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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Marxism and Urban Culture is the first volume to reconcile social science and humanities perspectives on culture. Covering a range of global cities-Bologna, Buenos Aires, Guatemala City, Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mahalla al-Kubra, Mexico City, Montreal, Osaka, Strasbourg, Vienna-the contributions fuse political and theoretical concerns with analyses of urban cultural practices and historical movements, as well as urban-themed literary and filmic art. Conceived as a response to the persistent rift between disciplinary Marxist approaches to culture, this book prioritizes the urban problematic and builds implicitly and explicitly on work by numerous thinkers: not only Karl Marx but also David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich Engels and Antonio Gramsci, among others. Rather than reanimate reductive views either of Marx or of urban theory, the chapters in Marxism and Urban Culture speak broadly to the interdisciplinary connections that are increasingly the concern of cultural scholars working across and beyond the boundaries of geography, sociology, history, political science, language and literature fields, film studies, and more. A foreword written by Andy Merrifield (the author of Metromarxism) and an introduction by Benjamin Fraser (the author of Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience) situate the book's chapters firmly in interdisciplinary terrain.

This book comes to terms with Marxism and its relationship to workers' self-management. David L. Prychitko offers a reinterpretation of Marx's vision of socialism by arguing that Marx's understanding of the praxis-nature of humankind led him to a utopian goal of decentralized socialism based on the total abolition of market exchange. The full development of workers' self-management of industry was to be accompanied by comprehensive planning of the socially owned means of production. Prychitko takes modern economists to task for paying too little attention to the implications of Marx's praxis philosophy and to the organizational consequences of abolishing private ownership and the market process. This abolition leads inevitably, he argues, to the development of hierarchical structures of state domination and power. This tension between democratic decentralization--workers' self-management--and central economic planning--which tends to destroy meaningful self-management--can be traced back to Marx himself. The failure of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has not dissuaded those who wish to keep Marx alive from pushing workers' self-management as a feasible enterprise in a free market system. Prychitko's volume does more than simply interpret the meaning of Marxism. It analyzes the tension between centralization and decentralization in contemporary theory and practice. The contemporary theory of self-managed socialism, put to much use in Yugoslavia, is critically assessed by Prychitko. After focusing on a case study of American barrel-making cooperatives that managed to compete well with traditional capitalist firms and survive an extraordinary degree of market competition, Prychitko concludes the book by speculating over the feasibility of worker-managed firms in a truly dynamic, rivalrous market setting. Marxism and Workers' Self-Management will be of great interest to scholars of Marx, political economy, social theory, and labor studies.

Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union is the first history of Nikita Khrushchev's venture to cover the Soviet Union in corn, a crop common globally but hitherto rare in his country. Lasting from 1953 until 1964, this crusade was an emblematic component of his efforts to resolve agrarian crises inherited from Joseph Stalin. Using policies and propaganda to pressure farms to expand corn plantings tenfold, Khrushchev expected the resulting bounty to feed not people, but the livestock necessary to produce the meat and dairy products required to make good on his frequent pledges that the Soviet Union was soon to "catch up to and surpass America." This promised to enrich citizens' hitherto monotonous diets and score a victory in the Cold War, which was partly recast as a "peaceful competition" between communism and capitalism. Khrushchev's former comrades derided corn as one of his "harebrained schemes" when ousting him in October 1964. Echoing them, scholars have ridiculed it as an "irrational obsession," blaming the failure on climatic conditions. Corn Crusade brings a more complex and revealing history to light. Borrowing technologies from the United States, Khrushchev expected farms in the Soviet Union to increase productivity because he believed that innovations developed under capitalism promised greater returns under socialism. These technologies generated results in many economic, social, and climatic contexts after World War II but fell short in the Soviet Union. Attempting to make agriculture more productive and ameliorate exploitative labor practices established in the 1930s, Khrushchev achieved only partial reform of rural economic life. Enjoying authority over formal policy, Khrushchev stood atop an undisciplined hierarchy of bureaucracies, local authorities, and farmworkers. Weighing competing incentives, they flouted his authority by doing enough to avoid penalties, but too little to produce even modest harvests of corn, let alone the bumper crops the leader envisioned.

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.

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.

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.

This volume examines how numerous international transfers, circulations, and exchanges shaped the world of socialism during the Cold War. Over the course of half a century, the Soviets shaped politics, values and material culture throughout the vast space of Eurasia, and foreign forces in turn often influenced Soviet policies and society. The result was the distinct and interconnected world of socialism, or the Socialist Second World. Drawing on previously unavailable archival sources and cutting-edge insights from "New Cold War" and transnational histories, the twelve contributors to this volume focus on diverse cultural and social forms of this global socialist exchange: the cults of communist leaders, literature, cinema, television, music, architecture, youth festivals, and cultural diplomacy. The book's contributors seek to understand the forces that enabled and impeded the cultural consolidation of the Socialist Second World. The efforts of those who created this world, and the limitations on what they could do, remain key to understanding both the outcomes of the Cold War and a recent legacy that continues to shape lives, cultures and policies in post-communist states today.

