Author: Paul Edward Gottfried
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 082626493X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
The Strange Death of Marxism seeks to refute certain misconceptions about the current European Left and its relation to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties that existed in the recent past. Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices. Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the emphasis on the specifically American roots of the European Left. Gottfried examines the multicultural orientation of this Left and concludes that it has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. It does, however, owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Europe. American culture and American political reform have foreshadowed related developments in Europe by years or even whole decades. Contrary to the impression that the United States has taken antibourgeois attitudes from Europeans, the author argues exactly the opposite. Since the end of World War II, Europe has lived in the shadow of an American empire that has affected the Old World, including its self-described anti-Americans. Gottfried believes that this influence goes back to who reads or watches whom more than to economic and military disparities. It is the awareness of American cultural as well as material dominance that fuels the anti-Americanism that is particularly strong on the European Left. That part of the European spectrum has, however, reproduced in a more extreme form what began as an American leap into multiculturalism. Hostility toward America, however, can be transformed quickly into extreme affection for the United States, which occurred during the Clinton administration and during the international efforts to bring a multicultural society to the Balkans. Clearly written and well conceived, The Strange Death of Marxism will be of special interest to political scientists, historians of contemporary Europe, and those critical of multicultural trends, particularly among Euro-American conservatives.
Author: Marci Shore
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300128622
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 959
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Book Description
""In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a cafe called Ziemianska."" Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the ""fin de siecle,"" They sat in Cafe Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. ""Caviar and Ashes"" tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically. Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafes to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.
Author: Paul Kengor
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781505114447
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 552
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Book Description
A chilling account of an evil ideology and the man whose nefarious thoughts made it possible.
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136758607
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.
Author: Stéphane Courtois
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674076082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 920
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Book Description
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.
Author: Andy Merrifield
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745330600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Following his hugely popular book, The Wisdom of Donkeys, Andy Merrifield breathes new life into the Marxist tradition. Magical Marxism demands something more of traditional Marxism -- something more interesting and liberating. It asks that we imagine a Marxism that moves beyond debates about class, the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In escaping the formalist straitjacket of orthodox Marxist critique, Merrifield argues for a reconsideration of Marxism and its potential, applying previously unexplored approaches to Marxist thinking that will reveal vital new modes of political activism and debate. This book will provoke and inspire in equal measure. It gives us a Marxism for the 21st century, which offers dramatic new possibilities for political engagement.
Author: Gareth Stedman Jones
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674974808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 720
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Book Description
Gareth Stedman Jones returns Karl Marx to his nineteenth-century world, before later inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. He shows how Marx adapted the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and others into ideas that would have—in ways inconceivable to Marx—an overwhelming impact in the twentieth century.
Author: Nikolas K. Gvosdev
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351473204
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The collapse of communism marked the close of an era of world history. What took place in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1991, in the eyes of its proponents, constituted a "great experiment" in the application of new modes of organization to social life, the largest such experiment in history. The Strange Death of Soviet Communism, which first appeared as a special issue of The National Interest, brings together leading scholars of Soviet history, who show why the experiment failed and how it has destroyed the laboratory of socialist utopias.Francis Fukuyama considers the role of long-term social and intellectual modernization while Vladimir Kontorovich examines the related factor of economic stagnation. Myron Rush then analyzes the accidental and precedent-breaking accession and leadership of Gorbachev. Charles Fairbanks looks at the more general factors of change and rigidity within communist political culture. Chapters by Peter Reddaway and Stephen Sestanovich conclude this section by assessing respectively the role of internal pressure from Soviet citizens and external pressure from the West. The next chapters deal with why the West was surprised by the communist collapse. This involves a critique of Western Sovietology both for its scholarly failures and its ideological prejudices. Here, Peter Rutland and William Odom deal with social science interpretations of the Soviet Union while Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes reflect on historians' readings of Soviet history. Martin Malia then offers a comparative assessment of both. In the third section Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer discuss communism in relation to the intellectuals in the West.Although the authors are united in their anti-communist stance, the volume is diverse in its perspectives and assessments of Soviet communism. Taken together, these contributions show that the debate on the legacy of communism and a subsequent rethinking of modern history is just beginnin
Author: Mark Fisher
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1910924393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
A noted British cultural critic takes on some of the strangest works of art from the 20th century and dissects our fascination with the unsettling in popular music, film, and writing What exactly are the Weird and the Eerie? Two closely related but distinct modes, and each possesses its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, but this genre alone does not fully encapsulate the pull of the outside and the unknown. In several essays, Mark Fisher argues that a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of transitory concepts such as the Weird and the Eerie. Featuring discussion of the works of: H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christopher Nolan.
Author: Paul Edward Gottfried
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826263151
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends Paul Gottfried’s examination of Western managerial government’s growth in the last third of the twentieth century. Linking multiculturalism to a distinctive political and religious context, the book argues that welfare-state democracy, unlike bourgeois liberalism, has rejected the once conventional distinction between government and civil society. Gottfried argues that the West’s relentless celebrations of diversity have resulted in the downgrading of the once dominant Western culture. The moral rationale of government has become the consciousness-raising of a presumed majority population. While welfare states continue to provide entitlements and fulfill the other material programs of older welfare regimes, they have ceased to make qualitative leaps in the direction of social democracy. For the new political elite, nationalization and income redistributions have become less significant than controlling the speech and thought of democratic citizens. An escalating hostility toward the bourgeois Christian past, explicit or at least implicit in the policies undertaken by the West and urged by the media, is characteristic of what Gottfried labels an emerging “therapeutic” state. For Gottfried, acceptance of an intrusive political correctness has transformed the religious consciousness of Western, particularly Protestant, society. The casting of “true” Christianity as a religion of sensitivity only toward victims has created a precondition for extensive social engineering. Gottfried examines late-twentieth-century liberal Christianity as the promoter of the politics of guilt. Metaphysical guilt has been transformed into self-abasement in relation to the “suffering just” identified with racial, cultural, and lifestyle minorities. Unlike earlier proponents of religious liberalism, the therapeutic statists oppose anything, including empirical knowledge, that impedes the expression of social and cultural guilt in an effort to raise the self-esteem of designated victims. Equally troubling to Gottfried is the growth of an American empire that is influencing European values and fashions. Europeans have begun, he says, to embrace the multicultural movement that originated with American liberal Protestantism’s emphasis on diversity as essential for democracy. He sees Europeans bringing authoritarian zeal to enforcing ideas and behavior imported from the United States. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends the arguments of the author’s earlier After Liberalism. Whether one challenges or supports Gottfried’s conclusions, all will profit from a careful reading of this latest diagnosis of the American condition.
