The first of the new Theory and History series, Matt Perry's punchy andaccessible volume examines Marxism's enormous impact on the way historians approach their subject. Perry offers both a concise introduction to the Marxist view of history and Marxism historical writing, and a guide to its relevance to students' own work.

This textbook examines Marxism’s enormous impact on the way historians approach their subject. Tackling current historiographical questions in an accessible way, the author offers a clear introduction to Marxist views of history, key Marxist historians and thinkers, and the relevance of Marxist theory and history to students’ own work. This is a concise, thorough overview of an important area of historiography. The second edition incorporates significant new developments in research, including Marxist contributions to the emergence of global, maritime and transnational history; the discovery of Marx’s ecologism and the historical critique of fossil capitalism as a source of environmental disaster; a reassessment of gender oppression through social reproduction theory; and the contribution of Marxism to debates on race, Eurocentrism and whiteness.

This critically aclaimed book, now in its second edition is firmly established as an essential guide to this recent historiographical debate. Adopted as a set book by the Open University. An indispensable guide to Marxist historiography for undergradu. . . .

First published in 1978, this book rapidly established itself as a classic of modern Marxism. Cohen's masterful application of advanced philosophical techniques in an uncompromising defense of historical materialism commanded widespread admiration. In the ensuing twenty years, the book has served as a flagship of a powerful intellectual movement--analytical Marxism. In this expanded edition, Cohen offers his own account of the history, and the further promise, of analytical Marxism. He also expresses reservations about traditional historical materialism, in the light of which he reconstructs the theory, and he studies the implications for historical materialism of the demise of the Soviet Union.

A decade after Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘End of History’, anti-capitalist demonstrators at Seattle and elsewhere have helped reinvigorate the Left with the reply ‘another world is possible’. More than anyone else it was Marx who showed that slogans such as this were no utopian fantasies, and that capitalism was just as much a historical mode of production, no more natural and certainly no less contradictory, than were the feudal and slave modes which proceeded it. Paul Blackledge opens this study with a defence of the Marxist approach to the study of history against what he argues as being the naive empiricism of traditional historians and the relativism of the postmodernists. He moves on to outline Marx and Engels analyses of concrete historical processes and their critiques of the alternative historiographic methodologies of their contemporaries. He then discusses neglected historical works produced by Marxists in the half-century or so after Marx and Engels’ deaths. Two central chapters survey recent Marxist debates on, first, the nature of modes of productions, including slave, feudal and tributary systems, and the revolutionary transitions between them; and, second, the methodological debate over the issue of structure and agency in the movement of history. Finally, he shows the political relevance of these debates through a concluding survey of competing Marxist attempts to periodise the present, postmodern, conjuncture. This book should be read by historians, students of cultural, social and political theory and anti-capitalist activists.

A masterful survey of the history of Marxist philosophy of science Sheehan retraces the development of a Marxist philosophy of science through detailed and highly readable accounts of the debates that shaped it. Skilfully deploying a large cast of characters, Sheehan shows how Marx and Engel’s ideas on the development and structure of natural science had a crucial impact on the work of early twentieth-century natural philosophers, historians of science, and natural scientists. With a new afterword by the author.

Marx's theory of history is often regarded as the most enduring and fruitful aspect of his intellectual legacy. His "historical materialism" has been the inspiration for some of the best historical writing in the works of scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P.Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Robert Brenner. S.H. Rigby establishes Marx's claims about social structure and historical change, discusses their use in his own and his followers' writings, and assesses the validity of his theories. He argues that Marx's social theories were profoundly contradictory and that Marxism has proved most useful when it is seen as a source of questions, concepts and hypotheses rather than as a philosophy of historical development.

This book offers readers a rare chance to witness a mainstream thinker challenge an outlaw-activist. Avakian and Martin wrestle with big questions that have to do with the state of the world and the possibility for radical change. The scope and relevance of Marxism, and the nature and reach of communist revolution, are at the heart of this rich and lively dialogue. Avakian and Martin probe a wide range of issues: the place of ethics in a transformative revolutionary politics; Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel; Marx and the question of colonialism and Eurocentrism; the Maoist experience in China; sustainable agriculture and the task of overcoming the urban-rural divide; imperialism and lopsided development in the world, and the effects on social structure and revolution; animal rights; secularism and religion; the post-911 agenda of the U.S. ruling class, the political-social-cultural landscape of the U.S., and the prospects for resistance and revolution; Marxism and the question of homosexuality; the challenges confronting radical and communist intellectuals and the possibilities for engaged, creative intellectual work today.

This magisterial analysis of human history - from "Lucy," the first hominid, to the Great Recession of 2008 - combines the insights of earlier generations of Marxist historians with radical new ideas about the historical process.Reading history against the grain, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past was not predetermined. Choices were frequent and numerous. Different outcomes - liberation or barbarism - were often possible. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives great events.At the beginning of the 21st century - with economic disaster, war, climate catastrophe and deep class divisions - humans face perhaps the greatest crisis in the long history of our species. The lesson of A Marxist History of the World is that, since we created our past, we can also create a better future.