Even Maurice Dobb's critics, and there were many, acknowledged that he was one of the world's most significant Communist economists. From his outpost at the University of Cambridge, where he was a protege of John Maynard Keynes and mentor to students ranging from Eric Hobsbawm to Amartya Sen, Dobb made himself into one of British communism's premier intellectuals. Until now, this remarkable life has been all but forgotten. Yet following Dobb's life from his birth in 1900 to his death in 1976 does more than just recover the career of one of modern Britain's most paradoxical thinkers. It reveals a surprising history that casts new light on the connections that bound economics, politics, and power together in the twentieth century--a history whose legacy still endures, long after the Soviet Union's fall.

Immanuel Wallerstein and Istvan Meszaros are prolific scholars whose analyses of global capitalism in crisis offer distinctive insights for research across the social sciences. This book engages readers with their main theses, encouraging their application in analysis of social reality and of its institutions of mass education, which aim to prepare workers for the global economy. Using the theoretical lenses offered by these two scholars, Tom G. Griffiths and Robert Imre develop a timely and provocative critique of mass education for this century, challenging readers to contribute to the construction of radical alternatives.

"China and Global Capitalism" is a historical and conceptual analysis of China's position and positioning in the world. Reviewing relevant debates, Lin Chun clarifies the evolving relationship between China and global capitalism, past, present, and possible future, and offers a critical reflection on received knowledge about China and the resulting expectations and recommendations for its development, which are largely dependent on the standardization of capitalist trajectories. Against the historical and international background of China's revolutionary, socialist, and post-socialist transformations, this book assesses the logic and crises of capitalist integration. It asks whether a renewed Chinese social model is still feasible as an alternative with potentially universal implications to the eco-socioeconomic impasse of standard modernization. Rejecting both economically and culturally deterministic approaches, the book argues for the centrality of transformative politics.

This work explores two lesser known aspects of Georg Lukacs's thought: his conception of language and theory of science, and his achievements in literary history. This book defends Lukacs's concept of rationality and presents an original argument demonstrating that there are good reasons for choosing rationalism; that is, it is possible to establish the foundations of rationalism. Internationally unknown aspects of Lukacs's oeuvre are also investigated, making extensive use of a number of his untranslated writings. Janos Kelemen's main statement is that, for the reader, the most important motif of Lukacs's thought is its defense of reason. Students and scholars of philosophy, political science, literary theory, and the humanities will be interested in this book.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter of a century ago, Russia has undergone a dizzying and complex transition that has seen it transform from a communist state into a democracy before regressing back to the more authoritarian regime that exists today. Through a compelling and insightful analysis of the Russian case, this book explores the role that social welfare plays in regime transitions, specifically it examines the role that gender and social welfare has played in Russia's often chaotic post-communist political evolution, from Boris Yeltsin's assumption of the presidency in 1991 to Vladimir Putin's return for a third term as president in 2012. From 2001 to 2011, social welfare (especially pronatalist policies) was a key part of the political leadership's governance strategy. A shift from pluralism to regulation accompanied a discourse in which strong government would rein-in a wayward society. But can a hierarchical political system satisfy the aspirations of a changing citizenry? This study demonstrates that gender is at the very centre of debates over the authenticity of democracy in Russia.

Victim of history," "a martyr from behind the Iron Curtain," "the Hungarian Gandhi" - these are just some of the epithets which people used to describe Cardinal Mindszenty, archbishop of Esztergom, who was the last Hungarian prelate to use the title of prince primate. Today, Mindszenty has been forgotten in most countries except for Hungary, but when he died in 1975, he was known all over the world as a symbol of the struggle of the Catholic Church against communism. Cardinal Mindszenty held the post of archbishop of Esztergom from 1945 until 1974, but during this period of almost three decades he served barely four years in office. The political police arrested him on December 26, 1948, and the Budapest People's Court subsequently sentenced him to life imprisonment. Based on the Stalinist practice of show trials, one of the accusations against Mindszenty, referring to his legitimist leanings, was his alleged attempt to re-establish Habsburg rule in Hungary. He regained freedom during the 1956 revolution but only for a few days. He was granted refuge by the US Embassy in Budapest between November 4, 1956 -September 28, 1971. In the fifteen years he spent at the American embassy enormous changes took place in the world while his personality remained frozen into the past. When in 1971 Pope Paul VI received the Hungarian foreign minister, he called Mindszenty "the victim of history". His last years were spent free at last, but far away from his homeland. In Hungary, the Catholic believers eagerly await his beatification.

This English-language edition, prepared in collaboration with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow, contains the second volume of Das Capital, the classic text of Marxism for economists, social scientists, philosophers, students and political activitists alike.

