In tackling emergentist Marxism in depth, this well-written volume demonstrates that critical realism and materialist dialectics are indispensable to theorizing the functioning of complex social and physical systems. Author Sean Creaven investigates Marx's dialectics of being and consciousness, forces and relations of production, base and superstructure, class structure and class conflict, and demonstrates how they allow the social analyst to conceptualize geo-history as embodying a tendential evolutionary directionality, rather than as simply random or indeterminate in terms of its outcomes. For those interested in social and political theory, Marxism and communism and contemporary social theory, this outstanding volume is an in important read and a valuable resource.

The desire for the 'core' leader has been imbedded in the ruling philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party. As the role of the 'core' leader and his interactions with other ruling elite are important in understanding Chinese politics, this book attempts to focus on the role of the party chief and how he could become the 'core' of the leadership. Xuezhi Guo provides the most detailed and comprehensive scrutiny of the 'core' of the Chinese Communist Party leadership and meticulously analyses the cultural, philosophical, and ideological origins as well as its evolution throughout the party's history. This study introduces an eclectic approach that integrates the most useful analytical perspectives and insights from Chinese political history, philosophy, and mainstream Western methodologies in order to explain the consistent patterns of elite politics and the behavior of the party's high-ranking leaders during times of cooperation and conflict from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping.

Using arresting case studies of how ordinary people understand the concepts of race, class, and gender, Celine-Marie Pascale shows that the peculiarity of commonsense is that it imposes obviousness-that which we cannot fail to recognize. As a result, how we negotiate the challenges of inequality in the twenty-first century may depend less on what people consciously think about "difference" and more on what we inadvertently assume. Through an analysis of commonsense knowledge, Pascale expertly provides new insights into familiar topics. In addition, by analyzing local practices in the context of established cultural discourses, Pascale shows how the weight of history bears on the present moment, both enabling and constraining possibilities. Pascale tests the boundaries of sociological knowledge and offers new avenues for conceptualizing social change. In 2008, Making Sense of Race, Class and Gender was the recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, of the American Sociological Association Section on Race, Gender, and Class, for "distinguished and significant contribution to the development of the integrative field of race, gender, and class."

Libman and Obydenkova reveal how legacies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) have survived in the politics, economic development, culture, and society of post-Communist regions in the 21st Century. The authors show how this impact is not driven by Communist ideology but by the clientelistic practices, opportunism and cynicism prevalent in the CPSU. Their study is built on a novel dataset of the CPSU membership rates in Russian regions in the 1950s-1980s, alongside case studies, interviews and an analysis of mass media previously only available in Russian and discussed here in English for the first time. It will appeal to students and scholars of Russian and Eastern European politics and history, and anyone who wants to better understand countries which live or have lived through Communism: from Eastern Europe to China and East Asian Communist states.

This compelling book provides a meticulously documented account of officially sanctioned cannibalism in the southwestern province of Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution. Drawing on his unique access to local archives of the Chinese Communist Party and on extensive interviews with party officials, the victims' relatives, and the murderers themselves, Zheng Yi paints a disturbing picture of official compliance in the systematic killing and cannibalization of individuals in the name of political revolution and "class struggle."The treasure-trove of evidence Zheng Yi has unearthed offers unprecedented insights into the way the internecine, factional struggles of the Cultural Revolution reached a horrifying level of insanity and frenzy among the ethnic Zhuang people of Guangxi. Profoundly moving, acutely observed, and unflinchingly graphic, "Scarlet Memorial" is a shining example of a genre of investigative reporting that courageously and independently records obscure and officially censored historical events, revealing hidden dimensions of modern Chinese history and politics.

How the Chinese Communist Party maintains its power by both repressing and responding to its people Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivaled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone-it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. The Party and the People explores how this paradox has helped the CCP endure for decades, and how this balance has shifted increasingly toward repression under the rule of President Xi Jinping. Delving into the tenuous binary of repression and responsivity, Bruce Dickson illuminates numerous questions surrounding the CCP's rule: How does it choose leaders and create policies? When does it allow protests? Will China become democratic? Dickson shows that the party's dual approach lies at the core of its practices-repression when dealing with existential, political threats or challenges to its authority, and responsiveness when confronting localized economic or social unrest. The state answers favorably to the demands of protesters on certain issues, such as local environmental hazards and healthcare, but deals harshly with others, such as protests in Tibet, Xinjiang, or Hong Kong. With the CCP's greater reliance on suppression since Xi Jinping's rise to power in 2012, Dickson considers the ways that this tipping of the scales will influence China's future. Bringing together a vast body of sources, The Party and the People sheds new light on how the relationship between the Chinese state and its citizens shapes governance.

Excavating the history of Marxism and Black revolutionary politics Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls 'Red Africa'. The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised - instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender. Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition.

