This book considers Karl Marx's ideas in relation to the social and political context in which he lived and wrote. It emphasizes both the continuity of his commitment to the cause of full human emancipation, and the role of his critique of political economy in conceiving history to be the history of class struggles. The book follows his developing ideas from before he encountered political economy, through the politics of 1848 and the Bonapartist "farce,", the maturation of the critique of political economy in the Grundrisse and Capital, and his engagement with the politics of the First International and the legacy of the Paris Commune. Notwithstanding errors in historical judgment largely reflecting the influence of dominant liberal historiography, Marx laid the foundations for a new social theory premised upon the historical consequences of alienation and the potential for human freedom.

Shows that the communist system in science and higher education was created less by an intentionally-imposed Soviet model than by the pressures and agendas developed within communist societies to reshape science and learning in successive periods of upheaval and consolidation. The communist academic regime was considerably more complex and historically contingent than previously recognized, as the persistence of many of its features after the fall of communism demonstrates.

The latest archival research by an international team of scholars is brought together to produce the first comparative treatment of the periods of upheaval that shaped the rise and fall of the communist academic regime in Russia and East Central Europe. This volume sheds new light on the question of a Soviet model by examining how a particular Soviet system of science and higher education emerged, how it was exported and imported across varying local, national and international settings, and how key aspects of it outlived the political system that fostered it. The contemporary crises in science and higher education surrounding the demise of communism appear as a distinctive break from the patterns set into motion in the 1920s and 30s, but also as one more upheaval following a long line of previous reorderings throughout the 20th century that were conditioned by broader cataclysms in politics, society, ideology, and culture.

First published in 1985, Thomas Sowell's book is a crisp, lucid and commonsensical introduction to Marx's own writings and to Marxist theory. It combines readability with intellectual rigour and distils more than a quarter of a century of Thomas Sowell's research and thought on the philosophical and economic doctrines of Karl Marx. Its central theme is that Marxian philosophy must be understood before Marxian economics can be defined. The book discusses Marx's ideas, including his philosophy of history, concept of capitalist "exploitation", morality and business cycle theory. The author's treatment is balanced, though often critical and displays a mastery of Marx's own writings which are liberally extracted throughout the text.

How would Marx have understood twenty-first-century capitalism? For Buzgalin and Kolganov, the answer lies in a theoretical investigation of how and why the fundamental elements of capitalism- commodities, money and capital - have changed since the publication of Marx's Capital more than 150 years ago. Introducing the concepts of social creativity, markets for simulacra and virtual fictitious capital - Buzgalin and Kolganov offer a recovery and development of Marx's understanding of social transformations. Twenty-first century capitalism not only demonstrates Marxism's relevance to the core economic questions of our time and its superiority over neoclassical economics, but it leads English-language readers into the 'undiscovered country' of Soviet and post-Soviet critical Marxism. How might modern Marxism respond to the contemporary challenges of the commodification of knowledge and information? And can it arrive at something resembling a Capital for the twenty-first century? This accessible and comprehensive account is essential reading for those wanting to understand the problems of the modern economy. -- .

This book explores the role of coercion in the relationship between the citizens and regimes of communist Eastern Europe. Looking in detail at Soviet collectivisation in 1928-34, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Polish Solidarity Movement of 1980-84, it shows how the system excluded channels to enable popular grievances to be translated into collective opposition; how this lessened the amount of popular protest, affected the nature of such protest as did occur and entrenched the dominance of state over society.

Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. The essays collected here reveal the range and depth of her thinking, with Taylor tackling the rising popularity of socialism, the problem of automation, the politics of listening, the possibility of rights for the natural and non-human world, the future of the university, the temporal challenge of climate catastrophe, and more. Addressing some of the most pressing social problems of our day, Taylor invites us to imagine how things could be different while never losing sight of the strategic question of how change actually happens. Curious and searching, these historically informed and hopeful essays are as engaging as they are challenging and as urgent as they are timeless. Taylor 's unique philosophical style has a political edge that speaks directly to the growing conviction that a radical transformation of our economy and society is required.

This book provides a concise overview of Marx's philosophy and political economy, tracing various changes of his theoretical views over time through his practical and theoretical engagements with contradictions of capitalism from the unique perspective of Japanese Marxism. While it offers an objective introduction to Marx's critique of capitalism, Sasaki uniquely pays particular attention to the concept of "metabolism," whose disruption under the capitalist mode of production causes exhaustion of labour-power as well as natural resources. Sasaki reconstructs Marx as a revolutionary thinker, whose devoted his entire life for the sake of establishing a more free and equal society beyond capitalism. Sasaki's book shows that Marx's passion for the socialist revolution in his last years is recorded in his late excerpt notebooks that become available through the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.