This unique collection is the first to bring attention to Antonio Gramsci s work within geographical debates. Presenting a substantially different reading to Gramsci scholarship, the collection forges a new approach within human geography, environmental studies and development theory. * Offers the first sustained attempt to foreground Antonio Gramsci s work within geographical debates * Demonstrates how Gramsci articulates a rich spatial sensibility whilst developing a distinctive approach to geographical questions * Presents a substantially different reading of Gramsci from dominant post-Marxist perspectives, as well as more recent anarchist and post-anarchist critiques * Builds on the emergence of Gramsci scholarship in recent years, taking this forward through studies across multiple continents, and asking how his writings might engage with and animate political movements today * Forges a new approach within human geography, environmental studies and development theory, building on Gramsci s innovative philosophy of praxis

Part of a definitive English-language edition, prepared in collaboration with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow, which contains all the works of Marx and Engels, whether published in their lifetimes or since. The series includes their complete correspondence and newly discovered works.

Ideology has been pronounced dead on several occasions in the past. The most recent verdict to this effect has been made in the context of the globalization debate. It proclaims the decline of 'ideological' politics in the fragmented societies of today and especially the irrelevance of established ideological systems and their failure to provide answers to the dilemmas of an increasingly global world.
This popular view is challenged here. On the basis of conceptual and historical analysis applied to a range of major ideological traditions this book argues that no such ideological rupture has in fact occurred. While conceptual shifts are identifiable, changes have occurred within existing ideological configurations and according to their pre-existing logical requirements. Globalization has not destabilized conventional ideologies to an extent that would render them incoherent. On the contrary, they remain meaningful as distinct sets of political beliefs and as such shape the globalization debate.

A study of the Chinese Communist Party's revolutionary enterprise in northern Shaanxi during the 1934-45 period, this book argues that the "Yan'an Way," long celebrated by the Party as the foundation and model for its success, was a product of quite special circumstances that were not replicable in most other parts of China.
In late 1943, Mao Zedong hailed the rural cooperative movement in northern Shaanxi as the northwest base area's "second revolution," the first being the land reform of 1934-36. Based on newly available Chinese sources, the book studies the different styles and consequences of the Party's efforts in two key subregions of northern Shaanxi, Yanshu (the home of the "Yan'an Way") and Suide. The critical difference between the two subregions was an abundance of land in Yanshu and a severe scarcity of land in densely populated Suide. In Yanshu, the Party was able to ride a wave of farmer enthusiasm for farm building and development, whereas in Suide the task was to cull farming populations, resulting in resentment of cadre heavy-handedness.
To show the variation in reform outcomes in the two subregions, the author examines the result of the Party's major reconstruction initiatives: internal migration, tax reform and tax collection mobilizations, tenancy reform, and heightened agricultural goals. Predictably, because of the widely varying conditions in Yanshu and Suide, community building took radically different forms and had strikingly different consequences.
Throughout, the book considers the evolution of peasant-Party relations in a period when the Party was consolidating its state-building and rural development strategies. It also studies the meaning of rural "democracy" in the Communist base area, the problem of "peasant consciousness" in relation to revolution and mobilization, the function of rural cooperatives, and the state-village nexus as it developed during a period of revolutionary upheaval.

Based on a careful reading of Lenin's Collected Works, Roland Boer pursues the implications for linking Lenin with religion and theology and seeks to bring Lenin into recent debates over the intersections between theology and the Left, between the Bible and political thought.

This book pursues the implications for linking Lenin with theology, which is not a project that has been undertaken thus far. What does this inveterate atheist known for describing religion as 'spiritual booze' (a gloss on Marx's 'opium of the people') have to do with theology? This book reveals far more than might initially be expected, so much so that Lenin and the Russian Revolution cannot be understood without this complex engagement with theology.
It also seeks to bring Lenin into recent debates over the intersections between theology and the Left, between the Bible and political thought. The key names involved in this debate are reasonably well-known, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zižek, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Boer has written concerning these critics, among others, in Boer's earlier five-volume Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Brill and Haymarket, 2007-13). Lenin and Theology builds upon this earlier project but it also stands alone as a substantial study in its own right. But it will be recognised as a contribution that follows a series that has, as critics have pointed out, played a major role in reviving and taking to a new level the debate over Marxism and religion.
The book is based upon a careful, detailed and critical reading of the whole 45 volumes of his Collected Works in English translation - 55 volumes in the Russian original. From that close attention to the texts, a number of key themes have emerged: the ambivalence over freedom of choice in matters of religion; his love of the sayings and parables of Jesus in the Gospels; his own love of constructing new parables; the extended and complex engagements with Christian socialists and 'God-builders' among the Bolsheviks; the importance of Hegel for his reassessments of religion; the arresting suggestion that a revolution is a miracle, which redefines the meaning of miracle; and the veneration of Lenin after his death.

