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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Marxism & Communism
Originally published in 1955, this is an illuminating study of the
political thought and action of the Russian intelligentsia, in the
decade up to and including the Revolution of 1905-6. It is based on
the writings, including those in the revolutionary press, by which
the chief figures of the main opposition parties expressed their
political theory, strategy and tactics and related them to the
turbulent events of those years. It is also based on personal
interviews with some of the survivors of these political struggles.
The book is focused on the emergence, starting in 1889 of the major
political parties in Russia and it tells of their efforts to form a
common front against Tsarism in the revolution which they
confidently expected in the early years of the century.
Originally published in 1984 this book reconsiders the effect of
Lenin on the politics and culture of the 20th Century. In a
detailed examination of Lenin's famous text, The State and
Revolution, the author argues that the peculiar status of this work
presents readers with major problems of interpretation and shows
how a failure to identify these problems has prevented an adequate
understanding of important issues in modern politics, history and
social theory. The book compares Lenin's 'radical utopia' with the
ideas of politics offered by other theorists, centrally Weber and
Sartre, but also writers such as Jefferson and Habermas. This
original approach shows the impact of Lenin's text on political
history and theory and leads to a new understanding of the
connection between revolution and violence, social change and
authoritarianism.
Translated from the Russian in 1933, this and the first volume of
the same title give an invaluable picture of what the Russian
leader Joseph Stalin understood by Leninism. Building on the
pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, (which forms the first part of
this book) the work presents a unified and complete work on the
problems of Leninism and socialist construction as they were
manifested in the 1920s, as well as discussion of the October
Revolution and the relationship of the USSR and the West in the
years following the First World War.
Emerging from a Marxist perspective, this book focuses on the
importance of social class and the role of education broadly in
relation to the possibility of revolutionary change in Sweden and
beyond. Critically tracing the celebrated so-called 'Swedish model'
from its inception to its current neoliberalisation, Maisuria
explores the contours of class as part of social democratic
history, culture and education, especially against the alternatives
of communism and fascism. Presenting empirical research on class
consciousness within a higher education context, Maisuria analyses
student testimonies on their perceptions of social democracy and
'Swedishness' with ethno-racial dynamics, which is subjected to a
Gramscian and Critical Realist derived explanatory critique for
social transformation.
First published in 1941, Marxism: Is it Science? was written to
present the author's criticisms of Marxism and, in doing so, to
further exemplify his 'Method of Instruction' first proposed in an
earlier work. The book is divided into six parts to provide six
complete presentations of Marxism and why the author considers it
unscientific. The six different approaches, varying in focus and
complexity, work together to give the reader a detailed overview of
Marxism and the authors critique of it.
This book offers a unique re-conceptualization of Marxism in
bringing together leading scholars across disciplines history,
philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, and literary and
culture studies into one comprehensive corpus. It demonstrates the
engaging relevance of the perspectives and techniques of the
analyses adopted by Karl Marx, Fr
Translated from the Russian in 1928, this and the second volume of
the same title give an invaluable picture of what the Russian
leader Joseph Stalin understood by Leninism. Building on the
pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, (which forms the first part of
this book) the work presents a unified and complete work on the
problems of Leninism and socialist construction as they were
manifested in the 1920s, as well as discussion of the October
Revolution and the relationship of the USSR and the West in the
years following the First World War.
Money is usually understood as a valuable object, the value of
which is attributed to it by its users and which other users
recognize. It serves to link disparate institutions, providing a
disguised whole and prime tool for the "invisible hand" of the
market. This book offers an interpretation of money as a social
institution. Money provides the link between the household and the
firm, the worker and his product, making that very division seem
natural and money as imminently practical. Money as a Social
Institution begins in the medieval period and traces the evolution
of money alongside consequent implications for the changing models
of the corporation and the state. This is then followed with
double-entry accounting as a tool of long-distance merchants and
bankers, then the monitoring of the process of production by
professional corporate managers. Davis provides a framework of
analysis for examining money historically, beyond the operation of
those particular institutions, which includes the possibility of
conceptualizing and organizing the world differently. This volume
is of great importance to academics and students who are interested
in economic history and history of economic thought, as well as
international political economics and critique of political
economy.
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding
road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which
are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of
progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind.
Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be
their own master, to use their insight to make a world different
from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their
immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of
the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian
regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the
Promethean passion there was modernity-humankind's project of
self-creation-and enlightenment, the existence of a constant
tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and
the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism
of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean
horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason,
which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the
idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism,
fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a
boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable
to return the fire to the gods.
Will capitalism survive forever? Capitalism has always lived in and
with crisis. Wars, revolutions, economic depression and repeated
recessions, the threat of nuclear annihilation and ecological
disaster have all failed to break the dominance of this economic
and political system. Challenging the predominance of capitalism in
a world fraught with inequalities, this book returns to classical
Marxism to reaffirm its relevance. It explores the contradictions
within capitalism as well as explains why Marxism has been unable
to mount a sustained challenge to capitalism. In order to explore
concrete alternatives in a period of increasing capitalist
globalisation and crisis, it goes on to present perspectives by
which theory and practice might be reunited to building independent
political and organisational structures. A search for "something
better", this volume will be an engaging read for scholars and
researchers of politics, especially political theory and political
economy, economics, and sociology.
