Abstract

We are witnessing the birth of a new politics -- anti-capitalist, libertarian and anti-war. But where do today's dissidents come from? Dissident Marxism argues that their roots can be found in the life and work of an earlier generation of socialist revolutionaries, including such inspiring figures as the Soviet poet Mayakovsky, the Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch, Communist historians Edward Thompson and Dona Torr, the Egyptian surrealist Georges Henein, American New Left economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, advocates of Third World liberation including Walter Rodney and Samir Amin, Harry Braverman, the author of Labor and Monopoly Capital, and David Widgery, the journalist of the May '68 revolts. What these writers shared was a commitment to the values of socialism-from-below, the idea that change must be driven by the mass movements of the oppressed. In a world dominated by slump, fascism and war, they retained a commitment to total democracy. Dissident Marxism describes the left in history. Some readers will enjoy it as a history of revolutionary socialism in the years between Stalin's rise and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others will find here a challenging thesis -- that the most enduring of left-wing traditions, and highly relevant to the times we live in today, were located in a space between the New Left and Trotskyism. Dissident Marxism explores the lives and thinking of some of the most creative and striking members of the twentieth century left, and asks if the new anti-capitalist movement might provide an opportunity for just such another left-wing generation to emerge?
David Renton is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Sunderland University. Before that, he worked as an Education Officer for the Trades Union Congress in London. He gained his MA in Modern History at Oxford University in 1995, and his PhD at Sheffield University in 1998. He has lectured at Edge Hill College of Higher Education in Ormskirk, at Rhodes University in South Africa and at Nottingham Trent University.
'A salutory antidote to oversimple ideas of an homogenous left. David Renton's round-up of rebels and resisters gives voice to suppressed traditions of left dissent which are of great relevance in our times.' Sheila Rowbotham, University of Manchester 'A readable and interesting account of somewhat less-known strands of Marxism - strands that might rescue its libertarian image and potential from the tarnish of Stalinism and kindred authoritarian left projects...Broaches ideas that are important and offers an alternative perspective on Marxism to the stagnant and inaccurate image that has dominated both much activism and much scholarship in recent years.' Progress in Human Geography