Lives on the left : a group portrait / edited by Francis Mulhern.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This volume brings together sixteen interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since. Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers. Included here are interviews with Georg Lukács, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Ernest Mandel, Jiři Pelikan, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, João Pedro Stédile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.

Part I. 1. Life and Work / Georg Lukacs --- 2. Memories of Karl Korsch / Hedda Korsch ---- Part II. 1. The Struggle for Socialism in Czechoslovakia --- 2. Memoir of an Indian Communist --- 3. The Luck of a Crazy Youth --- 4. The Personal and the Political / Dorothy Thompson --- 5. A Political and Philosophical Interview --- 6. II Manifesto and Italian Communism --- 7. "What Exists Cannot Be True" ---- Part III. 1. Itinerary of a Thought --- 2. Linguistics and Politics --- 3. Reinventing Geography ---- Part IV. 1. Landless Battalions --- 2. A Left Within the Place of Nothingness --- 3. Fire at the Castle Gate ---- Part V. 1. The Winding Paths of Capital.