Theories for Radical Change - (Studies in Critical Social Sciences) by Raju J Das (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book argues for the primacy of production and production relations over other moments of the economic realm, and examines how production relations of capitalism and imperialism impede economic-ecological improvements, and state's ability to solve the problems created by capitalism.

Book Synopsis

This book is focused on production and its relations. It argues for the primacy of economic over extra-economic processes, and of production and production relations over other aspects of the economic realm. It explores how production relations of capitalism and imperialism fetter the development of the productive forces of nature and wage-labour and hinder state's ability to solve the problems produced by capitalism. It covers a wide range of political-economic issues including commodity production, class differentiation, fundamental traits of capitalist production (including its uneven and combined development), capitalist state, and the impoverishment of common people and their struggle against the capitalist mode of production.

Review Quotes

"Raju J Das has produced the much-needed book all Marxists hoped one of their number would someday provide, uniting in a well-argued and theoretically rigorous manner two positions that have tended to drift apart: what in political and economic terms Marxism is currently seen to involve, and what Marx and Lenin themselves said it must be. By doing so, Das confirms two things: both the resilience of Marxist scholarship, and also that he himself is in the vanguard of this process." - Tom Brass, formerly of SPS, Cambridge University, and Editor of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

"Raju Das has produced an excellent and wide-ranging conspectus of Marxist political economy, one based on a careful and incisive reading of the "classical" works of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin on the subject as well as a critical survey of the ideas of more recent Marxist thinkers. As Das explains so well, Marx and Lenin didn't answer all the questions currently posed about our century's decaying capitalist order; but they did lay an imperishable foundation for answering them." - Murray Smith, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Brock University, Canada.

About the Author

Raju Das (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) is Professor at York University, Toronto. His research interests include Marxist political economy. His recent books include: Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Brill, 2017) and Marx's Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State (Routledge, 2022).