This book provides a comparative analysis and a systemic categorization of the Populist Radical Left Parties (PRLPs) in Western Europe. Institutional and socio-economic aspects have transformed the political culture of many modern democracies, leading to the creation of radical left-wing parties who, by combining a strongly populist political offer with the historical demands of the traditional left wing, are capable of electoral success. This book analyzes a range of different Populist Radical Left Parties (PRLPs) in Western Europe through in-depth case studies. The author uses statutes, internal documents, programs, election results, membership data, and international political literature combined with interviews with executives and national secretaries to describe and interpret the main features of PRLPs, their paths of formation and political transformation. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of political science and political sociology, media studies and anyone interested in trying to better understand European populism and the distinctions among its different forms.

This book presents a critical and empirically informed examination of Islamophobia and related issues of racism and nationalism in Germany today, with particular attention to the East/West distinction. The authors, representing several disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and media and literary studies, situate the topic in the global and German context of the 2015-16 "migration crisis" and its aftermath, and of the ongoing transformations seen in the postsocialist regions of the European Union. Since the 2015-16 "refugee crisis," illiberal leaders and parties within Europe have instrumentalized Islamophobia in an attempt to dislodge the traditional political elites. Strikingly, such illiberal movements have been most successful in the formerly socialist areas of the EU. This is mirrored within Germany itself, where political formations with an Islamophobic agenda remain more popular in the East than in the West. This volume examines the reasons for this difference, including not only the ideological heritage of Soviet-dominated socialism but also the effects of western interventions in the formerly socialist areas in and beyond Germany since the end of the Cold War. Some Islamophobic and other hateful tendencies were in fact introduced from, and continue to prosper also, in the West. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

This book pursues the implications for linking Lenin with theology, which is not a project that has been undertaken thus far. What does this inveterate atheist known for describing religion as 'spiritual booze' (a gloss on Marx's 'opium of the people') have to do with theology? This book reveals far more than might initially be expected, so much so that Lenin and the Russian Revolution cannot be understood without this complex engagement with theology.
It also seeks to bring Lenin into recent debates over the intersections between theology and the Left, between the Bible and political thought. The key names involved in this debate are reasonably well-known, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zižek, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Boer has written concerning these critics, among others, in Boer's earlier five-volume Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Brill and Haymarket, 2007-13). Lenin and Theology builds upon this earlier project but it also stands alone as a substantial study in its own right. But it will be recognised as a contribution that follows a series that has, as critics have pointed out, played a major role in reviving and taking to a new level the debate over Marxism and religion.
The book is based upon a careful, detailed and critical reading of the whole 45 volumes of his Collected Works in English translation - 55 volumes in the Russian original. From that close attention to the texts, a number of key themes have emerged: the ambivalence over freedom of choice in matters of religion; his love of the sayings and parables of Jesus in the Gospels; his own love of constructing new parables; the extended and complex engagements with Christian socialists and 'God-builders' among the Bolsheviks; the importance of Hegel for his reassessments of religion; the arresting suggestion that a revolution is a miracle, which redefines the meaning of miracle; and the veneration of Lenin after his death.

This volume analyses the narration of the social through music and the seismographic function of music to detect social problems and envision alternatives. Beyond state-driven attempts to link musical production to the official narrative of the nation, mass musical movements emerged during the 20th century that provided countercultural and alternative narratives of the prevailing social context. The Americas contain numerous examples of the strong connection between music and politics; Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" envisioned a socialist transformation of the U.S., the Chilean Nueva Cancion created a narrative and affective frame for the recognition of popular culture as a central element of the cultural politics of the Chilean way to socialism, and Reggae emerged as a response to British colonialism, drawing inspiration and guidance from the pan-Africanist visions of Marcus Garvey. Providing a significant contribution to the study of music and politics/social movements from an inter-American perspective, this book will appeal to students and scholars of U.S. and Latin American Cultural Studies, Transnational Studies, History and Political Studies, Area Studies, and Music Studies. For additional information, please see the authors' Sonic Politics webpage: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/cias/sonicpolitics/index.html