How did Ludwig van Beethoven help overthrow a tsarist regime? With the establishment of the Russian Musical Society and its affiliated branches throughout the empire, Beethoven's music reached substantially larger audiences at a time of increasing political instability. In addition, leading music critics of the regime began hearing Beethoven's dramatic works as nothing less than a call to revolution. Beethoven in Russia deftly explores the interface between music and politics in Russia by examining the reception of Beethoven's works from the late 18th century to the present. In part 1, Frederick W. Skinner's clear and sweeping review examines the role of Beethoven's more dramatic works in the revolutionary struggle that culminated in the Revolution of 1917. In part 2, Skinner reveals how this same power was again harnessed to promote Stalin's campaign of rapid industrialization. The appropriation of Beethoven and his music to serve the interests of the state remained the hallmark of Soviet Beethoven reception until the end of communist rule. With interdisciplinary appeal in the areas of history, music, literature, and political thought, Beethoven in Russia shows how Beethoven's music served as a call to action for citizens and weaponized state propaganda in the great political struggles that shaped modern Russian history.

A spellbinding new biography of Stalin in his formative years This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the twentieth century's most ruthless dictators. In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a wealth of new archival evidence from Stalin's early years in the Caucasus to chart the psychological metamorphosis of the young Stalin, taking readers from his boyhood as a Georgian nationalist and romantic poet, through his harsh years of schooling, to his commitment to violent engagement in the underground movement to topple the tsarist autocracy. Stalin emerges as an ambitious climber within the Bolshevik ranks, a resourceful leader of a small terrorist band, and a writer and thinker who was deeply engaged with some of the most incendiary debates of his time. A landmark achievement, Stalin paints an unforgettable portrait of a driven young man who abandoned his religious faith to become a skilled political operative and a single-minded and ruthless rebel.

In Marxism's uneasy relationship with ethics a small number of theorists considered it imperative to develop the moral principles implicit in Marx's social theory. They created a humanistic Marxism in stark contrast to the crude approach of Stalinism. This collection brings together analyses by leading scholars on those thinkers who made signifiant contributions to ethical thinking within the Marxist tradition—Kautsky, Bloch, Fromm, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Macpherson, and Heller.

This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression. In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation. Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.

Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

First published in 1978, this book rapidly established itself as a classic of modern Marxism. Cohen's masterful application of advanced philosophical techniques in an uncompromising defence of historical materialism commanded widespread admiration. In the ensuing twenty years, the book has served as a flagship of a powerful intellectual movement - analytical Marxism. In this expanded edition Cohen offers his own account of the history, and the further promise, of analytical Marxism. He also expresses reservations about traditional historical materialism, in the light of which he reconstructs the theory, and he studies the implications for historical materialism of the demise of the Soviet Union.

In this book the experiential history of the Soviet-style social transformation projects between 1945 and 1980 is discussed through the example of rural Hungary. The book interprets state socialism as a (modernization) project. Existing socialism was a form of dictatorship in which authorities sought to transform the mentalities of their subjects from the individual level to the global scale. This project depended on socio-economic homogenization; one important method of asserting state power was the transformation of property rights (land redistribution, collectivization). Communist modernization discriminated against the inhabitants of rural areas, who were the primary victims of collectivization and the discriminatory effects of the rules implemented by policymakers. The resulting radical changes in peasant lifestyles would become a source of social pathologies. However, not the authorities but contemporary scholars considered the social costs of these actions. The book aims at Weberian disenchantment and contributes to the deconstruction of the common image of Hungarian socialism, "the happiest barrack". The intended audience includes readers at the graduate level in the fields of history, political science, and anthropology, general readers interested in the history of communism. It is hoped that the research questions inspire new research for exploring convergent and divergent elements in social transformation in former communist countries.

This new work (the first in a two-volume series) by the leading Marxian philosopher of our day is a milestone in human self-understanding. It focuses on the location where action emerges from freedom and necessity, thefoundation of all social science.

Today, as never before, the investigation of the close relationship between social structure--defined by Marx as "arising from the life-process of definite individuals"--and the various forms of consciousness is particularly important. We can only perceive what is possible by first identifying the historical process that constrains consciousness itself and therefore social action.

The relationship between social structure and forms of consciousness discussed in this volume is multifaceted and profoundly dialectical. It requires the presentation of a great wealth of historical material and the assessment of the relevant philosophical literature, from Descartes through Hegel and the Liberal tradition to the present, together with their connections with political economy and political theory. Istvan Meszaros moves beyond both abstract solutions to the surveyed methodological questions and one-sided structuralist evaluation of the important substantive issues, bringing the process of our understanding of social structure and consciousness to a level not previously attained.

Above all, in the spirit of the Marxian approach, even the most complicated problems are always analyzed in relation to the major practical concerns of our time. The primary aim of this work is to outline the dialectical intelligibility of historical development toward a viable societal reproductive order. Social Structures and Forms of Consciousness is of the highest importance as both a political and philosophical work, illuminating the place from where we must act, today."

