The Soviet attempt to propagandise the "new Soviet woman" through the magazines "Rabotnitsa" and "Krest'yanka" from the 1920s to the end of the Stalin era is explored here. Women were expected to play a full role in the construction of socialism, but they also had to reproduce the population. Balancing work and family did not prove easy in a climate of shifting economic and demographic priorities, and the periodic changes made to the model are charted here.

This book aims to explore precisely how modern Japanese poetry has remained central to public life in both Japan and its former colony of Taiwan. Though classical Japanese poetry has captivated the imagination of Asian studies scholars, little research has been conducted to explore its role in public life as a discourse influential in defining both the modern Japanese empire and contemporary postcolonial negotiations of identity. This book shows how highly visible poetry in regular newspaper columns and blogs have in various historical situations in Japan and colonial Taiwan contested as well as promoted diverse colonial imaginaries. This poetry reflects both contemporary life and traditional poetics with few counterpoints in Western media. Methodologically, this book offers a defense of the public influence of poetry, each chapter enlisting a wide range of social and media theorists from Japan, Europe, and North America to explore specific historical moments in an original recasting of intertextuality as a vital feature of active inter-evental material engagements. In this book, rather than recite a standard survey of literary movements and key poets, the approach taken is to examine uses of poetry shown not only to support colonialism and imperialism, emerging objectionable forms of exploitation as well as the destruction of ecologies (including old-growth forests in Taiwan and the Fukushima Disaster), but also to present a medium of resistance, a minor literature for registering protest, forming transnational affiliations, and promoting grass-roots democracy. The book is based on years of research and fieldwork partially in conjunction with the production of a documentary film, Horizons of the Rising Sun: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Politics in the Taiwan Tanka Association Today (2017).

In contrast to the traditional Marxist interpretation of emerging capitalism and a revolutionary bourgeoisie, this book shows that commodified labor, fundamental to the existence of a capitalist bourgeoisie, did not take shape in eighteenth-century France. The mass of the population consisted of peasants and artisans in possession of land and workshops, and embedded in autonomous communities. The old regime bourgeoisie and nobility thus developed within the absolutist state in order to have the political means to impose feudal forms of exploitation on the people. These class relations explain the crisis of 1789 and the revolutionary conflicts of the 1790s.

This book examines the political career of Hua Guofeng, Mao's successor as paramount leader in 1976. Hua emerged seemingly out of nowhere following an unexceptional career as a young revolutionary in Shanxi and a provincial official in Hunan. It was in Hunan that Hua became well-known to Mao and Hua's loyalty to Mao while he was there, just when Mao needed it most, helped to facilitate Hua's later ascent to power. On emerging as paramount leader, Hua moved quickly to arrest his opponents, the Gang of Four. As head of party, state and military, Hua looked well set to remain in power indefinitely. Just over two years later Hua had been eclipsed by Deng Xiaoping, a more politically shrewd, progressive and charismatic figure, with a political legacy that far outweighed Hua's modest beginnings. If Hua's rise to power was remarkable, then this fall was even more so.

This volume of essays by a number of the foremost experts in the field examines the varieties of anti-fascism in inter-war Britain. Anti-fascism between the wars is still most frequently associated with the extreme left and its violent street confrontations with Mosley's British Union of Fascists. By extending the scope of anti-fascism to include center and right-wing opinion, and a wide range of institutions, this book breaks new ground. Chapters examine the state, political parties of left and right, the media, the churches, the involvement of women, and the responses of intellectuals. It also discusses the impact of European anti-fascist exiles and the legacy of anti-fascism on the post-war British Establishment.This volume examines the varieties of anti-fascism in inter-war Britain. Ordinarily anti-fascism is defined in terms of anti-fascist activism. By extending the scope of the concept, this book breaks new ground. Chapters examine political parties, the state, the media, women, the churches, and intellectuals.

Analysing the politics of the 2012 London Olympics, Stephen Wagg examines the framing of London's bid to host the Games, arguments about the Games' likely impact and the establishment of 'Fortress London' to protect the Games. The book asks who won, and who lost out, in this important event as well as exploring its media coverage and legacy.

