Communism in Britain, 1920–39

Communism in Britain, 1920–39
Author: Thomas Linehan
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526130440

Based on extensive use of primary evidence, this is the first study of interwar British communism to set the communist experience within the framework of the life cycle. Communism offered a complete identity that could reach into virtually all aspects of life; the Party sought influence even over members' personal conduct, moral codes, health and diet, personal hygiene, and aesthetic judgements. The British Communist Party (CPGB) sought to address the communist experience through all of the principal phases of the life cycle, and its reach therefore extended to take in children, youth, and the various aspects of the adult experience, including marital and kinship relations. The book also considers the contention that the Communist Party functioned as a ‘political religion’ for some joiners who opted to enter the congregation of the communist devoted.

Rites, Rituals & Religions

Rites, Rituals & Religions
Author: Dr Debra D Andrist
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2023-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1782847898

Philosophers have contemplated the meaning of life, the who & the why, since nascent self-consciousness of the evolving hominid species. Yet practical efforts, i.e., control of life, have always transcended the philosophical: how to dominate what happens to the physical body itself, how to control the environment, and the interaction therefrom. Thus are born rites, rituals & religions. A rite can be a prescribed religious or other solemn ceremony or act it can be a social custom or practice, or even a mundane conventional act. A ritual can be the established form for a ceremony, the order of words used for example; a ritual observance can be either a system of ceremonial acts or actions, or an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner. Religion generally encompasses a socio-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements. Religion is a set of beliefs, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances (rites and rituals). Control efforts highlighted in this volume range from prehistoric cave paintings, Amerindian ceremonies, Christian denominational (especially Roman Catholic), traditions & Afro-Caribbean syncretic rites, to crossovers, which deal with the more socio-cultural rites of passage like the quinceanera, and/or dance rites & rituals like the Southern Cone tango, African candombe, Cuban habanera and European waltzes and polkas and the corrida, from the public ritual known as tauromaquia. The premise behind this comparative volume is to discover how rites, rituals & religions are addressed in real life in these divergent societies by exploring the visual and literary representations of control. Rites, Rituals and Religions is eighth and final volume in the Hispanic Worlds series

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
Author: Philip Mirowski
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781683026

At the onset of the Great Recession, as house prices sank and joblessness soared, many commentators concluded that the economic convictions behind the disaster would now be consigned to history. Yet in the harsh light of a new day, attacks against government intervention and the global drive for austerity are as strong as ever. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste is the definitive account of the wreckage of what passes for economic thought, and how neoliberal ideas were used to solve the very crisis they had created. Now updated with a new afterword, Philip Mirowski’s sharp and witty work provides a roadmap for those looking to escape today’s misguided economic dogma.

Marx and Marxism

Marx and Marxism
Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1568588968

A new biography of Karl Marx, tracing the life of this titanic figure and the legacy of his work Karl Marx remains the most influential and controversial political thinker in history. He died quietly in 1883 and a mere eleven mourners attended his funeral, but a year later he was being hailed as "the Prophet himself" whose name and writings would "endure through the ages." He has been viewed as a philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, even a literary craftsman. But who was Marx? What informed his critiques of modern society? And how are we to understand his legacy? In Marx and Marxism, Gregory Claeys, a leading historian of socialism, offers a wide-ranging, accessible account of Marx's ideas and their development, from the nineteenth century through the Russian Revolution to the present. After the collapse of the Soviet Union his reputation seemed utterly eclipsed, but now a new generation is reading and discovering Marx in the wake of the recurrent financial crises, growing social inequality, and an increasing sense of the injustice and destructiveness of capitalism. Both his critique of capitalism and his vision of the future speak across the centuries to our times, even if the questions he poses are more difficult to answer than ever.