Interest in Theodor W. Adorno continues to grow in the English-speaking world as the significance of his contribution to philosophy, social and cultural theory, as well as aesthetics is increasingly recognized. Espen Hammer's lucid book is the first to properly analyze the political implications of his work, paying careful attention to Adorno's work on key thinkers such as Kant, Hegel and Benjamin. Examining Adorno's political experiences and assessing his engagement with Marxist as well as liberal theory, Hammer looks at the development of Adorno's thought as he confronts Fascism and modern mass culture. He then analyzes the political dimension of his philosophical and aesthetic theorizing. By addressing Jurgen Habermas's influential criticisms, he defends Adorno as a theorist of autonomy, responsibility and democratic plurality. He also discusses Adorno's relevance to feminist and ecological thinking. As opposed to those who see Adorno as someone who relinquished the political, Hammer's account shows his reflections to be, on the most fundamental level, politically motivated and deeply engaged. This invigorating exploration of a major political thinker is a useful introduction to his thought as a whole, and will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of philosophy, sociology, politics and aesthetics.

What was life in the Soviet Union really like? Through a series of true stories, One Day We Will Live Without Fear describes what people's day-to-day life was like under the regime of the Soviet police state. Drawing on events from the 1930s through the 1970s, Mark Harrison shows how, by accident or design, people became entangled in the workings of Soviet rule. The author outlines the seven principles on which that police state operated during its history, from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and illustrates them throughout the book. Well-known people appear in the stories, but the central characters are those who will have been remembered only within their families: a budding artist, an engineer, a pensioner, a government office worker, a teacher, a group of tourists. Those tales, based on historical records, shine a light on the many tragic, funny, and bizarre aspects of Soviet life.

This book provides a concise overview of Marx's philosophy and political economy, tracing various changes of his theoretical views over time through his practical and theoretical engagements with contradictions of capitalism from the unique perspective of Japanese Marxism. While it offers an objective introduction to Marx's critique of capitalism, Sasaki uniquely pays particular attention to the concept of "metabolism," whose disruption under the capitalist mode of production causes exhaustion of labour-power as well as natural resources. Sasaki reconstructs Marx as a revolutionary thinker, whose devoted his entire life for the sake of establishing a more free and equal society beyond capitalism. Sasaki's book shows that Marx's passion for the socialist revolution in his last years is recorded in his late excerpt notebooks that become available through the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.

This book systematically introduces the idea of an improper politics. Introducing a conceptual vocabulary, it engages with the politics of the proper, propriety and property from a post-foundational perspective. Mark Devenney argues that this triad is central to understanding the maintenance of global inequality, both economic and political. He characterises democratic politics as improper, challenging the proper bounds of reason, accepted behaviours, and the policing of proper order. The conceptualisation of democracy as an improper practice of equality accords a dignity to forms of politics often deemed marginal.

Utterly corrupt corporate and government elites bankrupted Greece twice over. First, by profligate deficit spending benefitting only themselves; second, by agreeing to an IMF bailout of the Greek economy, devastating ordinary Greek citizens who were already enduring government-induced poverty, unemployment, and hunger. Finally, in response to dire austerity measures, the people of Greece stood up, forming, from their own historic roots of resistance, Syriza the Coalition of the Radical Left. For those who caught the Syriza wave, there was, writes Helena Sheehan, a minute of precarious hope. A seasoned activist and participant-observer, Helena Sheehan adroitly places us at the center of the whirlwind beginnings of Syriza, its jubilant victory at the polls, and finally at Syriza s surrender to the very austerity measures it once vowed to annihilate. Along the way, she takes time to meet many Greeks in tavernas, on the street, and in government offices, engage in debates, and compare Greece to her own economically blighted country, Ireland. Beginning as a strong Syriza supporter, Sheehan sees Syriza transformed from a horizon of hope to a vortex of despair. But out of the dust of defeat, she draws questions radiating hope. Just how did what was possibly the most intelligent, effective instrument of the Greek left self-destruct? And what are the consequences for the Greek people, for the international left, for all of us driven to work for a better world? The Syriza Wave is a page-turning blend of political reportage, personal reflection, and astute analysis."

The Reification of Desire takes two critical perspectives rarely analyzed together-formative arguments for Marxism and those that have been the basis for queer theory-and productively scrutinizes these ideas both with and against each other to put forth a new theoretical connection between Marxism and queer studies. Kevin Floyd brings queer critique to bear on the Marxian categories of reification and totality and considers the dialectic that frames the work of Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Fredric Jameson. Reading the work of these theorists together with influential queer work by such figures as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and alongside reconsiderations of such texts as The Sun Also Rises and Midnight Cowboy, Floyd reformulates these two central categories that have been inseparable from a key strand of Marxist thought and have marked both its explanatory power and its limitations. Floyd theorizes a dissociation of sexuality from gender at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of reification to claim that this dissociation is one aspect of a larger dynamic of social reification enforced by capitalism. Developing a queer examination of reification and totality, Kevin Floyd ultimately argues that the insights of queer theory require a fundamental rethinking of both.

