The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty First Century

A breakthrough in the development of socialist thought, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time is both a companion volume to Mészáros’s seminal Beyond Capital and a major theoretical contribution in its own right. Mészáros, one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of our age, focuses on the tyranny of capital’s time imperative and the necessity of a new socialist time accountancy, and provides a strong refutation of the popular view that there is no alternative to the current neoliberal order.

Mészáros offers masterful analysis of the forces behind the expansion of inequality and unemployment, the return of imperial intervention across the globe, the growing structural crisis of the capitalist state, and the widening ecological crisis along with the hope offered by the reemergence of concrete socialist alternatives. This powerful and provocative new collection defines the challenges and burdens facing all who are committed to a more rational and egalitarian future.

István Mészáros left his native Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He is professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, where he held the chair of philosophy for fifteen years. Mészáros is author of Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, The Structural Crisis of Capital, Beyond Capital, and Marx’s Theory of Alienation, among other books.