Exotic Commodities

Exotic Commodities
Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2007-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231511872

Exotic Commodities is the first book to chart the consumption and spread of foreign goods in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of communism in 1949. Richly illustrated and revealing, this volume recounts how exotic commodities were acquired and adapted in a country commonly believed to have remained "hostile toward alien things" during the industrial era. China was not immune to global trends that prized the modern goods of "civilized" nations. Foreign imports were enthusiastically embraced by both the upper and lower classes and rapidly woven into the fabric of everyday life, often in inventive ways. Scarves, skirts, blouses, and corsets were combined with traditional garments to create strikingly original fashions. Industrially produced rice, sugar, wheat, and canned food revolutionized local cuisine, and mass produced mirrors were hung on doorframes to ward off malignant spirits. Frank Dikötter argues that ordinary people were the least inhibited in acquiring these products and therefore the most instrumental in changing the material culture of China. Landscape paintings, door leaves, and calligraphy scrolls were happily mixed with kitschy oil paintings and modern advertisements. Old and new interacted in ways that might have seemed incongruous to outsiders but were perfectly harmonious to local people. This pragmatic attitude would eventually lead to China's own mass production and export of cheap, modern goods, which today can be found all over the world. The nature of this history raises the question, which Dikötter pursues in his conclusion: If the key to surviving in a fast-changing world is the ability to innovate, could China be more in tune with modernity than Europe?

Fashion: A Visual History

Fashion: A Visual History
Author: NJ Stevenson
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2012-02-14
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780312624453

Every generation can recall and identify with the fashion icons and idols of their era. The crinoline-caged Victorian female, the Gibson girl, and the grunge-layered youth of the 1990s all reflect the influences and extremes of their life and times. The start of the 19th century marks the dawn of the designer, a sartorial influence that became a star-studded industry. Fashion: A Visual History charts those points in time when distinctive styles that began as extravagances of the very rich permeated through well-dressed society until a cut of cloth or choice of accessory defined fashion. This elegantl- dressed volume asseses the contribution of such innovative players as Worth, Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent, Klein, Westwood, and Gaultier, as well as the effects of stage, sceren, music, dance, and sports celebriries on our ever-changing sense of fashion. Each spread focuses on a definitive item--be it bowler hat or little black dress, stiletto or caftan--or identifies key shifts in fashion that reflect excess, liberation, austerity, nostalgia, and technology, displaying it in contemporary images ranging from paintings and illustrated fashion plates to cartoons and photographs. Evocative primary quotes complete a history that visually traces the revealing evolution of fashion in Western society.

The Death of the KPD

The Death of the KPD
Author: Patrick Major
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1998-02-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191583901

Why was the West German Communist Party banned in 1956, only 11 years after it had emerged from Nazi persecution? Although politically weak, the postwar party was in fact larger than its Weimar predecessor and initially dominated works councils at the Ruhr pits and Hamburg docks, as well as the steel giant, Krupp. Under the control of East Berlin, however, the KPD was sent off on a series of overambitious and flawed campaigns to promote national unification and prevent West German rearmament. At the same time, the party was steadily criminalized by the Anglo-American occupiers, and ostracized by a heavily anti-communist society. Patrick Major has used material available only since the end of the Cold War, from both Communist archives in the former GDR as well as western intelligence, to trace the final decline and fall of the once-powerful KPD.

A Zone of Engagement

A Zone of Engagement
Author: Perry Anderson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 408
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN:

The texts in this volume offer critical assessments of a number of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics. They include Roberto Unger, advocate of plasticity; the historians of antiquity and of revolution, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and Isaac Deutscher; the philosophers of liberalism, Norberto Bobbio and Isaiah Berlin; the sociologists of power, Michael Mann and W.G. Runciman; the exponents of national identity, Andreas Hillgruber and Fernand Braudel; the ironists of science, Max Weber and Ernest Gellner; Carlo Ginzburg, explorer of cultural continuity, and Marshall Berman, herald of modernity. A concluding chapter looks at the idea of the end of history, recently advanced by Francis Fukuyama, in its successive versions from the nineteenth century to the present, and considers the situation of socialism today in the light of it.