Sociology Department Seminar - Michael Kraetke - The MEGA project and the coming end of Marxism as we know it

Date: 12 June 2012 Time: 4.15 - 6.00 pm

Venue: Bowland North Seminar Room 23

The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) project is one of the largest and most long-lasting projects in the social sciences, starting (again) in the 1970s, now halfway completed and expected to continue for another 20 years. It is an edition project in the tradition of 'historical-critical' editions. Accordingly, it is an interdisciplinary and international project, involving scholars from various disciplines and research groups in Europe, America and Asia. It deals with one of the big classics in the tradition of Western social science, with Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels as his closest collaborator), who in the guise of "Marxism" had an enormous and lasting impact upon nearly all the other classics in the social sciences. The importance of this project can hardly be overstated as it clearly shows that the Marx (and Engels) of all the various strands of "Marxism" (and therefore of "Anti-marxism") are largely false and distorted constructions. Behind them, we are discovering a rather unknown (and until recently largely unpublished) Marx (and Engels) quite different from the icons of the "Marxisms". In sum, the findings of the MEGA project confirm the basic ideas of Raymond Aron and Maximilien Rubel about the inevitable oppositions between Marx and Marxism

All welcome.

A seminar organised by the Department of Sociology. For more information, contact Bronislaw Szerszynski (bron@lancaster.ac.uk).

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Who can attend: Anyone