|
Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Marxism & Communism
'A REMARKABLE BOOK... AN AMAZINGLY AUDACIOUS AND COMPLETELY
INNOVATIVE WAY OF WRITING HISTORY... IMMEDIATE AND GRIPPING' -
WILLIAM BOYD In Petrograd a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to
the Urals. A rancorous Russian exile crosses war-torn Europe to
make his triumphal entry into the capital. 'Peace now!' the crowds
cry... German soldiers return from the war to quash a Communist
rising in Berlin. A former field-runner trained by the army to give
rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against
the Jews... A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk from
Switzerland into a celebrity, shaking the foundations of human
understanding with his revolutionary theories of time and space...
In Paris an American reporter in search of himself writes ever
shorter sentences and discovers a new literary style... Lenin and
Hitler, Einstein and Hemingway, Sigmund Freud and Andre Breton,
Emmaline Pankhurst and Mustafa Kemal - these are some of the
protagonists in this dramatic panorama of a world in turmoil.
Emperors, kings and generals depart furtively on midnight trains
and submarines. Women are given the vote. Artistic experiments
flourish. The real becomes surreal. Marching tunes are syncopated
into jazz. Civilisation is loosed from its pre-war moorings. People
search for meaning in the wreckage. Even as the ink is drying on
the armistice that ends the war in the west in 1918, fresh
conflicts and upheavals erupt elsewhere. It takes six years for
Europe to find uneasy peace. Crucible is the collective diary of an
era: filled with all-too-human tales of exuberant dreams, dark
fears, grubby ambitions and the absurdities of chance. Encompassing
both tragedy and humour, it brings immediacy and intimacy to a
moment of deep historical transformation - with consequences which
echo down to today.
This book re-examines and brings to light the libertarian
components of Marx's and Engel's political and economic thought.
Central to the book is a discussion of the notion of freedom in
Marx and Engel's work. In a post-Soviet world, there is a need to
revise Marxism in the search for a libertarian foundation of
political economy. The book argues that the libertarian foundations
were present in Marx's and Engel's work and utilizes contemporary
theory's of freedom to re-interpret and analyse their original
work.
Christian Lotz argues that Immanuel Kant's idea of a mental
schematism, which gives the human mind access to a stable reality,
can be interpreted as a social concept, which, using Karl Marx, the
author identifies as money. Money and its "fluid" form, capital,
constitute sociality in capitalism and make access to social
reality possible. Money, in other words, makes life in capitalism
meaningful and frames all social relations. Following Marx, Lotz
argues that money is the true Universal of modern life and that, as
such, we are increasingly subjected to its control. As money and
capital are closely linked to time, Lotz argues that in capitalism
money also constitutes past and future "social horizons" by turning
both into "monetized" horizons. Everything becomes faster, global,
and more abstract. Our lives, as a consequence, become more mobile,
"fluid," unstable, and precarious. Lotz presents analyses of
credit, debt, and finance as examples of how money determines the
meaning of future and past, imagination, and memory, and that this
results in individuals becoming increasingly integrated into and
dependent upon the capitalist world. This integration and
dependence increases with the event of electronics industries and
brain-science industries that channel all human desires towards
profits, growth, and money. In this way, the book offers a critical
extension of Theodor Adorno's analysis of exchange and the culture
industry as the basis of modern societies. Lotz
argues-paradoxically with and against Adorno-that we should return
to the basic insights of Marx's philosophy, given that the
principle of exchange is only possible on the basis of more
fundamental social and economic categories, such as money.
Drawing on recently declassified Soviet archival sources, this book
sheds new light on how the division of Europe came about in the
aftermath of World War II. The book contravenes the notion that a
neutral zone of states, including Germany, could have been set up
between East and West. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was
determined to preserve control over its own sphere of German
territory. By tracing Stalin's attitude toward neutrality in
international politics, the book provides important insights into
the origins of the Cold War.
