Gender mainstreaming made its debut on the stage of women politics in the European Union as late as in the 1990s, while looking back at more than thirty years of history in global development policies and debate. The study explores how, whilst travelling from South to North, the concept lost much of its critical potential. As gender mainstreaming goes through the various stages of "EUization", it becomes even more difficult to develop a sustained critical-constructive attitude.

This study explores the history of women's and gender studies in higher education in Central Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space since the early 1990s. It describes the interests – rooted in academic and non-academic contexts – of a whole variety of transnational and political actors and academics on the ground and relates them to the process of transforming higher education. The study highlights why and how varying transnational and local hegemonic constellations were conducive to the institutional development of women's and gender studies, while at the same time severely restricting the unfolding of their critical political potential.

The article provides a comprehensive picture – focusing on the developed countries – on the performance and currents of the left-of-centre social thought after the collapse of state socialist regimes. According to the author, although ‘Marxist politics has either disappeared or become completely marginalized' in almost all the world ‘but left-wing intellectual creativity has not ceased.' The Marxian theory still is an important reference for many leftwing social analysts and in addition to various post- and neo-Marxian currents also the classical sense Marxian social science produced relevant works in the past one an a half decades. "Capitalism still produces, and will continue to produce, a sense of outrage. … New cohorts of anti-capitalist social scientists will certainly emerge, many will read Marx, but it may be doubted whether many will find it meaningful to call themselves Marxists."

The New Left Review 43 (Jan.-Feb. 2007) published the original article.

The author critically analyses and sums up the main points in Lenin's Marxism the ones that contributed to the development of Marxism in the 20^th Century. The relationship of dialectics, theory and practice, that was in focus of Lenin's theoretical thinking, is not dead but a relevant historical lesson. The article gives an overview of Lenin's general approach, history perception and the starting points and conclusions, contradictions and the relevance to the present of Lenin's thoughts on revolution and socialism. "Lenin's heritage" is a centre of evil to many of the representatives of the ruling ideology, with a solid ground in fact, since this heritage cannot be integrated by the promoters of the capitalist system, because it is a clear social alternative against capitalism. The progressive and forward looking elements of Lenin's Marxism – after getting rid of the "Marxism-Leninism" of Stalinism and post-Stalinism – has been integrated into the further development of Marxism by Gramsci, Lukács and many others.

The article is only available in Hungarian. You can order a copy of the issue.

The essay of the Marx researcher has deep thoughts: first it confronts the systematisation of the heritage of the founding father with the openness of dialectics; second, he sees that political needs won over science in the reception in Russia. Facts of social practice have been replaced by the needs of scientific analysis as it happened with Kautsky – contrary to the efforts made by Gramsci at the same time.