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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Marxism & Communism
Introducing the most famous work of the nineteenth-century radical
thinkers Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, this comprehensive
reader's guide to the Communist Manifesto explores the key themes,
ideas and issues of a revolutionary pamphlet.Beginning with a
discussion of the intellectual, political and social context of the
Manifesto, the "Reader's Guide" clearly illustrates the themes by
relating points in the work to ideas and theories made in other
works written by Marx and Engels. This is followed by a closer
examination and analysis of the text that: - covers the
introductory statement and each of the chapters in detail-
discusses the style, structure and intended audience of the
Manifesto including its later prefaces- explores the ways in which
the Manifesto was received both during the lives of Marx and Engels
and in the twentieth century, for example: the Soviet Union's
version of Marxism, China's re-interpretations of the ideas, and
the innovative political philosophy found in Western analytical
Marxism.As well as presenting relevant biographical points about
Marx and Engels and giving concise information on prominent people
mentioned in the text, this valuable study resource features
discussion questions and annotated guides to further reading. For
students studying political philosophy and political theories,
"Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto: A Reader's Guide" provides a
better understanding of the ideas, theories and contexts discussed
in the most famous work of the writers who founded the ideology of
Marxism.
The collected papers of Costas Lapavitsas are a pathway to Marxist
monetary theory, a field that continues to attract strong interest.
The papers range far and wide, including markets and money, finance
and the enterprise, power and money, the financialisation of
capitalism, finance and profit, even money as art. Despite its
breadth, the collection remains highly coherent. Money and finance
are pre-eminent, even dominant, features of contemporary
capitalism. Lapavitsas has been one of the first political
economists to notice their ascendancy and to devote his research to
it. He offers a resolutely Marxist perspective on contemporary
capitalism while remaining conversant with the history of political
economy, sensitive to mainstream economic theory, and fully aware
of the empirical reality of financialisation.
Marxism in a Lost Century retells the history of the radical left
during the twentieth century through the words and deeds of Paul
Mattick. An adolescent during the German revolutions that followed
World War I, he was also a recent emigre to the United States
during the 1930s Great Depression, when the unemployed groups in
which he participated were among the most dynamic manifestations of
social unrest. Three biographical themes receive special attention
-- the self-taught nature of left-wing activity, Mattick's
experiences with publishing, and the nexus of men, politics, and
friendship. Mattick found a wide audience during the 1960s because
of his emphasis on the economy's dysfunctional aspects and his
advocacy of workplace councils-a popularity mirrored in the
cyclical nature of the global economy.
This groundbreaking book offers a comprehensive documentary history
of children whose parents were identified as enemies of the Soviet
regime from its inception through Joseph Stalin's death. When
parents were arrested, executed, or sent to the Gulag, their
children also suffered. Millions of children, labeled "socially
dangerous," lost parents, homes, and siblings. Co-edited by Cathy
A. Frierson, a senior American scholar, and Semyon S. Vilensky,
Gulag survivor and compiler of the Russian documents, the book
offers documentary and personal perspectives. The editors present
top-secret documents in translation from the Russian state
archives, memoirs, and interviews with child survivors. The
editors' narrative reveals how such prolonged child victimization
could occur, who knew about it, and who tried to intervene on the
children's behalf. The editors show how the emotions from childhood
trauma persist into the twenty-first century, passing from victims
to their children and grandchildren. Interviews with child
survivors also display their resilient ability to fashion
productive lives despite family destruction and stigma.
In 1980 Polish workers astonished the world by demanding and
winning an independent union with the right to strike, called
Solidarity--the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. Jack M.
Bloom's Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution explains
how it happened, from the imposition to Communism to its end, based
on 150 interviews of Solidarity leaders, activists, supporters and
opponents. Bloom presents the perspectives and experiences of these
participants. He shows how an opposition was built, the battle
between Solidarity and the ruling party, the conflicts that emerged
within each side during this tense period, how Solidarity survived
the imposition of martial law and how the opposition forced the
government to negotiate itself out of power.