Marx expected the working class to create 'a movement of immense majority, in the interests of immense majority'. However, there is not and never has been such a movement. At least a part of the reason is that the traditional Marxist picture of a two-class polarisation bears little resemblance to the diverse and complex society of today's Western world. In this book, Michal Polak attempts to move beyond the austerity of the two-class model to come closer to the empirical realities. In the process, the author re-examines the very foundations of the Marxist theory, demonstrating how an important critique of the theory can in fact be fruitfully interpreted as a generalisation of it. While remaining true to the Marxian spirit, he comes up with original and innovative extensions of the traditional concepts, which finally allow for the explanation of the diverse class map of the advance capitalist societies.

This is a witty introduction to Communism which quotes extensively from all of the key protagonists to illuminate the issues. Full of jokes and illustrations it is the perfect introduction for the newcomer.

Through a comparative analysis of diverse texts and contexts, this book offers a cultural history of the interplay between the aesthetic and the political in the formation of personal and collective identity that crystallizes into the Chinese aesthetic of the sublime.
It describes how various kinds of politics are aestheticized and how aesthetic manifestations are bound up with prevalent ideologies and politics. In this book, politics refers to various projects for fashioning a viable self, a workable personal and collective identity in the crisis-ridden history of modern China. These projects include imagining a political subject adapted to the modern nation-state, mobilizing revolutionary masses as subjects of the Communist state, sustaining a unified self despite the challenges to traditional culture, erecting the sublime figure of the revolutionary hero, and, finally, debunking the grand images of the hero and history in post-Mao culture. Throughout, the author seeks to delineate the ways the political masquerades as aesthetic discourse and aesthetic experience.
Covering a wide range of material from fiction, poetry, aesthetics, and political discourse to memoirs, film, and historical documents, the book reconsiders a number of prominent cultural figures, including Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Mao Zedong, Zhu Guangqian, and Li Zehou. It also analyzes such important cultural features and events as Western influences on the formation of modern Chinese aesthetic discourse, modernist writings, Revolutionary Cinema, the Cultural Revolution, and New Wave Fiction.
An East-West comparative approach informs the analysis, which engages in dialogue with Kant, Hegel, Freud, Marx, and Walter Benjamin, as well as Terry Eagleton and other contemporary critics. The author's interdisciplinary method, which emphasizes the interaction among text, context, and the psyche, both presents new materials and illuminates familiar texts and phenomena from the perspective of the political-aesthetic nexus.

The question of how political parties are, and ought to be, regulated has assumed an increased importance in recent years, both within the scholarly community and among policy-makers and politicians as the state assumes an increasingly active role in the management of, and control over, their behaviour and organisation This book concentrates on the regulation of political parties in the EU post-communist democracies, and on Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, in particular. In analysing the various dimensions of party regulation, it builds on the main premises derived from the neo-institutionalist literature in political science, concerning the ways in which the (formal and informal) rules and procedures may influence, constrain or determine the behaviour of political actors. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive overview of the regulation of Eastern European political parties provided by leading experts in the field and casts theoretical and empirical light on the manner in which the constitutional and legal regulation of party organizations and finances have had an impact (or not) on the consolidation of party politics in post-communist Europe since 1989. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Political Parties and Behaviour, East European and Post-Communist Politics and Comparative Politics.

Economists, historians and social scientists have offered a variety of conflicting answers to the issue of the beginnings of capitalism and these deviating answers imply different conceptualizations of what capitalism actually is. This book provides a simultaneous inquiry into the origins of capitalism as well as provides a theoretical treatise on capitalism. The Origins of Capitalism as a Social System explores the line between what is and is not capitalism, (re)producing a theory of capitalism as a system of class domination and exploitation. Part I of the book focuses on the monetary theory of value and capital developed by Karl Marx, while at the same time critically reviews an array of economic and historical literature, both Marxist and non-Marxist. Following this, Part II expounds the first emergence of capitalism in Venice. It highlights the historical contingencies that made capitalism in the Venetian society possible, as well as the structural elements of the capitalist system and their interconnectedness. Finally, Part III discusses the capitalist character of the Venetian social formation from the end of the fourteenth century until the fall of the republic to Napoleon in 1797. As part of this, the author investigates the significance of forms of governmentality beyond national cohesion and territorialization. Of great interest to economists, historians and both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book gives special emphasis to a critical evaluation of the tensions and controversies between historians, economists and other social scientists with regard to the character and role that money and trade played in societies and economies.

