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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.
"On Anarchism" provides the reasoning behind Noam Chomsky's
fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched
power. In these essays, Chomsky redeems one of the most maligned
ideologies, anarchism, and places it at the foundation of his
political thinking. Chomsky's anarchism is distinctly optimistic
and egalitarian. Moreover, it is a living, evolving tradition that
is situated in a historical lineage; Chomsky's anarchism emphasizes
the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.
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.
The Anatomy of the New Poland examines the nature and scope of political change in the first years of post-communist politics in Poland. Poland is significant not only because events there triggered the downfall of Communism throughout the region, but also because of the bold economic experiments of the new Polish leadership. Covering the period from the Round table negotiations of 1989 to the second free parliamentary elections in September 1993, the book blends an examination of the general features of communist systems and the challenges for democratic development in Eastern Europe with a specific analysis of the situation in Poland. In an authoritative analysis, Frances Millard discusses the shaping of the new constitutional framework and the interplay of political institutions in Poland while highlighting the influences upon the development of political parties and the emergence of a new party system. The dilemmas and achievements of post-communist politics are illustrated with reference to topical issues of decommunization and privatization. Written in a clear, accessible style, this book links developments in Poland to general themes in political science. As an assessment of the factors that undermine, and those that further, the emergence of democratic politics, it will be welcomed by scholars and students of the development and transformation of post-communist societies. |
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