Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Political Ideologies - Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism

The 1917 revolutions that gave birth to Soviet Russia had a profound impact on Russian religious life. Social and political attitudes toward religion in general and toward the Russian Orthodox Church in particular remained in turmoil for nearly 30 years. During that time of religious uncertainty, a movement known as "renovationism," led by reformist Orthodox clergy, pejoratively labeled "red priests," tried to reconcile Christianity with the goals of the Bolshevik state. But Church hierarchy and Bolshevik officials alike feared clergymen who proclaimed themselves to be both Christians and...

In 1997, Rusmir Mahmutcehajic, one of Bosnia's leading public intellectuals, was scheduled to lecture on Bosnia at Stanford University but was unexpectedly denied an entry visa by American authorities. This book, first published in Bosnia in 1998, is an expanded version of that lecture. It is an indictment of the partition of Bosnia, formalized in 1995 by the Dayton Accord. It is also a plea for Bosnia's communities to reject ethnic segregation and restore mutual trust. For the first time, English-speaking readers can hear this important voice of dissent from within...

More is known about Nikita Khrushchev than about many former Soviet leaders, partly because of his own efforts to communicate through speeches, interviews, and memoirs. (A partial version of his memoirs was published in three volumes in 1970, 1974, and 1990, and a complete version was published in Russia in 1999 and will appear in an English translation to be published by Penn State Press.) But even with the opening of party and state archives in 1991, as William Taubman points out in his Foreword, many questions remain unanswered. "How did Khrushchev manage not only to survive Stalin but...

One hundred years after the death of Friedrich Engels, the longtime colleague of Karl Marx continues to influence the thought of socialist thinkers. This critical reappraisal of Engels addresses his relevance after both the death of Marx and the decline of Marxism, bringing Engels out from under the shadow of Marx to show the theoretical significance and historical impact of his wide-ranging criticisms for philosophy, science, political economy, history, and socialist politics.

This collection of original essays seeks to determine the nature of Engels's role as an independent...

In 1980 Alvin Gouldner identified two traditions of Marxist thought--Marxism as science and Marxism as critique. This book is concerned with the first and by far the most politically influential of those traditions--Marxism as science. It analyzes the claim, first made by Marx and Engels themselves, that Marxism is some kind of "hard" natural science of society able to identify laws of social development and to provide a scientific guide to revolutionary activity.

Marxism and Science breaks new ground by using Wittgensteinian analysis of Marxist discourse to construct a...

The challenge to Marxian theory presented by the current collapse of communist economies centers on the role of markets. Marx versus Markets points out that Marx defines communist economies--even in their lower stage of development--as classless economies without markets. It then examines his claims that classless economies with markets are in some sense inferior to communist economies.

Two conclusions emerge from Stanley Moore's analysis. First, Marx's major arguments for abolishing commodity exchange rely on moral and philosophical premises, derived from Feuerbach in the...

"Leninism" provides an in-depth analysis of the economic and political doctrines of Lenin, creator of the Communist Party that came into power in Russia in 1917. Based upon the author's comprehensive reading of Lenin's "Collected Works" (some 10 million words in Russian), the study dissects Lenin's political economy, and shows it to be pseudoscience, based on simple, arbitrary, and unrealistic assumptions. According to Dovring, Lenin was a politician, not a scientist, and his aim was power, not truth. The work begins by providing a brief sketch of Lenin's life and an overview of his career...

This description of real-world models and interpretive perspectives on Soviet economic and political theory and practice from 1917 through 1991 encompasses War Communism, New Economic Policy, Stalinism, and the reforms and debates of Krushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev. The work focuses on political economy as contrasted with pure economy, and it is organized on a more or less historical basis. The work demonstrates the forces that led to the disintegration of the Soviet state.

Alexander surveys the most important dissident movement within International Communism in the developed world since World War II. He traces its origins, the issues that differentiated the movement from Moscow-oriented communism, and shows why the movement had an attraction for both traditional communists and others of the left.

Examining the movement by region and then by country, he describes the appearance and evolution of the Maoist Communist parties throughout North America, Europe, Japan and Ociania. An important resource for all scholars and researchers involved with the...

To fully grasp Marx's theory of the labor movement, Lapides supplies a deeper insight into the economic analysis underlying it. This book presents Marx's theory of wages and wage labor, previously scattered throughout his writings, in its entirety for the first time. The author places the theory in its historical context, locating the sources of Marx's wage theory, its intellectual antecedents, and the roots of later controversies, but the primary focus of the work is the actual development of Marx's theory in the words in which he expressed it.

In order to reveal the true nature and...

During the Cold War, the West typically represented socialism as a threat to genuine aesthetic achievement. Nonetheless, socialist cultures have produced a rich and varied body of creative works, and socialism continues to be a living force in China and in many regions of the Third World. The essays in this volume begin to reassess the legacy of socialist cultural production in such areas of the world, which were outside the specific scope of influence of either the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War era.

The contributors give special attention to the strong...

The Party of Democratic Socialism is wrongly stigmatized as polarizing German politics on the left. In fact, Oswald argues, the PDS is East Germany's contribution to the regionalized pluralism of united Germany's party system. Although initially marginalized as the successor of East Germany's SED, the PDS legitimized itself by combining eastern regionalism, a left-socialist identity, and political ambition. The PDS has become an acceptable partner in center-left parties in eastern state governments, in stark contrast to its continuing irrelevance in West Germany. While its earlier...

In Russia, as in other new federations and those undergoing constitutional reform, wealthy and politically cohesive regions can substantially alter the rules of intergovernmental relations to their benefit within the context of bilateral bargaining. The end result is institutionalized asymmetry, and potentially unstable federal structures. In this book the author explores the role of center-periphery bargaining in the stability and sustainability of post-Soviet Union Russia.