Socialism and Fantasy: China Miéville's Fables of Race and Class

2016 ◽  
Vol 67 (9) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Christopher Kendrick
Keyword(s):  
Index Volume ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Fantasy Fiction ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Fiction Writers

Among a number of contemporary science and speculative fiction writers who identify as left-wing, China Mi&eacute;ville stands out, not only for the quality of his literary production, but also for the critical character of his political commitment, dedicated equally to socialism and to fantasy. In addition to his fictive works, he has written articles and given lectures on the nature and value of speculative and fantasy fiction; edited a collection of essays on Marxism and fantasy in an issue of the journal <em>Historical Materialism</em>; and, not least, published a list of "Fifty Sci-Fi and Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read." I wish to discuss here the form and thematics of the early novels known (after the alternate world in which they are set) as the Bas-Lag trilogy&mdash;which remains, if you take it as a single work, his most ambitious and memorable achievement. But since Mi&eacute;ville is a serious critic and advocate of fantasy fiction, I will approach the books with a brief discussion of his aesthetic positions and program, gathered from essays and talks as well as from his literary works.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-9" title="Vol. 67, No. 9: February 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Voices of Socialism: Karl Marx

2015 ◽  
Vol 66 (8) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Ralph Miliband
Keyword(s):  
Economic System ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Practical Activity ◽  
Monthly Review

By vocation, Marx was not an economist, or a philosopher, or a sociologist. He was a revolutionary who, being deprived of the opportunity of participating in revolutions in the years after 1848, turned to the detailed analysis of the economic system he wanted to overthrow. Marx never ceased to stress the liberating quality of practical activity; but he himself was compelled by the circumstances of his time to devote most of his life to theoretical work.<p class="mrlink">This article can also be found at the <a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-66-number-7" title="Vol. 66, No. 7: January 2015" target="_blank"><em>Monthly Review</em> website</a>, where most recent articles are published in full.</p><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-66-number-7" title="Vol. 66, No. 7: January 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

scholarly journals World War I and its aftermath: Reaching for the past and across the Atlantic

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 304-317
Author(s):  
Jana Gohrisch
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
World War ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
African Caribbean

This article focuses on the British West Indies beginning with the involvement of African Caribbean soldiers in the Great War. It challenges the enduring myth of the First World War as a predominantly white European conflict. The main part focuses on C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian historian and playwright, following his paradigmatic trajectory from the colony to the ‘mother country’ and his involvement in the protracted transnational process of decolonization after the First Word War. It concentrates on one of his political pamphlets and on his play Toussaint Louverture. The work of the British writer and left-wing political activist Nancy Cunard is also presented as another ‘outsider’ text which can further an ongoing methodological project: the re-integration and cross-fertilization of received knowledge about the war with seemingly outlying knowledge, unorthodox political commitment and challenging aesthetics to produce a richer understanding of this formative period across the Atlantic divide.

Marx as a Student of Technology

1976 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Social Pathology ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Importance

This paper will attempt to demonstrate that a major reason for the fruitfulness of Marx's framework for the analysis of social change was that Marx was, himself, a careful student of technology. By this I mean not only that he was fully aware of, and insisted upon, the historical importance and the social consequences of technology. That much is obvious. Marx additionally devoted much time and effort to explicating the distinctive characteristics of technologies, and to attempting to unravel and examine the inner logic of individual technologies. He insisted that technologies constitute an interesting subject, not only to technologists, but to students of society and social pathology as well, and he was very explicit in the introduction of technological variables into his arguments.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-28-number-3" title="Vol. 28, No. 3: July-August 1976" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Beyond Economism

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Ahlquist ◽  
Margaret Levi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Aggregate Behavior ◽  
Self Selection ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Service To Others ◽  
Governance Arrangements

This chapter explores the variation in organizational norms, governance arrangements, and social networks that produce systematic differences in aggregate behavior. Left-wing longshore union members give up time and money to fight on behalf of social justice causes from which they can expect no material return. Parishioners of churches throughout the United States risk jail to shelter asylum seekers. Altruism is common enough, and so are volunteering, political commitment, and unselfish service to others. The chapter asks why and how do some organizations produce membership willingness to self-sacrifice on behalf of a wide range of political and social justice issues. In some instances, the answer may be simple: self-selection. The more interesting cases are those in which individuals join for one reason but come to pursue goals they may not have considered previously.

scholarly journals Inhabiting Whiteness: The Eoan Group La traviata, 1956

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
Juliana M. Pistorius
Keyword(s):  
South Africans ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Cultural Ideal ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
La Traviata ◽  
Apartheid Regime

