Author Description

This is a partisan book, rejecting the assumption of a bankruptcy of Marxist theory in face of the collapse of the state socialist regimes, and countering the criticisms advanced by postmodernist writers and feminists, although it takes the latter very seriously. Viewing Marxism as the indispensable basis for a new 21st-century liberation doctrine, it identifies the basic issue as the nature of the historical subject, which Marx and Engels too readily associated with a white, male industrial proletariat. Starting with the 'philosophical anthropology' of the early Marx, this book takes a concept of common human needs as a way of theorizing concrete historical experience. It sees history in terms of a double development of capitalism, at the 'centre' and on the 'periphery', and pays special attention to consciousness and the non-material aspects of human life, undervalued by Marxism.