CFP for a new Marxist book series

Robert Wilkie Announcement
Announcement Type
Call for Publications
Subject Fields
Cultural History / Studies, Humanities, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology

Routledge and the Board of Editors are pleased to announce a new book series

Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
Books in Marxist Social and Cultural Theory

Editorial Board: Bret Benjamin, Kimberly DeFazio, Shahrzad Mojab, Rob Wilkie

The task of the series is to advance new social and cultural theories grounded in historical materialism and to provide a collective space for a new generation of Marxist thinkers in dialogue with the most advanced forms of bourgeois thought.

The series is for the new. Not the “new” in bourgeois philosophies.  Like the representatives of capital in liberal democracies who every “three or six years” fight with each other to “represent and repress” people, such “new” theories relentlessly compete with each other to design new illusions for maintaining the capitalist conditions that require newer and newer illusions.    

The new in the series is the new of a historical becoming. It strives to comprehend and know its conditions of existence and understand why “the old system…must come to an end.” The series’ founding arguments are that “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life” and determines the “relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of state” in a society.

Books in the series contribute to knowledge for conscious, organized class struggles to build a different society that crosses the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” and inscribes on its banner “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!”

The series is critique-al. Bourgeois anti-critique bans critique as a negative “digging down” in the “deep dark below,” but the “deep dark below” is “the hidden abode of production” where one sees “not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced” and “The secret of profit-making” is “at last laid bare.”

Situated on the other side of reform-al marxisms (Neo-, Post-, Autonomist, Exit, Neue, Accelerationist, Krisis,…), the series overturns the libertarian fictions of “the common,” “capital is dead,” “communism of capital,” and the digital metaphysics that fashions Walmart as “the very anticipatory prototype of some new form of socialism.” Reform-al marxism and bourgeois thought (the contemporary expression of which are mostly in intersectionality, speculative realism, OOO, ANT, “new materialism,” social reproductionism...) are twins of the ruling ideas: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

The series is open to all Marxist critiques of capitalism and welcomes books in metatheory. It is particularly interested in dialectical inquiries into the capitalist relations of production—its class contradictions, (im)material labor, value-form, general intellect, the law of value, wages and profits, labor process, climate change, imperialism, traveling capital, labor in the diaspora, fall in the rate of profit—their cultural consequences and material links to struggles for the “positive transcendence of private property” and the return of humans to themselves as social beings. The editors welcome books that explain how the oppression that is one’s daily lived experience as “other” is caused not by cultural domination but by exploitation of labor at the point of production, by “the silent compulsion of economic relations.”

An independent editorial board of four Marxist scholars will review manuscripts and proposals and select them for peer review. The Editorial Board is coordinated by Dean Birkenkamp as its inaugural chief editor. Thinkers who are interested in contributing to the series can send inquires to Dean Birkenkamp at Routledge: Dean.Birkenkamp@taylorandfrancis.com

Forthcoming: Marxism and Pandemic: Materialist Anatomy of a Social Crisis. Ed. Stephen Tumino

Contact Email
Dean.Birkenkamp@taylorandfrancis.com