In this second volume of his Lenin trilogy, Robert Service builds on the approach established in the first. He emphasises the extraordinary circumstances in Russia and the world enabling Lenin to come to power in 1917. He also details ways whereby Lenin led a turbulent Bolshevik party and adjusted its policies so as to gain authority in the soviets. Lenin the crafty and pragmatic politican as well as the utopian and merciless class warrior are portrayed.

This is a new single volume history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, examining the party from its foundation in 1920 to its demise in the early 1990s. Drawing on original research and a reading of specialist texts, the authors analyze the rise and fall of the party and evaluate its role on the left of British politics. While sympathetic to the ideals and commitment of many British communist activists, the book is sharply critical of much of the actual practice of the party.

In this age of overlapping and mutually reinforcing deep global crises (financial convulsions, global warming, mass migrations, militarism, inequality, selfish nation-states, etc.), there needs to be more realistic dialogue about radical alternatives to the status quo. Most literature produced heretofore has focused on the surface causes of these crises without much attention given to the sorts of major societal changes needed in order to deal with the crises we face. This book moves the debate beyond the critiques and the false or not fully realised alternatives, to focus on what can be termed "practical utopias". The contributors to this book outline a range of practical proposals for constructing pathways out of the global economic, ecological and social crisis. Varieties of Alternative Economic Systems eschews a single blueprint but insists on dealing directly with the deep structural problems and contradictions of contemporary global capitalism. It provides a diverse array of complementary proposals and perspectives that can inform both theoretical thinking and practical action. This volume will be of interest to academics and students who study political science, ecological economics, international politics and socialism.

The Falungong movement originated in 1992 as a system of breathing exercises designed to promote health and well-being. Riding on the coattails of the qigong fever that swept through China, it attracted an extensive following until 1994, when the Chinese government suppressed the qigong movement. A series of protest rallies by Falungong organizations against local government repression set in motion an upward conflict spiral that culminated in the siege of the Party headquarters in Beijing on April 25, 1999, by more than 20,000 Falungong practitioners. Revenge of the Forbidden City begins with the shock of the Politburo against such insolent defiance, resolving to retaliate against the Falungong, a retaliation that represented "the most serious political incident" since the Tiananmen upheaval in 1989.
James W. Tong reveals how the Chinese government's relentless, sustained repression of the Falungong movement typifies its response towards perceived internal threats. Though many claim that the Democratic reforms in China have eroded the government's ability to monitor and control its citizens, the success of the campaign to eradicate Falungong indicates otherwise: the government effectively implemented a multifaceted offensive involving unsparing suppression, pervasive propaganda, and coercive conversion. The successful execution of this complex campaign reveals the resilience of China's authoritarian institutions. Using empirical evidence and thorough analysis, Tong reveals the Chinese state's formidable ability to crush dissent and provides a cogent rebuttal to those who claim that the Communist government is on the verge of collapse. The definitive account of China's response to Falungong, Revenge of the Forbidden City is essential for any scholar interested in how the Chinese state actually operates.

Collins traces Communist strategy in the so-called Cold War from its ideological roots, through its successes, to the system's collapse. He demonstrates that Communist ideology made the Cold War inevitable, shaped Communist strategy and the resultant structure and purpose of Communist states, and assured that Soviet and other Communist states and party strategies would be subsets of a larger Communist world strategy. Collins challenges American perception and conduct of the Cold War as essentially a conflict between Great Powers in a bipolar world, demonstrating that it was in fact a real war, with its objective to create a Communist world. He illuminates the central role of internal strategy conflicts in fractionating the Communist world, and the direct linkage between the failure of Communist world strategy and the system's collapse. This is a major synthesis that will be of interest to scholars and researchers of international Communism and security issues as well as lay readers.

Using examples of democratic changes in former Communist states, Wejnert provides a dual-level conceptual framework that concentrates on objectification of the fundamental and unique roles of various mechanisms and components of transition. The first of these two levels is an integrative framework of the diverse social processes of transition. Here, the essays included examine the effects of global and domestic factors, and diffusion on the articulation of transition from communism. The second level is a similarly integrative framework of the interrelation of three distinct social entities of economy, polity, and culture as recorded at a time-point when the polity-economy-culture components of the transition are inserted into the processes of social change.

