A Critique of British Marxism: On Not Wanting to Know
Mar 2025 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing
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304
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About this ebook
In their enthusiasm to promote the notion of human agency, British Marxists have remained umbilically attached to the individual/society opposition, central to bourgeois ideology, and to its variants, such as subject/system and text/context. They are attached, similarly, to the notion of consciousness, whether exercised by individual or collective agencies. This book argues that such an approach is methodologically misconceived. It recommends, accordingly, the recovery of Marxism's classical concepts, notably the 'social formation' and 'modes of production', with a consequent focus upon the notion of the ideological (as opposed to political or libidinal) unconscious. British Marxists, it elaborates, need urgently to familiarize themselves with the work of the Spanish Marxist Juan Carlos Rodríguez. This book also advocates, by extension, a reconsideration of other social modes, notably of a feudalism based not upon ‘subjects’, as under capitalism, but upon ‘lords’ and ‘serfs’/‘servants’. The result is a radically new take on the history of ideological production.
About the author
Malcolm K. Read was born in Derby, England, in 1945. Educated at Bristol University, Professor Read gained his PhD at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he lectured in Spanish from 1968 to 1980. He was lecturer and senior lecturer at Auckland University, New Zealand, from 1980 to 1993, during which time he held a visiting professorship at the University of the West Indies, in Jamaica (1987). He moved to the USA in 1993 to become Chair of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he taught until his retirement in 2012.
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