Tracing the history of left-wing, subversive and oppositional forces in the People's Republic of China over the last seventy years, Ralf Ruckus pulls back the curtain on Chinese politics. He looks at the labour strikes in the 1950s, the rebel uprising during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the democracy movements in the 1970s and 1980s, the struggles of urban and migrant workers since the 1990s and 2000s, and women's forms of resistance until today. Each of these struggles inspired left-wing groups and movements that criticised or challenged the regime of the Chinese Communist Party, from Mao Zedong's rule to the regime under Xi Jinping. Is the country still socialist today, the Chinese Communist Party a left-wing organisation, and the leadership indeed Marxist? The book sorts out the confusion by presenting the fascinating history of social movements and left politics in the People's Republic up to the present day.

No Free Speech for Fascists explores the choice of anti-fascist protesters to demand that the opportunities for fascists to speak in public places are rescinded, as a question of history, law, and politics. It explains how the demand to no platform fascists emerged in 1970s Britain, as a limited exception to a left-wing tradition of support for free speech. The book shows how no platform was intended to be applied narrowly, only to a right-wing politics that threatened everyone else. It contrasts the rival idea of opposition to hate speech that also emerged at the same time and is now embodied in European and British anti-discrimination laws. Both no platform and hate speech reject the American First Amendment tradition of free speech, but the ways in which they reject it are different. Behind no platform is not merely a limited range of political targets but a much greater scepticism about the role of the state. The book argues for an idea of no platform which takes on the electronic channels on which so much speech now takes place. It shows where a fascist element can be recognised within the much wider category of far-right speech. This book will be of interest to activists and to those studying and researching political history, law, free speech, the far right, and anti-fascism. It sets out a philosophy of anti-fascism for a social media age.

Communist Parties in the Middle East: 100 Years of History One hundred years since the Russian Revolution, Communist parties have undergone great changes, in an evolution that has affected the entire Left and the social movements. Given that the impact of Communist parties and their evolution in the Middle East is a topic that has not been widely researched, Communist parties in the Middle East. 100 years of history aims to cover a century in the lives of these parties, from the moment the Communist ideology first reached the region in the early 20th century (brought by activists from minority groups) and the creation of the first parties and trades unions after the 1917 revolution, right up to the upheaval caused by the dissolution of the USSR and, more recently, the Arab Spring. The book has been designed to offer a unique, updated and comprehensive study of Communist parties in the Middle East, based on both a theoretical framework of analysis and substantial empirical research and archive documentation. Several issues are examined in this work. When the Russian Revolution took place, the Middle Eastern region as a whole was under colonial control. This meant taking decisions related to the relationship between the class struggle and the national struggle. The composition of the communist parties in the Middle East is also analysed as is their role as the vanguard -understood in the broad sense of the word- in relation to the objectives of liberation, emancipation, revolution and system change or reform, and their connection to mass or popular movements. Furthermore, the volume looks back at the dependency or autonomy of communist parties during the Cold War and the tensions that this generated in them, as well as the search for individual constructions of communism that took into account cultural characteristics and the local context of the struggle. In this respect, one of the recurring themes in the work is the relationship between communist activism and the sectors that mobilized in the name of nationalism or political Islam. Finally, the chapters trace the history of the parties, including -for the first time in the literature- the post-Cold War period and continuing to the current situation, in which communist parties occupy a residual position in the political field, sharing space with other small groups from the real Left, new programmes adapted to neoliberal advancement in the region and the new mobilizations symbolized by the uprisings of 2010-2011. The first section of the book presents the evolution of the CPs in Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Israel, Egypt, South Yemen, Sudan, Algeria and Morocco. The second section explores some cross-cutting issues that have affected relations between the communist parties and other political sectors: political Islam and the New Left. Through the testimony of some leading figures, it presents the arguments around the question of gender in the Arab world and in leftist circles as well as an example of the evolution of a female leftist activist, some contradictions and the prominent debates from the most convulsive years to the present.

Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World explores the relationship between the work of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and the study of classical antiquity. The collection of essays engages with Greek and Roman history, literature, society, and culture, offering a range of perspectives and approaches building on Gramsci's theoretical insights, especially from his Prison Notebooks. The volume investigates both Gramsci's understanding and reception of the ancient world, including his use of ancient sources and modern historiography, and the viability of applying some of his key theoretical insights to the study of Greek and Roman history and literature. The chapters deal with the ideas of hegemony, passive revolution, Caesarism, and the role of intellectuals in society, offering a complex and diverse exploration of this intersection. With its fascinating mixture of topics, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of classics, ancient history, classical reception studies, Marxism and history, and those studying Antonio Gramsci's works in particular.

During the last two centuries, ethnolinguistic nationalism has been the norm of nation building and state building in Central Europe. The number of recognized Slavic languages (in line with the normative political formula of language = nation = state) gradually tallied with the number of the Slavic nation-states, especially after the breakups of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. But in the current age of borderless cyberspace, regional and minority Slavic languages are freely standardized and used, even when state authorities disapprove. As a result, since the turn of the 19th century, the number of Slavic languages has varied widely, from a single Slavic language to as many as 40. Through the story of Slavic languages, this timely book illustrates that decisions on what counts as a language are neither permanent nor stable, arguing that the politics of language is the politics in Central Europe. The monograph will prove to be an essential resource for scholars of linguistics and politics in Central Europe.

This book argues that capitalism cannot be said to be truly democratic and that a system of producer cooperatives, or democratically managed enterprises, is needed to give rise to a new mode of production that is genuinely socialist and fully consistent with the ultimate rationale underlying Marx's theoretical approach. The proposition that firms should be run by the workers on their own was endorsed by John Dewey, the greatest social thinker of the twentieth century, but is also shared by Marxists such as Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Angelo Tasca, Antonio Gramsci and Richard Wolff. This book explores the history of this argument, taking into account concepts from economic and political thought including historical materialism, cooperation, utopianism and economic democracy. The book will be of significant interest to scholars and students of political economy, Marxism, socialism, history of economic thought and political theory.

Much is written about China and the role of the Chinese Communist Party, but without exploring in detail the nature of the party and how it operates. This book provides an in-depth assessment of the current state of the Chinese Communist Party. It outlines the huge size of the party - 88 million members with 4.3 million organizations at the grassroots level. It sets out how the party has developed over time, how the party is organized and how its ideology is formed and transmitted. It discusses how the party acts in the different areas of China's economy, society and government, at local, regional and national levels. It explores the party's role in the formation of policy, including foreign policy, and assesses the impact of different factions and of the current anti-corruption campaign. Overall, the book demonstrates how embedded the Communist Party is in all aspects of Chinese economy, society and politics, and how its position continues to be consolidated.

By using the concept of capitalism as a "form of life", the authors in this volume reconceive capitalism, its mechanisms and effects on our bodies and on our common life. The idea that capitalism is more than a discrete economic system and instead a "form of life" that shapes our relationships with others, our sense of ourselves and our capacities, practices, bodies, and actions in the material world should be rather obvious. Yet efforts - whether through criticism or policy remedies - to redress the vast inequalities, inherent exploitation, alienation, and the manifold destructive effects of capitalism on the environment, typically proceed without grappling fully with the entwinement of the economic with the social and cultural, much less the ethical, ontological, and phenomenological. This volume proposes "form of life" as a heuristic tool, connecting literatures that often remain isolated from one another - the Frankfurt School, neo-materialism, Wittgenstein's philosophy, Foucault's and Agamben's biopolitics, and Marx's discussion of reproduction. In emphasizing economic practices, as opposed to capitalism as a system, they conceive of "the economic" as an integral and integrated dimension of life, and thus develop new possibilities for critique. Viewing human beings as "economic bios," provides a needed alternative to analyses that position neoliberalism as an economic logic imposed upon the social and cultural. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

This book draws on the example of the major cities of Leipzig and Dresden to illustrate continuity and change in public health in the German Democratic Republic. Based on archival work, it will demonstrate how members of the medical profession successfully manipulated their pre-1945 past in order to continue practising, leading to persistence in the social conception of medicine and disease after Communism took hold. This was particularly evident in attitudes towards and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases and the pathology of deviant behaviour among young people.

