In this book, first published in 1989, Ken Post and Phil Wright provide a critical analysis of socialist construction in underdeveloped countries. Pointing out that all the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century have occurred in underdeveloped peripheral capitalist countries, they focus on the relationship between socialism and underdevelopment. They bring together the insights of both development theory and the political economy of socialism, and draw upon their direct experience of the state socialist societies as diverse as North Korea, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union.

The 2010s were a decade of foodbanks, riots, and the rebirth of political alternatives. Looking to escape a future of rising debt, falling living standards and climate meltdown, a set of movements were born across the globe, led by students, workers and the tent cities of Occupy. A new wave of optimistic, radical young people were building mass movements outside the political bubble, rejecting the neo-liberal consensus and the enrichment of the 1%, and laying the foundations of a new left. Eight years later, Bernie Sanders was favorite to clinch the Democratic Party nomination, and Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum had taken over the Labour Party in Britain, promising 'a new kind of politics'. But as the new left poured into Labour, it was overwhelmed by older, institutional forces on both left and right. Four years after Corbyn became leader, after bitter-infighting and a Brexit-fuelled strategic crisis, it all fell apart. This is the inside story of how the left came back to life in the 2010s, from a man who found himself at the centre of events - featuring unparalleled access and a range of interviews with key left-wing figures. Influential journalist and activist Michael Chessum explains how this movement was built, why it failed, and what it needs to do now.

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.

What's gone wrong with capitalism and how should governments respond? What does the future hold for the Left in the UK in the face of the austerity straitjacket around our politics and media? Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism (1956) provided a creed for governments of the centre left until the global banking crisis. Now Peter Hain presents an evidence-based case for a radical alternative to the neo-liberal economic agenda. A substantial new Afterword outlines what the Labour Party needs to do following the 2015 UK General Election to win again by returning to its core values of decency, social justice, equality and prosperity for all. A rousing alternative to the neoliberal, right-wing orthodoxy of our era, Hain's book is now even more essential reading for everyone interested in the future of the left.

In February 1900 a group of men representing trade unionists, socialists, Fabians and Marxists gathered in London to make another attempt at establishing an organisation capable of getting working-class men elected to Parliament. The body they set up was the Labour Representation Committee; six years later when 29 of its candidates were elected to the House of Commons, it changed its name to the Labour Party. No women took part in that first meeting, but several watched from the public gallery. Amongst them was Isabella Ford, an active socialist and trade unionist who would have been familiar to most of the men assembled below. She had been asked by her friend, Millicent Fawcett, to attend and report back on what happened. A few years later she would become the first woman to speak at a Labour Party conference, moving a resolution on votes for women but, at the Party's inception in 1900, she and every other woman in the hall was silent. Throughout Labour's history, even in its earliest years, women were present in the room, but they were not always recorded or remembered. They came from many different backgrounds and they worked for the causes they believed in as organisers, campaigners, negotiators, polemicists, public speakers and leaders. They took on the vested interests of their time; sometimes they won. Yet the vast majority of them have been forgotten by the Labour movement that they helped to found. Even Margaret Bondfield, who became Britain's first woman cabinet minister, often barely merits a footnote. Women made real and substantial contributions to Labour's earliest years and had a significant impact on the Party's ability to attract and maintain women's votes after World War I. In addition to Margaret and Isabella, in many of the rooms in which the Labour Party found its feet, remarkable women wait to be rediscovered. This book tells their story.

Political parties with activists are in decline due to various external shocks. Societal changes, like the emergence of new technologies of communication have diminished the role and number of activists, while party elites increasingly can make do without grassroots activists. However, recent scholarship concerning different democracies has shown how activism still matters for representation. This book contributes to this literature by analyzing the unique case of the Uruguayan Frente Amplio (FA), the only mass-organic, institutionalized leftist party in Latin America. Using thick description, systematic process tracing, and survey research, this case study highlights the value of an organization-centered approach for understanding parties' role in democracy. Within the FA, organizational rules grant activists a significant voice, which imbues activists' participation with a strong sense of efficacy. This book is an excellent resource for scholars and students of Latin America and comparative politics who are interested in political parties and the challenges confronting new democracies.

