Covering 10 years of post-communist political change in eastern Europe, this work examines the capacity of the former ruling parties to attract contemporary voters and their role in contributing to the consolidation of the new democratic regimes. Attention is paid to the comparative processes of party development in terms of party activity becoming more professional, aspects of party system institutionalization, major dimensions of institutional and electoral development, and party finances. A range of countries are surveyed to throw light on these processes, and broad analysis conducted on the nature of conservatism in post-communist Europe and the role of transnational party cooperation in fostering processes of Europeanization.

'Enlightening ... Funny, smart, original and provocative ... It is hard to imagine the stalwarts of Mock the Week recognising the Druze militia leader Walid Jumblatt in a London cinema' NEW STATESMAN 'Few standups have come close to capturing a fraction of this creative energy in a book ... Alexei Sayle is an exception' GUARDIAN "What I brought to comedy was an authentic working-class voice plus a threat of genuine violence - nobody in Monty Python looked like a hard case who'd kick your head in." In 1971, comedians on the working men's club circuit imagined that they would be free to continue telling their tired, racist, misogynistic gags forever. But their nemesis, a nineteen-year-old Marxist art student, was slowly coming to meet them... Thatcher Stole My Trousers chronicles a time when comedy and politics united in electrifying ways. Recounting the founding of the Comedy Store, the Comic Strip and the Young Ones, and Alexei's friendships with the comedians who - like him - would soon become household names, this is a unique and beguiling blend of social history and memoir. Fascinating, funny, angry and entertaining, it is a story of class and comedy, politics and love, fast cars and why it's difficult to foul a dwarf in a game of football.

This is a study of the activities, ideas and internal life of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai during its formative period. It investigates the party's relations to the city's students and teachers, women, entrepreneurs, secret societies and its workers, and examines the efforts to transform the CCP into a 'Leninist' party, exploring relations between intellectuals and workers, men and women, Chinese and Russians within the party. The book culminates in a detailed analysis of the three armed uprisings which led to the CCP's briefly taking power in March 1927, before being crushed by troops loyal to Chiang Kai-shek. The study highlights the extent to which the Soviet Union sought to manipulate China's national revolution, yet also reveals how divisions at every level of the Comintern allowed the CCP to achieve a degree of independence and to conduct policy at considerable variance with that laid down by Moscow.

As the global political order enters the twenty-first century, the cold war endures on the Korean peninsula, which has been since the early days of the cold war and remains one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the world. The fragility of the political, economic, and military balance within the two Koreas and in Northeast Asia stubbornly persists, and it is deeply worrisome to policymakers, diplomats, academics, and all watchers of contemporary East Asian affairs. It is noteworthy that most of the problems studied in this volume show no sign of abating.

The contributors to this book, most with direct, hands-on experience dealing with the issues being studied, provide in-depth and perceptive analysis of the principal factors that gave rise to the persisting cold war on the Korean peninsula. To a significant extent, they have successfully unraveled many aspects of the complicated domestic and economic dynamics of the two Koreas and the pattern of relations between the two rival states of Korea as well as their changing relations with the United States and other major powers.

In this important text, Stephen Valocchi brings capitalism back into the study of the gay and lesbian movement. He argues that to understand the collective identity, structure, strategies and goals of the movement, we need to understand the role that capitalism and the state have played. While capitalism and the state have figured centrally in earlier analyses of social movements, these important institutions and their social processes are no longer central concerns of the theory and research of social movements in the United States. Capitalisms and Gay Identities examines how the class-based inequalities and changing class structures of capitalism interact with and indeed help shape the dynamics of other types of inequalities, such as gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. These inequalities and structures, in turn, shape the specific grievances of, and affect the nature of, stigma levied against individuals with sexual and gender nonconformity. Valocchi shows that capitalism is a dynamic system, and as it changes, the nature of the movement and the collective identity created by the movement also changes. A vital text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, social movements, LGBTQ politics and American studies, Capitalisms and Gay Identities challenges our understanding of many aspects of the gay and lesbian movement when viewed through the lens of capitalism, particularly its ability to advance the cause of sexual freedom and gender justice.

This collection addresses fundamental themes in Marx's social and political thought. It covers key controversies in the analysis of Marx's overall intellectual development, the influence of Hegel, the Marx-Engels relationship, the validity of historical materialism, the significance of class and class struggle, the state and political parties, and reform and revolution. It also addresses Marx's work as historian, anthropologist, student of time and space, social psychologist, social interactionist, and literary scholar. It also covers debates regarding Marx's views on technological determinism: *national identity *nationalism, and cosmopolitanism *cities and citizenship *welfare and human rights *science and ideology *patriarchy and the family *gender and sexual orientations *culture and religion *alienation and fetishism *justice in capitalism and communism.
Bob Jessop provides an extended general introduction and also summarizes and interrelates the various articles at the start of each volume. Contributors adopt a wide range of approaches and cover some sixty years of analysis.