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.

Ideology has been pronounced dead on several occasions in the past. The most recent verdict to this effect has been made in the context of the globalization debate. It proclaims the decline of 'ideological' politics in the fragmented societies of today and especially the irrelevance of established ideological systems and their failure to provide answers to the dilemmas of an increasingly global world.
This popular view is challenged here. On the basis of conceptual and historical analysis applied to a range of major ideological traditions this book argues that no such ideological rupture has in fact occurred. While conceptual shifts are identifiable, changes have occurred within existing ideological configurations and according to their pre-existing logical requirements. Globalization has not destabilized conventional ideologies to an extent that would render them incoherent. On the contrary, they remain meaningful as distinct sets of political beliefs and as such shape the globalization debate.

This book aims to restore Marx's original emancipatory idea of socialism, conceived as an association of free individuals centered on working people's self- emancipation after the demise of capitalism. Marxist scholar Paresh Chattopadhyay argues that, Marx's (and Engels's) ideas have been deliberately warped with misinterpretation not only by those who resent these ideas but more consequentially by those who have come to power under the banner of Marx, calling themselves communists. This book challenges those who have inaccurately revised Marx's ideas justify their own pursuit of political power.

The Soviet Union and the communist ideology on which it was founded were central to a great number of people's lives and pivotal to international relations for decades, most clearly in giving rise to the Cold War. Soviet Communism provided an alternative path forward, set apart from liberal capitalism and also from the various strands of fascism that took root in the early twentieth century, and its legacy can still be felt across the contemporary globe. This innovative analysis of Soviet Communism offers a fresh perspective on the Soviet Union's role in world politics by paying particular attention to the influence of Soviet ideology and the balance of power on different regions of the world, including the West, the Third World, and the East European Soviet bloc. A central theme of the book is the diverse effects nationalism had on the Soviet Union, which the author argues not only played an important and often overlooked part in shaping Bolshevik policy but also contributed to the demise of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the USSR.

To fully grasp Marx's theory of the labor movement, Lapides supplies a deeper insight into the economic analysis underlying it. This book presents Marx's theory of wages and wage labor, previously scattered throughout his writings, in its entirety for the first time. The author places the theory in its historical context, locating the sources of Marx's wage theory, its intellectual antecedents, and the roots of later controversies, but the primary focus of the work is the actual development of Marx's theory in the words in which he expressed it. In order to reveal the true nature and rich texture of Marx's thought, the author has assembled Marx's own formulations, scattered throughout his numerous works and buried beneath mountains of commentary and criticism. The book provides a faithful record of the complete evolutionary progress of Marx's theory.

Fascism, Nazism, and Communism dominated the history of much of the twentieth century, yet comparatively little attention has focused on popular reactions to the regimes that sprang from these ideologies. Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes is the first volume to investigate popular reactions to totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the communist regimes in Poland and East Germany after 1945.
The contributions, written for this volume by internationally acknowledged experts in their fields, move beyond the rather static vision provided by traditional themes of consent and coercion to construct a more nuanced picture of everyday life in the various regimes. The book provides many new insights into the ways totalitarian regimes functioned and the reasons for their decline, encouraging comparisons between the different regimes and stimulating re-evaluation of long-established positions.

The first book to investigate the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno's work for theorizing the age of neoliberal capitalism. Through an engagement with Adorno's critical theory of society, Charles Prusik advances a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of neoliberalism. Offering a corrective to critics who define neoliberalism as an economic or political doctrine, Prusik argues that Adorno's dialectical theory of society can provide the basis for explaining the illusions and forms of domination that structure contemporary life. Prusik explains the importance of Marx's critique of commodity fetishism in shaping Adorno's work and focuses on the related concepts of exchange, ideology, and natural history as powerful tools for grasping the present. Through an engagement with the ideas of neoliberal economic theory, Adorno and Neoliberalism criticizes the naturalization of capitalist institutions, social relations, ideology, and cultural forms. Revealing its origins in the crises of the Fordist period, Prusik develops Adorno's analyses of class, exploitation, monopoly, and reification to situate neoliberal policies as belonging to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society.

Through a close and extensive reading of his works, Dialectics of Human Nature in Marx's Philosophy demonstrates that Marx's explanations are fundamentally dialectical, and that his dialectic method, as well as his philosophical system, is inconceivable without his conception of human nature. An exploration of Marx's thought without any favorable or critical ideological agendas, this book opposes the compartmentalization of Marx's thought into various competing doctrines, such as historical materialism, dialectical materialism, and different forms of economic determinism. Mehmet Tabak highlights Marx's humanism; however, instead of pitting Marx's humanism against materialism, dialectical and historical, this book demonstrates their unity in a novel way.