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

by István Mészáros, John Bellamy Foster (Foreword)

An extraordinary new work by the leading Marxian philosopher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time represents a breakthrough in the development of socialist thought. It can be seen both as a companion volume to his earlier pathbreaking Beyond Capital and a major theoretical contribution in its own right. Its focus is on the “decapitation of historical time” in today’s capitalism and the necessity of a new “socialist time accountancy” as a revolutionary response to the debilitating present.
Extending Mészáros’s earlier analysis of capitalism as a social-metabolic system caught in an irreversible structural crisis, it represents a crushing refutation of the view that “there is no alternative” to the current social order. Mészáros’s wide-ranging analysis explores the forces behind the expansion of world inequality, the return of imperial interventionism, the growing structural crisis of the capitalist state, and the widening planetary ecological crisis—along with the new hope offered by the reemergence of concrete socialist alternatives.
At the heart of his book is an examination of the preconditions of Latin America’s historic Bolivarian journey, which is producing new revolutionary transformations in Venezuela, Bolivia and elsewhere. The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time is a work of great political as well as philosophical importance, one that defines the challenges and burdens facing all those who are committed to a more rational, more egalitarian future.

Genres: Politics

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

István Mészáros was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Described as "one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" by Monthly Review, Mészáros wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism.

Reviews

[Pablo]

Un análisis contemporáneo de la crisis capitalista. El problema de la hegemonía mundial (China vs EEUU) y el desastre ecológico son puntos centrales del análisis de Meszaros, a pesar de haber sido escrito hace más de diez años.

Es interesante leer autores que aun creen (o creyeron hasta la muerte como Meszaros) en una salida radical y socialista a la actual crisis. Y pareciera que sus tesis cada día son más certeras.
Socialismo o barbarie, como hace más de cien años proclamara Rosa Luxemburgo, es lo que reafirma este libro.

[Andrew]

I really liked his book on alienation, and the book on Lukacs' dialectic isn't bad. But I found this book to be quite rambling and underneath the verbaige, not really saying all that much new.

[Victor Lopez]

There were some interesting bits in this book, but a lot of it was restating things said by Lukács or Marx in a needlessly verbose way.