First published in 1955 to wide acclaim, James Joll's introduction to the history and development of International Socialism before the First World War is of crucial importance for understanding the development of Left-wing movements in the 20th century: the difficulties posed by prominent anarchist groups, the ambiguities of the scope of revolutionary activity, and the challenges posed by the rise of nationalism. Incorporating insightful research into the international links and the ideological structure of socialism, as well as on the structure of individual parties and the actual nature of their working-class support, The Second International 1889-1914 is a valuable resource for political historians and students of socialist thought alike.

Pursuing historical analogies between nineteenth-century theories and the current practices captivated by digital reproducibility, this book offers a critical take on architecture's contemporaneity through four essays: tectonics, materiality, cladding, and labor. Fundamental to this proposition is the historicity of Gottfried Semper's theorization of architecture amidst the outpouring of new materials and construction techniques during the 1850s. Starting with Semper's differentiation between theatricalization and the tectonic of theatricality, this book closely examines thematic essential to architecture's self-representation. Even though the title of this book recalls the Semperian four elements of architecture, its argument encapsulates a unique historico-theoretical project probing the tectonic of theatricality beyond Semper. The invisible tie between technique and labor is the cord running through the four subjects covered in this book. In exploring these subjects from the theoretical standpoint of Marxian dialectics, this book's contribution is focused on, but not limited to, the topicality of labor today when its relationship with capital has been further obscured by the prevailing digitalization of commodity exchange value, starting roughly in the 1990s. Each essay examines Semper's theorization of architecture in contradistinction to the ways in which technology's mediation has dominated architecture's representation. Burrowing through the invisible tie between technique and work, asymptomatic of architecture's predicament in global capitalism, this book advances the scope of architectural criticism beyond the exhausted formalism and architecture's turn to philosophy circa the 1980s and the present tendencies for presentism. It will therefore be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history and theory.

Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital's paradoxical expansion and entrenchment amidst crisis and unrest, Mute Compulsionoffers a novel theory of the historically unique forms of abstract and impersonal power set in motion by the subjection of social life to the profit imperative. Building on a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx's unfinished critique of political economy and a wide range of contemporary Marxist theory, philosopher Soren Mau sets out to explain how the logic of capital tightens its stranglehold on the life of society by constantly remoulding the material conditions of social reproduction. In the course of doing so, Mau intervenes in classical and contemporary debates about the value form, crisis theory, biopolitics, social reproduction, humanism, logistics, agriculture, metabolism, the body, competition, technology and relative surplus populations.

This book traces the life of Francois Mitterrand from his youth as an ardent Catholic and supporter of Marshal Petain, to his career as a centrist politician of the Fourth Republic, through his capture of the leadership of the Socialist Party, leading to his election as President of France in 1981. During these years the Communist Party of France, influenced by such militants as the poet Louis Aragon, was evolving into a national party eager to participate in a joint effort with the Socialist Party to begin a rupture with capitalism through the election of Mitterrand as President. The reform of the Communist Party and the rise of Mitterrand led to the Union of the Left. In 1981, the Socialist Party had an absolute majority in the French Parliament plus support from the Communist Deputies. President Mitterrand could have implemented his leftist electoral promises and given Western Europe a historical lesson in how to move toward socialism in an advanced industrial country. Instead, he chose to change his program to the development of capitalism on a European scale. The reasons for this turn-around emerge from an examination of his life and career.

Several years ago on a whim, Culleton requested James Joyce's FBI file. Hoover had Joyce under surveillance as a suspected Communist, and the chain of cross references that Culleton followed from Joyce's file lead her to obscenity trials and, less obviously, to a plot to assassinate Irish labour leader Philip Larkin. However devoted a great deal of energy to keeping watch on intellectuals and considered literature to be dangerous on a number of levels. Joyce and the G Men explores how these linkages are indicative of the culture of the FBI under Hoover, and the resurgence of American anti intellectualism. MARKET 1: American History; Political History; Communism

This book examines the 'turn to the East' by the international communist movement in fostering world revolution after the success in Russia in 1917, which led to communism's greatest gains after the Second World War. Based on a theorisation of the building of revolutionary movements, this study critically assesses communist strategy and tactics using three key cases, China, India and Brazil, drawing out implications for possible future developments in less-developed countries.

The 'Cominternians' who staffed the Communist International in Moscow from its establishment in 1919 to its dissolution in 1943 led transnational lives and formed a cosmopolitan but closed and privileged world. The book tells of their experience in the Soviet Union through the decades of hope and terror.

