Routledge and the Board of Editors are pleased to
announce a new book series
Teresa L. Ebert and
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
Books in Marxist Social and Cultural Theory
Editorial Board: Bret Benjamin,
Kimberly DeFazio, Shahrzad Mojab, Rob Wilkie
The task of the series is to advance new social and
cultural theories grounded in historical materialism and to provide a
collective space for a new generation of Marxist thinkers in dialogue
with the most advanced forms of bourgeois thought.
The series is for the new. Not the "new" in bourgeois philosophies. Like the representatives of capital in liberal democracies who every "three or six years" fight with each other to "represent and repress" people, such "new" theories relentlessly compete with each other to design new illusions for maintaining the capitalist conditions that require newer and newer illusions.
The new in the series is the new of a historical
becoming. It strives to comprehend and know its
conditions of existence and understand why "the old system…must
come to an end." The series’ founding arguments are that "The mode of
production of material life conditions the general process of social,
political and intellectual life" and determines the "relationship of
sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of state" in a
society.
Books in the series contribute to knowledge for
conscious, organized class struggles to build a different society that
crosses the "narrow horizon of bourgeois right" and inscribes on its
banner "From each according to their ability, to each according to their
needs!"
The series is
critique-al. Bourgeois anti-critique bans critique as a negative
"digging down" in the "deep dark below," but the "deep dark below" is
"the hidden abode of production" where one sees "not only how capital
produces, but how capital is itself produced" and "The secret of
profit-making" is "at last laid bare."
Situated on the other
side of reform-al marxisms (Neo-, Post-, Autonomist, Exit, Neue,
Accelerationist, Krisis,…), the series overturns the libertarian
fictions of "the common," "capital is dead," "communism of capital," and
the digital metaphysics that fashions Walmart as "the very anticipatory
prototype of some new form of socialism." Reform-al marxism and
bourgeois thought (the contemporary expression of which are mostly in
intersectionality, speculative realism, OOO, ANT, "new materialism,"
social reproductionism...) are twins of the ruling ideas: "The ideas of
the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."
The series is open to
all Marxist critiques of capitalism and welcomes books in metatheory. It
is particularly interested in dialectical inquiries into the capitalist
relations of production—its class contradictions, (im)material labor,
value-form, general intellect, the law of value, wages and profits,
labor process, climate change, imperialism, traveling capital, labor in
the diaspora, fall in the rate of profit—their cultural consequences and
material links to struggles for the "positive transcendence of private
property" and the return of humans to themselves as social beings. The
editors welcome books that explain how the oppression that is one’s
daily lived experience as "other" is caused not by cultural
domination but by exploitation of labor at the point of
production, by "the silent compulsion of economic relations."
An independent editorial board of four Marxist scholars
will review manuscripts and proposals and select them for peer review.
The Editorial Board is coordinated by Dean Birkenkamp as its inaugural
chief editor. Thinkers who are interested in contributing to the series
can send inquires to Dean Birkenkamp at Routledge:
Dean.Birkenkamp@taylorandfrancis.com
Forthcoming: Marxism and Pandemic: Materialist Anatomy of a Social Crisis. Ed. Stephen Tumino