Adopting Argentina's popular uprisings against neoliberalism
including the 2001-02 rebellion and subsequent mass protests as a
case study, The Mobilization and Demobilization of Middle-Class
Revolt analyzes two decades of longitudinal research (1995-2018),
including World Bank and Latinobarometer household survey data,
along with participant interviews, to explore why nonpolitically
active middle-class citizens engage in radical protest movements,
and why they eventually demobilize. In particular it asks, how do
they become politicized and resist economic and political crises,
along with their own hardship? Theoretically informed by Gramsci's
notions of hegemony, ideology and class consciousness, Ozarow
posits that to affect profound and lasting social change,
multisectoral alliances and sustainable mobilizing vehicles are
required to maintain radical progressive movements beyond periods
of crisis. With the Argentinian revolt understood to be the
ideological forbearer to the autonomist-inspired uprisings which
later emerged, comparisons are drawn with experiences in the USA,
Spain, Greece UK, Iceland and the Middle East, as well as 1990s
contexts in South Africa and Russia. Such a comparative analysis
helps understand how contextual factors shape distinctive
struggling middle-class citizen responses to external shocks. This
book will be of immense value to students, activists and theorists
of social change in North America, in Europe and globally.
More than twenty-five years after the collapse of the Socialist
bloc, the nature of the regimes in Eastern Europe between 1945 and
1989 continues to evade the attempts of political theorists and
scholars of post-communism to define and classify them. Drawing on
philosophical inquiry, jurisprudential analysis and intellectual
history, this book traces the impact of communist ideology and
practice on legal thought: from its critical roots in the midst of
the nineteenth century to its reactionary stand in the later years
of the twentieth. Exploring how the communist experience - both in
its revolutionary and authoritarian guises - has been articulated
within the legal theoretical field, the book addresses two central
theoretical lacunae fostered by the historiography of
authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe: the status of law,
and its relationship to the broader ideological framework
legitimising authoritarian regimes. Moving beyond the limits of the
contemporary discourse on communism - particularly as it is
channelled through transitional justice and memory studies - Cosmin
Cercel develops a theoretical framework that is able to uncover
law's complicity with the extreme ideologies that dominated Central
and Eastern Europe. For it is, he argues, in its recourse to legal
concepts that the communist experience raises important
jurisprudential questions for our contemporary understanding of
law, the limits of state sovereignty, and law's relationship to
historical violence.
From longtime labor organizer Jane McAlevey, a vital call-to-arms
in favor of unions, a key force capable of defending our democracy
For decades, racism, corporate greed, and a skewed political system
have been eating away at the social and political fabric of the
United States. Yet as McAlevey reminds us, there is one weapon
whose effectiveness has been proven repeatedly throughout U.S.
history: unions. In A Collective Bargain, longtime labor organizer,
environmental activist, and political campaigner Jane McAlevey
makes the case that unions are a key institution capable of taking
effective action against today's super-rich corporate class. Since
the 1930s, when unions flourished under New Deal protections,
corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the
labor movement. And they've been winning. Until today. Because, as
McAlevey shows, unions are making a comeback. Want to reverse the
nation's mounting wealth gap? Put an end to sexual harassment in
the workplace? End racial disparities on the job? Negotiate climate
justice? Bring back unions. As McAlevey travels from Pennsylvania
hospitals, where nurses are building a new kind of patient-centered
unionism, to Silicon Valley, where tech workers have turned to
old-fashioned collective action, to the battle being waged by
America's teachers, readers have a ringside seat at the struggles
that will shape our country-and our future.
Beginning with a review of the numerous studies that tend to
emphasize the national, societal dimension of the Italian and
French communist parties, Cyrille Guiat's book is a comparative
study of the two parties from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.
Originally published in 1916, this volume discusses the history of
the labour movement during the latter part of the 19th and early
part of the 20th centuries, in so far as it relates to the advocacy
and use of violence. A contentious issue which divided the labour
movement during the 19th century, the author presents arguments
made by both sides of this controversy. Nonetheless, the book
remains a Marxist critique of violence as practised by direct
action anarchists.
This title was first published in 1978: Communism aims at putting
working people in charge of their lives. A multiplicity of
Councils, rather than a big state bureaucracy is needed to empower
working people and to focus control over society. Mattick develops
a theory of a council communism through his survey of the history
of the left in Germany and Russia. He challenges Bolshevik
politics: especially their perspectives on questions of Party and
Class, and the role of Trade Unions. Mattick argues that a??The
revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China,
were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to
the a??association of free and equal producersa??, but
state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to
issue into socialism. Marxism served here as a mere ideology to
justify the rise of modified capitalist systems, which were no
longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of
the authoritarian state. Based on the peasantry, but designed with
accelerated industrialisation to create an industrial proletariat,
they were ready to abolish the traditional bourgeoisie but not
capital as a social relationship. This type of capitalism had not
been foreseen by Marx and the early Marxists, even though they
advocated the capture of state-power to overthrow the bourgeoisie
a?? but only in order to abolish the state itself.a??
