A. Kiarina Kordela steps beyond extant commentaries on Marx's theory of commodity fetishism-from A. Sohn-Rethel to L. Althusser, E. Balibar, Slavoj Zizek, and others-to show that in capitalism value is the manifestation of the homology between thought and being, while their other aspect-power-is foreclosed and becomes the object of biopower. Using monistic Marxian/Lacanian structuralism as an alternative to dominant models from Plato and Kant to phenomenological accounts, deconstruction, and other contemporary approaches, Kordela expertly argues that Marx's theory of commodity fetishism is a reformulation of the Spinozian thesis that thought (mind) and things (bodies or extension) are manifestations of one and the same being or substance. Kordela's link between Spinoza and Marx shows that being consists of two aspects, value and power, the former leading to structuralist thought, the latter becoming the object of contemporary biopower. Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan intervenes between two dominant lines of thought in the reception of Marx today: on the one hand, an approach that relates Marxian thought to psychoanalysis from a Hegelian/dialectical perspective and, on the other hand, an approach that links Marxism to Spinozian monism, at the total exclusion of psychoanalysis. This book will interest scholars and researchers who study Marxism, (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, ontology, epistemology and theories of representation, theoreticians of cultural studies and comparative literature, aesthetic theory, including the relation of art to economy and politics, and biopolitics.

This important book reassesses a defining historical, political and ideological moment in contemporary history: the 1989 revolutions in central and eastern Europe. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, the authors reconsider such crucial themes as the broader historical significance of the 1989 events, the complex interaction between external and internal factors in the origins and outcomes of the revolutions, the impact of the 'Gorbachev phenomenon', the West and the end of the Cold War, the political and socio-economic determinants of the revolutionary processes in Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, and the competing academic, cultural and ideological perceptions of the year 1989 as communism gave way to post-communist pluralism in the 1990s and beyond. Concluding that the contentious term 'revolution' is indeed apt for the momentous developments in eastern Europe in 1989, this book will be essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and specialists alike. -- .

The White Terror was a movement of right-wing militias that for two years actively tracked down, tortured, and murdered members of the Jewish community, as well as former supporters of the short-lived Council Republic in the years following World War I. It can be argued that this example of a programme of virulent antisemitism laid the foundations for Hungarian participation in the Holocaust. Given the rightward shift of Hungarian politics today, this book has a particular resonance in re-examining the social and historical context of the White Terror.

First published in 1999, this volume is the first full length study of one of the most important political institutions of the erstwhile Soviet political system - the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The originality of this work lies in its main argument that the central reform during Perestroika was that of the Party and the State - a reform which ultimately resulted in the CPSU and its institutions, the Central Committee being one of the most vital among them - firstly, surrendering the monopoly over political power and control over the instrumentalities of the State and secondly, systematically de-institutionalising and dismantling the formidable Soviet political system. The seeds of transformation and the shape of politico-economic and socio-cultural systems that emerged in successor States were laid down during the Soviet era - in particular during Perestroika itself. The continuity is, therefore, as striking as the change - if not more so.

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history. Encompassing all key periods in Russia's dramatic development, the book covers everything from early settlers, through medieval decline, Ivan the Terrible - the 'English Tsar', Peter the Great, the Crimean War and the rise of capitalism, the revolution, the Soviet period, finally ending with the return of capitalism after 1991. Setting Russia within the context of the 'World System', as outlined by Wallerstein, this is a major work of historical Marxist theory that is set to become a future classic.

The reforms of the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes were unparalleled-both in the radical, precedent-setting reforms attempted by the two countries and in the outcomes of these attempts. While the Soviet Union collapsed quickly in the midst of its reforms, more than a decade later China, the world's most populous country, still stands as a testament to the resilience of Communist rule. It is this phenomenon that Christopher Marsh explores in Unparalleled Reforms. Marsh goes beyond simply discussing the differing initial conditions, the sequencing of reform, and cultural differences to also consider the objectives and intentions of the policy makers and leaders that directed the reform processes and the interdependent nature of politics on the world stage. Unparalleled Reforms offers the reader a sophisticated understanding of the nature of political reform and develops a theoretical model that can account for commonly overlooked factors that affect political processes in all types of political systems. In a class all its own, this is an important work for scholars interested in comparative politics, international relations, economics, Asian studies, and Russian studies.

My generation in Eastern Europe was caught in the middle of two revolutions (1944 and 1989), which instead of moving history ahead pushed it backward. We thus at first made a U-turn-a tortuous one, to be sure-from underdeveloped capitalism to underdeveloped socialism, but because socialism and underdevelopment are strange bedfellows,we have since discovered we were on the wrong path and are trying now to return to where we started. The drama of that generation is what this book is about.

