Waubonsee Community College

Main currents of Marxism, the founders, the golden age, the breakdown, Leszek Kołakowski ; translated from the Polish by P.S. Falla

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 1215-1222) and index

index present

non fiction

Main currents of Marxism

bibliography

61169688

Leszek Kołakowski ; translated from the Polish by P.S. Falla

"Drawing on powerful historical and philosophical insight, Main Currents of Marxism traces the intellectual foundations of Marxist thought from Plotinus through Hegel to Lukacs, Sartre, and Mao. Leszek Kolakowski reveals Marxism to be "the greatest fantasy of our century ... an idea that began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalinism." Long before the overwhelming majority of historians, journalists, and intellectuals around the world came to see the devastation wrought by autocratic, state-sponsored socialism, Kolakowski pointed to the shortcomings of a system doomed to failure." "Recognized when it was first published for its profound historical insights and for its exposition of how the Communist hierarchy was quickly corroding from the inside, this forceful work has influenced several generations of scholars and historians. Despite decades of major political change, Main Currents of Marxism remains as accurate and incisive as ever. In a new preface and epilogue, Kolakowski reexamines the collapse of international Communism in light of the last tumultuous years."--Jacket

the founders, the golden age, the breakdown

v. 1. The founders -- v. 2. The golden age -- v. 3. The breakdownPreface to the 1981 edition -- BOOK ONE: THE FOUNDERS: The origin of the dialectic -- The Hegelian left -- Marx's thought in its earliest phase -- Hess and Feuerbach -- Marx's early political and philosophical writings -- The Paris Manuscripts. The theory of alienated labour. The young Engels -- The Holy family -- The German ideology -- Recapitulation -- Socialist ideas in the first half of the Nineteenth Century as compared with Marxian socialism -- The writings and struggles of Marx and Engels after 1847 -- Capitalism as a dehumanized world -- The contradictions of capital and their abolition. The unity of analysis and action -- The motive forces of the historical process -- The dialectic of nature -- Recapitulation and philosophical commentary -- Selected bibliographyBOOK TWO: THE GOLDEN AGE: Marxism and the Second International -- German orthodoxy: Karl Kautsky -- Rosa Luxemburg and the Revolutionary Left -- Bernstein and revisionism -- Jean Jaures: Marxism as a soteriology -- Paul Lafargue: a Hedonist Marxism -- Georges Sorel: a Jansenist Marxism -- Antonio Labriola: an attempt at an open orthodoxy -- Ludwik Krzywicki: Marxism as an instrument of sociology -- Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz: a Polish brand of orthodoxy -- Stanislaw Brzozowski: Marxism as a Historical Subjectivism -- Austro-Marxists, Kantians in the Marxist movement. Ethical socialism -- The beginnings of Russian Marxism -- Plekhanov and the codification of Marxism -- Marxism in Russia before the rise of Bolshevism -- The rise of Leninism -- Philosophy and politics in the Bolshevik movement -- The fortunes of Leninism: from a theory of the state to a state ideology -- Selective bibliographyBOOK THREE: THE BREAKDOWN: The first phase of Soviet Marxism. The beginnings of Stalinism -- Theoretical controversies in Soviet Marxism in the 1920s -- Marxism as an ideology of the Soviet State -- The crystallization of Marxism-Leninism after the Second World War -- Trotsky -- Antonio Gramsci: Communist Revisionism --Gyorgy Lukacs: reason in the service of dogma -- Karl Korsch -- Lucien Goldman -- The Frankfurt School and 'Critical Theory' -- Herbert Marcuse: Marxism as a totalitarian utopia of the New Left -- Ernst Bloch: Marxism as a futuristic gnosis -- Developments in Marxism after Stalin's death -- Epilogue -- New epilogue -- Selective bibliography