This collection brings together Eastern European, Russian, and American scholars as well as prominent political figures from democratically elected East European governments. Included are Jan Kavan, Vice-Prime Minister of the Czech Republic and Grzegorz Kolodko of Poland, the designer of the post-communist therapy economic plan. The theoretical and pratically oriented papers are enriched by the broad perspective of the book, making it particularly useful to scholars, students, and researchers of Eastern Europe and Russia.

What were Socialist Spaces? The Eastern Bloc produced distinctive spaces, some of which were fashioned from ideological templates, such as the monumental parade grounds and Red Squares where communist leaders could receive tributes, or new factory cities with towering chimneys and glittering palaces of culture. But what of the grimy toilet in the communal apartment or the forlorn ruins left after the Second World War?This book explores the representation, meanings and uses of space in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1947 and 1991. The essays - written from different disciplinary perspectives - investigate the extent to which actual spaces conformed to the dominant political order in the region. Should, for instance, the creation of private spaces, such as the Russian dacha and the Czech chata, be understood as acts of appropriation in which lives were fashioned against the collective or, alternatively, as 'gifts' given by the State in return for quiescence? Whilst monuments and public spaces were designed to relay official ideology, one of the most notable features of the events that marked the end of the Bloc was the way that they became sites of dissent. Examining the myriad ways in which space was used and conceived within socialist society, this book makes an essential contribution to Eastern European and Soviet Studies and provides significant new angles on the factors that underpinned socialism's eventual downfall.

What was known about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during his career was strictly limited by the secretive Soviet government. Little more information was available after he was ousted and became a "non-person" in the USSR in 1964. This pathbreaking book draws for the first time on a wealth of newly released materials -- documents from secret former Soviet archives, memoirs of long-silent witnesses, the full memoirs of the premier himself -- to assemble the best-informed analysis of the Khrushchev years ever completed. The contributors to this volume include Russian, Ukrainian, American, and British scholars; a former key foreign policy aide to Khrushchev; the executive secretary of a Russian commission investigating Soviet-era repressions and rehabilitations; and Khrushchev's own son Sergei.

The book presents and interprets new information on Khrushchev's struggle for power, public attitudes toward him, his role in agricultural reform and cultural politics, and such foreign policy issues as East-West relations, nuclear strategy, and relations with Germany. It also chronicles Khrushchev's years in Ukraine where he grew up and began his political career, serving as Communist party boss from 1938 to 1949, and his role in mass repressions of the 1930s and in destalinization in the 1950s and 1960s. Two concluding chapters compare the regimes of Khrushchev and Gorbachev as they struggled to reform Communism, to humanize and modernize the Soviet system, and to answer the haunting question that persists today: Is Russia itself reformable?

In light of the events of the late 1980's and early 1990's, one might naively suppose that capitalism has emerged entirely victorious over communism, and hence that the former is practically and philosophically justified by its historical dominance. Even so-called "analytical Marxists" argue that in his later works Marx abandons his earlier "humanistic" perspective and with it his conception of "alienation." So then, is Francis Fukuyama correct to assert that we now have a glimpse of "the end of history," given that capitalism has seemingly triumphed over its alternatives? Some authors, such as David Schweickart, answer with a resounding, no. He is adamant that, "getting beyond capitalism is the best hope for our species," and although he does his best to offer an alternative to contemporary capitalism, his model is fraught with difficulties and still does not answer the question of the application of Marx's theory of alienation to contemporary society. This book argues that, to the contrary, Marx does not abandon the concept of alienation, and (contrary to the analytical Marxists and pro-capitalists) that its application is still relevant to today's economy and world. This account analyses at least four fundamental manifestations of the corrosive nature of American-style capitalism: excessive consumerism, negative effects of globalization, cruel economic inequalities between persons, and a deep "irrational exuberance" intensifying our interaction in the material world (from the pace of our work-lives to our relation to the environment). Padgett argues that new forms of these four traditional aspects of alienation outlined by Marx are still present in our world, and hence that Marx's analyses of negative aspects of capitalism are still widely relevant today.