Emerging from a Marxist perspective, this book focuses on the importance of social class and the role of education broadly in relation to the possibility of revolutionary change in Sweden and beyond. Critically tracing the celebrated so-called 'Swedish model' from its inception to its current neoliberalisation, Maisuria explores the contours of class as part of social democratic history, culture and education, especially against the alternatives of communism and fascism. Presenting empirical research on class consciousness within a higher education context, Maisuria analyses student testimonies on their perceptions of social democracy and 'Swedishness' with ethno-racial dynamics, which is subjected to a Gramscian and Critical Realist derived explanatory critique for social transformation.

Originally published in 1955, this is an illuminating study of the political thought and action of the Russian intelligentsia, in the decade up to and including the Revolution of 1905-6. It is based on the writings, including those in the revolutionary press, by which the chief figures of the main opposition parties expressed their political theory, strategy and tactics and related them to the turbulent events of those years. It is also based on personal interviews with some of the survivors of these political struggles. The book is focused on the emergence, starting in 1889 of the major political parties in Russia and it tells of their efforts to form a common front against Tsarism in the revolution which they confidently expected in the early years of the century.

Originally published in 1984 this book reconsiders the effect of Lenin on the politics and culture of the 20th Century. In a detailed examination of Lenin's famous text, The State and Revolution, the author argues that the peculiar status of this work presents readers with major problems of interpretation and shows how a failure to identify these problems has prevented an adequate understanding of important issues in modern politics, history and social theory. The book compares Lenin's 'radical utopia' with the ideas of politics offered by other theorists, centrally Weber and Sartre, but also writers such as Jefferson and Habermas. This original approach shows the impact of Lenin's text on political history and theory and leads to a new understanding of the connection between revolution and violence, social change and authoritarianism.

Translated from the Russian in 1928, this and the second volume of the same title give an invaluable picture of what the Russian leader Joseph Stalin understood by Leninism. Building on the pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, (which forms the first part of this book) the work presents a unified and complete work on the problems of Leninism and socialist construction as they were manifested in the 1920s, as well as discussion of the October Revolution and the relationship of the USSR and the West in the years following the First World War.

Translated from the Russian in 1933, this and the first volume of the same title give an invaluable picture of what the Russian leader Joseph Stalin understood by Leninism. Building on the pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, (which forms the first part of this book) the work presents a unified and complete work on the problems of Leninism and socialist construction as they were manifested in the 1920s, as well as discussion of the October Revolution and the relationship of the USSR and the West in the years following the First World War.

This book is a unique account of trade union and political struggles in the Morris Motors (later British Leyland) car assembly plant in Cowley, where Alan Thornett began work in 1959. He became a shop steward for the lorry drivers, deputy TGWU convener for the plant, and chair of the Joint Shop Stewards Committee and of the TGWU branch. The plant was rarely out of the headlines in the 1960s and 1970s, which was the high point of trade union militancy in Britain in the 20th century. After a successful struggle for unionisation, the Morris plant was by the end of the 1960s amongst the most militant in the industry, averaging over 300 strikes a year. Working conditions were transformed and a vibrant shop floor movement built. The plant was involved in the strikes against In Place of Strife, Harold Wilson's attempt at anti-union laws, and against Heath's Industrial Relations Act, which led to the jailing of the Pentonville Five. This rise of militant trade unionism, however, was bitterly opposed by TGWU officials who worked tirelessly with management to destroy it. The battles this involved, both within the union and in the plant, are vividly described. The book traces how these actions of the trade union establishments reflected institutionalised class compromise, which directly threatened the gains of the 60s and 70s, and which opened the door to the Tory onslaught of the 1980s. It led directly to the betrayal of the NGA by the TUC at Warrington in 1983 and its collapse under Tebbit's anti-union laws. It also led to the isolation and defeat of the miners in 1985, which has been so destructive to the trade union movement, and from which the unions have not even started to recover.

This book offers a unique re-conceptualization of Marxism in bringing together leading scholars across disciplines history, philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, and literary and culture studies into one comprehensive corpus. It demonstrates the engaging relevance of the perspectives and techniques of the analyses adopted by Karl Marx, Fr

Money is usually understood as a valuable object, the value of which is attributed to it by its users and which other users recognize. It serves to link disparate institutions, providing a disguised whole and prime tool for the "invisible hand" of the market. This book offers an interpretation of money as a social institution. Money provides the link between the household and the firm, the worker and his product, making that very division seem natural and money as imminently practical. Money as a Social Institution begins in the medieval period and traces the evolution of money alongside consequent implications for the changing models of the corporation and the state. This is then followed with double-entry accounting as a tool of long-distance merchants and bankers, then the monitoring of the process of production by professional corporate managers. Davis provides a framework of analysis for examining money historically, beyond the operation of those particular institutions, which includes the possibility of conceptualizing and organizing the world differently. This volume is of great importance to academics and students who are interested in economic history and history of economic thought, as well as international political economics and critique of political economy.

