The work set before the reader here had its origins over many years, and is the result of our dialogues with numerous scholars and social activists in Russia and in many other countries. Creative work is invariably the outcome of co-creation, the result of joint activity with the people whose books we have read, whose lectures we have attended, with whom we have argued, and with whom we have participated in diverse types of socially creative practice. We cannot list the names of everyone with whom we have conducted these dialogues, but we cannot fail to make special mention of those of our teachers who are no longer with us—of Ernest Mandel, Samir Amin and Nikolay Khessin—and of our colleagues on the editorial board of the journal Alternatives, most of whom also adhere to the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism: Mikhail Voeykov, Andrey Sorokin, Emil Rudyk and Boris Slavin.
Others who made huge contributions include our late comrades who worked on the journal, the great Soviet authority in the field of foreign Marxism Mily Gretsky, the outstanding philosopher of culture Nal Zlobin, the theorist and activist of the social liberation struggle of the peoples of Latin America Kiva Maydanik, and the well-known theorist on questions of war and peace Leonid Istyagin.
In recent years the authors have worked in close dialogue with our students who have become faculty members of the Centre for Modern Marxist Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University Olga Barashkova, Natalia Iakovleva and Gleb Maslov. To them, and to other representatives of the new generation of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism, we also express our sincere thanks.
Our special gratitude is due to David Fasenfest, editor and adviser, initiator of this project, and to Renfrey Clarke, our comrade and translator who has worked with us for close to 30 years, and to our colleagues Olga Barashkova and Angelina Shpileva, who were enormously helpful to us in editing and formatting the manuscript.
The fact that this book has appeared is because we were raised to be as we are—Marxists, people striving toward the future—by our kind and clever parents, people who lived and worked in the communist spirit: Nina and Vladimir Buzgalin, Svetlana Bulavka and Aleksey Bulavka, and Energiya and Ivan Kolganov.