'Enlightening ... Funny, smart, original and provocative ... It is
hard to imagine the stalwarts of Mock the Week recognising the
Druze militia leader Walid Jumblatt in a London cinema' NEW
STATESMAN 'Few standups have come close to capturing a fraction of
this creative energy in a book ... Alexei Sayle is an exception'
GUARDIAN "What I brought to comedy was an authentic working-class
voice plus a threat of genuine violence - nobody in Monty Python
looked like a hard case who'd kick your head in." In 1971,
comedians on the working men's club circuit imagined that they
would be free to continue telling their tired, racist, misogynistic
gags forever. But their nemesis, a nineteen-year-old Marxist art
student, was slowly coming to meet them... Thatcher Stole My
Trousers chronicles a time when comedy and politics united in
electrifying ways. Recounting the founding of the Comedy Store, the
Comic Strip and the Young Ones, and Alexei's friendships with the
comedians who - like him - would soon become household names, this
is a unique and beguiling blend of social history and memoir.
Fascinating, funny, angry and entertaining, it is a story of class
and comedy, politics and love, fast cars and why it's difficult to
foul a dwarf in a game of football.
Is there such a thing as human nature? Here Sean Sayers defends the
controversial theory that human nature is in fact an historical
phenomenon. He gives an ambitious and wide ranging defence of the
Marxist and Hegelian historical approach and engages with a wide
range of work at the heart of the contemporary debate in social and
moral philosophy.
Isaiah Berlin made a now classic distinction between negative and
positive conceptions of freedom. This book, first published in
2005, introduces a fresh way of looking at these conceptions and
presents a new defence of the positive conception of freedom.
Revealing how the internal debate between various versions of
negative freedom give rise to hybrid conceptions of freedom which
in turn are superseded by various versions of the positive
conception of freedom, Silier concludes that Marx's concrete
historical account of positive freedom resolves many of the key
debates in this area and provides a fruitful framework to evaluate
the freedoms and unfreedoms that are specific to capitalism.
Since the early 2000s, authoritarianism has risen as an
increasingly powerful global phenomenon. This shift has not only
social and political implications, but also environmental
implications: authoritarian leaders seek to recast the relationship
between society and the government in every aspect of public life,
including environmental policy. When historians of technology or
the environment have investigated the environmental consequences of
authoritarian regimes, they have frequently argued that
authoritarian regimes have been unable to produce positive
environmental results or adjust successfully to global structural
change, if they have shown any concern for the environment at all.
Put another way, the scholarly consensus holds that authoritarian
regimes on both the left and the right generally have demonstrated
an anti-environmentalist bias, and when opposed by environmentalist
social movements, have succeeded in silencing those voices. This
book explores the theme of environmental politics and authoritarian
regimes on both the right and the left. The authors argue that in
instances when environmentalist policies offer the possibility of
bolstering a country's domestic (nationalist) appeal or its
international prestige, authoritarian regimes can endorse and have
endorsed environmental protective measures. The collection of
essays analyzes environmentalist initiatives pursued by
authoritarian regimes, and provides explanations for both the
successes and failures of such regimes, looking at a range of case
studies from a number of countries, including Brazil, China,
Poland, and Zimbabwe. The volume contributes to the scholarly
debate about the social and political preconditions necessary for
effective environmental protection. This book will be of great
interest to those studying environmental history and politics,
environmental humanities, ecology, and geography.
Originally published in 1999, Higher Education in the
Post-Communist World focuses on specific public universities during
their, and their nations' early transition years (1989-1995) from
communism to democracy and the changes from centrally planned, to
free-market economies. The book offers a detailed view of
universities in transition rather than case studies of entire
systems of higher education, providing an opportunity for readers
to understand the national politico-economic transition on higher
education- individual faculty, students, and administrator;
departments; and university - in a more immediate way than a
system-wide approach would. The book presents information on
specific universities and how the demise of the Soviet Union
affected the governance, finance, faculty, students, and curriculum
in several post-communist countries.
This volume offers new perspectives on the appeal and profound
cultural meaning of socialism over the past two centuries. It
brings together scholarship from various disciplines addressing
diverse national contexts, including Britain, China, France,
Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the USA. Taken together, the
contributions highlight the aesthetic, narrative, and religious
dimensions of socialism as it has developed through three broad
phases in the modern era: early nineteenth-century beginnings,
mass-based political organizations, and the attainment of state
power in the twentieth century and beyond. Socialism did not
attract millions of people primarily because of logical argument
and empirical evidence, important though those were. Rather, it
told the most compelling story about the past, present, and future.
Refocusing attention on socialism's imaginative dimensions, this
volume aims to revive scholarly interest in one of the modern
world(1)s most important political orientations.
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