“Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control

“Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming December 2014), 15 pp.

Reprinted as “Mészáros and the Critique of the Capital System,” Monthly Review 66, no. 7: 1-15.

István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms of thought—is unequaled in our time. No less a historical figure than Hugo Chávez referred to him as the “pathfinder” of twenty-first century socialism.… The role of this foreword is to help to put his system of thought as a whole, and this book in particular, in their historical contexts, while illuminating some of the distinctive concepts governing his analysis.