This book explores how the communist cult of the individual was not just a Soviet phenomenon but an international one. When Stalin died in 1953, the communists of all countries united in mourning the figure that was the incarnation of their cause. Though its international character was one of the distinguishing features of the communist cult of personality, this is the first extended study to approach the phenomenon over the longer period of its development in a truly transnational and comparative perspective. Crucially it is concerned with the internationalisation of the Soviet cults of Lenin and Stalin. But it also ranges across different periods and national cases to consider a wider cast of bureaucrats, tribunes, heroes and martyrs who symbolised both resistance to oppression and the tyranny of the party-state. Through studying the disparate ways in which the cults were manifested, Kevin Morgan not only takes in many of the leading personalities of the communist movement, but also some of the cultural luminaries like Picasso and Barbusse who sought to represent them. The cult of the individual was one of the most fascinating, troubling and revealing features of Stalinist communism, and as reconstructed here it offers new insight into one of the defining political movements of the twentieth century.

There's really no escaping it: if you want to understand capitalism, you simply have to read Karl Marx's "Capital". But this is easier said than done. "Capital" is Marx's magnum opus - consisting of more than 2,000 pages, over three volumes. It is a masterpiece of analysis, of relentlessly methodical and logical reasoning. So is "Capital" only for the expert? No. "Capital" can be read - and understood - by beginners as well, provided they are guided into it. Which is exactly what this volume does. Seven leading Marxist scholars lay out the conceptual framework of "Capital" as well as investigate its various themes in essays written specially for this Reader. Moreover, each of the authors has taken care to not limit him/herself to only preliminary explication of concepts, and has also gone into matters of advanced theory. The volume as a whole also has a broadly similar trajectory - the first couple of essays lay the foundation, the middle four essays graduate from basic concepts to theoretical discussion and debates, and the last essay does not go into basic concepts at all, but applies the method of "Capital" to theorise about contemporary capitalism. This introductory Reader, then, does two things: it equips new readers with the basic conceptual keys that could unlock the vast treasure trove of Marx's analysis and insights, as well as offering fresh insights into Marx's magnificent work to the initiated.

Part of a definitive English-language edition, prepared in collaboration with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow, which contains all the works of Marx and Engels, whether published in their lifetimes or since. The series includes their complete correspondence and newly discovered works.

Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China traces the totalitarian elements that linger in China's governing policies and practices, such as extra-legal Anti-Corruption Campaign, great concentration of power in one man, increasing intolerance, increasing propaganda, increasing indoctrination, increasing self-criticism inside the Party, expansion of Party cells across society, increasing censorship, cult of personality, and mass incarceration in Xinjiang. Steven P. Feldman develops a concept of pre-totalitarianism to explore these developments through extensive field data, including interviews with business executives, professors, lawyers, and non-profit executives, and observations of daily life. Feldman argues that Chinese political culture, based on the core principle of small group loyalties is inherently unstable, resulting in an ongoing tendency for leaders to concentrate power to survive and accomplish their goals. Under communist dictatorial political organization, totalitarian domination is always a temptation and risk.

Spanning twenty-five years, this historic collection of writings shows Vaclav Havel's evolution from a modestly known playwright who had the courage to advise and criticize Czechoslovakia's leaders to a newly elected president whose first address to his fellow citizens begins, "I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you." Some of the pieces in Open Letters, such as "Dear Dr. Husak" and the essay "The Power of the Powerless," are by now almost legendary for their influence on a generation of Eastern European dissidents; others, such as some of Havel's prison correspondence and his private letter to Alexander Dubcek, appear in English for the first time. All of them bear the unmistakable imprint of Havel's intellectual rigor, moral conviction, and unassuming eloquence, while standing as important additions to the world's literature of conscience.

The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949. Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions.

The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949. Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions.

