Despite their many disagreements when it comes to the subject of capitalism, Marxist and market-liberal approaches seem to agree about one thing: the economic structures of capitalist market society have made direct violence against the person not only superfluous, but economically counterproductive. Heide Gerstenberger's Market and Violence does not contest the thesis that there has been, in many places, a decline in the use of violence in the pursuit of profit; but it demolishes the assumption that this can be put down to the evolution of economic rationality. By means of a deep engagement...

The Communist Women’s Movement (CWM), virtually unknown today, was the world’s first truly international revolutionary organisation of women. Formed in 1920, the CWM mapped out a programme for women’s emancipation; participated in struggles for women’s rights; and worked to advance women’s participation in the Communist movement. The present volume, part of a series on the Communist International in Lenin’s time, contains proceedings and resolutions of CWM conferences, along with reports on its work around the world. Most of the contents here are published in English for the...

That the idea of world revolution was crucial for the Bolshevik leaders in the years following the 1917 revolution is a well-known fact. But what did the party’s rank and file make of it? How did it resonate with the general population? And what can a social history of international solidarity tell us about the transformation of Soviet society from NEP to Stalinism? This book undertakes the first in-depth analysis of the discourses and practices of internationalism in early Soviet society during the years of revolution, civil war and NEP, using forgotten archival materials and contemporary...

The life of legendary revolutionary fighter and journalist Larisa Reisner (1895–1926) is set against the world-shaking events of 1917, and draws on material recently released from the Soviet archives to tell her story through the memories of those close to her, her own voluminous writings, and her six books, to be published together in translation for the first time by Brill with this biography.

Evgeny A. Preobrazhensky was Russia’s foremost economist in the 1920s. This volume editorially reconstructs his theory of socialist industrialisation in an agrarian country and relates it to previous socialist theories and to issues of political struggle, culture and communist morality. The editors create a unique portrait of Preobrazhensky as an economist and social theorist, assess the viability of NEP as a model of economic growth, and identify the fault lines that contributed to the split in the Trotskyist Opposition and its defeat in the struggle against Stalin. The bulk of the work...

How did the revolutionary Left view cultural modernists? Their uneasy relationship is illustrated in this book with quotations ranging from Alexander’s ‘Dada is merely an impertinence’ through Trotsky’s ‘There cannot be a proletarian culture’ to Averbakh’s ‘Tear off the masks!’ and Becher’s ‘There can only be one kind of genuine art: fighting art.’

Evgeny A. Preobrazhensky was Russia’s foremost economist in the 1920s. This volume editorially reconstructs his theory of socialist industrialisation in an agrarian country and relates it to previous socialist theories and to issues of political struggle, culture and communist morality. The bulk of the work consists of Preobrazhensky’s Concrete Analysis of the Soviet Economy, which supplements his theoretical inquiry published in Volume II. A number of appendices present Preobrazhensky’s analysis of the NEP and his correspondence with Trotsky alongside extensive contributions by the...

Subject of numerous interpretations and studies, the vicissitudes of the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research nevertheless still reserve some little-known pages, such as the human and scientific relationship that bound philosopher Max Horkheimer and economist Friedrich Pollock for over fifty years. Based on texts and letters translated here into English for the first time as well as some previously unpublished documents, the book reconstructs the crucial moments in the friendship between the two scholars with a narrative style and philological accuracy. Nicola Emery accompanies us...

How is it possible that works of art exist? How do we become receptive aesthetic subjects? The Specificity of the Aesthetic extends these fundamental ontological and phenomenological questions around which Georg Lukács’s theory of art was organised. This late work of aesthetics seeks to solve a puzzle that neither philosophy nor socialist politics was able to: the fundamental ethical question of what individuals and humanity as a whole ought to do. Art offers Lukács the already-existing means through which the damaged edifice of Marxism might be reconstructed on a durable basis on which...