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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Marxism & Communism
How do post-communist museums and cinema contribute to shaping the
image of a communist past in contemporary Central and Eastern
Europe? This is the first systematic analysis of the use of visual
techniques in grasping what the previous regime means. After the
past was lost in 1989 in the former communist world, museums and
memorials started mushrooming all over East and Central Europe.
While reflecting on possible, actual meanings of the lost history
the aim of shaping public opinion and discourse of the recent
communist past also became apparent. Most of these undertakings -
movies included - tried hard to make political use of recollections
of the earlier world, and employed select tools from contemporary
museological, memorializing and new-media practice to make their
politicized intent historically credible. Thirteen essays from
scholars in the region deal with the use of new media in shaping
and fashioning popular perception of the previous era, and provide
a fresh approach to the subject.
"Home Front" examines the gendered exploitation of labor in the
household from a postmodern Marxian perspective. The authors of
this volume use the anti-foundationalist Marxian economic theories
first formulated by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff to explore
power, domination, and exploitation in the modern household.
The thought of Antonio Gramsci continues to enjoy widespread appeal
in contemporary political and social theory. This book draws
together some of the world's leading scholars on Gramsci to
critically explore key ideas, debates and themes in his work in an
accessible manner, relating them to contemporary politics and
society.
Young adult science fiction novel written by Harold L. Goodwin
under the pseudonym Blake Savage. Illustrated.
A major and timely re-examination of key areas in the social and
political thought of Hegel and Marx. The editors' extensive
introduction surveys the development of the connection from the
Young Hegelians through the main Marxist thinkers to contemporary
debates. Leading scholars including Terrell Carver, Chris Arthur
and Gary Browning debate themes such as: the nature of the
connection itself; scientific method; political economy; the
Hegelian basis to Marx's 'Doctoral Dissertation'; human needs;
history and international relations.
Subject of numerous interpretations and studies, the vicissitudes
of the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research nevertheless
still reserve some little-known pages, such as the human and
scientific relationship that bound philosopher Max Horkheimer and
economist Friedrich Pollock for over fifty years. Based on texts
and letters translated here into English for the first time as well
as some previously unpublished documents, the book reconstructs the
crucial moments in the friendship between the two scholars with a
narrative style and philological accuracy. Nicola Emery accompanies
us through the two friends and intellectuals' "nonconformism" and
search for an alternative life-form that led to the birth of the
Frankfurt critical theory.
All the great political revolutions of the twentieth century
referred back to Marx. Reviled by some, revered by many, Marx's
influence can be found in every area of the humanities and social
sciences from literary criticism to globalization. In this
thoroughly revised and updated new edition of his classic
biography, David McLellan provides a clear and detailed account
both of Marx's dramatic life and of his path-breaking thought
together with a wealth of bibliographical information for further
reading.
The fourth edition of Marxism after Marx is an updated version of
what has become the classic account of Twentieth-century Marxism.
It includes new bibliographical information and sections covering
developments since the previous edition. This new edition
represents a comprehensive and reliable guide to one of the most
influential bodies of thought of the Twentieth century.
In this study, distinguished international contributors project an
'open' Marxism - a rejection of the determinism and positivism
which characterise so much of contemporary left-wing thought.
Topics covered in the two volumes include Marxism and political
economy, historical materialism, dialectics, state theory, class,
fetishism and the periodisation of capitalist development.
In this short, but rich piece of work, Erzsebet Szalai offers a
neo-socialist alternative to socialism and neo-capitalism. Drawing
upon the fertile tradition of left-wing Hungarian Social Science,
she offers her own theory of transitional society, suggesting that
socialism was not an independent formation, but instead a society
in transition. She relocates soviet-type societies on the
semi-periphery of the capitalist world system. In addition she
offers a critique of capitalism that pivots on the two connected
issues of over production and ecological crisis. She makes the
distinction between an anti-globalism critique and a globalization
critique, locating herself in the latter. This work offers readers
the opportunity to engage in a critique of capitalism that is
organized along a new understanding of socialism itself.
