In the years since Stalin's death, his profound influence upon the historical development of Communism has remained elusive and in need of interpretation. Stalinism, as his system has become known, is a phenomenon which embraced all facets of political and social life. While its effect upon the Soviet Union and other nations today is far less than it was while Stalin lived, it is by no means dead. In this landmark volume some of the world's foremost scholars of the subject, in a concerted group inquiry, present their interpretations of Stalinism and its influence on all areas of comparative Communist studies from history and politics to economics, sociology, and literary scholarship. The studies contained in this volume are an outgrowth of a conference on Stalinism held in Bellagio, Italy, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. In his major contribution to this book, Leszek Kolakowski calls Stalinism "a unified state organism facing atom-like individuals." This extraordinary volume, augmented by a revealing new introduction by the editor, Robert C. Tucker, can be seen as amplifying that remark nearly a half century after the death of Joseph Stalin himself. Contributors to this work are: Wlodzimierz Brus, Katerina Clark, Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Erlich, Leszek Kolakowski, Moshe Lewin, Robert H. McNeal, Mihailo Markovic, Roy A. Medvedev, T. H. Rigby, Robert Sharlet, and H. Gordon Skilling. Robert C. Tucker's principle work on Stalin has been described by George F. Kennan as "the most significant single contribution made to date, anywhere, to the history of Soviet power."

The Vietnam War lasted twenty years and resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers, with many more Vietnamese victims. But the roots of the American-led conflict lay in the complex colonial history of Vietnam itself. Here, Pablo de Orellana uses recently declassified material to provide a new interpretation of the diplomatic failures and processes that lead to the outbreak and continuation of the conflict. Through a focus on the first Vietnam War, de Orellana shows how and why a Southeast Asian French colony already devastated by two wars came to be seen as an existential threat by policymakers in the United States, and how an attempt to stem the influence of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China spiraled out of control. The Road to Vietnam features new archival documents, including diplomatic notes and briefing material, to construct a new history of America's descent into conflict. This will be an essential resource for scholars and students of the Vietnam War and 20th Century diplomatic history.

Knowledge, Class, and Economics: Marxism without Guarantees surveys the "Amherst School" of non-determinist Marxist political economy, 40 years on: its core concepts, intellectual origins, diverse pathways, and enduring tensions. The volume's 30 original essays reflect the range of perspectives and projects that comprise the Amherst School-the interdisciplinary community of scholars that has enriched and extended, while never ceasing to interrogate and recast, the anti-economistic Marxism first formulated in the mid-1970s by Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff, and their economics Ph.D. students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The title captures the defining ideas of the Amherst School: an open-system framework that presupposes the complexity and contingency of social-historical events and the parallel "overdetermination" of the relationship between subjects and objects of inquiry, along with a novel conception of class as a process of performing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor. In a collection of 30 original essays, chapters confront readers with the core concepts of overdetermination and class in the context of economic theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, continental philosophy, economic geography, economic anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory/studies. Though Resnick and Wolff's writings serve as a focal point for this collection, their works are ultimately decentered-contested, historicized, reformulated. The topics explored will be of interest to proponents and critics of the post-structuralist/postmodern turn in Marxian theory and to students of economics as social theory across the disciplines (economics, geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, among others).

Following the Russian Revolution, the cultural and political landscape of Russia was strewn with contradictions. The dictatorship, censorship and repression of the Communist party existed alongside private enterprise, the black market and open debates on Socialism. In Russian Society and politics 1921-1929 Vladimir Brovkin offers a comprehensive cultural, political, economic and social history of developments in Russia in the 1920's. By examining the contrast between Bolshevik propaganda claims and social reality, the author explains how Communist representations were variously received and resisted by workers, peasants, students, women, teachers and party officials. He presents a picture of cultural diversity and rejection of Communist constraints through many means including unauthorised protest, religion, jazz music and poetry. In Russian Society and Politics 1921-1929 Vladimir Brovkin argues that these trends, if left unchecked, endangered the Communist Party's monopoly on political power. The Stalinist revolution can thus be seen as a pre-emptive strike against this independent and vibrant society as well as a product of Stalin's personality and communist ideology.

The veritable tsunami of anxieties that are affecting individual lives, the increasingly dysfunctional nature of society and the potential catastrophes of global conflict and of climate change, have a common cause. The inability of capitalism or the state to respond to existential crises and internal contradictions is the cause of what William Briggs terms A Cauldron of Anxiety. Briggs defends a Marxist perspective that would challenge this and provides an optimistic vision for the future.

