The first collection of its kind, Transgender Marxism is a provocative and groundbreaking union of transgender studies and Marxist theory. Exploring trans lives and movements, the authors delve into the experience of surviving as transgender under capitalism. They explore the pressures, oppression and state persecution faced by trans people living in capitalist societies, their tenuous positions in the workplace and the home, and give a powerful response to right-wing scaremongering against 'gender ideology'. Reflecting on the relations between gender and labour, these essays reveal the structure of antagonisms faced by gender non-conforming people within society. Looking at the history of transgender movements, Marxist interventions into developmental theory, psychoanalysis and workplace ethnography, the authors conclude that for trans liberation, capitalism must be abolished.

China's Rise to Power: Conceptions of State Governance examines how a twenty-first century contradiction-the country's combination of authoritarian rule and a market-oriented economy in state-led capitalism-has proven simultaneously appealing and a source of domestic dissatisfaction. Balancing policy analysis with detailed investigation of escalating popular unrest, this essay collection explores the discontent that stems from the Communist leadership's obsession with growth and control, and anticipates new space for alternative governance. As the sixth-generation leaders come of age at this critical juncture, the way out of internal crises will not necessarily be the way of the Chinese Communist Party..

Since 1949, Chinese capitalists have experienced some dramatic shifts in their political and economic life. Keming Yang examines what such changes tell us about China's current political situation and future political development, making use of both historical and current interdisciplinary evidence.

Providing an innovative conceptualization to extremist political movements founded upon "world-historic" populations and vanguard party organizations, Vanguardism sets out a new path in investigating the intellectual and historical influences that created extremist politics, the totalitarian movements and regimes of the twentieth century, and a framework for interpreting extremism in the present. Expanding its view across the turbulent intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, Philip W. Gray illustrates how these ideas shaped the shared ideational and organizational structures that would develop into Leninism, Fascism, and Nazism in the early twentieth century. Moving beyond the Second World War, the book explicates how vanguardism did not vanish with the war's conclusion, but was modified throughout the period of national liberation movements and Western extremist groups over the ensuing decades. Concluding in the present with an eye to the future, Gray presents a framework for comprehending the extremist movement of today, and how organizational shifts can give us clues to the forms of totalitarian politics of tomorrow. Original and provocative, Vanguardism will become essential reading for everyone looking to understand totalitarianism and extremist politics of our time.

This book provides, in one volume, primary sources by Marx and critical commentary which relates Marxism to contemporary social and political topics. It includes six brief works by Marx and ten articles by scholars, sympathetic to, but critical of, Marxism. For example, the author includes the classic essay by Heidi Hartmann which criticizes Marxism for misunderstanding gender oppression, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism." No previous anthology of Marx has combined both brief works by Marx and multiple critical essays elaborating on his themes or engaging the shortcomings of his arguments.

This book provides, in one volume, primary sources by Marx and critical commentary which relates Marxism to contemporary social and political topics. It includes six brief works by Marx and ten articles by scholars, sympathetic to, but critical of, Marxism. For example, the author includes the classic essay by Heidi Hartmann which criticizes Marxism for misunderstanding gender oppression, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism." No previous anthology of Marx has combined both brief works by Marx and multiple critical essays elaborating on his themes or engaging the shortcomings of his arguments.

This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression. In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation. Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.

In this wide-ranging and insightful work, Soma Marik defends the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, arguing against many of its detractors that the early communist regime was centrally concerned with both the liberation of women and the expansion of democracy. Soma Marik teaches history at RKSM Vivekananda Vidyabhavan, Kolkata, and is a former visiting professor, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University. She is involved as an activist in the women's movement, through the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Kolkata) and the network Das Theke Das Hajar, as well as with general democratic and anticommunal work. She has published extensively on class and gender relations in socialist and communist history.

Communism as a political movement attained global importance after the Bolsheviks toppled the Russian Czar in 1917. After that time the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, especially the influential "Communist Manifesto (1848)", enjoyed an international audience. The world was to learn a new political vocabulary peppered with 'socialism', 'capitalism', 'the working class', 'the bourgeoisie', 'labor theory of value', 'alienation', 'economic determinism', 'dialectical materialism', and 'historical materialism'. Marx's economic analysis of history has been a powerful legacy, the effects of which continue to be felt world-wide. Serving as the foundation for Marx's indictment of capitalism is his extraordinary work titled "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts", written in 1844 but published nearly a century later. Here Marx offers his theory of human nature and an analysis of emerging capitalism's degenerative impact on man's sense of self and his creative potential. What is man's true nature? How did capitalism gain such a foothold on Western society? What is alienation and how does it threaten to undermine the proletariat? These and other vital questions are addressed as the youthful Marx sets forth his first detailed assessment of the human condition.

An exploration of the contemporary re-conception of freedom after the critique of objective truths and ideas of an unchanging human nature, in which modern self-determination was grounded. This book focuses on the radical theorist Cornelius Castoriadis and the new paradigm of 'agonistic autonomy' is contrasted with Marxian and liberal approaches.

This book analyses racism in communist and post-communist contexts, examining the 'Red' promise of an end to racism and the racial logics at work in the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, Cuba and China, placing these in the context of global racialisation.

The collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union requires a major rethink of many sociological theories of social integration and change.Drawing on a wide range of social theory, Social Theory and the Crisis of State Socialism offers a comparative analysis of the democratic revolutions, combining historical understanding with accounts of the crisis of communism in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Larry Ray identifies contradictions within Soviet societies, developing a theory of crisis management that accounts both for the survival of the system over several decades and for its eventual failure. The social structure of Soviet systems is analysed in relation to debates in sociological theory over legitimation, social integration, social movements and modernity. Larry Ray examines new forms of class, political and national identity in post-socialist Europe, demonstrating how political conflicts are related to economic transformation, especially the emergence of 'nomenklatura capitalism', and asks whether sufficient conditions exist for the stabilization of democratic citizenship. Social Theory and the Crisis of State Socialism will be welcomed for comparatively analysing the communist and post-communist experiences of a number of East European countries in the light of a critical examination of the broad issues of social theory and modernity.