The 59th annual volume of the Socialist Register examines the growth of corporate power and other important organizational trends in global capitalism. It rejects such notions as stakeholder capitalism and reviews the organisation and strategies of unions and the left, and its current and potential practices, as it searches for new routes to socialism.

Arguing that the hegemony of the neoliberal/capitalist nexus must be challenged if we are to address the proliferating challenges facing our world, this inspiring book explains how democracy can revive the political fortunes of the left. * Explores issues central to the civil uprisings that swept the world in 2011, drawing profound connections between democracy and neoliberalism in an urban context * Features in-depth analysis of key political theorists such as Gramsci; Lefebvre; Ranciere; Deleuze and Guattari; and Hardt and Negri * Advocates the reframing of democracy as a personal and collective struggle to discover the best in ourselves and others * Includes empirical analysis of recent instances of collective action

These are the essential writings of a man who inspired a new, egalitarian socialist regime in the Middle East, which is currently fighting for survival against religious extremism and state violence. Abdullah Ocalan led the struggle for Kurdish liberation for more than 20 years until his capture in 1999. Now, writing from prison in Turkey, he has inspired a new political movement. Called Democratic Confederalism, this revolutionary model is developing on the ground in parts of Syria and Turkey; it represents an alternative to religious sectarianism, patriarchy, capitalism and chauvinistic nationalism, providing the blueprint for a burgeoning radical democratic society. This selection of Ocalan's writings is an indispensable introduction for anyone wanting to engage with his political ideas. His central concepts address the Kurdish question, gender, Democratic Confederalism and the future of the nation. With The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan, his most influential ideas can now be considered and debated in the light of his continuing legacy, most notably in the ongoing revolution in Rojava.

What has happened to the religious left? If there is a religious left, why don't we hear more about it? The academics and activists who write this rich volume, edited by Rebecca Alpert, argue passionately on topics that concern all of us. Quoting from the Bible, the Torah, the Qur'an, the teachings of Buddha, as well as Native American folklore, they make the voices of the religious left heard -- teaching lessons of peace and liberation. As this invaluable sourcebook shows, the religious left is committed to issues of human rights and dignity. Answering questions of identity and ideology, the essays included here stem from the \u0022culture wars\u0022 that have divided orthodox and liberal believers. Responding to the needs of and raised by marginalized social groups, the writers discuss economic issues and religious politics as they champion equal rights, and promote the teaching of progressive vision. Containing insightful perspectives of adherents to many faiths, Voices of the Religious Left makes it clear that there is a group dedicated to instilling the values of justice and freedom. They are far from silent. All of the essays in this collection \u0022...represent the power of the written word as a vehicle for advocacy and social change. ..It is my hope that the readers of these essays will themselves feel compelled to think more about the importance of taking a stand on issues from religious perspectives, and to act on something that compels them.\u0022 --Rabbi Rebecca Alpert

The 50th volume of the Socialist Register is dedicated to the theme of 'registering class' in light of the spread and deepening of capitalist social relations around the globe. Today's economic crisis has been deployed to extend the class struggle from above while many resistances have been explicitly cast in terms of class struggles from below. This volume addresses how capitalist classes are reorganizing as well as the structure and composition of working classes in the 21st century.

Although contemporary China is a repressive state, protests and demonstrations have increased almost tenfold between 2005 and 2015. This is an astounding statistic when one considers that Marxist-Leninist regimes of the past tolerated little or no public dissent. How can protests become more common as the state becomes more repressive? This collection helps to answer this compelling question through in-depth analyses of several Chinese protest movements and state responses. The chapters examine the opportunities and constraints for protest mobilization, and explains their importance for understanding contemporary Chinese society.

