an associate professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her books include Labour in the Global South: Challenges and Alternatives for Workers; The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala, India; and South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South.

Vishwas Satgar is an associate professor of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the editor of the Democratic Marxism series, and is the principal investigator for the Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene project and a democratic eco-socialist.

Jacklyn Cock is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and a research associate of the university’s Society, Work and Politics Institute.

Ashwin Desai is professor of Sociology based at the Centre for Sociological Research, University of Johannesburg.

Daryl Glaser is associate professor in the department of Political Studies at Wits University.