Developing a contemporary account of political friendship and synthesizing it with the radical movement of degrowth, this book provides the ethical grounding and the rationale of an alternative economy which serves human flourishing. The Aristotelian political friendship embodies active concern for the others' well-being that contemporary societies lack; the crucial problems of ecological destruction and global poverty illustrate this friendship deficit. Arguing for the need for re-embracing a friendly civic ethos and re-aligning the economy with moral objectives, the author updates the Aristotelian idea and identifies it with democratic-autonomous political-economic praxis that ensures citizens' self-actualization. Degrowth movement questioning economic growth and productivism, and privileging a simpler life with less material goods, favours political friendship precisely because it nourishes its unconscious substratum namely human instinctual sociality. The call for genuine democratic political praxis that political friendship implies could enable the degrowth movement to retain its radical character and accomplish the shift to an economy which serves life. The book is worthwhile studying by students and researchers across social sciences and especially by scholars in the fields of sociology, philosophy, and politics, but also a broader readership sensitive to the issues of social and environmental sustainability will find this work extremely interesting.

Humanity faces epoch-making challenges arising from the convergence of demographic, social, economic, ecological and political megatrends, which are additionally superimposed by the fatal COVID-19 pandemic and the new Cold War. Traditional economic thought is not able to cope with them. In the conditions of irreversible globalization, these challenges are met by the original concept of a new pragmatism - a peculiar interface between economic theory and practical economic policy for sustainable development. Grzegorz W. Kolodko, an outstanding economist with a world-wide reputation, a public intellectual, successful politician and a globetrotter who has explored the world - clearly writes what is happening in the economy and why, on its links with society and politics, environment, security, culture and technology. The work devotes due attention to the rise of China and the consequences of its global expansion. The unique interdisciplinary approach to the issues discussed makes this book a fascinating read for all professionals interested in the future of a rapidly changing world.

Out of early twentieth-century Russia came the world's first significant effort to build a modern revolutionary society. According to Marxist economist Samir Amin, the great upheaval that once produced the Soviet Union has also produced a movement away from capitalism - a long transition that continues even today. In seven concise, provocative chapters, Amin deftly examines the trajectory of Russian capitalism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possible future of Russia - and, by extension, the future of socialism itself. Amin manages to combine an analysis of class struggle with geopolitics - each crucial to understanding Russia's singular and complex political history. He first looks at the development (or lack thereof) of Russian capitalism. He sees Russia's geopolitical isolation as the reason its capitalist empire developed so differently from Western Europe, and the reason for Russia's perceived "backwardness." Yet Russia's unique capitalism proved to be the rich soil in which the Bolsheviks were able to take power, and Amin covers the rise and fall of the revolutionary Soviet system. Finally, in a powerful chapter on Ukraine and the rise of global fascism, Amin lays out the conditions necessary for Russia to recreate itself, and perhaps again move down the long road to socialism. Samir Amin's great achievement in this book is not only to explain Russia's historical tragedies and triumphs, but also to temper our hopes for a quick end to an increasingly insufferable capitalism. This book offers a cornucopia of food for thought, as well as an enlightening means to transcend reductionist arguments about "revolution" so common on the left. Samir Amin's book - and the actions that could spring from it - are more necessary than ever, if the world is to avoid the barbarism toward which capitalism is hurling humanity.