Historians of political history are fascinated by the rise and fall of political parties and, for twentieth-century Britain, most obviously the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberal Party. What is often overlooked in this political development is the work of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was a formative influence in the growth of the political Labour movement and its leaders in the late nineteenth century and the early to mid-twentieth century. The ILP supplied the Labour Party with some of its leading political figures, such as Ramsay MacDonald, and moved the Labour Party along the road of parliamentary socialism. However, divided over the First World War and challenged by the Labour Party becoming socialist in 1918, it had to face the fact that it was no longer the major parliamentary socialist party in Britain. Although it recovered after the First World War, rising to between 37,000 and 55,000 members, it came into conflict with the Labour Party and two Labour governments over their gradualist approach to socialism. This eventually led to its disaffiliation from the Labour Party in 1932 and its subsequent fragmentation into pro-Labour, pro-communist and independent groups. Its new revolutionary policy divided its members, as did the Abyssinian crisis, the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Show Trials. By the end of the 1930s, seeking to re-affiliate to the Labour Party, it had been reduced to 2,000 to 3,000 members, was a sect rather than a party and had earned Hugh Dalton's description that it was the 'ILP flea'. In the following monograph, Keith Laybourn analyses the dynamic shifts in this history across 25 years. This scholarship will prove foundational for scholars and researchers of modern British history and socialist thought in the twentieth century.

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 ground-breaking book weaves together insights from the children and youth studies literature and critical development studies. Debunking the idea of childhood and youth as self-evident social categories, the author unravels how these generational constructs are (re)constituted and experienced in relational terms in development contexts spanning both the Global South and the Global North. Running through these chapters is a fundamental concern with age, gender and generation as key principles of social differentiation. This is developed in Part 1 at a theoretical level, and applied to everyday contexts, including school, work, migration and the street in Part 2. Part 3 zooms in on the generational dynamics of development by exploring how prominent development interventions (conditional cash transfers, schooling) problems (gender discrimination) and questions (the generational question of farming) shape the (gendered) experience of being young and growing up.

In Reelpolitik Ideologies in American Political Film, Beverly Merrill Kelley examines more than a century of political movie history, providing a thorough historical background for diametrically opposed political ideologies in order to facilitate debate and dialectical learning. Kelley explores 185 American political movies (categorized by ideological themes and presented in chronological order) in order to illustrate the history of film as well as the history of the specific political ideology. Each chapter includes a case study which provides an in-depth analysis of the single film that best illustrates the ideology at hand, including: The Candidate (populism), Wall Street (elitism), The Godfather (fascism), All the President's Men (anti-fascism), Patton (interventionism), and M*A*S*H (isolationism). Reelpolitik Ideologies in American Political Film establishes a paradigmatic analysis of political films that details the cyclical nature of ideological dialectic throughout American history and identifies the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the voters who choose not to affiliate with Republicans and Democrats, and who often determine the outcomes of elections. The text also includes an extensive ideological filmology spanning more than 100 years of American cinema. This study represents a bold investigation of the political and social values of American film, and is an essential text in the study of the relationship between culture and politics.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism-New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse. Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

Assessing the political dimensions of Anthony Giddens' work from the 1970s to the present, this book highlights new directions for politics distinct from his Third Way. Kolarz provides an assessment of Giddens' political relevance and utility for present-day political endeavours, reflecting on the approach to critical social theory found in his early work, notably his theory of structuration and critique of historical materialism, and his consequent utopian realist analysis of late modernity. Giddens and Politics beyond the Third Way extracts from his work a rationale for global redistributive action, as well as an integrative approach to policymaking, suggesting that coherence of centre-left emancipatory politics requires coordination of policy areas previously thought of as separate.

