MAKING OUR OWN HISTORY

A User's Guide to Marx's Historical Materialism

by Jonathan White

As global capitalism lurches from one crisis to the next we are seeing a resurgence of interest in Marxist ideas and politics. Marxist thought provides a way of understanding the economic crises rippling across the globe, the environmental destruction and climate change that threaten to change our lives and the desperate inequality and poverty that blights human society. Marxist politics focuses our attention on the nature of political power and how working people can wrest it from the grip of big business. Yet Marxism is more even than this.

Making Our Own History argues that Marxist ideas derive their force from their deeply historical world view. The socialist thought developed by Marx and Engels was scientific because it uncovered the laws at work not just within capitalism but human history as a whole, enabling the working class to penetrate beneath the distorted visions of ruling class ideology and perceive the forces at work pushing society toward a better possible future, as well as helping them to identify and eliminate the barriers to that progress.

Making Our Own History is new introduction to this vital, but often neglected dimension of Marxist thought, written to be read by anyone engaged in today's struggles to build a better world.