The dramatic story of a Jewish child's rescue at Buchenwald and its use as propaganda in both East and united Germany. At the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, communist prisoners organized resistance against the SS and even planned an uprising. They helped rescue a three-year-old Jewish boy, Stefan Jerzy Zweig, from certain death in the gas chambers. After the war, his story became a focus for the German Democratic Republic's celebration of its resistance to the Nazis. Now Bill Niven tells the true story of Stefan Zweig: what actually happened to him in Buchenwald, how he was protected, and at what price. He explores the (mis)representation of Zweig's rescue in East Germany and what this reveals about that country's understanding of its Nazi past. Finally he looks at the telling of the Zweig rescue story since German unification: a story told in the GDR to praise communists has become a story used to condemn them. Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Ten engaging personal histories introduce readers to what it was like to live in and with the most powerful political machine ever created: the Chinese Communist Party. Detailing the life of ten people who led or engaged with the Chinese Communist Party, one each for one of its ten decades of its existence, these essays reflect on the Party's relentless pursuit of power and extraordinary adaptability through the transformative decades since 1921. Demonstrating that the history of the Chinese Communist Party is not one story but many stories, readers learn about paths not taken, the role of chance, ideas and persons silenced, hopes both lost and fulfilled. This vivid mosaic of lives and voices draws together one hundred years of modern Chinese history - and illuminates possible paths for China's future.

The foreign policies of communist states were governed and their actions justified by official Marxist ideology - at least in principal. This collection of essays examines the extent to which nationalism has replaced communist ideology in the foreign policy of these states. It also analyses how these countries use foreign policy to articulate renewed or newly-established national identities and their wider sense of geopolitical belonging. Written by an international collection of country specialists, the volume includes a comparative introduction and chapters on Russia and a selection of post-communist states from the Baltic, Central Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

This study, written from the perspective of political sociology, represents the first comparative examination of Central Asian communal and political organisation before and after the tsarist conquest of the region. It covers Turkman, Kyrgyz, Kazakh and other tribal societies, analyses the patrimonial state structures of the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanates of Khiva and Khokland, and discusses the impacts of the established tsarist civil military administration on communal and political orientations of the Muslim population.

Contents:
Editors Foreword Acknowledgements Preface 1. Introduction 2. Life and Context 3. The Foundation of Sociology 4. The Works 5. A New Reception Bibliography of Simmel's Major Works Annotated Bibliography of secondary Sources Index

This is a study of the responses of the Soviet Union to the European crises which led to World War II. It is based on a substantial body of political and diplomatic documents that has become accessible to scholars since the opening up of former Soviet archives in 1992.

Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This startling new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis.

Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature.

Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley.

By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx's Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

What has become of the Communist parties that once held monopoly power in the east bloc? A decade ago, it was assumed that they would dissolve, but many of them have enjoyed electoral success. This book systematically examines how they have evolved. In the opening section, Herbert Kitschet and Ivan Szelenyi respectively consider post-communist party strategies and social democratic prospects in the transitional societies. Part II presents nine case studies of the major communist and communist successor parties of the region, and Part III is devoted to seven comparative studies. Appendices provide comparable electoral and party membership data.

After the collapse of the Soviet world, North Korea alone has continued on the rigid communist way, in spite of its economic consequences leading the state beyond ruin to famine. What are the reasons behind this peculiar choice of direction? Why did the leaders in Pyongyang pursue a policy abandoned not only by the Soviet Union, but also by China and Vietnam?
The author of this book spent three years as head of the embassy of Sweden in Pyongyang. Until a few years ago, it was the only Western embassy in North Korea. His unique experiences are related with descriptions of day-to-day life and with analyses of economic, political and ideological conditions. A picture is drawn of a society and a political order that defy both human nature and common sense.

This work describes and analyzes the individual identities, social-ecological 'landscape' and group undertakings among the homosexual population of the Soviet Union during the final years of the communist regime. It includes detailed descriptions of the conditions of life and reveals substantial social organization regarding personal considerations, the social environment and legal-political status in society.

Introducing the key concepts and thinkers within the Marxist tradition, Marxism Goes to the Movies demonstrates their relevance to film theory and practice past and present. Author Mike Wayne argues that Marxist filmmaking has engaged with and transformed this popular medium, developing its potential for stimulating revolutionary consciousness. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, this history and these resources are vital for a better future. Marxism is one of the few approaches that can bring together political, economic, formal and cultural analysis into a unified approach of studying film, and how films in turn can help us understand and even critically interrogate these forces. The book examines how filmmakers, who have been influenced by Marxism, have made some of the most significant contributions to film culture globally, and provides historical perspective on the development of Marxism and film. Each chapter covers a broad theme that is broken down into sections that are cross-referenced throughout, providing helpful navigation of the material. Clear and concise in its arguments, this is an ideal introduction for students of Marxism and film, inviting readers to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the subject.