This book challenges the notion that the Marxian approach is no longer relevant to the problems of contemporary society in the post-Soviet world. The first part of the book deals with the distinctive method of Marx's political economy, with an emphasis on its origins and the problems that arise out of misinterpretations of Capital . The second section applies this method to some of the key contemporary issues including unemployment, globalization and the crisis of the welfare state, and suggests that the approach of Marxist political economy remains a highly relevant and intellectually sound method of analysis.

James Klugmann appears as a shadowy figure in the legendary history of the Cambridge spies. As both mentor and friend to Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and others, Klugmann was the man who manipulated promising recruits deemed ripe for conversion to the communist cause. This perception of him was reinforced following the release of his MI5 file and the disclosure of Soviet intelligence files in Moscow, which revealed he played a key part in the recruitment of John Cairncross, the 'fifth man', and had a pivotal war-time role in the Special Operations Executive, helping shift Churchill and the allies to support Tito and the communist partisans in Yugoslavia. In this book, Geoff Andrews reveals Klugmann's story in full for the first time, uncovering the motivations, conflicts and illusions of those drawn into the world of communism - and the sacrifices they made on its behalf.

Throughout the history of the USSR, groups of like-minded people have gathered, without official permission, to discuss issues of common interest. They had their predecessors in prerevolutionary voluntary associations and political parties. During the 1960s it became easier and less dangerous than in the previous period of Stalin's rule to engage in activities outside government control. Indeed, since the de-Stalinization campaign in the 1950s, Soviet society has been slowly asserting its independence, at least in areas nominally nonpolitical. Nevertheless, until Gorbachev's drive for liberalization achieved some momentum, the creation of unsanctioned groups often continued to provoke persecution of their members. In this book, Vera Tolz studies these unsanctioned groups and reveals the effect they are having on the Soviet political system. In 1990, primarily because of pressure from these unofficial movements, the Communist party was forced to relinquish its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly on power. In other words, a multiparty system had emerged in the USSR by the end of the period under observation in this book. From the time that voluntary associations of Soviet people were permitted to emerge from the underground and openly participate in official public life (1987), their role in the political and social life of the country has been rapidly expanding. By 1989, new sociopolitical groups, especially in the Baltic republics and Transcaucasia, started to pose not only a challenge but also a threat to the power of the Communist party. The emergence of a multiparty system in the Soviet Union, with various political groups pursuing different--and at times opposing--goals, is coinciding with a period during which the central authorities are being inconsistent in implementing democratic reforms. Representatives of new movements are often politically inexperienced, and the Communist party is facing a serious crisis, which makes the political situation in the Soviet Union highly unpredictable and highlights the difficulties that the country faces in moving toward a more democratic system

This collection discusses China's contemporary national and international identity as evidenced in its geopolitical impact on the countries in its direct periphery and its functioning in organizations of global governance. This contemporary identity is assessed against the background of the country's Confucian and nationalist history.

In this work Conan Fischer investigates how the public-brawling between Communists and Nazis during the Weimar Era masked a more subtle and complex relationship. It examines the way in which the National Socialists' growth across traditional class and regional barriers came to threaten the Communists on their home ground and forced them to adopt increasingly precarious, comprising strategies to confront this challenge. Encouraged by Moscow, they ascribed a qualified legitimacy to grass-roots Nazism which justified fraternisation with Hitler's ordinary supporters. Fischer's book thereby strengthens and elaborates recent perceptions of Nazism as a populist mass movement and shows the collapse of Weimar to have been even more convoluted and controversial than hitherto believed.

The author draws on lesser known archival materials, including Marx's notebooks on women and patriarchy and technology to offer a new interpretation of Marx's concept of alienation as this concept develops in his later works.

To begin with, rational choice Marxism, promised to construct historical explanations and social theories with clarity and rigour. Subsequently, it took a `political turn' in addressing issues of class and production, and the prospects for electoral socialism. This anthology commences with the founding classics - Erik Olin Wright's `What is Analytical Marxism?' and Alan Carling's spirited challenge to the Marxist establishment - which are answered with critical responses detailed by Ellen Meiksins Wood and Michael Burawoy in previously uncollected debates. Also included are further debates charting the historical progression of rational choice Marxism. The editors demonstrate that the clarity and rigour originally promised by the rational choice Marxists was never in fact achieved, but that rational choice Marxism has considerably enhanced the theoretical treatment of class and production in a world of commodification and difference.

