Criticism of Religion asks why and how some of the leading Marxist critics deal with the question of religion and theology. It offers a spirited critical commentary on the work of Lucien Goldmann, ...Fredric Jameson, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Georg Lukács, and Raymond Williams.
If the Soviet Union did not have a socialist society, then how should its nature be understood? The present book presents the first comprehensive appraisal of the debates on this problem, which was ...so central to twentieth-century Marxism.
Factory of Strategyis the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought ...and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's theoretical trajectory.
Lenin is the only prominent politician of the modern era to seriously question the "withering away" and "extinction" of the state, and like Marx, he recognized the link between capitalism and modern sovereignty and the need to destroy capitalism and reconfigure the state. Negri refrains from portraying Lenin as a ferocious dictator enforcing the proletariat's reappropriation of wealth, nor does he depict him as a mere military tool of a vanguard opposed to the Ancien Régime. Negri instead champions Leninism's ability to adapt to different working-class configurations in Russia, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. He argues that Lenin developed a new political figuration in and beyond modernity and an effective organization capable of absorbing different historical conditions. He ultimately urges readers to recognize the universal application of Leninism today and its potential to institutionally -- not anarchically -- dismantle centralized power.
Shannon Woodcock,
Life is War: Surviving Dictatorship in Communist Albania
, Tirana: HammerOnPress, 2016, 238 pp, $22 (paperback), ISBN 1910849030
Margo Rejmer,
Mud Sweeter Than Honey: Voices of ...Communist Albania
, translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, London: MacLehose Press, 2021, 320 pp, £18.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-1529411461
In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe's most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to ...practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read "decadent" Western literature began to devour the outside world. They opened cafés, companies, and newspapers. Previously banned rock music blared in the streets.
Modern Albaniaoffers a vivid history of the Albanian Communist regime's fall and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists' last Politburo meetings and the first student revolts, the fall of the Stalinist regime, the outflows of refugees, the crash of the massive pyramid-loan schemes, the war in neighboring Kosovo, and Albania's relationship with the United States. Fred Abrahams weaves together personal experience from more than twenty years of work in Albania, interviews with key Albanians and foreigners who played a role in the country's politics since 1990-including former Politburo members, opposition leaders, intelligence agents, diplomats, and founders of the Kosovo Liberation Army-and a close examination of hundreds of previously secret government records from Albania and the United States. A rich, narratively-driven account,Modern Albaniagives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.
This promising addition to the growing literature on the history of late socialism charts the development of youth culture and politics in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on the 1980s. Rather than ...examining the 1980s as a mere prelude to the violent collapse of the country in the 1990s, the book recovers the multiplicity of political visions and cultural developments that evolved at the time and that have been largely forgotten in subsequent discussion. The youth of this generation, the author convincingly argues, sought to rearticulate the Yugoslav socialist framework in order to reinvigorate it and 'democratise' it, rather than destroy it altogether.
Political selection is central to the survival of all regimes. This article evaluates the relative importance of performance and political connection for the advancement of local politicians under ...authoritarianism. We hypothesize that in a large-scale multilevel polity, economic performance plays a greater role in promotion at lower administrative levels of government than at higher ones, even after controlling for political connections. This dualist strategy allows the ruling elites to achieve economic performance while minimizing the advancement of potentially disloyal challengers. Thus, balancing between loyalty and competence among subordinates enhances regime survival. Our empirical evidence draws on a comprehensive panel dataset of provincial, prefectural, and county-level Communist party secretaries and government executives appointed between 1999 and 2007. We find consistent evidence for our argument under various model specifications. We also explore the heterogeneous effects of performance on promotion given the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) age ineligibility rule for cadre promotion and jurisdiction characteristics.
We theorize how an ideological imprint—ideology formed through past events—serves as an information filter that persistently affects individuals’ decision making and how subsequent behaviors of the ...imprinter—the entity that established the imprint—may alter it. We test our model with a longitudinal dataset of Chinese private entrepreneurs from 1993 to 2012, investigating the influence of a founder’s communist ideological imprint, which characterizes foreign capitalism as evil, and subsequent dynamics introduced by the imprinter—the Communist Party–led government of China—on two internationalization strategies that deal with foreign investors and markets: firms’ efforts to attract foreign capital and to expand globally. Our findings show that Chinese entrepreneurs’ communist ideological imprint negatively affects the internationalization of their ventures, while available and credible information contradicting communism—coming from the government directly, government-created industry social networks for entrepreneurs, or observing governmental support of internationalization—weakens the influence of the imprint. Our study contributes to a better understanding of imprinting and its decay, the effects of corporate decision makers’ political ideology, and the internationalization of firms.
