Robinson in Ruins: New materialism and the archaeological imagination

Robinson in Ruins New materialism and the archaeological imagination Paul dave Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keil er’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson. [1] The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson […]

Giddens and Historical Materialism

Giddens and Historical Materialism Paul Bagguley Jntroduction In this paper I examine a recent critique of historical materialism by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens and the alternative theory of history developed by him. This is contained in his recent book A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. It is the most recent in a series of […]

Althusser’s epistemology: The limits of the theory of theoretical practice

ALTHUSSBR’S BPISTBMOLOGY: Ihe limils of Ihe Iheo..y of Iheo..elical p ..aclice PaulPatton concepts and theses which would permit the demarcation of science from other kinds of theoretical discourse. Dialectical materialism, then, was thought to be the philosophical theory Within which the scientific character of historical materialism could be demonstrated. Althusser’s marxist philosophy, however, was no […]

Misadventures of the Dialectic

Misadvenlures of Ihe Dialeclic Peter Dews I would like to offer some kind of critical response to the ideas on dialectic and social science which have been developed by Roy Edgley in articles published in Radical Philosophy (‘Reason as Dialectic’ RP15) and, more recently. in Critique (‘Dialectic: The Contradiction of Colletti’, Critique 7). As Edgley’s […]

Personal Autonomy and Historical Materialism

PiRSONAL AUTONOMY a: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Richard Archer The following is largely a criticism of some of the mistakes and certain tendencies antithetical to an historical materialist conception of the world found in Eoss Poole’s paper ‘Freedom and Alienation’. (Radical Philosophy, Winter 1975). Basically the criticism is this: because Poole never entirely leaves the framework employed […]

Intellectual and Manual Labour: An attempt at a materialistic theory

(New Left Books 1973). But also read Macciocchi’s own contributions to this important and exciting book. Althusser on intellectuals: ‘It is extremely difficult for specialists and other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois “intellectuals” (including students). For a mere education of their consciousness is not enough, nor a mere reading of Capital. They must also make a real […]

Dialectical Reason

Richard Turner The concept ‘dialectical reason’, as used by ‘marxist’ theorists, contains buried within it a number of theoretical problems, problems which have significance for where why and how we may use dialectical reason. There are three issues, in particular, on which reflective clarity is both always needed and often lacking. Firstly, what precisely distinguishes […]

What’s material about materialist feminism?: A Marxist Feminist critique

What’s material about materialist feminism? A Marxist Feminist critique Martha E. Gimenez In the heady days of the Womenʼs Liberation Movement, it was possible to identify four main currents within feminist thought: Liberal (concerned with attaining economic and political equality within the context of capitalism); Radical (focused on men and patriarchy as the main causes […]

Marxism and war

Marxism and war Étienne balibar War for Marxism is not exactly a concept, but it is certainly a problem.* While Marxism could not invent a concept of war, it could re-create it, so to speak – that is, introduce the question of war into its own problematic, and produce a Marxist critique of war, or […]