The Seductions of Karl Marx

Contents: Preface. Introduction. 1. Reification and communal-fascism. 2. Whither India? 3. The sorcerer and his apprentice: globalization and culture. 4. The return of the emancipated. 5. Georg Lukacs and the problem of romantic aesthetics. 6. Psychosis and phantasmagoria. 7. Human rites: the death and the birth of the subject. Index.

"The Seductions of Karl Marx is a work in the historic and humanist traditions of Marxism. Basing itself on Marx\'s theory of the alienation of humanity, it analyses issues like the rise of right-wing religious fundamentalism and communal-fascism, the Asiatic mode of production, the caste question and the hegemony of the imperialist bloc of nations. Locating the trajectory of emancipatory politics, this book reclaims the original space that Marx had discovered--the space of communist society that is free from commodity production as well as the dominance of the state. The communalism that The Seductions argues for is not to be confused with the Soviet experiment, which as the author mentions, was sabotaged by the Stalinist counterrevolution. On the contrary, the author recalls Marx\'s statement that communism is humanism and naturalism, as well as the sign for the appropriation of the human essence that is lost in the marshes of globalisation, casteism and communalism. Besides dealing with Marx, this book also traverses the philosophical concerns of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Freud, Ambedkar, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Jurgen Habermas." (jacket)