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  1. Home
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  3. Marxism at Work
  • Cited by 12
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2010
Print publication year:
1992
Online ISBN:
9780511752131
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511752131
Subjects:
Area Studies, European History after 1450, History, European Studies, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Information

Book description

Despite a century of debate and criticism, Marxism as a mass ideological practice has remained an elusive topic. This book examines Marxist socialism as a mode of understanding and self-understanding treasured and transmitted by thousands of anonymous militants. It focuses upon the Parti Ouvrier Français, the 'Guesdists', an archetypal movement of Marxism's 'Golden Age' before the First World War, the period when Marxist socialism evolved from sect to mass movement. Thousands of French socialists adopted Marxism due to the effectiveness of vulgar Guesdist polemic rather than Marx's profound theoretical works, and entire communities were converted to an austere but messianic socialism which still affects French politics today. This book traces the doctrine's birth through conflict with liberals, proto-fascists, and anarchists; its 'making' of a working class, and its attempted seduction of the middle class; and its confusion before the alternative social visions of the Catholic devout, racist nationalists, and feminists.

Reviews

‘This book is an outstanding piece of scholarship devoted to the ideological rather than the organizational history of the Parti Ouvrier, the French representative of the ‘orthodox’ Marxism of the Second International … This is a fascinating and sustained argument, lucidly presented in a nicely produced book.’

Source: Political Studies

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