Major political and economic shifts have marked the turn into the
21st century: the collapse of the Soviet bloc; the rise to
prominence of ecological issues; social changes generated by
globalization; and, most recently, one of the worst world financial
crises ever. These developments compel us to examine the capitalist
system with a critical eye and to reflect on the need for
alternatives. The 150th anniversary of the birth of the
International Workingmen's Association (IWA) (1864-2014) offers an
important opportunity to compare present mainstream paradigms and
the political platform developed by the IWA in order to better
address our contemporary crisis?] and theorize solutions. This
sourcebook introduces and contextualizes the most valuable notes
and proceedings from these legendary meetings, and includes letters
and commentary surrounding the events themselves, many appearing
for the first time in English. The carefully compiled materials
reach beyond Marx's writings through the history of the IWA to
include the cooperative movement, trade union reformism,
collectivism, and anarchism. In his introductions to these texts,
acclaimed scholar Marcello Musto provides accessible critical
evaluations and explanations. The text also highlights how certain
themes--self-emancipation of the working class versus communist
vanguardism and the taking of political power to achieve social
ends versus oppressive Soviet-style state control--find sharp
discontinuity between Marx's thought as a political leader of the
IWA and the tradition of Soviet Marxism. Carefully selected and
painstakingly translated, this volume is an invaluable resource for
all those interested in the foundations of modern political and
labor history.
This book explores the development of state welfare in Taiwan,
focusing on the interconnection between capitalist development and
state welfare from 1895 to 1990, using an integrated Marxist
perspective to which the capitalist world system, state structure,
ideology, and social structure are considered simultaneously. It
argues that neither citizenship nor welfare needs were the concern
of Taiwanese social policies. A decline in legitimacy and risen
social movements forced the state to expand welfare, namely the
National Health Insurance, in the 1980s.
In Michael Romanov: Brother of the Last Tsar, translator Helen Azar
and Romanov historian Nicholas B. A. Nicholson present for the
first time in English the annotated 1916-1918 diaries and letters
of Russia's Grand Duke Michael, from the murder of the Siberian
mystic Grigorii Rasputin through the Revolution of 1917, which
dethroned the Romanov dynasty after Michael briefly found himself
named Emperor when his brother Nicholas II abdicated. Michael's
diaries provide rare insight into the fall of the Empire, the rise
and fall of the Provisional Government and brief Russian republic,
and the terrifying days of the February and October Revolutions
after which Michael found himself a prisoner who would meet his end
in the Siberian city of Perm. Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of
Russia (1878-1918) was born the youngest son of Tsar Alexander III,
but with the death of his brother Grand Duke George in 1899,
Michael was thrust into the spotlight and the role of
"Heir-Tsesarevich" to Emperor Nicholas II, then the father of three
girls. Even after the birth of an heir in 1904, Michael found
himself pushed closer to the throne with each of the boy's bouts of
hemophilia. By 1916 during World War I, Nicholas and Alexandra
found themselves deeply unpopular not only in political circles but
also with other members of the House of Romanov, who felt that the
parlous times required drastic change. Michael found himself at the
center of these events. Azar's translation is uniquely faithful to
the original text and gives readers the feeling of the immediacy
and haste in Michael's original observations of these tumultuous
times. Nicholson's annotations provide biographical and historical
background, while quoting dozens of other rare primary sources.
The first major study on the making of new cultures, movements and
public celebrations of transnational solidarity in Weimar Germany.
The book shows how solidarity was used to empower the oppressed in
their liberation and resistance movements and how solidarity
networks transferred visions and ideas of an alternative global
community.
Wilf Page was a champion of agricultural workers, a promoter of
justice in the countryside, a rural communist councillor during the
difficult cold war years and a lifelong community activist. He is
best known for his role in the National Union of Agricultural
Workers, and in the European Federation of Agricultural Unions, but
he was also a prominent local politician in Norfolk, and was a
communist councillor for Edgefield for twenty-eight years. On his
death, an obituary in "The Times" accurately reported that Wilf's
communism had not been of the 'big Russian bear' variety, but had
been about 'the community owning the wealth'. He was a man whose
tireless battle for justice lasted until the last day of his life.
Here, in this 1850 classic, a powerful refutation of Karl Marx's
Communist Manifesto, published two years earlier, Bastiat
discusses: what is law?, why socialism constitutes legal plunder,
the proper function of the law, the law and morality, "the vicious
circle of socialism," and the basis for stable government. French
political libertarian and economist CLAUDE FREDERIC BASTIAT
(1801-1850) was one of the most eloquent champions of the concept
that property rights and individual freedoms flowed from natural
law.
This book not only explicates Stalin's thoughts, but thinks with
and especially through Stalin. It argues that Stalin often thought
at the intersections between theology and Marxist political
philosophy - especially regarding key issues of socialism in power.
