Rehabilitate Marx

Jan Mervart (Author) Jan Mervart is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of several books and is coeditor of Czechoslovakism (Routledge, 2021) and Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete (Brill, 2021). He is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Contradictions.Jiří Růžička (Author) Jiří Růžička is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is editor and cotranslator of the Czech translation of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Filosofia, 2019) and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Contradictions.

[Rehabilitate Marx!] looks at a cohort of ferocious young Stalinists when the Communist Party seized power in 1948 and were rewarded with places in the official intelligentsia. After Stalin died in 1953 these philosophers were not ready to give up on Marxism. The book in effect tells the tale of a group failure that may haunt our own time more than we realize... probably the most interesting text produced by this generation of philosophers was the output of a group of techno-optimists, who heralded the dawn of the scientific-technological revolution that would bring liberation through automation and cybernetics. [Their report] taunts us from across the decades with promises of a life of productive, meaningful leisure in which technological advances free us from drudgery. The idealized workplace resembles today’s hyperscale data centers operated by a spectral skeleton crew while consuming huge quantities of water and electricity. Perhaps [these] unquiet dreams haunt the executive suites of Silicon Valley, whose oligarchs are themselves fond of manifestos promising revolutionary change, and are always eager to curry political favor.