The White Terror was a movement of right-wing militias that for two years actively tracked down, tortured, and murdered members of the Jewish community, as well as former supporters of the short-lived Council Republic in the years following World War I. It can be argued that this example of a programme of virulent antisemitism laid the foundations for Hungarian participation in the Holocaust. Given the rightward shift of Hungarian politics today, this book has a particular resonance in re-examining the social and historical context of the White Terror.

This book identifies the origins and central assertions of bourgeois ideology as well as the reasons for their persuasive power, and offers pedagogical tools to weaken them. The author suggests techniques for use in the classroom, the community and the imagination that subvert negative stereotypes about poor people and individualist explanations for socio-economic status. Written from an ecumenical socialist perspective combining Marxist, neo-Marxist, and anarchist perspectives, this book utilizes a broad interdisciplinary scope, encompassing political theory, religion, political psychology, and literature.

The Middle East seems to be in perpetual crisis. One might expect a plethora of Marxist analyses of Israel and Palestine. Yet in the literature on Israel and Palestine there are hardly any studies of class, relations of production, or the relationship between the political and economic balance of forces over time. This edited volume brings a diverse array of Marxist-influenced interpretations of the present conjuncture in Israel and Palestine. The collection includes works by luminaries of social theory, such as Noam Chomsky and Fred Jameson, as well as leading scholars of Palestine (Raja Khalidi, Sherene Seikaly, and Orayb Aref Najjar) and Israel (Jonathan Nitzan, Nitzan Lebovic and Amir Locker-Biletzki). It comprises the first-ever collection of Marxist-influenced writings on Palestine and Israel, and the relationship between them. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism.

In, Love and Politics Jeffery L. Nicholas argues that Eros is the final rejection of an alienated life, in which humans are prevented from developing their human powers; Eros, in contrast, is an overflowing of acting into new realities and new beauties, a world in which human beings extend their powers and senses. Nicholas uniquely interprets Alasdair MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism as a response to alienation defined as the divorce of fact from value. However, this account cannot address alienation in the form of the oppression of women or people of color. Importantly, it fails to acknowledge the domination of nature that blackens the heart of alienated life. Alienation must be seen as a separation of the human from nature. Nicholas turns to Aristotle, first, to uncover the way his philosophy embodies a divorce of human from nature, then to reconstruct the essential elements of Aristotle's metaphysics to defend a philosophical anthropology based on Eros. Love and Politics: Persistent Human Desires as a Foundation for Liberation presents a critical theory that synthesizes MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and Social Reproduction Theory. It will be of great interest to political theorists and philosophers.

This book explores the changing evolution of memory debates on places intimately linked to the lives and deaths of different fascist, para-fascist and communist dictators in a truly transnational and comparative way. During the second decade of the twenty-first century, a number of parallel debates arose in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania, Austria and other European countries regarding the public management by democratic regimes of those sites of memory that were directly linked to the personal biographies of their former dictators. The ways in which each democracy deals with the dead bodies, mausoleums and birthplaces of the dictators vary considerably, although common questions occur, such as whether oblivion or re-signification is better, the risk of a posthumous cult of personality being established and the extent to which the shadow of the authoritarian past endures in these sites of memory. Using the concept of "sites of the dictators", the author explains why it is so difficult to deal with some sites of memory linked to dead autocrats, as those places contribute directly or indirectly to humanizing them, making their remembrance more acceptable for the present and future generations, and discusses the potential of the "Europeanization" of these "dark" memories of the past. Exploring the imperatives of memory politics and how these are reconciled with local actors interested in exploiting the dictator's remembrance, this book will be useful reading for students and scholars of history, politics and memory studies.