This book provides, in one volume, primary sources by Marx and critical commentary which relates Marxism to contemporary social and political topics. It includes six brief works by Marx and ten articles by scholars, sympathetic to, but critical of, Marxism. For example, the author includes the classic essay by Heidi Hartmann which criticizes Marxism for misunderstanding gender oppression, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism." No previous anthology of Marx has combined both brief works by Marx and multiple critical essays elaborating on his themes or engaging the shortcomings of his arguments.

This volume bases a clear and unbiased account of Communist philosophy on the Marxian Materialist Concept of History and Marxian Theory of Value. The spear-head of Marxism is its doctrine of class-struggle and from this Laski sets out on in his exposition of the Communist attitude. Although first published in 1927, the intervening years have in no way detracted from the intrinsic value of this enlightening study, regarded by many as the essential textbook for the understanding of this subject.

This collection investigates the state of play in studies informed by Marxism. It includes an essay on state theory by Bob Jessop, a discussion of fundamental socialist values using analytical Marxism by Alan Carling, an introduction to Fromm's humanist Marxism by Lawrence Wilde, and pieces on Marxism and ecology, Marxism and feminism, the debate between Marxists and post Marxists, the democratic Marxism of Hal Draper, the confrontation between Marxism and Liberalism, and Marxism's place in the history of political thought.

The Chinese system is like no other known to man, now or in history. This book explains how the system works and where it may be moving. Drawing on Chinese and international sources, on extensive collaboration with Chinese scholars, and on the political science of state analysis, Stein Ringen concludes that under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, the system of government has been transformed into a new regime radically harder and more ideological than the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. China is less strong economically and more dictatorial politically than the world has wanted to believe. By analyzing the leadership of Xi Jinping, the meaning of "socialist market economy," corruption, the party-state apparatus, the reach of the party, the mechanisms of repression, taxation and public services, and state-society relations, The Perfect Dictatorship broadens the field of China studies, as well as the fields of political economy, comparative politics, development, and welfare state studies.

Historical Materialism and Social Evolution brings together a collection of essays which investigate the relationship between Marxist thought and Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Each of the contributors emphasize the idea that the distinctive character of progressive social thought is derived from creative ideas drawn from the study of natural evolutionary processes.

Neal Riemer presents, analyzes, and criticizes Marx's guiding values, his social scientific criticism of the existing 19th century order, his theory of revolutionary action, and his views of the future of economics, politics, society, and culture.

The Revolutions of 1989 were a surprise to Kremlinologists because their models of change overestimated the staying power of ruling communist elites; at the same time civil society was able to form alternative political cultures which undermined the legitimacy of the socialist order. The Revolutions were the result of a prolonged systemic crisis of communism, combined with the unwillingness of Gorbachev to use force to maintain the Eastern European rulers in power. Civil society lost its fear of the repressive apparatus of the communist system as the ruling elites became increasingly disunited as to how to best respond to the crisis. After the Revolutions, other surprises were in store as the transition unfolded and the process of democratic consolidation encountered unanticipated obstacles.

Weiner details these issues in one of the most up-to-date examinations of change in East Europe. After reviewing the history of the region and the imposition of communism, he analyzes the collapse of communism and the efforts to create stable alternatives country-by-country. In addition, he examines models of change and the foreign policies of the region. An indispensable guide to the area that will be of value to political scientists and others concerned with contemporary Eastern Europe.

The purpose of this translated volume Tadeusz Kowalik's book is to examine Rosa Luxemburg's contribution to economic theory. The essential subject-matter is the dependence of capital accumulation on effective demand, the dependence of economic growth on specific capitalist barriers to growth.

Richard Muller, a leading figure of the German Revolution in 1918, is unknown today. As the operator and unionist who represented Berlin's metalworkers, he was main organiser of the 'Revolutionary Stewards', a clandestine network that organised a series of mass strikes between 1916 and 1918. With strong support in the factories, the Revolutionary Stewards were the driving force of the Revolution. By telling Muller's story, this study gives a very different account of the revolutionary birth of the Weimar Republic. Using new archival sources and abandoning the traditional focus on the history of political parties, Ralf Hoffrogge zooms in on working class politics on the shop floor and its contribution to social change. First published in German by Karl Dietz Verlag as Richard Muller - Der Mann hinter der November Revolution, Berlin, 2008, this english edition was completerly revised for the english speaking audience and contains new sources and recent literature.