Download or read book The Contradictions of quot Real Socialism quot The Conductor and the Conducted written by Michael Lebowitz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this concise volume, noted scholar and economist Michael A. Lebowitz considers the legacy of twentieth century socialist societies, or what some have termed ?real socialism.? While these societies were able to claim major achievements in areas from health care to education to popular culture, they nonetheless met limited success in eroding what Marx called the ?opposition of the worker as direct producer and the proprietor of the means of production.? That this opposition between workers and managers continued to exist in one form or another under ?real socialism? means that, according to L

Download or read book The Contradictions of Real Socialism written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-08 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was “real socialism”—the term which originated in twentieth-century socialist societies for the purpose of distinguishing them from abstract, theoretical socialism? In this volume, Michael A. Lebowitz considers the nature, tendencies, and contradictions of those societies. Beginning with the constant presence of shortages within “real socialism,” Lebowitz searches for the inner relations which generate these patterns. He finds these, in particular, in what he calls “vanguard relations of production,” a relation which takes the apparent form of a social contract where workers obtain benefits not available to their counterparts in capitalism but lack the power to decide within the workplace and society. While these societies were able to claim major achievements in areas from health care to education to popular culture, the separation of thinking and doing prevented workers from developing their capacities as fully developed human beings. The relationship within “real socialism” between the vanguard as conductor and a conducted working class, however, did not only lead to the deformation of workers and those elements necessary for the building of socialism; it also created the conditions in which enterprise managers emerged as an incipient capitalist class, which was an immediate source of the crises of “real socialism.” As he argued in The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, Lebowitz stresses the necessity to go beyond the hierarchy inherent in the relation of conductor and conducted (and beyond the “vanguard Marxism” which supports this) to create the conditions in which people can transform themselves through their conscious cooperation and practice—i.e., a society of free and associated producers.

Download or read book States of Emergency written by Kees van der Pijl and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brilliantly researched, impeccably sourced, the story is told in an engaging style and with great analytical acuity. Here is a dire warning against the slide into authoritarianism..." WILLIAM I. ROBINSON, Distinguished Prof. of Sociology, UC-Santa Barbara Ever since large parts of the world were placed in lockdown in March 2020 in the name of public health, there has been a growing public suspicion that some sort of global seizure of power and social transformation is being implemented under guise of the extraordinary suspension of democracy and unprecedented restrictions of basic freedoms occurring in so many countries at the same time. This book contends that since the financial collapse of 2008, populations in many countries have become restive in the face of extreme inequality and diminishing life chances. In a digital economy, one to two billion people will soon be superfluous, but they are not likely to remain sitting on their hands; in many parts of the world their resistance has begun. The Western capitalist elites have lost the capacity to engage their respective peoples in an equitable social contract and have resorted to stoking fear -- from the terrorism scare and the Russian threat to the COVID infliction, with more variants coming on line -- as a formula for curtailing protest and maintaining power. It analyses the social forces driving this process: the US national security state and its intelligence apparatus, the IT giants spun off from it, and the large media conglomerates that have joined forces to create a comprehensive surveillance system of Orwellian dimensions The production of disease threats is amplified by the Gates Foundation and other public international organizations including the WHO, along with the pharmaceutical industries, foresee unprecedented profit in plans to inoculate the world population with experimental gene therapies sold as vaccines. Ideas on using a pandemic to initiate a worldwide state of siege have matured until the need for collective intervention -- the threat of a new financial meltdown and the need to remove Trump -- prompted global elites to seize the day. The virus threat may not be an idle one, given the Pentagon's biowarfare infrastructure which for decades has been producing gain-of-function viruses in laboratories the world over, as have a wide range of countries. The book is the first to offer an extensively documented, comprehensive analysis of all aspects of this real and embellished threat

Download or read book The Socialist Imperative written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 production and, at the same time, fulfill 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.

Download or read book The Outline of Sanity written by G. K. Chesterton and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2016-12-09 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: G. K. Chesterton’s famous thesis explores the subjects of poverty, agriculture, machinery, capital gain, and concentration of wealth from an anti-capitalist viewpoint. This fascinating volume argues the threat to smaller businesses as corporate companies become more dominant. Fiercely relevant almost 100 years after its first publication, The Outline of Sanity is G. K. Chesterton’s insightful exploration of humanity’s future. He criticises both the scientific management theory and Marxist Trotskyism, questioning the longevity of democracy. First published in 1926. The contents of this volume features: - Some General Ideas - The Beginning of the Quarrel - The Peril of the Hour - The Chance of Recovery - Some Aspects of Big Business - The Bluff of the Big Shops - A Misunderstanding about Method - A Case in Point - The Tyranny of Trusts - Some Aspects of the Land

Download or read book Where and why Public Ownership Has Failed written by Yves Guyot and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The ABC of Communism written by Nikolai Bukharin and published by Pattern Books. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ABC of Communism is a book written by Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky in 1919, during the Russian Civil War. Originally written to convince the proletariat of Russia to support the Bolsheviks, it became "an elementary textbook of communist knowledge". It became the best known and most widely circulated of all pre-Stalinist expositions of Bolshevism and the most widely read political work in Soviet Russia. Long out of print, and often only being available with the abridged first few chapters, this version includes completed new transcriptions of the last eight chapters along with the Programme of the Communist Party of Russia, a glossary, and a new word index. The ABC of Communism is written to be a systematic description of communism and the proletarian condition under capitalism, away from the reality of Soviet life, into a redirection towards a militant optimism on the horizon. This book in the Radical Reprint series from Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to manufacturing cost as possible.

Download or read book The Conduct of Life written by Ralph Waldo Emerson and published by . This book was released on 1860 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rules for Radicals written by Saul Alinsky and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-06-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This country's leading hell-raiser" (The Nation) shares his impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” First published in 1971 and written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.

Download or read book Terrorism and Communism written by Karl Kautsky and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Download or read book Wagnerism written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

Download or read book The Lost World of British Communism written by Raphael Samuel and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating account of life as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain The Lost World of British Communism is a vivid account of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Raphael Samuel, one of post-war Britain’s most notable historians, draws on novels of the period and childhood recollections of London’s East End, as well as memoirs and Party archives, to evoke the world of British Communism in the 1940s. Samuel conjures up the era when the movement was at the height of its political and theoretical power, brilliantly bringing to life an age in which the Communist Party enjoyed huge prestige as a bulwark for the struggles against fascism and colonialism.

Download or read book Mute Compulsion written by Søren Mau and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new Marxist theory of the abstract and impersonal forms of power in capitalism Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and entrenchment amidst crisis and unrest, Mute Compulsion offers a novel theory of the historically unique forms of abstract and impersonal power set in motion by the subjection of social life to the profit imperative. Building on a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy and a wide range of contemporary Marxist theory, philosopher Søren Mau sets out to explain how the logic of capital tightens its stranglehold on the life of society by constantly remoulding the material conditions of social reproduction. In the course of doing so, Mau intervenes in classical and contemporary debates about the value form, crisis theory, biopolitics, social reproduction, humanism, logistics, agriculture, metabolism, the body, competition, technology and relative surplus populations.

Download or read book Economic Calculation in the Socialist Society written by Trygve J. B. Hoff and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 1981 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Hoff's 1938 book and Professor Vaughn's important introduction establish the theoretical impossibility of socialism: a system empirically in ruins but still advocated by many.

Download or read book All that is Solid Melts Into Air written by Marshall Berman and published by Verso. This book was released on 1983 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

Download or read book Ten Days that Shook the World written by John Reed and published by Books Explorer. This book was released on 1919 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Account of the November Revolution in Russia.