Download or read book The Idea of Communism 3 written by Alex Taek-Gwang Lee and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An all-star cast of radical intellectuals discuss the continued importance of communist principles In 2009 Slavoj Žižek brought together an acclaimed group of intellectuals to discuss the continued relevance of communism. Unexpectedly the conference attracted an audience of over 1,000 people. The discussion has continued across the world and this book gathers responses from the conference in Seoul. It includes the interventions of regular contributors Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, as well as work from across Asia, notably from Chinese scholar Wang Hui, offering regional perspectives on communism in an era of global economic crisis and political upheaval.
Download or read book Philosophy and the Idea of Communism written by Alain Badiou and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a well-known text called ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, first published in 2007, the renowned philosopher Alain Badiou breathed fresh life into the idea of communism as an intellectual representation that provides a critical perspective on existing politics and offers a systemic alternative to capitalism. Now, in the course of this wide-ranging conversation with Peter Engelmann, Alain Badiou explains why he continues to value the idea of communism against the background of current social crises and despite negative historical experiences. From the anticipation of a communism without a state to the problem of the concept of democracy and an analysis of capitalism as a system, the two thinkers discuss the key political issues of our time. Whilst explaining his political philosophy, Badiou also reflects on current socio-political developments such as the turmoil in the Middle East and the situation in China. This compelling dialogue is both a highly topical contribution to the question of how we might organize our societies differently and an accessible introduction to Badiou's philosophical thinking.
Download or read book The Idea of Communism written by Costas Douzinas and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it-time to get serious once again!-Slavoj Zizek Responding to Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis', the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.
Download or read book The Idea of Communism written by Tariq Ali and published by Seagull Books Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 2009 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: November 9, 2009 will mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the monumental event that signaled the beginning of the end of Communism in the former Soviet Union. Yet, why was this collapse of Communism considered final, but the many failures of capitalism are considered temporary and episodic? In The Idea of Communism, Tariq Ali addresses this very question. The idea of Communism, argues Ali, was simple and noble. The Communist Manifesto, which advocated the creation of a society based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" rather than a system based on greed and profit, appealed to millions all over the globe. However, Ali argues that the vision of society adumbrated by the founders of Communism was a far cry from what became known as actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union and China. The Communist system that developed ignored Engels's belief that a workers' movement and its victory were inconceivable without freedom of the press and assembly. This freedom, Engels insisted, "is the air it needs to breathe. Here, in a thought-provoking re-evaluation, Ali argues that a new form of socialism and global planning is vital to save the planet from capitalist and environmental degradation.
Download or read book Communism A Very Short Introduction written by Leslie Holmes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of communism was one of the most defining moments of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction examines the history behind the political, economic, and social structures of communism as an ideology.
Download or read book The Black Book of Communism written by Stéphane Courtois and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 920 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.
Download or read book Manifesto written by Ernesto Che Guevara and published by Ocean Press. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to ‘do something,’ you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.” — Adrienne Rich With a preface by Adrienne Rich, Manifesto presents the radical vision of four famous young rebels: Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and Che Guevara’s Socialism and Humanity.
Download or read book Vanguard of the Revolution written by A. James McAdams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive political history of the communist party Vanguard of the Revolution is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. A. James McAdams argues that the rise and fall of communism can be understood only by taking into account the origins and evolution of this compelling idea. He shows how the leaders of parties in countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and North Korea adapted the original ideas of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to profoundly different social and cultural settings. Vanguard of the Revolution is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand world communism and the captivating idea that gave it life.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism written by S. A. Smith and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.
Download or read book Marx s Dream written by Tom Rockmore and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two centuries after his birth, Karl Marx is read almost solely through the lens of Marxism, his works examined for how they fit into the doctrine that was developed from them after his death. With Marx’s Dream, Tom Rockmore offers a much-needed alternative view, distinguishing rigorously between Marx and Marxism. Rockmore breaks with the Marxist view of Marx in three key ways. First, he shows that the concern with the relation of theory to practice—reflected in Marx’s famous claim that philosophers only interpret the world, while the point is to change it—arose as early as Socrates, and has been central to philosophy in its best moments. Second, he seeks to free Marx from his unsolicited Marxist embrace in order to consider his theory on its own merits. And, crucially, Rockmore relies on the normal standards of philosophical debate, without the special pleading to which Marxist accounts too often resort. Marx’s failures as a thinker, Rockmore shows, lie less in his diagnosis of industrial capitalism’s problems than in the suggested remedies, which are often unsound. ? Only a philosopher of Rockmore’s stature could tackle a project this substantial, and the results are remarkable: a fresh Marx, unencumbered by doctrine and full of insights that remain salient today.