In 1939, residents of a rural village near Chengdu watched as Lei Mingyuan, a member of a violent secret society known as the Gowned Brothers, executed his teenage daughter. Six years later, Shen Baoyuan, a sociology student at Yenching University, arrived in the town to conduct fieldwork on the society that once held sway over local matters. She got to know Lei Mingyuan and his family, recording many rare insights about the murder and the Gowned Brothers' inner workings. Using the filicide as a starting point to examine the history, culture, and organization of the Gowned Brothers, Di Wang offers nuanced insights into the structures of local power in 1940s rural Sichuan. Moreover, he examines the influence of Western sociology and anthropology on the way intellectuals in the Republic of China perceived rural communities. By studying the complex relationship between the Gowned Brothers and the Chinese Communist Party, he offers a unique perspective on China's transition to socialism. In so doing, Wang persuasively connects a family in a rural community, with little overt influence on national destiny, to the movements and ideologies that helped shape contemporary China.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the emergence of left-wing politics in two of the largest South American nations: Argentina and Brazil. It looks in particular at the transformation of democracy seen as "point of arrival" into democracy seen as an unending struggle for greater equality.

This short collection of essays engages with queer lives and activism in 1970s Poland, illustrating discourses about queerness and a trajectory of the struggle for rights which clearly sets itself apart, and differs from a Western-based narrative of liberation. Contributors to this volume paint an uneven landscape of queer life in state-socialist Poland in the 1970s and early 1980s. They turn to oral history interviews and archival sources which include police files, personal letters, literature and criticism, writings by sexuality experts, and documentation of artistic practice. Unlike most of Europe, Poland did not penalize same-sex acts, although queer people were commonly treated with suspicion and vilified. But while many homosexual men and most lesbian women felt invisible and alone, some had the sense of belonging to a fledgling community. As they looked to the West, hoping for a sexual revolution that never quite arrived, they also preserved informal queer institutions dating back to the prewar years and used them to their advantage. Medical experts conversed with peers across the Iron Curtain but developed their own "socialist" methods and successfully prompted the state to recognize transgender rights, even as that state remained determined to watch and intimidate homosexual men. Literary critics, translators, and art historians began debating-and they debate still-how to read gestures defying gender and sexual norms: as an aspect of some global "gay" formation or as stemming from locally grounded queer traditions. Emphasizing the differences of Poland's LGBT history from that of the "global" West while underscoring the existing lines of communication between queer subjects on either side of the Iron Curtain, this book will be of key interest to scholars and students in gender and sexuality studies, social history, and politics.

Is today's left really new? How has the European radical left evolved? Giorgos Charalambous answers these questions by looking at three moments of rapid political change - the late 1960s to late 1970s; the turn of the millennium; and post-2008. He challenges the conventional understanding of a 'new left', drawing out continuities with earlier movements and parties. Charalambous examines the 'Long '68', symbolised by the May uprisings in France, which saw the rise of new left forces and the widespread criticism by younger radical activists of traditional communist and socialist parties. He puts this side by side with the turn of the millennium when the Global Justice Movement rose to prominence and changed the face of the international left, and also the period after the financial crash of 2008 and the rise of anti-austerity politics which initiated the most recent wave of new left parties such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. With a unique 'two-level' perspective, Charalambous approaches the left through both social movements and party politics, looking at identities, rhetoric and organisation, and bringing a fresh new approach to radical history, as well as assessing challenges for both activists and scholars.

The Great Labour Unrest examines the struggle between liberals, socialists and revolutionary syndicalists for control of Britain's best established district miners' union. Drawing widely on a vast and rich body of primary sources, this study reveals the debates that grassroots activists had during the fascinating and turbulent 'Great Labour Unrest' period. It charts the contexts in which the socialists challenged the union's Liberal leaders from the late 1890s and considers the complex strikes in 1910 against the implementation of the Liberal government's miners' eight-hour day. It analyses the emergence and development of a mass rank-and-file movement in the coalfield based around demands for a miners' minimum wage and, when this principle was won in March 1912, for an improved minimum wage. This book is of interest to academics, advanced students and lay people interested in political, social and economic history, political thought, economics, and industrial relations. -- .