This Handbook provides the first in-depth analysis of non-violent extremism across different ideologies and geographic centres, a topic overshadowed until now by the political and academic focus on violent and jihadi extremism in the Global North. Whilst acknowledging the potentiality of non-violent extremism as a precursor to terrorism, this Handbook argues that non-violent extremism ought to be considered a stand-alone area of study. Focusing on Islamist, Buddhist, Hindu, far-right, far-left, environmentalist and feminist manifestations, the Handbook discusses the ideological foundation of their 'war on ideas' against the prevailing socio-political and cultural systems in which they operate, and provides an empirical examination of their main claims and perspectives. This is supplemented by a truly global overview of non-violent extremist groups not only in Europe and the United States, but also in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Middle East. The Handbook thus answers a call to decolonise knowledge that is especially prescient given both the complicity of non-violent extremists with authoritarian states and the dynamic of oppression towards more progressive groups in the Global South. The Handbook will appeal to those studying extremism, radicalisation and terrorism and intersects several relevant disciplines, including social movement studies, political science, criminology, Islamic studies and anthropology.

This book explores a variety of interconnected themes central to contemporary Marxist theory and its further development as a critical social theory. Championing the critique of political economy as a critical theory of society and rejecting Marxian economics as a contradiction in terms, it argues instead that economic categories are perverted social categories, before identifying the sheer unrest of life - the struggle to make ends meet - as the negative content of the reified system of economic objectivity. With class struggle recognised as the negative category of the cold society of capitalist wealth, which sees in humanity a living resource for economic progress, the author contends that the critique of class society finds its rational solution in the society of human purposes, that is, the classless society of communist individuals. A theoretically sophisticated engagement with Marxist thought, A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in critical theory and post-capitalist imaginaries.

"Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." "--The Times "(London) Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. "Red Plenty "is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.
"Red Plenty "is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as "Sputnik," as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

For almost 150 years, scholars have been debating how to interpret Marx's seminal work Capital while they had access to just some of Marx's economic manuscripts. This changed in 2013 with the publication of all the known economic writings of Marx and Engels in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). One can now reconstruct the lines of intellectual development, and one can also explore in detail how Friedrich Engels went about compiling volumes II and III of Capital from the vast legacy of manuscripts that Marx left behind after his death in 1883. It should be possible, now, to develop a more comprehensive and accurate picture of Marx as an economic theoretician. This volume of essays aims to initiate this process. Contributors are: Christopher J. Arthur, Matthias Bohlender, Timm Grassmann, Jorge Grespan, Gerald Hubmann, Heinz D. Kurz, Marcel van der Linden, Kenji Mori, Fred Moseley, Lucia Pradella, Geert Reuten, Regina Roth, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf.

The Communist Party appeared a hundred years ago on the French political and social scene. According to opinions and moments, it has been the party of Moscow, of those shot, of the working class, of the union of the left, the party of the foreigner or that of the nation. It has been underground, in government, in town halls, in factories or in the streets. Some considered it too revolutionary, others not enough. More than others, it aroused passions, positive or negative. It attracted many and repelled just as many. After the fall of the USSR, it decided to remain a communist party, while many others gave it up. But it no longer has the place it once had, in reality as in the imagination. This book does not intend to judge, but to provide keys to understanding. It is based on a considerable number of archives that are now available and is an ordered and distanced look at an object that is not lacking in complexity and no doubt even in mystery. This book has been translated from French to English thanks to a financial help from the Gabriel Peri Foundation and the LIR3S UMR Cnrs 7366 of Dijon.

How is scientific knowledge of social life possible? If there are social sciences, must they employ methods different from those of the natural sciences? In Social Knowledge, Paul Mattick argues that the well-known difficulties of the social sciences -- in particular the predictive and explanatory failures of economics -- are due not to an inherent resistance of social life to scientific explanation, but to the failure of social scientists to include their own categories of social explanation among the objects of scientific study. Looking at Marx as an anthropological theorist, Mattick compares his critique of political economy with Evans-Pritchard 's analysis of Azande witchcraft. Just as the British anthropologist attempted to explain Azande ideas and rituals in terms of their place in native life, Marx wished to explain the continued faith in economics -- despite its striking weakness as a science -- in terms of the central role played by this system of ideas in the daily lives of natives of capitalist society. This comparison leads to the questions about the nature of scientific thinking and its relation to our everyday knowledge of social reality that are the subject of this book. Second edition, with a new Preface by the author. The first edition was published in 1986 by Hutchinson, ISBN 9780091654603.