AbstractActive at the height of the apartheid regime, the Eoan Group treated South Africans to operas ‘in the true tradition of Italy’. The group relied on elaborate, naturalistic stage settings and the most stereotypical of operatic conventions to construct a hereditary link between itself and Italy, thus creating an alignment with the cultural ideal of Europe and its colonial representative – whiteness. This article offers a materialist reading of the Eoan Group's first operatic endeavour, La traviata in 1956, to argue that their invocation and emulation of the ‘Italian tradition’ served to situate them within a class-based discourse of racially inscribed civility. Drawing on archival records relating to props, costumes, advertisements and funding, it shows how the group constructed an imagined Italian heritage both to emphasise the quality of their productions, and to create an affinity with their white audiences. In this reading, the construction of an Italian operatic tradition functions not as a neutral aesthetic category, but as a historically situated politics of race and class.

scholarly journals Index, Volume 78 - 2007 : subject / Indeks, Jaargang 78 - 2007 : onderwerp

2007 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Index Subject
Keyword(s):  
Index Volume ◽  
Induction Of Anaesthesia

Comparison of quality of induction of anaesthesia between intramuscularly administered ketamine, intravenously administered ketamine and intravenously administered propofol in xylazine premedicated cats

Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 82 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Smith
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
First Century ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
Foreign Labor ◽  
Class Status

The globalization of production and its shift to low-wage countries is the most significant and dynamic transformation of the neoliberal era. Its fundamental driving force is what some economists call "global labor arbitrage": the efforts by firms in Europe, North America, and Japan to cut costs and boost profits by replacing higher-waged domestic labor with cheaper foreign labor, achieved either through emigration of production ("outsourcing," as used here) or through immigration of workers. Reduction in tariffs and removal of barriers to capital flows have spurred the migration of production to low-wage countries, but militarization of borders and rising xenophobia have had the opposite effect on the migration of workers from these countries&mdash;not stopping it altogether, but inhibiting its flow and reinforcing migrants' vulnerable, second-class status.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-3" title="Vol. 67, No. 3: July 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

John Brunner

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jad Smith
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Own Name ◽  
John Brunner

Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934–1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction authors of the late twentieth century. During his exemplary career, the British author wrote with a stamina matched by only a few other great science fiction writers and with a literary quality of even fewer, importing modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probing every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare, and ecology. This book, an intensive review of Brunner's life and works, demonstrates how Brunner's much-neglected early fiction laid the foundation for his classic Stand on Zanzibar and other major works such as The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Making extensive use of Brunner's letters, columns, speeches, and interviews published in fanzines, the book approaches Brunner in the context of markets and trends that affected many writers of the time, including his uneasy association with the “New Wave” of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. This book shows how Brunner's attempts to cross-fertilize the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance complicated the distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and between hard and soft science fiction, and helped carve out space for emerging modes such as cyberpunk, slipstream, and biopunk.

The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption

1976 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Batya Weinbaum ◽  
Amy Bridges
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
The Other ◽  
Accumulation Process ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
Economic Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Social Importance ◽  
Economic Function

The housewife is central to understanding women's position in capitalist societies. Marxists expected that the expropriation of production from the household would radically diminish its social importance. In the face of the household's continuing importance, Marxists have tried to understand it by applying concepts developed in the study of production." Yet obviously, the household is not like a factory, nor are housewives organized in the same way as wage laborers. As Eli Zaretsky has written, the housewife and the proletarian are the characteristic adults of advanced capitalist societies." Moreover, households and corporations are its characteristic economic organizations. Just as the socialization of production has not abolished the housewife, so accumulation has not abolished the economic functions of the household. Harry Braverman has demonstrated how the accumulation process creates new occupational structures, and he has documented the expansion of capital's activity to new sectors. We will argue that these developments also change the social relations of consumption, an economic function which continues to be structured through the household and performed by women as housewives.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-28-number-3" title="Vol. 28, No. 3: July-August 1976" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Notes from the Editors

1976 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
The Editors
Keyword(s):  
Index Volume ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Monthly Review

This issue of <em>Monthly Review</em> began as an invitation to one writer to review Harry Braverman's <em>Labor and Monopoly Capital</em> shortly after it was published by Monthly Review Press near the end of 1974. It soon became apparent, however, that there was no need to invite a review: a number of economists and sociologists expressed a desire to review the book or elaborate on themes either stressed or touched upon in Harry Braverman's analysis. So we changed the plan from a single review to a special issue of <em>Monthly Review</em>, inviting as authors not only those who had already expressed an interest but also others we thought would have useful contributions to make.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-28-number-3" title="Vol. 28, No. 3: July-August 1976" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

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