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In this volume, leading scholars from around the world suggest that radical ideologies have shaped complex historical processes in East Asia by examining how intellectuals and activists interpreted, rethought and criticized Marxism in East Asia. The contributors to this volume ask how we can use Marxism to understand East Asia in a global capitalist world, and where the problems that Marxism highlighted, including imperialism, domination and inequality, are increasingly prevalent.
The volume draws on various disciplines to reinterpret Marx, and shed light on the complex dynamics of global capitalism in various historical/national contexts. The distinguished contributors illuminate, rethink and make accessible highly complex Marxist concepts, such as the question of class contradiction, the temporalities of capitalism, real and formal subsumption, relative surplus value and the commodity form, the question of class and the proletariat.
At a time when people around the world are struggling to cope with the crises of global capitalism, this volume on regional responses to capitalism is especially welcome. It will be of interest to students and scholars of East Asian studies, social and political theory, sociology and globalization studies.
List of contents
Introduction Marxism, Space, Time and East Asia
[Viren MURTHY & Joyce C. H. LIU]
Part I Perspectives of Capital: Universality, Particularity and Temporality
(1) Deprovincializing Marx: Reflections on a Cultural Dominant
[Harry HAROOTUNIAN]
(2) Marx, Temporality, and Modernity -
[Moishe POSTONE]
(3) Two Kinds of New Poor and Their Future
[WANG Hui]
(4) On the simultaneous World Revolution
[KARATANI Kojin]
Part II Trajectories of Marxisms in Japan, China and Korea
(1) Historical Difference and the Question of East Asian Marxism
[Max WARD]
(2) Value without Fetish – Problematizing Uno Kōzō's Reading of the Value Form
[Elena Louisa LANGE]
(3) Compradors: The Mediating Middle of Capitalism in Twentieth Century China and the World
[Rebecca KARL]
(4) A Vast Crucible of Electric Flame": The Collapse of Liberal Society in Shanghai and the Rise of the Masses
[Jake WERNER]
(5) Paradoxical Routes of the Sinification of Marxism
[Joyce C. H. LIU]
(6) The Formation and the Limits of the People’s Democracy: A Critical History of Contemporary South Korean Marxism
[Seung-wook BAEK]
(7) Imagining Asia/Provincializing Marxism: Takeuchi Yoshimi and His Transnational Afterlives
[Viren MURTHY]
About the author
Joyce C.H. Liu is Professor of Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.
Viren Murthy teaches Transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and researches Chinese and Japanese Intellectual History.
Summary
This volume draws together some of the leading scholars in the field to examine how Marxism was interpreted in East Asia, how it had its effects on the complex historical processes in East Asian countries.