During the last two centuries, ethnolinguistic nationalism has been the norm of nation building and state building in Central Europe. The number of recognized Slavic languages (in line with the normative political formula of language = nation = state) gradually tallied with the number of the Slavic nation-states, especially after the breakups of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. But in the current age of borderless cyberspace, regional and minority Slavic languages are freely standardized and used, even when state authorities disapprove. As a result, since the turn of the 19th century, the number of Slavic languages has varied widely, from a single Slavic language to as many as 40. Through the story of Slavic languages, this timely book illustrates that decisions on what counts as a language are neither permanent nor stable, arguing that the politics of language is the politics in Central Europe. The monograph will prove to be an essential resource for scholars of linguistics and politics in Central Europe.

Communist Propaganda at School is based on an analysis of reading primers from the Soviet bloc and recreates the world as presented to the youngest schoolchildren who started their education between 1949 and 1989 across the nine Eastern European countries. The author argues that those first textbooks, from their first to last pages, were heavily laden with communist propaganda, and that they share similar concepts, techniques and even contents, even if some national specificities can be observed. This volume reconstructs the image of the world presented to schoolchildren in the first books they were required to read in their school life, and argues that the image was charged with communist propaganda. The book is based on the analysis of over sixty reading primers from nine countries of the Soviet bloc: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia from the period. Written with simplicity and straightforwardness, this book will be a valuable resource, not only to international academics dealing with the issues of propaganda, censorship, education, childhood and everyday life under communism in Eastern and Central Europe, but can also academics dealing with education under communism or with the content of primary education. It also brings educational experiences of the Soviet bloc to international researchers, in particular to researchers of education under totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

This book tells the story of the dissident imaginary of samizdat activists, the political culture they created, and the pivotal role that culture had in sustaining the resilience of the oppositional movement in Poland between 1976 and 1990. This unlicensed print culture has been seen as one of the most emblematic social worlds of dissent. Since the Cold War, the audacity of harnessing obsolete print technology known as samizdat to break the modern monopoly of information of the party-state has fascinated many, yet this book looks beyond the Cold War frame to reappraise its historical novelty and significance. What made that culture resilient and rewarding, this book argues, was the correspondence between certain set of ideas and media practices: namely, the form of samizdat social media, which both embodied and projected the prefigurative philosophy of political action, asserting that small forms of collective agency can have a transformative effect on public life here and now, and are uniquely capable of achieving a democratic new beginning. This prefigurative vision of the transition from communism had a fundamental impact on the broader oppositional movement. Yet, while both the rise of Solidarity and the breakthrough of 1989 seemed to do justice to that vision, both pivotal moments found samizdat social media activists making history that was not to their liking. Back in the day, their estrangement was overshadowed by the main axis of contention between the society and the state. Foregrounding the internal controversies they protagonized, this book adds nuance to our understanding of the broader legacy of dissent and its relevance for the networked protests of today.

Public Libraries and Marxism provides a Marxist analytical framework for understanding public libraries and presents a set of proposals for transforming the capitalist libraries of today. Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of this Marxist framework, the authors also provide a critical examination of the history, theory and practice of libraries in the Soviet Union and North Korea. Considering what a Marxist library service would look like in the Western capitalist countries of today, Pateman and Pateman synthesise the insights provided throughout the book into a set of Marxist proposals designed to promote the transformation of contemporary Western public librarianship. These proposals suggest how Western public libraries can change their organisation and practices - their strategies, structures, systems and culture - in order to best serve those with the most needs, particularly as society evolves in response to new challenges. Public Libraries and Marxism will be relevant for scholars and students of library and information science, history, politics and sociology. Outlining the rudiments of a Marxist library service that should be applicable around the world, the book will also appeal to library practitioners who want to develop libraries in a community-led and needs-based direction.