Drawing on recently declassified Soviet archival sources, this book sheds new light on how the division of Europe came about in the aftermath of World War II. The book contravenes the notion that a neutral zone of states, including Germany, could have been set up between East and West. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was determined to preserve control over its own sphere of German territory. By tracing Stalin's attitude toward neutrality in international politics, the book provides important insights into the origins of the Cold War.

This masterful political treatise, first published in 1962, examines the history and nature of Communism as it developed in the Soviet Union and in Poland. Jozef Mackiewicz, known for his relentless opposition to Communism, argues that accommodation with the Communists simply helped them to impose their vision of the world and pursue their goal of global domination. He compares Communism to Nazism and insists that the former was the greater threat to the future of humanity. Now available in English for the first time, "The Triumph of Provocation" will be compelling reading for those interested in Polish history, Communism, and Nazism.Mackiewicz's unique interpretation of the differences and similarities between Communism and Nazism is highly relevant to debates about these two systems and to major contemporary issues which are of particular importance to the U.S. and Europe, including radical Islam and the necessity of war and the responsibility for war.

Although Haitian revolutionaries were not the intended audience for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they heeded its call, demanding rights that were not meant for them. This failure of the French state to address only its desired subjects is an example of the phenomenon James R. Martel labels "misinterpellation." Complicating Althusser's famous theory, Martel explores the ways that such failures hold the potential for radical and anarchist action. In addition to the Haitian Revolution, Martel shows how the revolutionary responses by activists and anticolonial leaders to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech and the Arab Spring sprang from misinterpellation. He also takes up misinterpellated subjects in philosophy, film, literature, and nonfiction, analyzing works by Nietzsche, Kafka, Woolf, Fanon, Ellison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others to demonstrate how characters who exist on the margins offer a generally unrecognized anarchist form of power and resistance. Timely and broad in scope, The Misinterpellated Subject reveals how calls by authority are inherently vulnerable to radical possibilities, thereby suggesting that all people at all times are filled with revolutionary potential.

Welcome to Gradieshti, a Soviet village awash in gray buildings and ramshackle fences, home to a large, collective farm and to the most oddball and endearing cast of characters possible. For three years in the 1960s, Vladimir Tsesis-inestimable Soviet doctor and irrepressible jester-was stationed in a village where racing tractor drivers tossed vodka bottles to each other for sport; where farmers and townspeople secretly mocked and tried to endure the Communist way of life; where milk for children, running water, and adequate electricity were rare; where the world's smallest, motley parade became the country's longest; and where one compulsively amorous Communist Party leader met a memorable, chilling fate. From a frantic pursuit of calcium-deprived, lunatic Socialist chickens to a father begging on his knees to Soviet officials to obtain antibiotic for his dying child, Vladimir's tales of Gradieshti are unforgettable. Sometimes hysterical, often moving, always a remarkable and highly entertaining insider's look at rural life under the old Soviet regime, they are a sobering expose of the terrible inadequacies of its much-lauded socialist medical system.

This unorthodox scholarly work dissects the ghosts of history in order to analyze how the past - both recent and distant - haunts posterity, and in what ways the present disfigures the image of times gone by. The book presents a novel history of Communism from the perspective of its collapse, and inspects the world beyond the Fall in the distorting mirror of its imagined prehistory. Using a series of strange and darkly ironic stories, the subsequent chapters provide a close exploration of some of the essential objects of historical study: the name, the date, the dead, the relic, the pantheon, the court, the underworld, and the underground. The tension between vast distances, both in space and time, that Retroactive Justice covers, and the extremely focused analyses, provide an unexpected experience of writing and rewriting, visioning and revisioning history. Cultural Memory in the Present

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, youth emerged as a new and important social force in many parts of the world. In China the image of this new youth imprinted itself on Chinese consciousness and made clear to potential national leaders that future governments would not be able to ignore China's youth or expect them simply to step in line. For this and other reasons, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD) and a string of War of Resistance-era collaborationist governments all formed youth organizations in an effort to win youth over and harness their vitality and enthusiasm to further their agendas. Mobilizing Shanghai Youth explores the similarities and differences among three youth organizations that were connected to Chinese political parties or governments in Shanghai, spanning from the beginning of the May Fourth Movement, just as youth began to emerge as a powerful social and political force in China, to World War II, when Nationalist, Communist and Japanese forces were still competing for dominance. It takes a comparative approach in exploring the similarities and differences, trials and tribulations in how the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese Nationalist Party and a series of collaborationist regimes sought to appeal to youth through the Communist Youth League, the Three People's Principles Youth Corps and the China Youth Corps. Focusing on Greater Shanghai allows a detailed exploration of the rise and fall of the original Communist Youth League and its connections to international communism. The spotlight on Shanghai also yields the extraordinary finding that the Three People's Principles Youth Corps was a valuable asset to the Nationalist Party, operating as a potent resistance organization in Japanese-controlled Shanghai whereas branches in Nationalist-controlled territory were factionalized, dysfunctional and a terrible liability for the Party. Most surprisingly, the collaborationist China Youth Corps took the most practical and in some ways the most successful approach to mobilizing China's youth. The result of exhaustive archival research, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese history, modern history, Communism and the role of youth in revolution.

