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This influential collection explores the pivotal texts and topics in the Marxist tradition. Ranging over questions of social theory, political theory, moral philosophy and literary criticism, it looks at the thought of Marx and Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Althusser. They include Geras's influential and widely-cited treatment of fetishism in Capital, his comprehensive review of recent debates on Marxism and justice, discussions on political organisation, revolutionary mass action and party pluralism, and a novel analysis of the literary power of Trotsky's writing. In close dialogue with common themes and arguments in the literature of revolutionary Marxism, Geras brings some of his persistent preoccupations to the fore; with the normative foundations and some of the epistemological assumptions of this tradition, with issues of socialist democracy, working class self-education and emancipation.
In the 20th century, communism claimed the lives of at least 100 million people. But often it is regarded with more sympathy than the other deadly totalitarian creed, national socialism. Despite several plausible accounts of famines, mass executions, labour camps and oppression, many Western intellectuals were either supporters or fellow-travellers of the communists. This illustrated report is about some of the most noteworthy books, travelogues, novels, memories, and historical treatises that came out in the great struggle between totalitarian communism and liberal democracy from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution onwards.
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.
This volume widens the field of Soviet literature studies by interpreting it as a multinational project, with national literatures acting not as copies of the Russian model, but as creators of a multidimensional literary space. The book proposes a reconsideration of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of literary field and analyzes the interactions of literature, power, and economics under the communist rule. The articles selected include theoretical discussions and case studies from different national literatures presenting different structural elements of the Soviet literary field, as well as phenomena created by the complexity of the field itself, such as the Aesopian language, state of emergency literature, or compromise as the essential element of the writers’ identity.