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This book is about the ways in which disaster-affected communities perform their misery to secure political gains. It argues that democratic politics can take root in contexts of widespread depravity and dispossession and is a testament to both the resilience and fragility of the democratic project when faced with existential threats.
Communist parties came to power in a variety of ways, usually by force, often with the acquiescence of people who hoped for a better future. Then came the imposition of Stalinism. The book examines this, and subsequent crises in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Marx’s only full draft of Volume III of Capital was written in the Economic Manuscript of 1864—1865. The Volume III that we know was heavily edited by Engels. It has been a long-standing question in Marxian scholarship whether or not there are significant differences between Marx’s original manuscript and Engels’s edited version. Marx’s manuscript was published for the first time in German in 1992 in the Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Section II, Volume 4.2, but this important manuscript has not previously been translated into English. The publication of this English translation of Marx’s original manuscript is thus an important event in Marxian scholarship. English-speaking Marxist scholars can finally compare Engels’s Volume III with Marx’s original manuscript and evaluate for themselves the significance of the differences.
This book is a revised translation of two works by Miroslav Hroch, which together form a pioneering comparative analysis of the various struggles for national identity in nineteenth-century Europe. It is concerned with the decisive phase of 'national renaissance', when small groups of committed patriots successfully generated mass support. When and why was their propaganda effective? The author attempts to answer this fundamental question by locating the patriots within the contemporary social structure, and uses data derived from many different nationalisms. The work is divided into three sections; a theoretical examination of the origins of nationalism and nation-hood, a quantitative survey of the social and territorial structure of the patriots of eight representative national movements, and a comparative analysis of the social and professional groups that formed the milieu of patriotism. Numerous statistical tables and maps illuminate the text, which forms one of the most significant studies of the nationalist phenomenon to be published in recent years.
Henryk Grossman is best-known as a Marxist economist but he also wrote valuable political texts as a leader of the revolutionary organisation of Jewish workers in the Polish province of Austria, before the First World War, as a member of the Communist Workers Party of Poland, during the early 1920s, and as a Marxist academic during the early 1930s. These writings dealt with the political situation, tactics and strategy of Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia, the initial reception of Marxism in Poland and then substantial entries on left wing movements, organisations and individuals in a multi-volume reference work.
Popular uprisings have taken many different forms in the last hundred or so years since Muslims first began to grapple with modernity and to confront various systems of domination both European and indigenous.The relevance of studies of popular uprising and revolt in the Muslim world has recently been underlined by shattering recent events, particularly in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia and Libya. The book consists of a close analysis of the problématique of the Qur’an, showing the openness of the text to Islamic reform and renewal; the role of Islam in creating a specific form of communism in Albania and Kosova; the Chechen revolts against Russian rule after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and ...
Ethnic and national conflicts have been an unexpected and major source of problems in many parts of the world in recent times. Nowhere more so than in the formerly communist countries. This book provides a readable introduction to, and brief analytical coverage of, all the ethnic disputes of the 1990s. Full justice is done both to complex present-day situations and the deeper roots of ethnic conflict. This is followed by a review and evaluation of the main available explanations. The book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand why the fall of communism did not introduce an era of goodwill between the nations.
States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios engages with the crisis of our capitalist world, with a view to explaining its origins, unravelling its symptoms, and demystifying the anodyne corrective solutions so far proposed. At the same time, it endorses the necessity for utopian interventions aimed at drastically rethinking our social order. Organised around the themes of economy and politics, critical theory, and culture in order to offer an impressive range of thematic perspectives and critical angles, the book delves into the most pressing of today’s quandaries by combining stringent critical analysis with creative foresight. A rigorous examination of the current crisis of late-capitalist society, States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios develops paradigms that promise to rekindle the desire to move beyond capitalism towards a different social order. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences with particular interests in social and political theory, contemporary philosophy and the crises faced by the current capitalist order.
This book is a historical study of the Tajiks in Central Asia from the ancient times to the post-Soviet period. For millennia, these descendants of the original Aryan settlers were part of many different empires set up by Greek, Arab, Turkic and Russian invaders, as well as their own, most notably during the Middle Ages. The emergence of the modern state of Tajikistan began after 1917 under Soviet rule, and culminated in the promulgation of independence from the moribund USSR in 1991. In the subsequent civil war that raged between 1992 and 1997, Tajikistan came close to becoming a failed state. The legacy of that internal conflict remains critical to understanding politics in Tajikistan a ge...