Marx's critique of political economy is vital for understanding the crisis of contemporary capitalism. Yet the nature of its relevance and some of its key tenets remain poorly understood. This bold intervention brings together the work of leading Marx scholars Slavoj i ek, Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza, to offer a fresh, radical reinterpretation of Marxism that explains the failures of neoliberalism and lays the foundations for a new emancipatory politics. Avoiding trite comparisons between Marx's worldview and our current political scene, the authors show that the current relevance and value of Marx's thought can better be explained by placing his key ideas in dialogue with those that have attempted to replace them. Reading Marx through Hegel and Lacan, particle physics, and modern political trends, the authors provide new ways to explain the crisis in contemporary capitalism and resist fundamentalism in all its forms. Reading Marx will find a wide audience amongst activists and scholars.

This projected ten-volume edition of Mao Zedong's writings provides abundant documentation in his own words regarding his life and thought. It has been compiled from all available Chinese sources, including the many new texts that appeared in 1993, Mao's centenary.

China, the largest socialist country, has enjoyed mixed achievements as a Marxist state and has recently become aggressively capitalistic. China Under Communism examines how Marxism took root, flourished and developed within the context of the ancient Chinese Civilization.
Through analysis of China's history and traditional culture, the author explores the nature of Chinese communism and how it has diverged from the Soviet model. This book also provides insight into the changing pereptions Westerners have of the Chinese, and vice versa.
This timely evaluation details how China's political and economic policies have been inextricably linked, and assess past failures and successes, as well as major problems for the future.

Independent Chinese workers' organizations took a leading role in the 1989 Democracy Movement. They also suffered heavily for their political dissent in the crackdown that followed, but attempts to form independent trade unions have continued into the 1990s. Jackie Sheehan traces the background and development of workers' clashes with the Chinese Communist Party through mass campaigns such as the 1956-7 Hundred Flowers movement, the Cultural Revolution, the April Fifth Movement of 1976, Democracy Wall and the 1989 Democracy Movement. The author provides a detailed and complete picture of workers protest in China to 1998 and locates their position within the context of Chinese political history. The book demonstrates that the image of Chinese workers as politically conformist and reliable supporters of the Communist Party does not match the realities of industrial life in China. Recent outbreaks of protest by workers are less of a departure from the past than is generally realized.

Alexander Bogdanov was a co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1904. After 1905, Bogdanov criticized Lenin's adaption of Bolshevism to the requirements of Duma politics and his authoritarian style of leadership. Expelled from the Bolshevik fraction in 1909, he at first formed the Forward faction of the RSDRP and then turned increasingly to scholarly and publicistic work. In 1910 he published Faith and Science, replying to Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocritcism, which had been written to discredit him. His ideas on the sociology of culture led to the founding of the Proletkult in 1917 and during the 1920s these ideas were taken up, adapted and often distorted in the course of the 'Cultural Revolution'. Bogdanov's textbooks in sociology and economics were widely used during the 1920s. Seeking to liberate Marxism from the shackles of Hegelianism, he developed a theory of 'organizational science' ('Tektology') which influenced early economic planning through the work of Groman and Bazarov. As a systems thinker, Bogdanov is now viewed as a precursor of Ludwig von Berthalanffy and Norbert Wiener. Arrested by the GPU in 1923, for alleged political opposition, Bogdanov withdrew even further from public life and returned to medicine, his original calling. In 1926 he founded the first Russian Institute of Blood Transfusion, presiding over pioneering work in this sphere until 1928 when he died. During the Stalin years, Bogdanov's works were judged to be heretical and were not republished. It was not until 1989 that his 'Universal Organizational Science' was republished, though his contribution to systems thinking had been recognized by Russian and East European systems thinkers as early as the 1960s. In the West. the importance of Bogdanov as a 'cultural Marxist', as an influence upon Gramsci, and as a pioneer in systems thinking, is increasingly being acknowledged. This bibliography of Bogdanov's works takes advantage of the opening of the Party and State archives and provides references to the principal relevant archives in Europe and the United States. Its publication is a landmark in the history of Bolshevism and in the history of Russian social thought.

This book addresses pioneering views and hot topics in contemporary Marxist philosophy, reflecting the latest advances and important achievements made over the past 30 years in China. Besides summarizes and reflects past and present advances in Marxist philosophy, this book also outlines a path for its future development in China. Presenting a comprehensive exploration of the most fundamental and significant theoretical issues in the field of contemporary Chinese Marxist philosophy, based on the latest research, it lays the foundation for Chinese philosophy in the new century, making it of great significance for promoting the study of contemporary Chinese philosophy.

Deng: A Political Biography is the story of an extraordinary man whose imprint on late twentieth-century China's social, political, and economic development is indelible. Written by an insider, this study is notable for the great detail it provides on elite-level Chinese Communist Party politics and Deng Xiaoping's changing relations with his party colleagues in the jockeying for power that constitutes an important aspect of CCP politics. Benjamin Yang has a masterful grasp of this dimension of Chinese politics, and his narrative leaves no doubt that Deng was a politician first and foremost. This fascinating biography combines intimate details and the sweep of history encompassing the epic struggles of twentieth-century China. Students of China, scholars as well as general readers, will find this book indispensable.

