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 Failed Utopias written by Arch Puddington and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Failed Utopias examines the various routine, or systematic, totalitarian controls employed by communist regimes. It is these less dramatic controls which enable Marxist governments to beat back their politcal opponents without having to resort to death squads or long-term military rule. The author also shows how this complex system of coercion now stands as a major obstacle to change in countries that desperately need to modernize.
Download or read book Socialism Utopian and Scientific written by Friedrich Engels and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Utopian Road to Hell written by William J. Murray and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2021-03-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "William Murray provides a unique perspective that should be read, particularly by America's youth, at a time central planners are once again promising utopian dreams at a cost to the most productive among us.” ―Governor Mike Huckabee Utopian dreamers are deceived and deceiving. Their “fight for the people” rhetoric may sound good at first, but history proves egalitarian governments and the cultures they try to create destroy freedom, destroy creativity, destroy human lives, create poverty and misery, and often spread beyond their borders to bring others under slavery. Utopians believe that through their own personal brilliance a better society can be created on earth. When the belief in man as a creation in the image of God is completely rejected, the use of slavery and mass execution can be justified in the name of the creation of a utopian state for the masses. Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung―together these so-called visionaries through their fanciful policies are responsible for the deaths of millions of people. In Utopian Road to Hell William J. Murray, son of atheist apologist Madelyn Murray O’Hair, describes the totalitarians throughout history and the current utopians who are determined to engage in social engineering to control the lives of every person on earth. From Marx to Hitler, Murray explains the progression of socialist engineering from its occultist roots to the extreme madness of the Nazis’ nationalistic racism. From Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the rebellious desire to be free from morality drives the “at-any-cost” campaigns such as abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and overreaching government provisions. From Woodrow Wilson’s “living document” distortion of the Constitution and his income tax to FDR’s New Deal to Obama’s executive orders, those who seek centralized power typically do so by proclaiming some utopian scheme that they claim will perfect mankind and eliminate competition, greed, poverty, and war. William J. Murray masterfully educates us on the utopians’ swath of destruction throughout history and warns us of the dangers of present-day utopians fighting to hold power. We must heed the warning of George Washington when he said in his 1796 Farewell Address that it is important for those entrusted with the administration of this great and free nation, “to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.” We must reclaim the freedom of the individual to avoid the continued path down the utopian road to hell.
Download or read book Utopianism and Marxism written by Vincent Geoghegan and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The grounding assumption of this book is that an element of utopianism is a necessity in any political thinking, and that a self-conscious utopianism can generate a richer level of theory and practice. The text then follows the chequered career of utopianism in the Marxist tradition.
Download or read book Utopia written by Thomas More and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Download or read book Political Uses of Utopia written by S. D. Chrostowska and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.
Download or read book The Village Against the World written by Dan Hancox and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hundred kilometers from Seville, there is a small village, Marinaleda, that for the last thirty years has been at the center of a long struggle to create a communist utopia. In a story reminiscent of the Asterix books, Dan Hancox explores the reality behind the community where no one has a mortgage, sport is played in the Che Guevara stadium and there are monthly "Red Sundays" where everyone works together to clean up the neighbourhood. In particular he tells the story of the village mayor, Sanchez Gordillo, who in 2012 became a household name in Spain after leading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalucian unemployed.
Download or read book The Devil in History written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.
Download or read book Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom written by Andrzej Walicki and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to carefully reconstruct Marx and Engels's theory of freedom, to highlight its centrality for their vision of the communist society of the future, to trace its development in the history of Marxist thought, including Marxism-Leninism, and to explain how it as possible for it to be transformed at the height of its influence into a legitimization of totalitarian practices. The relevance of the Marxist conception of freedom for an understanding of communist totalitarianism derives from the historical fact that the latter came into being as a the result of a conscious, strenuous striving to realize the former. The Russian Revolution suppressed "bourgeois freedom" to pave the way for the "true freedom" of communism. Totalitarianism was a by-product of this immense effort. The last section of the book gives a concise analysis of the dismantling of Stalinism, involving not only the gradual detotalitarization but also the partial decommunization of "really existing socialism." Throughout, Marxism is treated as an ideology that has compromised itself but that nevertheless deserves to be seen as the most important, however exaggerated and, ultimately, tragically mistaken, reaction to the multiple shortcomings of capitalist societies and the liberal tradition.
Download or read book Cities of the Gods written by Doyne Dawson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historical study of the theory of Utopian communism in ancient Greek thought identifies and assesses the reasons for the decline in Utopian traditions after 150 BC. The author examines the evidence of the survival of Utopian traditions; particularly their influence on early Christianity.
Download or read book Red Star written by Alexander Bogdanov and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1984-06-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An Earth-man’s journey to the planet Mars, where he is treated to a wondrous vision of a communist future, complete with flying cars and 3D color movies.” —Wonders & Marvels A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist. “[A] surprisingly moving story.” —The New Yorker “The contemporary reader will marvel at [Bogdanov’s] foresight: nuclear fusion and propulsion, atomic weaponry and fallout, computers, blood transfusions, and (almost) unisexuality.” —Choice “Bogdanov’s novels reveal a great deal about their fascinating author, about his time and, ironically, ours, and about the genre of utopia as well as his contribution to it.” —Slavic Review
Download or read book Fully Automated Luxury Communism written by Aaron Bastani and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first decade of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of these disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream remains the same. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics, a new paradigm has emerged. Fully Automated Luxury Communism claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. For everyone. In his first book, radical political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history. Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone.
Download or read book Zizek and Communist Strategy written by Chris McMillan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good theory; bad politics - this is how Zizek's works have been described. Now Chris McMillan argues that Zizek's reading of global capitalism could reinvent political subversion. He highlights the political consequences of Zizek's fundamental concepts, such as the Lacanian Real, universality and the communist hypothesis. He argues that Zizek's turn to Communism represents the ultimate significance of Zizek's work for the 21st century and a marked new direction for Zizekian theory. While Zizek's work attracts a lot of labels, most of them pejorative - communist, conservative, anti-semantic - Chris McMillan identifies Zizek's unique and productive contribution to social and political theory, constructing his work as a response to the difficulties of contemporary social theory and the political deadlock of global capitalism.
Download or read book In Defense of Marxism written by Leon Trotsky and published by . This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essential Writings of Friedrich Engels written by Friedrich Engels and published by . This book was released on 2011-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of writings from Friedrich Engels. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific; The Principles of Communism; The Part Played by Labour in the Transition From Ape to Man; Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of Classical German Philosophy; and The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
Download or read book Looking Backward 2000 1887 written by Edward Bellamy and published by . This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1887. According to Erich Fromm, Looking Backward is "one of the most remarkable books ever published in America".