Catalonia: A New History revises many traditional and romantic
conceptions in the historiography of a small nation. This book
engages with the scholarship of the past decade and separates
nationalist myth-history from real historical processes. It is thus
able to provide the reader with an analytical account, situating
each historical period within its temporal context. Catalonia
emerges as a territory where complex social forces interact, where
revolts and rebellions are frequent. This is a contested terrain
where political ideologies have sought to impose their
interpretation of Catalan reality. This book situates Catalonia
within the wider currents of European and Spanish history, from
pre-history to the contemporary independence movement, and makes an
important contribution to our understanding of nation-making.
In this study of the mechanisms of transitional justice in Poland,
Frances Millard asks: How does society come to terms with its past?
How should it punish the perpetrators of oppression and acknowledge
its victims? In the former communist countries of Central and
Eastern Europe the task of answering these questions came down to
the need to eliminate the communist parties' hold over the state,
the economy and society in order to move towards democracy. Millard
argues that the key step in achieving this was uncovering the truth
about the previous regime's past, prosecuting the perpetrators of
past crimes and providing compensation and restitution for its
victims. Through the specific case of Poland, Millard provides a
comprehensive assessment of the mechanisms and institutions used to
achieve this, such as lustration, law enforcement through a
Constitutional Tribunal and institutions dedicated to dealing with
the past such as the Institute of National Remembrance. Crucially,
these processes have assumed new significance in recent years after
the Law and Justice Party came to power in 2015, using transitional
justice as a tool of political control which has enabled the
restructuring of Polish democracy.
In contrast to the dissident movements of Eastern Europe, the East
German movement remained committed to the 'revisionist' reform of
the communist regime. This book tries to explain why. It is argued
that the peculiarities of German history and culture prevented the
possibility of a 'national' opposition to communism. As a result,
East German dissidents had to remain in a paradoxical way 'loyal'
to the old regime.
Brucan, a former Romanian ambassador to the United States and the
United Nations, provides the first social history of the remarkable
transition from communism to capitalism in Russia and Eastern
Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He begins with an
examination of the old social structure in communist societies,
which used to be cosmetically advertised by the party and
officialdom, paying particular attention to the nomenklatura, who
have miraculously transformed themselves into big businessmen and
bankers. A chapter is devoted to the decline of the working class,
whom Brucan shows to be the big loser in the revolution. He then
examines the new social stratification, illustrating how the new
classes are taking shape under the conditions created by market
reform. The symbiosis between capital and power is analyzed in
depth, and Ambassador Brucan concludes his study with a look at the
direction the social transformations are pushing these societies,
particularly the separate paths being followed by Russia and
Eastern Europe. This is an important study for researchers,
scholars, and policy makers involved with Russia and Eastern
Europe.
Through a series of interconnected articles, this book makes
available a range of international authors for an English
readership. Topics covered include: Marzism and political economy,
historical materialism, dialectics, state theory, class crisis,
fetishism and the periodization of capitalist development. Picking
up where the debates of the 1970s left off, these collections
assess current debates in Marxist theory and project an "open"
Marxism by way of critical response to the determinism and
positivism which characterize much of contemporary left-wing
thought.
Over the past decades, waves of political contention involving the
use of information and communication technologies have swept across
the globe. The phenomenon stimulates the scholarship on digital
communication technologies and contentious collective action to
thrive as an exciting, relevant, but highly fragmentary and
contested field with disciplinary boundaries. To advance
interdisciplinary understanding, Shifting Dynamics of Contention in
the Digital Age outlines a communication-centered framework that
articulates the intricate relationship between technology,
communication, and contention. It systematically explores the
influence of mobile technology on political contention in China,
the country with the world's largest number of mobile and internet
users. Using first-hand in-depth interview and fieldwork data,
Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age tracks the
strategic choice of mobile phones as repertoires of contention,
illustrates the effective mobilization of mobile communication on
the basis of its strong and reciprocal social ties, and identifies
the communicative practice of forwarding officially alleged
"rumors" as a form of everyday resistance. Through this
groundbreaking study, Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the
Digital Age presents a nuanced portrayal of an emerging dynamics of
contention-both its strengths and limitations- through the
embedding of mobile communication into Chinese society and
politics.