This is the first scientific biography of Milan Rastislav Stefanik (1880-1919) that is focused on analysing the process of how he became the Slovak national hero. Although he is relatively unknown internationally, his contemporaries compared him "to Choderlos de Laclos for the use of military tactics in love affairs, to Lawrence of Arabia for vision, to Bonaparte for ambition ... and to one of apostles for conviction". He played the key role in founding an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 through his relentless worldwide travels during the First World War in order to create the Czechoslovak Army: he visited Serbia and Romania on the eve of invasion by the Central Powers, Russia before the February revolution, the United States after it declared war on Germany, Italy dealing with the consequences of defeat in the Caporetto battle, and again when Russia plunged into Civil War. Several historical methods are used to analyse the aforementioned central research question of this biography such as social capital to explain his rise in French society, the charismatic leader to understand how he convinced and won over a relatively large number of people; more traditional political, military, and diplomatic history to show his contribution to the founding of Czechoslovakia, and memory studies to analyse his extraordinary popularity in Slovakia. By mapping his intriguing life, the book will be of interest to scholars in a broad range of areas including history of Central Europe, especially Czechoslovakia, international relations, social history, French society at the beginning of the 20th century and biographical research.

'The problem is not how to manage the capital system, but to get rid of it'. And who will do the job? These are the questions posed at the start of Cliff Slaughter's latest book. Recognising the importance of Istvan Meszaros's analysis - in Beyond Capital (1995) and other books - of the historic, 'structural crisis' that has taken capital into its stage of 'destructive self-reproduction', Against Capital focuses on the crucial question of agency. Today, when there are fundamental disjunctures between the globalised economy, the means of social control and political and state structures, what are we to make of Marx's conclusion that the working class - capital's only structural antagonist - is 'the gravedigger' of capitalism? And what are the implications for this of the information revolution, the changing composition of the working class, and the emergence of new forms of oppositional organisation, with young people to the fore? Slaughter assembles contributions by participants in recent movements in South Africa, Britain, Spain, Mexico, countries in the former Soviet zone and - in a major contribution from Yassamine Mather - the Middle East. He offers an extended critique of 'vanguardist' conceptions such as Trotsky's 'the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of working-class revolutionary leadership' and Kautsky's and the early Lenin's formulation that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class 'from the outside'. Finally, Against Capital examines the necessary theoretical foundations of a rebuilt working-class movement, with special attention to the concepts of class-consciousness and the relation between theory and practice. This book is a compelling and distinctive contribution to recent debates encompassing works such as Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and Paul Mason's PostCapitalism (2015).

Khrushchev and the Communist World, first published in 1984, reviews the Khrushchev era, when the legacy of the Stalinist past was partly repudiated and the possibilities of reform within the USSR and the countries of the socialist camp were explored. The lessons derived from this exploration by Bloc leaders and Khrushchev's successors unhappily led them to conclude that the scope for such reform was extremely limited. Many of Khrushchev's reforms and reorganisation measures were indeed rescinded, but the notion had been planted that the naked terror of Stalinist rule and direct, centralised command over other socialist states were no longer feasible. This book reviews the evidence for this view both in internal terms and also in foreign affairs.

This book renews the Marxian theory of the general equivalent by highlighting the contradiction between the social functions of money (unit of account, means of circulation) and its private functions (store of value, accumulation). It draws a clear distinction between the monetary base and the commodity base of money and thus avoids the confusion between money and credit on the one hand, and money and capital on the other, which are found in other heterodox monetary theories. It accounts for the new forms of monetary constraints weighing on the banking systems under and inconvertible fiat money standard, the class relationships underlying the interventions of monetary authorities and governments, and presents a definition of the state which emphasises its mode of intervention on the collective and social conditions of capitalisms which are money and labour power. The emphasis on the contradiction between these two types of monetary functions gives a more fundamental account of the conflict between the international role and the national origin of the dollar than the Triffin dilemma, which has been constantly overcome or deferred by the US since 1960. The author explains this evolution by demonstrating how, from the 1950s onwards, the dollar began a process of acquiring relative autonomy from the US economy. By focusing on the role and international functions of the dollar, he offers a fresh look at the 2008 crisis and its consequences for the international monetary system, but also for a possible post-capitalist financial system - which post-revolutionary Russia experimented with in the form of the NEP, and whose contemporary implementation is foreshadowed by the rise of digital central bank currencies. The book thereby provides a necessary update to the tools and concepts inherited from Marx for analysing and understanding money, capital and the state.