Postmarxism is often depicted as a point of intersection for a set of inter-disciplinary theories that are in themselves complex and dense. Bringing the postmarxist theory of Ernesto Laclau into the field of political sociology through a close reading and analysis of postmarxism and its relationship to 'the social', A Sociology of Postmarxism develops key postmarxist arguments in an engaging and sociologically applicable way. Indeed, through a threefold method of analysis, Howson first unpacks the relationship between 'the social' and 'the political' by analysing key allied theories to show where the points of connection occur. This is then followed by an insightful analysis of the key features of postmarxist theory such as antagonism and the inevitability of social dislocation, the political importance of hegemony; and the empty signifier thesis and equivalence to show how such theory can be applied at a sociological level. Finally, through the use of sociological categories such as masculinities, migration and social capital, the foregoing theoretical analyses are synthesised to show the social nature of postmarxism and particularly in the context of aspiration and co-operation. This enlightening volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers who are interested in fields such as Political Sociology, Post Marxist Political Theory and Social Theory.

Jameson's first full-length engagement with Walter Benjamin's work. The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin's corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit program-"to transfer the crisis into the heart of language" or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena-requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin's favorite expressions.

In this study, first published in 1982, the author draws on his considerable experience at all levels in the school system to present a radical Marxist critique of that structure. He argues that the schooling process within contemporary corporate capitalism is inimical to education, while true education in turn is inimical to capitalism. He argues further that teachers, who are participants in ongoing class struggle, can begin to be concerned primarily with education only when they perform the function of the collective labourer. This title will be of interest to students of education and sociology.

First published in 1980, this book argues that a theory of ideology is essential to a theory of education. It relates developments in the Marxist theory of ideology to the analysis of schooling in a capitalist society. Beginning with an appraisal of the early twentieth century liberal social theorists, including Weber, Durkheim, Veblen and Mannheim, it demonstrates that the weakness of their approaches arose from a failure to comprehend adequately the nature of capitalism. It then outlines the state of the theory of ideology at the time and applies the concept in an analysis of contemporary schooling, concluding with a discussion of its political implications. The application of the theory of ideology offers important possibilities for a radical socialist strategy on education.

First published in 1982, this work is a critical survey of contemporary educational debates and themes which took on new urgency and importance at the time. In particular, it explores the problematic nature of 'progressive education' and 'discipline'; the changes in the labour process and youth unemployment; the nature of the state and its relationship with schooling; the growth of state intervention and the specific forms of discrimination suffered by women and black people. It argues that trends in education at the time can be explained by a Marxist analysis. It suggests that the changes taking place in schools and colleges were expressions of the contradictions of capitalism and of the state's attempt to restructure education.

The relation between Hegel and Marx is among the most interpreted in the history of philosophy. Given the contemporary renaissance of Marx and Marxist theories, how should we re-read the Hegel-Marx connection today? What place does Hegel have in contemporary critical thinking? Most schools of Marxism regard Marx's inversion of Hegel's dialectics as a progressive development, leaving behind Hegel's idealism by transforming it into a materialist critique of political economy. Other Marxist approaches argue that the mature Marx completely broke with Hegel. By contrast, this book offers a wide-ranging and innovative understanding of Hegel as an empirically informed theorist of the social, political, and economic world. It proposes a movement 'from Marx to Hegel and back', by exploring the intersections where the two thinkers can be read as mutually complementing or even reinforcing one another. With a particular focus on essential concepts like recognition, love, revolution, freedom, and the idea of critique, this new intervention into Hegelian and Marxian philosophy unifies the ethical content of Hegel's philosophy with the power of Marx's social and economic critique of the contemporary world.

To the surprise of many, the Dalai Lama recently declared that, 'I am a socialist'. While many Buddhists and socialists would be perplexed at the suggestion that their approaches to life share fundamental principles, important figures in the Buddhist tradition are increasingly framing contemporary social and economic problems in distinctly socialist terms. In this novel and provocative work, Terry Gibbs argues that the shared values expressed in each tradition could provide signposts for creating a truly humane, compassionate and free society. Hopeful about our potential to create the 'good society' through collective effort, Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist is grounded in the fundamental belief that everyday human activity makes a difference.