This comprehensive volume advances heterodox reconstructions of agrarian Marxism on the occasion of Marx's 200th birth anniversary. While Marxists have long criticized 'populists' for ignoring capitalism and class, populists have charged Marxists with historical determinism. This ongoing debate has now reached something of an impasse, in part because new empirical work addressing the complex contemporary patterns and conjunctures of global agrarian capitalism offers exciting new horizons, along with new and generative theoretical reconstructions of Marxism itself. This book helps to point the way beyond this impasse, and illustrates that agrarian Marxism remains a dynamic theoretical program that offers powerful insights into agrarian change and politics in the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Based on original Stasi and Communist Party archival sources, this text uncovers why East Germany was for two decades running one of the most successful nations in the Summer and Winter Olympics, and explores how the central elite sports system was beset by internal tensions and disputes.

Taking its cue from the renewed interest in theology among Marxist and politically radical philosophers or thinkers, this study inquires into the reasons for this interest in theology focusing on the British literary theorist Terry Eagleton and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, as two contemporary prominent Marxist thinkers.

The first comprehensive political history of the communist party Vanguard of the Revolution is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. In this book, A. James McAdams argues that the rise and fall of communism can be understood only by taking into account the origins and evolution of this compelling idea. He shows how the leaders of parties in countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and North Korea adapted the original ideas of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to profoundly different social and cultural settings. Taking readers from the drafting of The Communist Manifesto in the 1840s to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, McAdams describes the decisive role played by individual rulers in the success of their respective parties--men like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro. He demonstrates how these personalities drew on vying conceptions of the party's functions to mesmerize their followers, mobilize their populations, and transform their societies. He also shows how many of these figures abused these ideas to justify incomprehensible acts of inhumanity. McAdams explains why communist parties lasted as long as they did, and why they either disappeared or ceased to be meaningful institutions by the close of the twentieth century. The first comprehensive political history of the communist party, Vanguard of the Revolution is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand world communism and the captivating idea that gave it life.

In this edited volume, leading scholars from the United States and China analyze the challenges and opportunities for China in the twenty-first century, each emphasizing particular dimensions of politics, economics, political culture, and foreign policy. Issues examined include social harmony and statecraft, markets and political reforms, media and political culture, and legality in foreign trade.

In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned, never-completed masterwork on The State and Revolution . . . This powerfully argued book offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on class conflict, the lessons of earlier revolutions, the dismantling of the bourgeois state and the replacement of capitalism by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Immediately established as a standard text, it was selectively cited by leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev in support of programmes which differed in important ways. As both historical document and political statement, its importance can hardly be exaggerated.

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Offering an in-depth interpretation of Sigmund Freud's 'collective' or 'social' works, Leon Rozitchner insists that the Left should consider the ways in which capitalism inscribes its power in the subject as the site for the verification of history. Thus, after a brief commentary on Freud's New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the present book provides the reader with a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Civilisation and Its Discontents and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Freud's views, according to Rozitchner's original reading, offer a striking contribution to a materialist theory and history of subjectivity. This book was first published in Spanish as Freud y los limites del individualismo burgues by Siglo XXI Editores, 1972.

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.

The Fight for China's Future throws light on the quintessence of 21st century Chinese politics through the prism of the struggle between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and China's vibrant intelligentsia and civil society. This book examines Xi Jinping's 24-hour, multi-dimensional, AI-enabled police-state apparatus and explores the CCP's policy towards civil society. Through exclusive interviews with activists from different provinces, it analyzes the experiences and aspirations of key stakeholders in Chinese society, especially intellectuals, human rights attorneys and Christian worshippers. Providing an examination of recent global trends in relation to CCP policies, including China's relationship with the U.S., it also goes on to explore the possible trajectories of future change. Featuring an assessment of Xi Jinping's leadership style and the opportunities this has given certain groups to promote the rule of law, media freedom and other global norms, this book will be invaluable to students of Chinese politics, society and culture.

The Chinese Communist Party, as the political leader of the world's largest country and second largest economy, plays an undeniably important role in global politics. Founded in a boarding school in Shanghai in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party is one of the oldest ruling parties in the world since its takeover of mainland China in 1949 under the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong. Since its inception, the party has survived a civil war with the Kuomintang (1946-1949); the political, cultural, and humanitarian catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), where upwards of 30 million Chinese civilians died; and the death of the Chinese Communist Party's dominant leader, Mao Zedong, in 1976. In recent years, intellectuals and party members have been given increasing leeway to express their opinions, and Lawrence R. Sullivan takes advantage of this new research to provide a comprehensive history of one of the world's most fascinating political movements. The Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Communist Party contains a chronology, an introductory essay, an appendix, an extensive bibliography, and more than 400 cross-reference dictionary entries on key people, places, and institutions. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Chinese Communist Party.

Can Marxism emerge from the long shadow cast by Stalinism, and challenge capitalism? There is undoubtedly a growing interest in Marxism and socialism. Opinion polls show a majority that regard socialism as a real option. It is against this reality, and as a contribution to growing debates, that this book has been written. Marxism, as an ideological force and instituted to lead the charge against capitalism, has been poorly served in the past century. Many of its core messages have been obscured. William Briggs gives a rousing defence of Marxism, calling for a return of the working class to the centre of potential struggle. Briggs seeks to heal the damage done to Marxism, in the name of Marxism, over generations past.