Careful and sustained attention to Stalin's written texts is the
primary approach used. The result is a series of arresting efforts
to develop the Marxist tradition in unexpected ways. Starting from
a sympathetic attitude toward socialism in power, this book
provides us with an extremely insightful interpretation of Stalin's
philosophy of socialism. It is not only a successful academic
effort to re-articulate Stalin's philosophy, but also a creative
effort to understand socialism in power in the context of both the
former Soviet Union and contemporary China. ------- Zhang Shuangli,
Professor of Marxist philosophy, Fudan University Boer's book, far
from both "veneration" and "demonization" of Stalin, throws new
light on the classic themes of Marxism and the Communist Movement:
language, nation, state, and the stages of constructing
post-capitalist society. It is an original book that also pays
great attention to the People's Republic of China, arising from the
reforms of Deng Xiaoping, and which is valuable to those who,
beyond the twentieth century, want to understand the time and the
world in which we live. -------Domenico Losurdo, University of
Urbino, Italy, author of Stalin: The History and Critique of a
Black Legend.
Yugoslavia and Political Assassinations is the first book in
English to analyse how and why the Yugoslav State Security Service
carried out multiple targeted assassinations, over the country's
forty-six years of existence, under the pretext of protecting the
Yugoslav communist party-state. Offering a detailed history of the
programme, from the inception of the State Security Service to the
recent trials of individuals involved, it draws on Christian Axboe
Nielsen's unique wealth of experience and research as an academic
and as an expert witness in numerous criminal trials. The result is
a ground-breaking contribution to the history of targeted
assassinations, communist history, state security services and
related criminal trials.
This volume brings together works written by international
theorists since the fall of the Berlin Wall, showing how today's
crisis-ridden global capitalism is making Marxist theory more
relevant and necessary than ever. This collection of key texts by
prominent and lesser-known thinkers from Latin America, Asia,
Africa, America, and Europe showcases an area of scholarly analysis
whose impact on academic and popular discourses as well as
political action will only grow in the coming years. It reflects
today's sense of planetary eco-emergency and a heightened interest
in political economy that follows discontentment with the growing
inequalities in the West and the unequal nature of development in
the "global South." The work is organized thematically, with
sections covering the present historical conjuncture, the
contemporary shapes of the social, philosophical concepts, theories
of culture, and the status of the political today. This new
formulation of the unity and nature of contemporary Marxist theory
will be an invaluable resource to any humanities and social science
student learning about social and political thought and theory.
Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Marx was regarded as a
thinker doomed to oblivion about whom everything had already been
said and written. However, the international economic crisis of
2008 favoured a return to his analysis of capitalism, and recently
published volumes of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA(2)) have
provided researchers with new texts that underline the gulf between
Marx's critical theory and the dogmatism of many twentieth-century
Marxisms. This work reconstructs with great textual and historical
rigour, but in a form accessible to those encountering Marx for the
first time, a number of little noted, or often misunderstood,
stages in his intellectual biography. The book is divided into
three parts. The first - 'Intellectual Influences and Early
Writings' - investigates the formation of the young Marx and the
composition of his Parisian manuscripts of 1844. The second - 'The
Critique of Political Economy' - focuses on the genesis of Marx's
magnum opus, beginning with his studies of political economy in the
early 1850s and following his labours through to all the
preparatory manuscripts for Capital. The third - 'Political
Militancy' - presents an insightful history of the International
Working Men's Association and of the role that Marx played in that
organization. The volume offers a close and innovative examination
of Marx's ideas on post-Hegelian philosophy, alienated labour, the
materialist conception of history, research methods, the theory of
surplus-value, working-class self-emancipation, political
organization and revolutionary theory. From this emerges "another
Marx", a thinker very different from the one depicted by so many of
his critics and ostensible disciples.
Marx is out of fashion in intellectual circles on the whole but he
is increasingly seen as an astute and relevant guide to the spread
of a new raw capitalism world wide. This book is no exercise in a
scholastic Marxology but a reappraisal of Marx and the socialist
experience in the light of subsequent political and intellectual
developments.
There are many ways of presenting the history of the left. In this
concise and cogent survey, Darrow Schecter avoids trivializing
struggles of the last 150 years, focusing on Marx's theories and
the diverse struggles for human emancipation that have
characterized European and world history since the French
Revolution. Each chapter in the book builds on the previous one,
analysing the emergence and development of a specifically left wing
understanding of the relation between knowledge, left politics, and
emancipation. Schecter explores the crucial question of how to
institutionalize the relation between humanity and nature in a free
society of fully humanized individuals. Including discussions of
Marxism, the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, Anarchism,
Surrealism, and Global Anti-Capitalism, "The History of the Left
from Marx to the Present" is a valuable tool for understanding the
theories that have helped shape our present-day political world.
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.
|
You may like...
Becoming
Michelle Obama
Hardcover
(6)
R776
R668
Discovery Miles 6 680
|