Neither a work concerned only with her Marxist writings nor a personal biography concerned with her private life, this book examines Rosa Luxemburg's ideas on revolution and democracy and how the two are bound together by her views on the importance of political action. Stretching, historically, from 1863 to the present, this book covers in great detail the history and developments within the German SPD during her time, the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, the German Revolution, the outbreak of World War I and the imperialism that fuelled it. It then moves on to consider political and historical developments after her death and examines her arguments on revolution and democracy in the light of the post-revolutionary government in Nicaragua: the one violent revolution that sought to establish social democracy (but failed). Also covered are aspects of Rosa Luxemburg's life, her important writings and actions, the relevant Marxist debates in which she was involved, including, for example Bernstein's arguments on social democracy through reform and, with Lenin, on revolutionary organization. A welcomed and timely collection presenting an important examination of the political and social context in which Luxemburg developed her activities and views and a complete understanding of the history of social democracy, the revolutionary times of a century ago and the relevance of their events and ideas for more recent revolutions for democracy in the twenty-first century.

This book, first published in 1980, provides both a broad review and detailed analysis of the major issues that had been affecting the changing relations between Moscow and the other European Communist parties. In discussing the Spanish, Italian, French and Scandinavian communist parties the individual contributors expose the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the parties, and analyse the ideological and sociological roots. This title will be of interest to students of politics.

Acknowledged as one of the classics of twentieth-century Marxism, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks contains a rich and nuanced theorization of class that provides insights that extend far beyond economic inequality. In Gramsci's Common Sense Kate Crehan offers new ways to understand the many forms that structural inequality can take, including in regards to race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Presupposing no previous knowledge of Gramsci on the part of the reader, she introduces the Prison Notebooks and provides an overview of Gramsci's notions of subalternity, intellectuals, and common sense, putting them in relation to the work of thinkers such as Bourdieu, Arendt, Spivak, and Said. In the case studies of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, Crehan theorizes the complex relationships between the experience of inequality, exploitation, and oppression, as well as the construction of political narratives. Gramsci's Common Sense is an accessible and concise introduction to a key Marxist thinker whose works illuminate the increasing inequality in the twenty-first century.

Searching for Marx in the Occupy Movement is a critical, participant observation study of the Philadelphia branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement. John Leveille spent over nine months with Occupy Philadelphia as the members organized and carried out their protests. This book describes and analyzes the rise, the organization, and the demise of this group. The important events and activities of Occupy Philadelphia are discussed and dissected, with specific attention given to the confusions and chaos that permeated this group, and Occupy Wall Street more generally, which contributed to its rather rapid decline. A revisionist Marxism, informed loosely by the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, is used here to understand and explain the happenings of this protest group. The theory provides an epistemological and methodological framework for this study, and it is also used to account for the observed behaviors. Leveille argues that an essential conflict between humanism and the forces of rational capitalism lies at the heart of this protest movement. This conflict contributed both to the rise of Occupy and to its operations. It was manifested in two intersecting ways. One of these concerns the destabilization of the self in contemporary capitalism, which provided fuel for the movement. The second revolves around the limited abilities of existing institutional arrangements to manage or channel the essential conflicts related to values that are produced by rational capitalism. Ultimately, Searching for Marx in the Occupy Movement makes a controversial claim that the movement was as much, if not more, about democracy, morality, and the organization and experience of the self and of social life as it was about economic matters. The argument is made that Occupy was as much an expressive movement as it was an instrumental one. It was expressing contradictions produced by capitalism through extra-institutional means because the existing institutional arrangements have been and continue to be unable to manage or contain them.

A historical biography of the Italian philosopher/politician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1973), considered one of the most important Marxist philosophers of the twentieth-century. As part of the Communist Lives series, Andrew Pearmain explores the life of Gramsci from his childhood, to his role in the newly formed Communist Party of Italy, and to his imprisonment and death in Turi di Bari, using recent archival research including material released by the Gramsci and Schucht family.

This is a path-breaking book. Characteristically readable, controversial and full of insights, Nove identifies a workable socialist programme, achievable in the lifetime of a child born today, that avoids far-fetched or utopian assumptions. This text has been immensely influential in the West, and is available in translation in China, Hungary and the Soviet Union. Alec Nove begins by demonstrating why Marx's theories provide a misleading guide to the issues facing economists under any realistically conceivable socialism. He goes on to discuss the problems experinced by communist-ruled countries, especially the Soviet Union, and to suggest possible remedies and solutions. Nove also examines problems of transition, in the context of Western industrialised countries and the Third World. He concludes by outlining a possible efficienct and human socialism, and examines objections to these ideas from the Left and the Right.

The current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture-that is, the logic of the capitalist system-is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out-of-the-mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. Their thinking had the following common keywords: contradiction, fetishism as a process and the notion of spell and all its implications. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.