This book examines the uses made of anthropology by Marx and
Engels, and the uses made of Marxism by anthropologists. Looking at
the writings of Marx and Engels on primitive societies, the book
evaluates their views in the light of present knowledge and draws
attention to inconsistencies in their analysis of pre-capitalist
societies. These inconsistencies can be traced to the influence of
contemporary anthropologists who regarded primitive societies as
classless. As Marxist theory was built around the idea of class,
without this concept the conventional Marxist analysis foundered.
First published in 1983.
First published in 1867, Capital, or Das Kapital, is the infamous
treatise on economics and capitalism by Prussian revolutionary KARL
MARX (1818-1883), who changed history with his 1848 book The
Communist Manifesto. In this work, edited by Marx's friend, German
philosopher FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820-1895), Marx systematically
analyzes the way the capitalist machine functions. In this academic
work written for students and serious thinkers, he explores wages,
competition, banking, rent, and the natural laws that seem to
govern the development of capitalism without any oversight by the
society in which it developed. Originally published in three
volumes, Capital is here presented in five volumes. Volume III,
Part 1 covers: . The Conversion of Surplus-Value into Profit and of
the Rate of Surplus-Value into the Rate of Profit . Conversion of
Profit into Average Profit . The Law of the Falling Tendency of the
Rate of Profit . Transformation of Commodity-Capital and
Money-Capital Into Commercial Capital and Financial Capital .
Division of Profit Into Interest and Profits of Enterprise
Since the 1920s, scholars have promoted a set of manuscripts, long
abandoned by Marx and Engels, to canonical status in book form as
The German Ideology, and in particular its 'first chapter,' known
as 'I. Feuerbach.' Part one of this revolutionary study relates in
detail the political history through which these manuscripts were
editorially fabricated into editions and translations, so that they
could represent an important exposition of Marx's 'theory of
history.' Part two presents a wholly-original view of the so-called
'Feuerbach' manuscripts in a page-by-page English-language
rendition of these discontinuous fragments. By including the
hitherto devalued corrections that each author made in draft, the
new text invites the reader into a unique laboratory for their
collaborative work. An 'Analytical Introduction' shows how Marx's
and Engels's thinking developed in duologue as they altered
individual words and phrases on these 'left-over' polemical pages.
For many years a neglected figure, Nikolai Bukharin has recently
been the subject of renewed interest in the West. Now regarded as a
leading Marxist theorist, Bukharin's work has wide appeal to those
interested in Soviet history and Marxist economics as well as to
those concerned with theories of development and socialist
economies.
Volume One analyses the intellectual sources and evolution of
Marx's critique of political economy leading up the writing of the
main Capital manuscripts (1844-1860). The volume: * Provides a
clear illustration of the contents of the texts in a way that
enables readers to understand the intellectual influences on Marx *
Clarifies Marx's own view of what he was trying to achieve through
his critique of political economy * The themes of value, income
distribution and the law of motion of capitalism are traced to
their origins.
Containing footnotes and an extensive bibliography, this edition of
Franz Mehring's classic biography is designed to assist the
English-speaking reader towards a better understanding of Marx, his
work and a history of Marxism. The book is divided into parts as
follows: Early Years; A Pupil of Hegel; Exile in Paris; Friedrich
Engels; Exile in Brussels; Revolution and Counter-Revolution; Exile
in London; Marx and Engels; The Crimean War and the Crisis;
Dynastic Changes; The Early Years of the International; 'Das
Kapital'; The Zenith and Decline of the International; The Last
Decade.
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