Born after 1940 and finishing higher education between 1965 and
1982, a generation of Russia's best, brightest, and most privileged
came of age in the Brezhnev era. Using recently declassified
archival material to uncover bother personal and professional
beliefs, this study explores the formative experiences of this
group, who now hold key positions in all parts of the government
and society. Comparison of these official documents with letters,
petitions, and complaints published in the Soviet press provides
new insight into the dynamic interaction between the Brezhnev
regime and Soviet times.
Confined by the Brezhnev regime's parameters and stability,
young Soviet specialists developed an ethos that focused personally
upon humanism and individualism, and professionally upon dignity
and autonomy. Censored and manipulated, they came to hold a complex
system of beliefs, frustrations, and expectations that stood in
stark contrast to many of the ideals of the Soviet Union. Ruffley
analyzes the ethos of this generation via the prism of
domination-resistance studies to offer unique insight into a
generation largely ignored by conventional historical inquiry.
The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917 is the most comprehensive
book on the epic uprising that toppled the tsarist monarchy and
ushered in the next stage of the Russian Revolution. Hasegawa
presents in detail the intense drama of the nine days of the
revolution, including the workers' strike, soldiers' revolt, the
scrambling of revolutionary party activists to control the
revolution, and the liberals' conspiracy to force Tsar Nicholas II
to abdicate. Based on his previous work, published in 1981, the
author has revised, enlarged, and reinterpreted the complexity of
the February Revolution, resulting in a major and timely
reassessment on the occasion of its centennial. See inside the
book.
Party-States and their Legacies in Post-Communist Transformation is
a unique investigation into the construction, operation,
self-destruction and transition of Hungarian politics from the
1960s to the mid- 1990s. It presents a rich picture which draws
upon an extraordinary body of data and provides not just simply a
retrospective theoretical analysis of the system, but details of
everyday life within the state apparatus. This remarkable book
includes extensive interviews with over four hundred key
individuals in the party, state and the economy from 1975 onwards.
In addition, Dr Csanadi draws upon other unique empirical research
including internal memos and secret state documents as well as a
full range of studies by East and West European scholars to reveal
the realities of the system as observed by those closest to it. She
not only considers the workings of the system during the communist
era, but also analyses the legacy it continues to exert on the
period of the transformation. As such the book contributes to our
understanding of the Hungarian transformation and sheds new light
on how party states worked throughout Eastern and Central Europe
during the communist era and what the consequences of their
self-similar features on the transformation are. In addition the
book offers comparisons with other formerly centrally planned
systems to reveal the structural differences in the distribution of
power in party states and the very different legacies they leave
for post-communist transformation. This comprehensive book will be
welcomed by researchers, academics and postgraduates interested in
the politics, economics, history and political science of Hungary
and other East and Central European countries in transition.
This innovative book offers a critical history of the development
of Soviet ideology, discussing its centrality to Soviet politics
and the destructive effect that it had on the Gorbachev
reforms.Neil Robinson analyses the nature and historical evolution
of Soviet ideology between 1917 and 1985 to demonstrate the
structural importance of Soviet ideological discourse and the
uncertain place that it allocated to the communist party in the
Soviet political system. On the basis of this analysis, Dr Robinson
provides a fresh interpretation of Gorbachev's political reforms.
He describes the ideological dynamic that underwrote the
development of perestroika, how Gorbachev's ideas on
democratization sent contradictory messages to the communist party,
and how this stimulated opposition to perestroika from party cadres
and Soviet society. Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System
establishes the ideological roots of the crisis of Soviet power
under Gorbachev and provides a convincing account of the Soviet
system's inability to reform itself.
In 1919 American Communist Party member Benjamin Gitlow was
arrested for distributing a "Left Wing Manifesto," a publication
inspired by the Russian Revolution. He was charged with violating
New York's Criminal Anarchy Law of 1902, which outlawed the
advocacy of any doctrine advocating to the violent overthrow of
government. Gitlow argued that the law violated his right to free
speech but was still convicted. He appealed and five years later
the Supreme Court upheld his sentence by a vote of 7-2.
