A Critical Introduction to Mao

A Critical Introduction to Mao
Author: Timothy Cheek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 113978904X

Mao Zedong's political career spanned more than half a century. The ideas he championed transformed one of the largest nations on earth and inspired revolutionary movements across the world. Even today Mao lives on in China, where he is regarded by many as a near-mythical figure, and in the West, where a burgeoning literature continues to debate his memory. In this book, leading scholars from different generations and around the world offer a critical evaluation of the life and legacy of China's most famous - some would say infamous - son. The book brings the scholarship on Mao up to date, and its alternative perspectives equip readers to assess for themselves the nature of this mercurial figure and his significance in modern Chinese history.

Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century
Author: John Smith
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2016-01-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1583675795

Winner of the first Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, John Smith's Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization.Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities-the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone-and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. From there, Smith draws on his empirical findings to powerfully theorize the current shape of imperialism. He argues that the core capitalist countries need no longer rely on military force and colonialism (although these still occur) but increasingly are able to extract profits from workers in the Global South through market mechanisms and, by aggressively favoring places with lower wages, the phenomenon of labor arbitrage. Meticulously researched and forcefully argued, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a major contribution to the theorization and critique of global capitalism.

Global Histories of Work

Global Histories of Work
Author: Andreas Eckert
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110434466

Global Histories of Work is the first title in the new series "Work in Global and Historical Perspective". This collection of selected articles written by leading scholars in different disciplines provides both an introduction and numerous insights into themes, debates and methods of Global Labour History as they have been developed over the last years. The contributions to the volume discuss crucial historiographical developments; present different professions that have gained new attention in the context of an emerging Global Labour History; critically engage the boundaries of "free" labour and the ambiguities contained in this concept; and take up and historicize current debates about "informal labour". Global Histories of Work will familiarize readers with a burgeoning fi eld of high academic, social, and political relevance.

The Mediterranean City in Transition

The Mediterranean City in Transition
Author: Lila Leontidou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 1990-04-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0521344670

Postwar capitalist development has involved a transition from polarization toward diffuse urbanization and flexibility. The timing and form of this transition and its effects on spatial structures have varied, as is especially evident in the case of Mediterranean Europe. Focusing upon Greater Athens between 1948 and 1981 - the crucial period of the transition - Lila Leontidou explores the role of social classes in urban development.

The Proletarian Wave

The Proletarian Wave
Author: Sunyoung Park
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Ideology and literature
ISBN: 9780674417175

From the 1910s to the 1940s, a wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the Korean cultural scene with differing agendas but shared demands for equality and social justice. Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture, focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression.

The Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution
Author: Walter Rodney
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-07-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786635321

A never-before published history of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and its post-colonial legacy, woven together from lecture excerpts by the renowned Pan-African revolutionary socialist theorist In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Wherever he was, Rodney was a lightning rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica’s Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney was assassinated. Walter Rodney’s The Russian Revolution collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a broad range of subjects—the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism—Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion.

Old Gods, New Enigmas

Old Gods, New Enigmas
Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788732197

Is revolution possible in the age of the Anthropocene? Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book, Mike Davis’s first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx’s inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause—and solution—of the planetary environmental crisis? Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx’s theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a “lost Marx,” whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the “middle landscape” of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the “anthropocene,” which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism’s failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880–1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.

The Law of Worldwide Value

The Law of Worldwide Value
Author: Samir Amin
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2010-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1583672338

"Portions of this book were originally published as The Law of value and historical materialism c1978 by Monthly Review Press."