China's Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976-an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong. "Walder convincingly shows that the effect of Maoist inequalities still distorts China today...[It] will be a mind-opening book for many (and is a depressing reminder for others)." -Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator "Andrew Walder's account of Mao's time in power is detailed, sophisticated and powerful...Walder takes on many pieces of conventional wisdom about Mao's China and pulls them apart...What was it that led so much of China's population to follow Mao's orders, in effect to launch a civil war against his own party? There is still much more to understand about the bond between Mao and the wider population. As we try to understand that bond, there will be few better guides than Andrew Walder's book. Sober, measured, meticulous in every deadly detail, it is an essential assessment of one of the world's most important revolutions." -Rana Mitter, Times Literary Supplement

In Hammer, Sickle, and Soil, Jonathan Daly tells the harrowing story of Stalin's transformation of millions of family farms throughout the USSR into 250,000 collective farms during the period from 1929 to 1933. History's biggest experiment in social engineering at the time and the first example of the complete conquest of the bulk of a population by its rulers, the policy was above all intended to bring to Russia Marx's promised bright future of socialism. In the process, however, it caused widespread peasant unrest, massive relocations, and ultimately led to millions dying in the famine of 1932-33. Drawing on scholarly studies and primary-source collections published since the opening of the Soviet archives three decades ago, now, for the first time, this volume offers an accessible and accurate narrative for the general reader. The book is illustrated with propaganda posters from the period that graphically portray the drama and trauma of the revolution in Soviet agriculture under Stalin. In chilling detail the author describes how the havoc and destruction wrought in the countryside sowed the seeds of destruction of the entire Soviet experiment.

Willi Munzenberg was a towering figure in the anti-fascist movement during the first half of the twentieth century. He was acquainted with many of the leading left wing activists and thinkers of his day including Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Karl Radek. He also played a foundational role in several important transnational organisations such as the Socialist Youth International, the largest anti-war movement in opposition to the First World War, the International Workers' Relief organisation, and the League against Colonialism and for National Independence. As a film distributor and promoter, he brought modern Soviet films to western Europe. As a publicist and manager, he built up the most influential left-wing media empire in the Weimar Republic and initiated the pioneering use of photography and photo montage. He was also a long-time member of the Reichstag. He was a pioneer in the use of a variety of media and the way he gained the support and collaboration of progressive politicians, artists and intellectuals ensured that he would become the leading, and most effective, opponent of Hitler's and Goebbels' propaganda machine, as he exposed the venality and brutality of the Nazis. Late in life, his turn against Stalinism almost certainly led to his mysterious death. This is the first detailed biography in English to give coverage to the full range of Munzenberg's activism. There are valuable lessons to be learnt from the book about the best ways to counter fascism which are powerfully relevant to our contemporary political situation. It should be of great interest to activists, scholars and those studying the history of the radical left.

Das Kapital, Karl Marx's seminal work, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that at one time dominated half the earth and for nearly a century kept the world on the brink of war. Even today, more than one billion Chinese citizens live under a regime that proclaims fealty to Marxist ideology. Yet this important tome has been passed over by many readers frustrated by Marx's difficult style and his preoccupation with nineteenth-century events of little relevance to today's reader. Here Serge Levitsky presents a revised version of Kapital, abridged to emphasize the political and philosophical core of Marx's work while trimming away much that is now unimportant. Pointing out Marx's many erroneous predictions about the development of capitalism, Levitsky's introduction nevertheless argues for Kapital's relevance as a prime example of a philosophy of economic determinism that "subordinates the problems of human freedom and human dignity to the issues of who should own the means of production and how wealth should be distributed." Here then is a fresh and highly readable version of a work whose ideas provided inspiration for communist regimes' ideological war against capitalism, a struggle that helped to shape the world today.

With contributions from well-regarded scholars of international economic law, this book sets out the case for an innovative solution to extreme poverty which utilizes international trade and its legal framework to relieve populations of the poorest countries around the world of extreme poverty. "Microtrade" is international trade on a small scale, based primarily on manually produced products using small amounts of capital and low levels of technology available at a local level in lesser developed countries. This book explores the theory, application, and legal framework for microtrade. In the first part of the book the architect of the microtrade theory, Yong-Shik Lee, offers a theoretical framework for microtrade including its basic elements, product demand and operational issues, legal issues, and the global management and facilitation of microtrade. The book then goes on to look at issues including the structure and financing of microtrade, e-commerce, government procurement, and the fair trade movement's possible relationship with microtrade. . The final part of the book considers empirical case studies of microtrade with agricultural products. The book shows how microtrade, if effectively administered on a global scale, can do much to end extreme poverty.