Anthony Crosland bequeathed a significant intellectual legacy to the Labour Party. In this timely book, Patrick Diamond considers a wide range of Crosland's writings on the economy and politics, relating his ideas on egalitarian social democracy, electoral strategy, the European question, and the importance of progressive liberalism on the British centre-left. Written in a clear and persuasive way, it will appeal to academics, students, activists, Labour Party members and associated think tanks,

William Morris is perhaps best known today for the beautiful textile designs he created under the banner of Morris & Co, which continue to decorate homes around the globe. As one of the leading lights of British socialism, however, he is less well known, and this series of Morris's Manifestos seeks to highlight his extraordinary contribution to the literary canon on subjects socialist and artistic. Based on a lecture given at the Manchester Royal Institution in 1883, Art, Wealth and Riches is a thought-provoking essay that considers art as having educative and aesthetic value that should be shared with the many, rather than financial value that should be hoarded by the few. Morris asks: 'Is art to be limited to a narrow class who only care for it in a very languid way, or is it to be the solace and pleasure of the whole people?'

Looks at the major Western European communist parties since the collapse of communist power in Eastern Europe. Discusses how they now see their futures, what their potentials are and how they have coped both ideologically and materially with the changes. It looks specifically at the parties in Italy, Scandinavia, France, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.

This collection examines how the loss of state socialism as a world-making project and the subsequent failures of postsocialist "civil society building" have impacted new generations of progressive, antinationalist, anarchist, and social-justice oriented activists. How do the histories of state socialism come to shape activist thinking and practice in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus? What kinds of political work can and does emerge out of this 30-year-long experience of political, social, and economic transformation? Understanding postsocialism as an intersectional experience and a geopolitically sensitive form of knowledge, this collection of essays seeks to render visible the forms of political activism in the region that are not tied to, or fully determined by, specific moments of street protest and public interruption. Instead, the contributors examine forms of activist effort that endure in the aftermath of protest movements and in the course of lingering crises, in order to capture how our interlocutors seek to enact their desired futures under the conditions of intensifying and shape-shifting pressures of neoliberal governance. The ethnographies that span from Armenia to Ukraine, to Bosnia-Herzegovina to the newly emerging transnational Balkan route that refugees and migrants have created, illuminate how local activists engage with and/or disengage from their socialist inheritance of political imaginaries differently and imagine different futures. Our collection argues for a need for a careful, theoretically nuanced and context-specific analysis across the uneven political landscapes of the former socialist world. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

Although there is an established historiography on women's roles during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), little has been written on Nationalist women in the Republican-held zones. Women were the anti-Republican resisters of the first hour in the capital but they have been largely overlooked in the historical record. During the bitter civil conflict a sector of dissident women helped to create a subversive and clandestine national Catholic space in the heart of Republican Madrid. By examining the vital and invisible role played by women within Madrid's 'fifth column' this monograph offers a new contribution to the gender historiography of the Spanish Civil War and re-evaluates the significance of women in the Nationalist war effort. It explores how and why a sector of Falangist and Catholic women decided to mobilise against the legally constituted Popular Front government in support of an undemocratic military coup. While women's subversive activities often involved the transgression of traditional gender norms, their social and political agency arose within the conditions and precepts of Catholicism and was conceptualised and imagined within new national-Catholic discourses of 'holy Crusade.'

This book examines the work and thought of Richard T. Ely in light of his rejection of capitalism and view toward individualism. It concludes that there are real problems with Ely's theories and the principles of Progressivism, and addresses the implications of this for current American political thought.

This book poses a major revisionist challenge to 20th century British labour history, aiming to look beyond the Marxist and Fabian exclusion of working class experience, notably religion and self-help, in order to exaggerate 'labour movement' class cohesion. Instead of a 'forward march' to secular state-socialism, the research presented here is devoted to a rich diversity of social movements and ideas. In this collection of essays, the editors establish the liberal-pluralist tradition, with the following chapters covering three distinct sections. Part One, 'Other Forms of Association' covers subjects such as trade unions, the Co-operative Party, women's community activism and Protestant Nonconformity. Part Two, 'Other Leaders', covers employer Edward Cadbury; Trades Union Congress leader Walter Citrine; and the electricians' leader, Frank Chapple. Part Three, 'Other Intellectuals', considers G.D.H. Cole, Michael Young and left libertarianism by Stuart White. Readers interested in the British Labour movement will find this an invaluable resource.

