Marxisms in the 21st Century ─ Crisis, Critique & Struggle

Although Marx’s writings on social transformation figured prominently in the global Left imagination for more than 150 years, by the late 20th century the relevance of Marxism was under question by both the Left (including Marxists) and the Right. Its revival in the second decade of the 21st century is finding new sources of inspiration and creativity from movements that believe that "another world is possible" through democratic, egalitarian, and ecological alternatives to capitalism built by ordinary people. The Marxism of many of these movements is not dogmatic or prescriptive, but open, searching, utopian. It revolves around four primary factors: the importance of democracy for an emancipatory project, the ecological limits of capitalism, the crisis of global capitalism, and the learning of lessons from the failures of Marxist-inspired experiments. This edited book introduces some contemporary approaches to Marxism. It shows how the 21st century has seen enormous creativity from movements that seek to overcome the weaknesses of the past by forging fundamentally new approaches to politics that draw inspiration from Marxism along with many other anticapitalist traditions such as feminism, ecology, anarchism, and indigenous traditions. Featuring leading thinkers from the Left, the book offers provocative ideas on interpreting our current world and will serve as an excellent reference book to introduce a new way of thinking about Marxism to students and scholars in the field.

Michelle Williams is an editor and an associate professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her books include Labour in the Global South: Challenges and Alternatives for Workers; The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala, India; and South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South. Vishwas Satgar is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He was the executive director of the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre (COPAC) for 12 years and has played a pioneering role in developing the solidarity economy movement in South Africa. He is the editor of The Solidarity Economy Alternative: Emerging Theory and Practice.