This projected ten-volume edition of Mao Zedong's writings provides abundant documentation in his own words regarding his life and thought. It has been compiled from all available Chinese sources, including the many new texts that appeared in 1993, Mao's centenary.

Marxism: The Inner Dialogues covers a wide range of basic issues and problems arising from what has been said for, against, and about Marxism. This is a rich and systematic collection of writings by the foremost authorities on the subject in the world. The book provides the most inclusive and lasting analysis of Marxist thought available. Curtis has confronted current problems in Marxist studies in the context of the classic concerns of Western thought.

No Free Speech for Fascists explores the choice of anti-fascist protesters to demand that the opportunities for fascists to speak in public places are rescinded, as a question of history, law, and politics. It explains how the demand to no platform fascists emerged in 1970s Britain, as a limited exception to a left-wing tradition of support for free speech. The book shows how no platform was intended to be applied narrowly, only to a right-wing politics that threatened everyone else. It contrasts the rival idea of opposition to hate speech that also emerged at the same time and is now embodied in European and British anti-discrimination laws. Both no platform and hate speech reject the American First Amendment tradition of free speech, but the ways in which they reject it are different. Behind no platform is not merely a limited range of political targets but a much greater scepticism about the role of the state. The book argues for an idea of no platform which takes on the electronic channels on which so much speech now takes place. It shows where a fascist element can be recognised within the much wider category of far-right speech. This book will be of interest to activists and to those studying and researching political history, law, free speech, the far right, and anti-fascism. It sets out a philosophy of anti-fascism for a social media age.

How did Ludwig van Beethoven help overthrow a tsarist regime? With the establishment of the Russian Musical Society and its affiliated branches throughout the empire, Beethoven's music reached substantially larger audiences at a time of increasing political instability. In addition, leading music critics of the regime began hearing Beethoven's dramatic works as nothing less than a call to revolution. Beethoven in Russia deftly explores the interface between music and politics in Russia by examining the reception of Beethoven's works from the late 18th century to the present. In part 1, Frederick W. Skinner's clear and sweeping review examines the role of Beethoven's more dramatic works in the revolutionary struggle that culminated in the Revolution of 1917. In part 2, Skinner reveals how this same power was again harnessed to promote Stalin's campaign of rapid industrialization. The appropriation of Beethoven and his music to serve the interests of the state remained the hallmark of Soviet Beethoven reception until the end of communist rule. With interdisciplinary appeal in the areas of history, music, literature, and political thought, Beethoven in Russia shows how Beethoven's music served as a call to action for citizens and weaponized state propaganda in the great political struggles that shaped modern Russian history.

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.

This projected ten-volume edition of Mao Zedong's writings provides abundant documentation in his own words regarding his life and thought. It has been compiled from all available Chinese sources, including the many new texts that appeared in 1993, Mao's centenary.

Through its provocative examination of feminist and Marxist approaches to women's art and female representations, this book challenges the widespread belief that Marxism has nothing valuable to contribute to women's studies. The author argues that, from the French Revolution through to the present, gender and class have shaped visual imagery. She shows how Marxist theory can function to question some of the premises of feminist art histories and to provide a more accurate understanding of the meaning(s) of visual imagery.

When originally published in 1984, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan provided the first focused consideration of the 1978 Saur Revolution and the subsequent Soviet invasion and occupation of the country. Nearly four decades later, its conclusions remain crucial to understanding Afghanistan today. In this much-anticipated re-release, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan offers an opportunity for fresh insight into the antecedents of the nation's enduring conflicts. A new foreword by editors M. Nazif Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield contextualizes this collection, which relies on extensive fieldwork in the years leading up to the Soviet invasion. Specific tribal, ethnic, and gender groups are considered within the context of their region, and contributors discuss local responses to government decrees, Islamic-inspired grassroots activism, and interpretations of jihad outside of Kabul. Long recognized as a vital ethnographic text in Afghan studies, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan provides an extraordinary chance to experience the diversity of the Afghan people on the cusp of irrevocable change and to understand what they expected of the years ahead.

No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in "For Marx" (1965), and "Reading Capital" (1968). These works, along with "Lenin and Philosophy "(1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship.

This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science.

Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist."

Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history.

Since the founding of the Communist Party in China just over a century ago, there is much the country has achieved. But who does the heavy lifting in China? And who walks away with the spoils? Cadre Country places the spotlight on the nation's 40 million cadres - the managers and government officials employed by the ruling Communist Party to protect its great enterprise. This group has captured the culture and wealth of China, excluding the voices of the common citizens of this powerful and diverse country. Award-winning historian John Fitzgerald focuses on the stories the Communist Party tells about itself, exploring how China works as an authoritarian state, and revealing Beijing's monumental propaganda productions as a fragile edifice built on questionable assumptions. Cadre Country is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the workings of the Chinese Communist Party and the limits of its achievements.