At a time of growing interest in relations between Marxism and Romanticism, Andrew Hemingway's essays on British art and art theory reopen the question of Romantic painting's ideological functions and, in some cases, its critical purchase. Half the volume exposes the voices of competing class interests in aesthetics and art theory in the tumultuous years of British history between the American Revolution and the 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. Half offers new perspectives on works by some of the most important landscape painters of the time: John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, John Crome, and John Sell Cotman. Four essays are hitherto unpublished, and the remainder have been updated and in several cases substantially rewritten for this volume.

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity-humankind's project of self-creation-and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.

Adopting Argentina's popular uprisings against neoliberalism including the 2001-02 rebellion and subsequent mass protests as a case study, The Mobilization and Demobilization of Middle-Class Revolt analyzes two decades of longitudinal research (1995-2018), including World Bank and Latinobarometer household survey data, along with participant interviews, to explore why nonpolitically active middle-class citizens engage in radical protest movements, and why they eventually demobilize. In particular it asks, how do they become politicized and resist economic and political crises, along with their own hardship? Theoretically informed by Gramsci's notions of hegemony, ideology and class consciousness, Ozarow posits that to affect profound and lasting social change, multisectoral alliances and sustainable mobilizing vehicles are required to maintain radical progressive movements beyond periods of crisis. With the Argentinian revolt understood to be the ideological forbearer to the autonomist-inspired uprisings which later emerged, comparisons are drawn with experiences in the USA, Spain, Greece UK, Iceland and the Middle East, as well as 1990s contexts in South Africa and Russia. Such a comparative analysis helps understand how contextual factors shape distinctive struggling middle-class citizen responses to external shocks. This book will be of immense value to students, activists and theorists of social change in North America, in Europe and globally.

Will capitalism survive forever? Capitalism has always lived in and with crisis. Wars, revolutions, economic depression and repeated recessions, the threat of nuclear annihilation and ecological disaster have all failed to break the dominance of this economic and political system. Challenging the predominance of capitalism in a world fraught with inequalities, this book returns to classical Marxism to reaffirm its relevance. It explores the contradictions within capitalism as well as explains why Marxism has been unable to mount a sustained challenge to capitalism. In order to explore concrete alternatives in a period of increasing capitalist globalisation and crisis, it goes on to present perspectives by which theory and practice might be reunited to building independent political and organisational structures. A search for "something better", this volume will be an engaging read for scholars and researchers of politics, especially political theory and political economy, economics, and sociology.

More than twenty-five years after the collapse of the Socialist bloc, the nature of the regimes in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989 continues to evade the attempts of political theorists and scholars of post-communism to define and classify them. Drawing on philosophical inquiry, jurisprudential analysis and intellectual history, this book traces the impact of communist ideology and practice on legal thought: from its critical roots in the midst of the nineteenth century to its reactionary stand in the later years of the twentieth. Exploring how the communist experience - both in its revolutionary and authoritarian guises - has been articulated within the legal theoretical field, the book addresses two central theoretical lacunae fostered by the historiography of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe: the status of law, and its relationship to the broader ideological framework legitimising authoritarian regimes. Moving beyond the limits of the contemporary discourse on communism - particularly as it is channelled through transitional justice and memory studies - Cosmin Cercel develops a theoretical framework that is able to uncover law's complicity with the extreme ideologies that dominated Central and Eastern Europe. For it is, he argues, in its recourse to legal concepts that the communist experience raises important jurisprudential questions for our contemporary understanding of law, the limits of state sovereignty, and law's relationship to historical violence.

Post-communist transformation differs from any previous experience of societies in transition by its scope, speed, international framework and complicity. It contains elements of democratization, marketization, nation building, and the creation of a new international environment in the framework of globalization. The contributors give an internal perspective of these highly complicated processes in a comparative form and using a multidisciplinary approach.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to all three volumes of Karl Marx's 'Capital', with advice on further reading and points for further discussion. Recognizing the contemporary relevance of 'Capital' in the midst of the current financial crisis, Kenneth Smith has produced an essential guide to Marx's ideas, particularly on the subject of the circulation of money-capital. This guide uniquely presents the three volumes of 'Capital' in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, placing them instead in the order that Marx himself sometimes recommended as a more user-friendly way of reading. Dr Smith also argues that for most of the twentieth century, the full development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist 'third world', which has caused the CMP to take on the form of what Marx called a highly developed mercantile system, rather than one characterized by an uninterrupted circuit of industrial capital of the kind he expected. While the guide can be read as a book in its own right, it also contains detailed references to Volumes I-III so that students, seminars and discussion groups can easily make connections between Smith's explanations and the relevant parts of 'Capital'.

Beginning with a review of the numerous studies that tend to emphasize the national, societal dimension of the Italian and French communist parties, Cyrille Guiat's book is a comparative study of the two parties from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.