The Bourgeois Charm of Karl Marx & the Ideological Irony of American Jurisprudence employs a well-known body of work, Marx’s, to explain the inevitable limits of scholarship, in hopes to encourage academic boldness, and diversity, especially within American jurisprudence

Donna Kline's contribution to the Sovietica series falls outside the strict confines of the study of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. It centers its attention on the seemingly minor question of Marx' knowledge of and attitude toward the legal theory and practice in vogue at the time he was writing studies that directly addressed issues of law and economics, and that indirectly helped to fashion the legal and economic behavior of Soviet-style regimes. That this question is not as minor or as irrelevant to Marxism-Leninism as it might seem at fIrst glance flows from Marx' obvious intent to do a thorough critique of all the vectors of 'bourgeois-capitalist' civilization and culture, clearly expressed in the many key texts, where 'legal relations' form at least part of the central focus. Marx' thought was forming when the 'bourgeois' law that had become self-conscious at the end of the 18th century was, following the French Revolution, trying to 'take possession' of the social-political consciousness of European-American culture, and fInding itself coming up against the 'vagaries' of economic quasi-anarchy. There is a sense in which the 'bourgeois-capitalist' efforts at developing a legal code for existing economic practice represent a sort of 'ideology in practice' to be applied to the same phenomena that Marx wanted to account for in his peculiarly Hegelian ideological critique.

Marx's undeveloped ideas about how society presents a misleading appearance which distorts its members' understanding of it have been the subject of many conflicting interpretations. In this book John Torrance takes a fresh, un-Marxist approach to Marx's texts and shows that a more precise, coherent and cogent sociology of ideas can be extracted from them than is generally allowed. The implications of this for twentieth-century capitalism and for recent debates about Marx's conceptions of justice, morality and the history of social science are explored. The author argues that Marx's theory of ideas is sufficiently independent of other parts of his thought to provide a critique and explanation of those defects in his own understanding of capitalism which allowed Marxism itself to become, by his own definition, an ideology.

E. B. Pashukanis was the most significant contemporary to develop a fresh, new Marxist perspective in post-revolutionary Russia. In 1924 he wrote what is probably his most influential work, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. In the second edition, 1926, he stated that this work was not to be seen as a final product but more for ""self-clarification"" in hopes of adding ""stimulus and material for further discussion."" A third edition was printed in 1927.Pashukanis's ""commodity-exchange"" theory of law spearheaded a perspective that traced the form of law, not to class interests, but to capital logic itself. Until his death, he continued to argue for the ideal of the withering away of the state, law, and the juridic subject. He eventually arrived at a position contrary to Stalin's who, at that time, was attempting to consolidate and strengthen the state apparatus under the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Inevitably, Pashukanis was branded an enemy of the revolution in January 1937. His works were subsequently removed from soviet libraries. In 1954, Pashukanis was ""rehabilitated"" by the Soviets and restored to an acceptable position in the historical development of marxist law.In Europe and North America, a number of legal theorists only rediscovered Pashukanis's work in the late 1970s. They subjected it to careful critical analysis, and realized that he offered an alternative to the traditional Marxist interpretations, which saw law simply and purely as tied to class interests of domination. By the mid-1980s the instrumental Marxist perspective in vogue in Marxist sociology, criminology, politics, and economics gave way, to a significant extent due to Pashukanis's insights, to a more structural Marxist accounting of the relationship of law to economics and other social spheres.In his new introduction, Dragan Milovanovic discusses the life of Pashukanis, Marx and the commodity-exchange theory of law, and the historical lessons of Pashukanis's work. This bo

“If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to ‘do something,’ you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.” — Adrienne Rich With a preface by Adrienne Rich, Manifesto presents the radical vision of four famous young rebels: Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and Che Guevara’s Socialism and Humanity.

Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers – from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America… His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work. Two hundred years after the birth of the great revolutionary Karl Marx, across the world, the capitalist system is in crisis and the working class are moving into action to change their lives. In ruling class circles, no longer do they snidely declare the death of Marx. On the contrary, there is fear and consternation in their ranks. There has, therefore, never been a more urgent time to study his ideas. This short book, released for the two hundredth birthday of Marx, contains a series of articles on the man, his life, and his ideas: from an explanation of the philosophy of Marxism; to Marx’s battles against petty-bourgeois anarchist ideas; to Trotsky’s assessment of the Communist Manifesto. And much more! This book should be read by all class-conscious workers as the beginning of the study of the ideas of Marxism. As Lenin said, “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement."

Strife has raged about Karl Marx for decades, and never had it been so embittered as at the time of this book’s first publication, 1936. Marx had impressed his image on the time as not other had done. To some he was – and still is – a fiend, the arch-enemy of human civilisation, and the prince of chaos, while to others he is a far-seeing and beloved leader, guiding the human race towards a brighter future. The arena in which Marx was fought about in 1936 was in the factories, in the parliaments and at the barricades. In both camps, the bourgeois and the socialist, Marx was first of all, if not exclusively, the revolutionary. This book sets out to describe the life of Marx the fighter.

Bakhtin and Voloshinov argued that dialogue is the intersubjective basis of consciousness, and of the creativity which makes historical changes in consciousness possible. The multiple dialogical relationships give every subject, who has developed through internalising them, the potential to distance him or herself from them. Consciousness is therefore an “unfinalised” process, always open to a possible future which would not merely reiterate the past. But this book explores its corollary: The relative openness is a field of conflict where rival discourses struggle for hegemony, by subordinating or eliminating their rivals. That is how the unconscious is created out of socio-historical conflicts. Hegemony is always incomplete, because there is always the possibility of a return of its repressed rivals in new combinations.