“This anthology is conceived as an introduction to recent thinking about the past of Marxist art history. It is not offered in the spirit of nostalgia – a kind of dusting off of relics – but as a prompt to critique and renewal. My assumption is that much of the history the contributors tell is little known in its specifics, and that its achievements are often misconstrued and undervalued.” (from the introduction)
Download: Marxism and the History of Art
“It is not only political history which those who ignore are condemned to repeat. A host of recent ‘post-Marxisms’ document the truth of the assertion that attempts to ‘go beyond’ Marxism typically end by reinventing older pre-Marxist positions (from the recurrent neo-Kantian revivals, to the most recent ‘Nietzschean’ returns through Hume and Hobbes all the way back to the Pre-Socratics). Even within Marxism itself, the terms of the problems, if not their solutions, are numbered in advance, and the older controversies – Marx versus Bakunin, Lenin versus Luxemburg, the national question, the agrarian question, the dictatorship of the proletariat – rise up to haunt those who thought we could now go on to something else and leave the past behind us.” (from Fredric Jameson’s “Reflections in Conclusion”)
Download: Aesthetics and Politics
Aklatang Bayan 