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

This book explores the changing evolution of memory debates on places intimately linked to the lives and deaths of different fascist, para-fascist and communist dictators in a truly transnational and comparative way. During the second decade of the twenty-first century, a number of parallel debates arose in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania, Austria and other European countries regarding the public management by democratic regimes of those sites of memory that were directly linked to the personal biographies of their former dictators. The ways in which each democracy deals with the dead bodies, mausoleums and birthplaces of the dictators vary considerably, although common questions occur, such as whether oblivion or re-signification is better, the risk of a posthumous cult of personality being established and the extent to which the shadow of the authoritarian past endures in these sites of memory. Using the concept of "sites of the dictators", the author explains why it is so difficult to deal with some sites of memory linked to dead autocrats, as those places contribute directly or indirectly to humanizing them, making their remembrance more acceptable for the present and future generations, and discusses the potential of the "Europeanization" of these "dark" memories of the past. Exploring the imperatives of memory politics and how these are reconciled with local actors interested in exploiting the dictator's remembrance, this book will be useful reading for students and scholars of history, politics and memory studies.

This book is a documentary record of the statements and debates that defined the formative period of a movement that has affected modern politics and history more than any other. It is generally acknowledged that not only were the theoretical problems faced by Russian Marxists during this period more complex than those encountered elsewhere but that they also brought to the resolution of these problems an originality and intellectual rigour second to none in the Marxist tradition. As predominantly a movement of intellectuals during these years they achieved a level of articulation and sophistication unsurpassed in the literature of Marxism, and that makes them such a rewarding subject of study. Plekhanov, Akselrod, Lenin, Struve, Martov, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Kautsky all feature in both celebrated and little-known texts alongside anonymous pamphleteers and writers of resolutions, editorials, flysheets and programmes.

Communist Propaganda at School is based on an analysis of reading primers from the Soviet bloc and recreates the world as presented to the youngest schoolchildren who started their education between 1949 and 1989 across the nine Eastern European countries. The author argues that those first textbooks, from their first to last pages, were heavily laden with communist propaganda, and that they share similar concepts, techniques and even contents, even if some national specificities can be observed. This volume reconstructs the image of the world presented to schoolchildren in the first books they were required to read in their school life, and argues that the image was charged with communist propaganda. The book is based on the analysis of over sixty reading primers from nine countries of the Soviet bloc: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia from the period. Written with simplicity and straightforwardness, this book will be a valuable resource, not only to international academics dealing with the issues of propaganda, censorship, education, childhood and everyday life under communism in Eastern and Central Europe, but can also academics dealing with education under communism or with the content of primary education. It also brings educational experiences of the Soviet bloc to international researchers, in particular to researchers of education under totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

Public Libraries and Marxism provides a Marxist analytical framework for understanding public libraries and presents a set of proposals for transforming the capitalist libraries of today. Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of this Marxist framework, the authors also provide a critical examination of the history, theory and practice of libraries in the Soviet Union and North Korea. Considering what a Marxist library service would look like in the Western capitalist countries of today, Pateman and Pateman synthesise the insights provided throughout the book into a set of Marxist proposals designed to promote the transformation of contemporary Western public librarianship. These proposals suggest how Western public libraries can change their organisation and practices - their strategies, structures, systems and culture - in order to best serve those with the most needs, particularly as society evolves in response to new challenges. Public Libraries and Marxism will be relevant for scholars and students of library and information science, history, politics and sociology. Outlining the rudiments of a Marxist library service that should be applicable around the world, the book will also appeal to library practitioners who want to develop libraries in a community-led and needs-based direction.

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

First published in 1988, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe states that since de-Stalinisation began in Eastern Europe, the 'dead hand' of institutional Marxism has been eroded by revisionist Marxism, with the turn to young Marx and the philosophy of human emancipation to undermine prevailing orthodoxies. But this revisionism clung to the old socialist dogmas and refused a total break with the system, and the effort eventually failed. The result was the emergence of a dissident counterculture rejecting the system entirely. Independent social movements (such as unofficial peace groups and trade unions like Solidarity) have given this counterculture a major role in Eastern Europe, whilst the ruling elites have responded with confusion. Tismaneanu concludes that the only hope for the anti-totalitarian intellectuals of Eastern Europe is to oppose the regimes with non-Marxist ideas - otherwise they will be permanently reduced to the status of a hopeless, albeit heroic minority. This book will be of interest to students of economics, political science and international relations.