Transnational Socialist Networks in the 1970s argues that western European socialist parties' transnational cooperation across national borders significantly influenced politics and policy-making in what was the European Communities (EC). It focuses on the network-like informal structures that characterised transnational cooperation between the party members and leaders of different socialist parties involved in European affairs. Taking the example of two case studies, namely EC development aid policy and EC southern enlargement policy, the book demonstrates that the socialist parties strengthened their informal transnational network structures for the purposes of debating ideological and programmatic issues and finding policy solutions to common challenges in both policy fields. Moreover, it shows that the networks developed various functions to influence European governance. Against this background, the analysis in this book makes not only a significant contribution to the study of transnational networks of western European socialist parties and the history of European integration, but also adds to the understanding of the role of transnational networks in European politics and policy-making.

'the first man from the midst of the working class who completely understood them, completely championed them ...never deserted them, never turned his back on a single principle which he had professed, never drifted away from his class in thought, in feeling or in faith.' John Bruce Glasier'France had her Jaures, Germany her Bebel and Liebknecht, Austria her Victor Adler, Russia her Lenin. Britain produced, and continues to produce, men to carry on the struggle of the poor, but no one who more personifies the spirit of that struggle than the miner from the coalfields of Lanarkshire.' James Maxton

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.

This socialist history of modern Greece tells the story of its rebirth in struggle, the heroic resistance to Nazi occupation, the civil war and its aftermath, the colonels' dictatorship and its overthrow, the rise and fall of PASOK, the debt crisis, the popular uprising of 2010-12, the election of SYRIZA, the referendum and the subsequent capitulation. What lessons can Greece's experience teach those campaigning against austerity throughout Europe? This book includes an Appendix by Eric Toussaint.

The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking was born of a simple realization: The world we have inherited is no longer working. The future of the planet and civilization as we know it are threatened, and the cries heard during the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests-"I can't breathe"-continue to echo. By giving us tools for navigating the transitions ahead, this catalog helps us breathe more deeply. The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking explains the transformational power of social collaboration by showcasing dozens of pathbreaking projects, books, websites, and activist initiatives. Commoners seek to prioritize people's needs over market extraction, steward the Earth, relocalize the economy, and build new institutions of empowerment. The emerging Commonsverse can be seen in relocalized food systems and community land trusts...in racial empowerment through collective action and mutual aid...and in free and open source software, peer production, and platform cooperatives. Commoning is helping communities to managing scarce water supplies, farmers to develop regenerative agriculture, and artists to reclaim control of their creative lives. Ordinary people are becoming more self-reliant through timebanking and collaborative finance, care collectives and gift economies, and alternative local currencies. The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking is an indispensable guide for understanding many profound social transformations now underway. In 25 thematic sections, The Commoner's Catalog offers a rare collection of tools for navigating the transitions ahead and building a new world. It offers a portrait of the system-change activism that is creating an economics of sufficiency, a politics of fairness, and a culture of belonging.

Jeremy Corbyn is the epitome of the anti-leader: he would, by impulse, shy away from the very idea of `Corbynism'. Yet when a general election is called, Corbyn's Labour promises to force a break with the current consensus every bit as historic as those of Attlee in 1945 and Thatcher in 1979. Corbyn is a phenomenon that has been purposely misrepresented and wilfully misunderstood, with supporters derided as `Corbynistas', fans and cultists. This book of specially commissioned essays explores the true nature of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership; expectations of how Labour might fulfil its promise of a new kind of politics; and the limits to what Labour can achieve; as well as offering tools for transforming the party from the bottom up. Building on the work of Mark Perryman's previous book The Corbyn Effect, this new collection is vital reading for all those interested in left politics and the future of the Labour Party. It presents a comprehensive account of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party: where it came from, how it has begun a process of radical change, and the party it promises to become.

In a little more than a decade, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written several major works about the transition from socialism to capitalism: Beyond Capital (winner of the Deutscher Prize), Build It Now, The Socialist Alternative, and The Contradictions of "Real Socialism." Here, he develops and deepens the analysis contained in those pathbreaking works by tracing major issues in socialist thought from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first. Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society's goods and services, we also "produce" something else: namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize roduction and, at the same time, fulfil their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three parts: social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.