Contradiction and Conflict explores the rich history, ideology, and development of the popular church in Nicaragua. From careful assessments within the context of Nicaragua's revolutionary period ...(1970s-1990), this book explains the historical conditions that worked to unify members of the Christian faith and the subsequent factors that fragmented the Christian community into at least four identifiable groups with religious and political differences, contradictions, and conflicts. Debra Sabia describes and analyzes the rise, growth, and fragmentation of the popular church and assesses the effect of the Christian base communities on religion, politics, and the nation's social revolutionary experiment.
This book examines how Nazism took shape in the classroom and offers a compelling new analysis of Nazi educational policy. The author convincingly argues that in order to understand National ...Socialism, we need to understand its policies on youth.
Advocating nuclear war, attempting communication with dolphins and taking an interest in the paranormal and UFOs, there is perhaps no greater (or stranger) cautionary tale for the Left than that of ...Posadism. *BR**BR*Named after the Argentine Trotskyist J. Posadas, the movement's journey through the fractious and sectarian world of mid-20th century revolutionary socialism was unique. Although at times significant, Posadas' movement was ultimately a failure. As it disintegrated, it increasingly grew to resemble a bizarre cult, detached from the working class it sought to liberate. The renewed interest in Posadism today - especially for its more outlandish fixations - speaks to both a cynicism towards the past and nostalgia for the earnest belief that a better world is possible.*BR**BR*Drawing on considerable archival research, and numerous interviews with ex- and current Posadists, I Want to Believe tells the fascinating story of this most unusual socialist movement and considers why it continues to capture the imaginations of leftists today.
The Bolsheviks took power in Russia 1917 armed with an ideology centered on the power of the worker. From the beginning, however, Soviet leaders also realized the need for rest and leisure within the ...new proletarian society and over subsequent decades struggled to reconcile the concept of leisure with the doctrine of communism, addressing such fundamental concerns as what the purpose of leisure should be in a workers' state and how socialist vacations should differ from those enjoyed by the capitalist bourgeoisie.
InClub Red, Diane P. Koenker offers a sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika. She shows that from the outset, the regime insisted that the value of tourism and vacation time was strictly utilitarian. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, the emphasis was on providing the workers access to the "repair shops" of the nation's sanatoria or to the invigorating journeys by foot, bicycle, skis, or horseback that were the stuff of "proletarian tourism." Both the sedentary vacation and tourism were part of the regime's effort to transform the poor and often illiterate citizenry into new Soviet men and women.
Koenker emphasizes a distinctive blend of purpose and pleasure in Soviet vacation policy and practice and explores a fundamental paradox: a state committed to the idea of the collective found itself promoting a vacation policy that increasingly encouraged and then had to respond to individual autonomy and selfhood. The history of Soviet tourism and vacations tells a story of freely chosen mobility that was enabled and subsidized by the state. While Koenker focuses primarily on Soviet domestic vacation travel, she also notes the decisive impact of travel abroad (mostly to other socialist countries), which shaped new worldviews, created new consumer desires, and transformed Soviet vacation practices.
Following the Civil War, large corporations emerged in the United
States and became intent on maximizing their power and profits at
all costs. Political corruption permeated American society as those
...corporate entities grew and spread across the country, leaving
bribery and exploitation in their wake. This alliance between
corporate America and the political class came to a screeching halt
during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when the U.S. workers in
the railroad, mining, canal, and manufacturing industries called a
general strike against monopoly capitalism and brought the country
to an economic standstill. In The St. Louis Commune of
1877 Mark Kruger tells the riveting story of how workers
assumed political control in St. Louis, Missouri. Kruger examines
the roots of the St. Louis Commune-focusing on the 1848 German
revolution, the Paris Commune, and the First International. Not
only was 1877 the first instance of a general strike in U.S.
history; it was also the first time workers took control of a major
American city and the first time a city was ruled by a communist
party.
Marxism and the Oppression of Women opens up an original direction in the Marxist-feminist theorisation of gender and capitalist reproduction. This edition elaborates Lise Vogel's unique contribution ...via a new introduction and Vogel's 2000 article "Domestic Labor Revisited.".
Set against a backdrop of mounting anti-communism, Red Apple documents the personal, physical, and mental effects of McCarthyism on six political activists with ties to New York City. From the late ...1940s through the 1950s, McCarthyism disfigured the American political landscape. Under the altar of anticommunism, domestic Cold War crusaders undermined civil liberties, curtailed equality before the law, and tarnished the ideals of American democracy. In order to preserve freedom, they jettisoned some of its tenets. Congressional committees worked in tandem, although not necessarily in collusion, with the FBI, law firms, university administrations, publishing houses, television networks, movie studios, and a legion of government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels to target "subversive" individuals. Exploring the human consequences of the widespread paranoia that gripped a nation, Red Apple presents the international and domestic context for the experiences of these individuals: the House Un-American Activities Committee, hearings of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, resulting in the incarceration of its chairman, Dr. Edward Barsky, and its executive board; the academic freedom cases of two New York University professors, Lyman Bradley and Edwin Burgum, culminating in their dismissal from the university; the blacklisting of the communist writer Howard Fast and his defection from American communism; the visit of an anguished Dimitri Shostakovich to New York in the spring of 1949; and the attempts by O. John Rogge, the Committee's lawyer, to find a "third way" in the quest for peace, which led detractors to question which side he was on. Examining real-life experiences at the "ground level," Deery explores how these six individuals experienced, responded to, and suffered from one of the most savage assaults on civil liberties in American history. Their collective stories illuminate the personal costs of holding dissident political beliefs in the face of intolerance and moral panic that is as relevant today as it was seventy years ago.
This book is a tribute to the memory of Victor Zaslavsky (1937–2009), sociologist, émigré from the Soviet Union, Canadian citizen, public intellectual, and keen observer of Eastern Europe.In ...seventeen essays leading European, American and Russian scholars discuss the theory and the history of totalitarian society with a comparative approach. They revisit and reassess what Zaslavsky considered the most important project in the latter part of his life: the analysis of Eastern European - especially Soviet societies and their difficult “transition” after the fall of communism in 1989–91. The variety of the contributions reflects the diversity of specialists in the volume, but also reveals Zaslavsky’s gift: he surrounded himself with talented people from many different fields and disciplines.In line with Zaslavsky´s work and scholarly method, the book promotes new theoretical and methodological approaches to the concept of totalitarianism for understanding Soviet and East European societies, and the study of fascist and communist regimes in general.