Throughout the legal proceedings, much attention was devoted to
the "bad tendency" doctrine-the idea that speakers and writers were
responsible for the probable effects of their words-which the
Supreme Court explicitly endorsed in its decision. According to
Justice Edward T. Sanford, "A state may punish utterances
endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening
its overthrow by unlawful means."
More important was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' dissent, in
which he argued that the mere expression of ideas, separated from
action, could not be punished under the "clear and present danger"
doctrine. As Holmes put it, "Every idea is an incitement"--and the
expression of an idea, no matter how disagreeable, was protected by
the First Amendment. While the majority disagreed, it also raised
and endorsed the idea that the Bill of Rights could be violated by
neither the federal government nor individual states--an idea known
as "incorporation" that was addressed for the first time in this
case.
In recreating Gitlow, Marc Lendler opens up the world of
American radicalism and brings back into focus a number of key
figures in American law: defense attorney Clarence Darrow; New York
Court of Appeals justices Roscoe Pound and Benjamin Cardozo; Walter
Pollak of the fledgling ACLU; and dissenting justices Oliver
Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Lendler also traces the origins
of the incorporation doctrine and the ebb and flow of Gitlow as a
precedent through the end of the Cold War.
In a time when Islamic radicalism raises many of the same
questions as domestic Communism did, Lendler's cogent explication
of this landmark case helps students and Court-watchers alike
better understand "clear and present danger" tests, ongoing debates
over incitement, and the importance of the Holmes-Brandeis dissent
in our jurisprudence.
After the Second World War, two contrasting political movements
became increasingly active in Italy - the communist and feminist
movements. In this book, Walter Baroni uses autobiographical
life-writing from both movements key protagonists to shed new light
on the history of these movements and more broadly the similarities
and differences between political activists in post-war Italy.
Perestroika's fate was determined by the hostile reaction of the
working class. Strikes, protest and the fear of working class
action had a devastating impact, yet relatively little is known
about the workers' movement during this period. This book surveys
the development of the new workers' movement in Russia under
perestroika to understand how it connected with the workers at shop
floor level and the national and local political authorities to
whom it addressed its demands, and whose development it sought to
influence. Drawing on a programme of collaborative research on
Russian industrial relations from 1987 to 1992, the authors use a
series of case studies to explain the gulf between the thousands of
tiny independent groups, often based in a single enterprise or even
a single shop and regional and national organizations without a
grassroots base. Extensive interviews with participants, tape and
video recordings as well as substantial documentary material are
used in case studies of the 1989 miners' strike in Kuzbass, the
Kuzbass Regional Council of Workers' committees, the Independent
Miner's Union in Kuzbass, Sotsprof in Moscow and the Federation of
Air Traffic Controllers' Unions.
Value without Fetish presents the first in-depth English-language
study of the influential Japanese economist Uno Kozo's (1897-1977)
theory of 'pure capitalism' in the light of the method and object
of Marx's Critique of Political Economy. A close analysis of the
theories of value, production and reproduction, and crisis in Uno's
central texts from the 1930s to the 1970s reveals his departure
from Marx's central insights about the fetish character of the
capitalist mode of production - a departure that Lange shows can be
traced back to the failed epistemology of value developed in Uno's
earliest writings. By disavowing the complex relation between value
and fetish that structures Marx's critique, Uno adopts the
paradigms of neoclassical theories to present an apology rather
than a critique of capitalism.
Mikhail Lifshitz is a major forgotten figure in the tradition of
Marxist philosophy and art history. A significant influence on
Lukacs, and the dedicatee of his The Young Hegel, as well as an
unsurpassed scholar of Marx and Engels's writings on art and a
lifelong controversialist, Lifshitz's work dealt with topics as
various as the philosophy of Marx and the pop aesthetics of Andy
Warhol. The Crisis of Ugliness (originally published in Russian by
Iskusstvo, 1968), published here in English for the first time, and
with a detailed introduction by its translator David Riff, is a
compact broadside against modernism in the visual arts that
nevertheless resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist
aesthetics. Its reentry into English debates on the history of
Soviet aesthetics promises to re-orient our sense of the basic
coordinates of a Marxist art theory.
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