The Real Situation in Russia, first published in 1928, contains three of Trotsky's harshest rebuttals of Stalin's takeover of the Russian Revolution following the death of Lenin. The first part contains a defence of the 'Opposition Platform' against the Stalinist denunciation; the second details Trotsky's view of the precise nature of the Stalinist program, as well as its disastrous consequences for Russia; and the third demonstrates the unashamed falsification of the history by Stalin with regard to the beginning of the Revolution. Including a sympathetic, but nonetheless astute, introduction to Trotsky's argument by the translator, The Real Situation in Russia will prove to be of value to all students of twentieth-century Marxism, and in particular to those interested in the Russian Revolution - not only its origins and early development, but also, perhaps, the reasons for its ultimate failure.

The Defence of Terrorism, originally written in 1920 on a military train during the Russian Civil War, represents one of Trotsky's most wide-ranging and original contributions to the debates that dominated the 1920s and '30s. Trotsky's intention is "far away from any thought of defending terrorism in general". Rather, he seeks to promote an historical justification for the Revolution, by demonstrating that history has set up the 'revolutionary violence of the progressive class' against the 'conservative violence of the outworn classes'. The argument is developed in response to the influential Marxist intellectual Karl Kautsky, who refuted Trotsky's 'militarisation of labour' and Lenin's wholesale rejection of a 'bloodless revolution'. The introduction, written for the second edition of 1935, presents Trotsky's reflections on the similarities between Kautsky and the burgeoning British Labour Party: specifically, it recapitulates Trotsky's belief that revolution conducted according to the norms of Parliamentarianism is no revolution at all.

Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin, by negating the Leninist-Stalinist theory of dialectical materialism and tracing Marx's political philosophy to the Classical Humanism of Aristotle, overthrows the stultifying entrapment of Stalinist Bolshevism and contributes to the revitalization of Marx's method.

Contemporary philosophy is by its nature pluralistic, to a perhaps greater extent than at any moment of the preceding tradition, in that there are multiple forms of thought competing for a position on the center of the philosophic stage. The reasons for this conceptual proliferation are numerous. But certainly one factor is the increasing development of contemporary means of publication and communication, which in turn make possible the rapid dissemination of ideas as well as an informed reaction to them. And this in turn has increased the possibility for serious philosophic exchange by enhancing the available opportunities for the interaction of competing forms of thought. But, although informed philosophic interaction has in principle become increasingly possible in recent years, the frequency, scope and quality of such discussion has often been less than satisfactory. Contemporary philosophic viewpoints tend not to interact in a Hegelian manner, as complementary aspects of a totally satisfactory and a-perspectival view, facets of a singly and all-embracing true position. Rather, contemporary philosophic viewpoints tend to portray themselves as mutually exclusive alternatives only occasionally willing to acknowledge the possible validity or even the intrinsic interest of other perspectives. Thus, although the multiplication of different forms of philosophy in principle means that there are greater possibilities for meaning ful exchange between them, in practice the tendency of each of the various philosophic positions to raise claims to philosophic truth from its point of view alone has had the effect of impeding such interaction."

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 'The best book I read last year by a mile. . . so beautifully written that anyone would be hooked' Laura Hackett, Sunday Times, Best Summer Books 'Wonderfully funny and poignant. . . a tale of family secrets and political awakening amid a crumbling regime' Luke Harding, Observer 'We never lose our inner freedom; the freedom to do what is right' Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. There was community and hope. Then, in December 1990, everything changed. The statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled. Almost overnight, people could vote freely, wear what they liked and worship as they wished. There was no longer anything to fear from prying ears. But factories shut, jobs disappeared and thousands fled to Italy on crowded ships, only to be sent back. Predatory pyramid schemes eventually bankrupted the country, leading to violent conflict. As one generation's aspirations became another's disillusionment, and as her own family's secrets were revealed, Lea found herself questioning what freedom really meant. Free is an engrossing memoir of coming of age amid political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality, and the hopes and fears of people pulled up by the sweep of history. THE SUNDAY TIMES MEMOIR OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, TLS, DAILY MAIL, NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR

This is an analysis of the impact of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union on the communist parties of Western Europe. Seven case-studies, covering the Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, British and German parties, provide a comparative perspective. The conclusion assesses the range of responses to the dramatic events of 1989-91 and the likely future direction of the west-European communist movement. It is argued that, whilst it is no longer possible to talk of a coherent "family" of communist parties, various individual parties - some of them in revised form - may continue to prosper.