This book addresses tourism and its development in the post-communist context of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Although it has been over 30 years since many countries of Central and Eastern Europe embarked on the path of transition from state socialism to capitalism and liberal democracy, the ongoing atrocious events in Ukraine bluntly remind us that the perception of CEE as a ‘transition’ region may have been done away with too early and that the legacies of communism continue to influence the reality of the region. Tourism is no exception here. While on the one hand, tourism has significantly contributed to the post-communist restructuring of CEE, on the other, the communist heritage has played (and still plays) an important role in shaping the tourism geographies of the CEE region. The book consists of 14 chapters (divided into two sections), a new introduction and a reflective concluding section. All 14 main chapters in this book were originally published in the Tourism Geographies journal. The aim of the book is two-fold. First, it summarises, distils and highlights the important and often ground-breaking contributions Tourism Geographies has made over the years to the debate on tourism in CEE. Second, it lays foundations for further research on tourism in the post-communist states of CEE. This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in various disciplines – human geography, politics, sociology, and tourism studies in general.

Through empirical analysis and conceptual development, this book analyzes the political psychology of Xi Jinping's Anticorruption Campaign and its role in the Chinese political system. Using Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment and data collected from direct fieldwork, the book analyzes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictatorship, revealing that it is prone to extremes, through ideology or corruption, and highlights how the Party’s attempts to address one extreme only leads to the rise of another. In turn, it examines the Anticorruption Campaign in multiple ways including its use to increase the role of ideology in Chinese society, how it functions to concentrate Xi's power, its cultural form as a status reversal ritual, and its continuity with previous communist campaigns and ancient Chinese political traditions. Through each of these analyses, the book identifies crucial mechanisms through which the CCP maintains power through interrelated policies, actions, and their emotional effects. Providing a vital understanding of the CCP, this book will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars of Chinese politics, as well as diplomats and policymakers on China.

This book explores the idea that alternatives to our present condition are available in the present, such that a search for alternatives must involve rigorous study of some of its central texts, events, and thinkers. Through engagement with selected modern thinkers, texts, and events, it imagines a different future from the position of the current postcolonial moment, indicating the possibilities that emerge from the present and which shape contemporary radical thinking. An invitation to imagine a possible future marked with alternative possibilities of conducting struggles, and living through contentions and social restructuring, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social and political theory, political philosophy, colonialism and postcolonialism, and historical materialism.

In Marx After Marx, Harry Harootunian questions the claims of Western Marxism and its presumption of the final completion of capitalism. If this shift in Marxism reflected the recognition that the expected revolutions were not forthcoming in the years before World War II, its Cold War afterlife helped to both unify the West in its struggle with the Soviet Union and bolster the belief that capitalism remained dominant in the contest over progress. This book deprovincializes Marx and the West's cultural turn by returning to the theorist's earlier explanations of capital's origins and development, which followed a trajectory beyond Euro-America to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Marx's expansive view shows how local circumstances, time, and culture intervened to reshape capital's system of production in these regions. His outline of a diversified global capitalism was much more robust than was his sketch of the English experience in Capital and helps explain the disparate routes that evolved during the twentieth century. Engaging with the texts of Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and other pivotal theorists, Harootunian strips contemporary Marxism of its cultural preoccupation by reasserting the deep relevance of history.

Crises and Hegemonic Transitions reworks the concept of hegemony at the international level and analyses its relation to world market crises. Returning to the critical edition of Gramsci's Quaderni and maintaining that the author's work is permeated by Marx's Capital and the law of value, Fusaro argues that imperialist states strive to constructing hegemonic relations in order to secure capital accumulation using domination and leadership, coercion and consensus, and that economic crises have only the potential to provoke crises of hegemony. Tracing the vicissitudes of US hegemony from the interwar period to the present and assessing the Great Depression's and the Great Recession's impact, Fusaro provides a novel way to interpret past and present developments within the world economy.

When originally published in 1984, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan provided the first focused consideration of the 1978 Saur Revolution and the subsequent Soviet invasion and occupation of the country. Nearly four decades later, its conclusions remain crucial to understanding Afghanistan today. In this much-anticipated re-release, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan offers an opportunity for fresh insight into the antecedents of the nation's enduring conflicts. A new foreword by editors M. Nazif Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield contextualizes this collection, which relies on extensive fieldwork in the years leading up to the Soviet invasion. Specific tribal, ethnic, and gender groups are considered within the context of their region, and contributors discuss local responses to government decrees, Islamic-inspired grassroots activism, and interpretations of jihad outside of Kabul. Long recognized as a vital ethnographic text in Afghan studies, Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan provides an extraordinary chance to experience the diversity of the Afghan people on the cusp of irrevocable change and to understand what they expected of the years ahead.

The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Marxism covers of the basics of Karl Marx s thought, the philosophical contributions of later Marxist theorists, and the extensive real-world political organizations and structures his work inspired that is, the myriad political parties, organizations, countries, and leaders who subscribed to Marxism as a creed. This text includes a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, both thinkers and doers; political parties and movements; and major communist or ex-communist countries. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Marxism."