This is the first scientific biography of Milan Rastislav Stefanik (1880-1919) that is focused on analysing the process of how he became the Slovak national hero. Although he is relatively unknown internationally, his contemporaries compared him "to Choderlos de Laclos for the use of military tactics in love affairs, to Lawrence of Arabia for vision, to Bonaparte for ambition ... and to one of apostles for conviction". He played the key role in founding an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 through his relentless worldwide travels during the First World War in order to create the Czechoslovak Army: he visited Serbia and Romania on the eve of invasion by the Central Powers, Russia before the February revolution, the United States after it declared war on Germany, Italy dealing with the consequences of defeat in the Caporetto battle, and again when Russia plunged into Civil War. Several historical methods are used to analyse the aforementioned central research question of this biography such as social capital to explain his rise in French society, the charismatic leader to understand how he convinced and won over a relatively large number of people; more traditional political, military, and diplomatic history to show his contribution to the founding of Czechoslovakia, and memory studies to analyse his extraordinary popularity in Slovakia. By mapping his intriguing life, the book will be of interest to scholars in a broad range of areas including history of Central Europe, especially Czechoslovakia, international relations, social history, French society at the beginning of the 20th century and biographical research.

Winner of The Alexander Nove Prize 2018 The nomads of Central Asia were already well accustomed to life under the power of a distant capital when the Bolsheviks fomented revolution on the streets of Petrograd. Yet after the fall of the Tsar, the nature, ambition and potency of that power would change dramatically, ultimately resulting in the near eradication of Central Asian nomadism. Based on extensive primary source work in Almaty, Bishkek and Moscow, Nomads and Soviet Rule charts the development of this volatile and brutal relationship and challenges the often repeated view that events followed a linear path of gradually escalating violence. Rather than the sedentarisation campaign being an inevitability born of deep-rooted Marxist hatred of the nomadic lifestyle, Thomas demonstrates the Soviet state's treatment of nomads to be far more complex and pragmatic. He shows how Soviet policy was informed by both an anti-colonial spirit and an imperialist impulse, by nationalism as well as communism, and above all by a lethal self-confidence in the Communist Party's ability to transform the lives of nomads and harness the agricultural potential of their landscape. This is the first book to look closely at the period between the revolution and the collectivisation drive, and offers fresh insight into a little-known aspect of early Soviet history. In doing so, the book offers a path to refining conceptions of the broader history and dynamics of the Soviet project in this key period.

Communism was one of the defining political movements of the twentieth century. Viewed from different perspectives, it was at once a utopia, an ideology, a system of government, an apparatus of terror and an international political movement stretching to almost every corner of the globe. None of these aspects of its history will be overlooked in "Twentieth Century Communism". Nevertheless, the journal's primary concern is with communism as an international movement of unparalleled scope and cohesiveness. Since the collapse of the USSR and its satellites nearly twenty years ago, this phenomenon has given rise to a rich historical literature, informed both by the accessibility of communist archives and wider developments in social, political and cultural history. "Twentieth Century Communism" is a peer-reviewed journal of 256 pages appearing annually in May. As well as peer-reviewed research and discussion articles, it includes reviews, conference reports, key and a noticeboard section. The core of each issue will be provided by a themed section.

Originally published in 1989 Social Philosophy and Ecological Scarcity presents a systematic study of the implications of ecological scarcity for social philosophy. The book argues for a new social philosophy based on a conception of the 'good society' and the 'good life' which makes fewer, rather than more demands on scarce ecological resources. The book shows that the two major competing social philosophies in modern philosophical thought - the bourgeois liberal and the state socialist - are both forms of capitalism. Despite their obvious differences, they both pursue the logic of capitalism, of ever-increasing accumulation, growth and consumption. This pursuit is carried out by means of modern science and its technology, which assume that Nature's resources are inexhaustible and can be exploited to meet infinite human wants or needs, ignoring ecological scarcity. The recognition of ecological scarcity would lead to a social philosophy, based on a frugal mode of socialism which has more affinities with the social visions of Fourier and Morris than with that of Marx. Their theories, far from being too 'utopian', are shown as more 'realistic' and less 'fantastic' than either bourgeois capitalism or state capitalism based on the Marxist model.