Download or read book Communism Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx written by Levy del Aguila Marchena and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates communism in Marx’s writings, incorporating a consideration of communist politicity. The author outlines the arguments by which it is possible to sustain—from Marx—the idea that human emancipation against capital also means the elimination of the State, the public, and the political dimension of praxis. He also posits that the concrete tasks of the “management of the common” in a communist society require political mediations that allow us to confront the difference inherent to the personality of freely associated producers, as well as the ontological finitude from which no technical power can evade. Finally, assuming Marx as a starting point whose work remains an inescapable source for “thinking communism,” the book proposes a research agenda from Marx and beyond to continue in this imperative task. Levy del Aguila Marchena is Senior Professor and Chair of the Department of Management Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He has published extensively on Marx, political philosophy, and applied ethics.
Download or read book Communism written by Richard Pipes and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2001-11-06 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our greatest historians, a magnificent reckoning with the modern world's most fateful idea. With astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime's scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice. At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state. Drawing on much new information, Richard Pipes explains the countryís evolution from the 1917 revolution to the Great Terror and World War II, global expansion and the Cold War chess match with the United States, and the regime's decline and ultimate collapse. There is no more dramatic story in modern history, nor one more crucial to master, than that of how the writing and agitation of two mid-nineteenth-century European thinkers named Marx and Engels led to a great and terrible world religion that brought down a mighty empire, consumed the world in conflict, and left in its wake a devastation whose full costs can only now be tabulated.
Download or read book The Communist Hypothesis written by Alain Badiou and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy—the form of state suited to capitalism—and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.”—Alain Badiou Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis,” first stated in 2008, cut through the cant and compromises of the past twenty years to reconceptualize the Left. The hypothesis is a fresh demand for universal emancipation and a galvanizing call to arms. Anyone concerned with the future of the planet needs to reckon with the ideas outlined within this book.
Download or read book Marx and Alienation written by Sean Sayers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of alienation and its overcoming are central to Marx's thought. They underpin his critique of capitalism and his vision of future society. Marx's ideas are explained in rigorous and clear terms. They are situated in the context of the Hegelian ideas that inspired them and put into dialogue with contemporary debates.
Download or read book The Meaning of Communism written by William Johnson Miller and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defines Communism by tracing it from the economic and social conditions that inspired Marx's Communist Manifesto to the development and specific application of the theory as a national system by the Russian people.
Download or read book Boundaries of Utopia Imagining Communism from Plato to Stalin written by Erik van Ree and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-22 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that socialism could be established in a single country was adopted as an official doctrine by the Soviet Union in 1925, Stalin and Bukharin being the main formulators of the policy. Before this there had been much debate as to whether the only way to secure socialism would be as a result of socialist revolution on a much broader scale, across all Europe or wider still. This book traces the development of ideas about communist utopia from Plato onwards, paying particular attention to debates about universalist ideology versus the possibility for "socialism in one country". The book argues that although the prevailing view is that "socialism in one country" was a sharp break from a long tradition that tended to view socialism as only possible if universal, in fact the territorially confined socialist project had long roots, including in the writings of Marx and Engels.
Download or read book Communism for Kids written by Bini Adamczak and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communism, capitalism, work, crisis, and the market, described in simple storybook terms and illustrated by drawings of adorable little revolutionaries. Once upon a time, people yearned to be free of the misery of capitalism. How could their dreams come true? This little book proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism. Offering relief for many who have been numbed by Marxist exegesis and given headaches by the earnest pompousness of socialist politics, it presents political theory in the simple terms of a children's story, accompanied by illustrations of lovable little revolutionaries experiencing their political awakening. It all unfolds like a story, with jealous princesses, fancy swords, displaced peasants, mean bosses, and tired workers–not to mention a Ouija board, a talking chair, and a big pot called “the state.” Before they know it, readers are learning about the economic history of feudalism, class struggles in capitalism, different ideas of communism, and more. Finally, competition between two factories leads to a crisis that the workers attempt to solve in six different ways (most of them borrowed from historic models of communist or socialist change). Each attempt fails, since true communism is not so easy after all. But it's also not that hard. At last, the people take everything into their own hands and decide for themselves how to continue. Happy ending? Only the future will tell. With an epilogue that goes deeper into the theoretical issues behind the story, this book is perfect for all ages and all who desire a better world.