Can electoral and parliamentary arenas be used toward revolutionary ends? This is precisely the question that held Lenin's attention from 1905 to 1917, leading him to conclude that they could-and would. This book explores the time in which Lenin initiated his use of the electorate, beginning with the Marxist roots of Lenin's politics, and then details his efforts to lead the deputies of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the First and Second State Dumas, concluding with Russia's first experiment in representative democracy from 1906 to 1907. During this time, Lenin had to address issues such as whether to boycott or participate in undemocratic elections, how to conduct election campaigns, whether to enter into electoral blocs and the related lesser of two evils dilemma, how to keep deputies accountable to the party, and how to balance electoral politics with armed struggle. Lenin later said that the lessons of that work were 'indispensable' for Bolshevik success in 1917, which means that this detailed analysis of that period is crucial to any thorough understanding of Leninism.

This book offers the very first collaborative analysis of various conditions and aspects of developmental citizenship in China and its practical and ideological implications for Chinese post-socialism. Development in post-socialist China - much like development in China's industrialized capitalist neighbors - is a collective political economic project which simultaneously involves political, social, as well as economic dimensions of public governance. In such a historical context, developmental citizenship is a generic category of citizenship in practice, not reducible to separate civil, political, or social rights. Improving people's material livelihood through augmented jobs and incomes has become the raison d'etre of post-socialist dictatorial politics in China (and a host of other post-socialist nations). A careful and comprehensive observation of post-Mao China in citizenship perspective reveals the practical centrality of developmental citizenship in post-socialist social governance. If China is compared with its industrialized capitalist neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as to their common sociopolitical order of national developmentalism, the pervasive scope and systemic varieties of developmental citizenship-in-practice are easily discovered. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies.

The character of social democracy in the constituent countries of the European Union is more significant and much better understood than the available literature would appear to suggest. This thought-provoking and edifying handbook aims to redress this disparity by bringing together a range of top political scientists from across Europe to provide a definitive collection on social democracy in the EU, one that offers students and scholars both an informative and easy-to-use guide to social democracy as a system of governance in Europe.
Through establishing a common framework for analysis and by exploring all 27 countries in the European Union according to this structure, The Palgrave Handbook of Social Democracy in Europe constitutes a compendium that is truly comparative in nature. This comparative and comprehensive framework coupled with the unprecedented overview of European social democracy over the past decade makes this handbook the go-to guide for those interested in all aspects of social democracy in the European Union.

This book analyzes the first of the vast popular uprisings in the countries of Eastern Bloc-the revolt of West Bohemian City of Pilsen against the currency reform on June 1, 1953. The text is the first complex critical monograph on this topic. In the methodological field the research is inspired by the theories of so-called new social movements. Therefore, the book frames the Pilsen revolt into the context of previous protest actions that had taken place in the examined region after the establishment of communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. Thus, the text deals with all the conflicts occurred within the years 1948-1953. This method enables the author to study several protest cultures which operated on a long-term base in various parts of the society and which-each of them in a different way-affected the course of the Pilsen revolt. So, the work provides not only the detailed critical description of June 1953 events but also their cultural genealogy.

The British Labour Party is in crisis. A prolonged period of government between 1997 and 2010 saw the party intellectually exhausted. The subsequent leadership of Ed Miliband ultimately failed with the loss of the 2015 General Election, and the party now finds itself without a clearly defined set of aims and values. Rebuilding Social Democracy is the first major reappraisal of social democracy and thinking on the centre left since the election of Jeremy Corbyn. With a foreword by Peter Hain, it examines the key foundational principles of social democracy, including economic reform, equality, welfare, public service organisation, social cohesion, civil liberties, democratisation, and internationalism, in order to find a route back to political credibility for Labour. Written by leading academics in the field, it identifies the values and objectives needed to move the party forward, and revive left and centre-left thought and practice in Britain as an alternative to Conservative austerity.