'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.