The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-first Century

Istvan Meszaros, John Bellamy Foster

ISBN 10: 1583671706 / ISBN 13: 9781583671702

Published by Monthly Review Press,U.S. 2008-08-15, 2008

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-ING-9781583671702

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-first Century
• Publisher: Monthly Review Press,U.S. 2008-08-15
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1583671706
• ISBN 13: 9781583671702
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

An extraordinary new work by the leading Marxian philosopher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time represents a breakthrough in the development of socialist thought. It can be seen both as a companion volume to his earlier pathbreaking Beyond Capital and a major theoretical contribution in its own right. Its focus is on the “decapitation of historical time” in today’s capitalism and the necessity of a new “socialist time accountancy” as a revolutionary response to the debilitating present.
Extending Mészáros’s earlier analysis of capitalism as a social-metabolic system caught in an irreversible structural crisis, it represents a crushing refutation of the view that “there is no alternative” to the current social order. Mészáros’s wide-ranging analysis explores the forces behind the expansion of world inequality, the return of imperial interventionism, the growing structural crisis of the capitalist state, and the widening planetary ecological crisis—along with the new hope offered by the reemergence of concrete socialist alternatives.
At the heart of his book is an examination of the preconditions of Latin America’s historic Bolivarian journey, which is producing new revolutionary transformations in Venezuela, Bolivia and elsewhere. The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time is a work of great political as well as philosophical importance, one that defines the challenges and burdens facing all those who are committed to a more rational, more egalitarian future.

About the Authors

István Mészáros was a professor emeritus at the University of Sussex and a world renown philosopher and critic. He authored Marx’s Theory of Alienation, Beyond Capital, and over a dozen other titles.

John Bellamy Foster is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review. He has written many books including The Robbery of Nature (with Brett Clark) and The Return of Nature, which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.