Alex Callinicos

"Alex Callinicos analyses the development of the movement, distinguishes between the different political forces within it, and explores the strategic dilemmas - notably over violence and the nation-state - that it increasingly confronts. He argues that the movement is directed against capitalism itself. The logic of competitive accumulation that drives this system is not only increasing global inequality and economic instability, but threatens ecological catastrophe and appalling conflict. To meet the challenge of global capitalism the new protest movement requires, according to Callinicos, a creative synthesis of its own inclusive and dynamic style and the best of the classical Marxist tradition."--Jacket.

"In Against the Third Way Alex Callinicos develops a fundamental critique of this philosophy. He argues that Third Way governments have continued the neoliberal policies of their conservative predecessors. They have promoted the interests of the multinational corporations, privatized areas where Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher dared not go, and allowed social and economic inequality to continue growing. Callinicos also attacks the theoretical underpinnings of the Third Way. He challenges the idea that the 'knowledge economy' is freeing us from the contradictions of capitalism, denies that New Labour has coherent strategies for achieving greater equality or reconciling the interests of individual and community, and argues that what is called 'political globalization' - the higher profile of international institutions such as NATO, the IMF, and the WTO - masks the assertion of American imperial power."--Jacket.

Theories and Narratives explores the relationship between social theory and historical writing. Its aim is to establish the contribution that theory can make to understanding the past. Pursuing this objective, Alex Callinicos critically confronts a number of leading attempts to reconceptualize the meaning of history, including Francis Fukuyama's rehabilitation of Hegel's philosophy of history and the postmodernist efforts of Hayden White and others to deny the existence of a past independent of our representations of it. In these cases philosophical arguments are pursued in tandem with discussions of historical interpretations of, respectively, Stalinism and the Holocaust. Leading theories of history - Marx's and Weber's - are then critically compared in the context of the work of recent writers such as Michael Mann, W. G. Runciman, and Robert Brenner. . Finally, the politics of historical theory is explored in a discussion of Marxism's claims to be a universal theory of human progress. Swimming against the tide of contemporary fashion, Theories and Narratives seeks to rebut the claim made by many postmodernists that Marxism is inherently Eurocentric in both its conceptual structures and its political practice. Marx's project of human emancipation, it concludes, still defines our political horizons.

"The Revenge of History is a frontal assault on the widely accepted idea that the East European revolutions of 1989 mark the death of socialism." "Alex Callinicos seeks to vindicate the classical Marxist tradition by arguing that socialism in this tradition can only come from below, through the self-activity of the working class. Stalinism from this standpoint was a counter-revolution, erecting at the end of the 1920s a state capitalist regime on the ruins of the radically democratic socialism briefly achieved in October 1917. Callinicos argues that the collapse of Stalinism at the end of the 1980s is one aspect of a world-wide transition from nationally organized to globally integrated capitalism. The result is likely to be greater economic and political instability. Against this background socialism -- in Marx's sense -- is all the more necessary. Callinicos contends that Marx's vision of a classless communist society would be both practically feasible and profoundly democratic." "He concludes that the collapse of Stalinism should be less the moment to abandon socialism than to resume unfinished business. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.