Inventing a Socialist Nation
Inventing a Socialist Nation

Author: Jan Palmowski

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-08-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781107690424

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Twenty years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, historians still struggle to explain how an apparently stable state imploded with such vehemence. This book shows how 'national' identity was invented in the GDR and how citizens engaged with it. Jan Palmowski argues that it was hard for individuals to identify with the GDR amid the threat of Stasi informants and with the accelerating urban and environmental decay of the 1970s and 1980s. Since socialism contradicted its own ideals of community, identity and environmental care, citizens developed rival meanings of nationhood and identities and learned to mask their growing distance from socialism beneath regular public assertions of socialist belonging. This stabilized the party's rule until 1989. However, when the revolution came, the alternative identifications citizens had developed for decades allowed them to abandon their 'nation', the GDR, with remarkable ease.

United States of Socialism
United States of Socialism

Author: Dinesh D'Souza

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2020-06-02

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1250758300

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The New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Wall Street Journal Bestseller For those who witnessed the global collapse of socialism, its resurrection in the twenty-first century comes as a surprise, even a shock. How can socialism work now when it has never worked before? In this pathbreaking book, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza argues that the socialism advanced today by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and Elizabeth Warren is very different from the socialism of Lenin, Mao and Castro. It is “identity socialism,” a marriage between classic socialism and identity politics. Today’s socialists claim to model themselves not on Mao’s Great Leap Forward or even Venezuelan socialism but rather on the “socialism that works” in Scandinavian countries like Norway and Sweden. This is the new face of socialism that D’Souza confronts and decisively refutes with his trademark incisiveness, wit and originality. He shows how socialism abandoned the working class and found new recruits by drawing on the resentments of race, gender and sexual orientation. He reveals how it uses the Venezuelan, not the Scandinavian, formula. D’Souza chillingly documents the full range of lawless, gangster, and authoritarian tendencies that they have adopted. United States of Socialism is an informative, provocative and thrilling exposé not merely of the ideas but also the tactics of the socialist Left. In making the moral case for entrepreneurs and the free market, the author portrays President Trump as the exemplar of capitalism and also the most effective political leader of the battle against socialism. He shows how we can help Trump defeat the socialist menace.

Inventing the Future
Inventing the Future

Author: Nick Srnicek

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1784780987

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This major new manifesto offers a “clear and compelling vision of a postcapitalist society” and shows how left-wing politics can be rebuilt for the 21st century (Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism) Neoliberalism isn’t working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms. This new edition includes a new chapter where they respond to their various critics.

The Human Rights Dictatorship
The Human Rights Dictatorship

Author: Ned Richardson-Little

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-04-23

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1108424678

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Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.

Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia
Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia

Author: Hilde Katrine Haug

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-03-30

Total Pages: 614

ISBN-13: 0857731009

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The Yugoslav communist leaders aspired to create a socialist Yugoslavia, and when they came into power in 1945, they claimed to have introduced a socialist solution to the Yugoslav national question. But what did it imply to 'solve a national question' and what did introducing a 'socialist solution' to a national question entail? 'Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia: Tito, Communist Leadership and the National Question' charts how the Yugoslav Communist leaders approached the national question, and what influence the complex national relations in the multinational state of Yugoslavia had on the development of the Yugoslav communists' policies, and on their post-war socialist project. From 1935 to 1990, tremendous changes took place in the Yugoslav approach to the national question, and in the institutions they devised as part of this solution. There were also significant changes to the role of the republics and the relations between the different national groups within the Yugoslav state. Discussions on the national question were not absent during this period, despite the communists claim to have solved it. Debates over what kind of Yugoslav unity was the most desirable continued to be a question of contention and different groups had different visions of this. A struggle over resources also developed between different republics. This book identifies and examines four particular phases in the communists' strategies towards the national question; each marked by particular processes, issues and challenges. The claim to have solved the national question often meant that this issue could not be discussed openly and had to be expressed in a particular rhetoric approved by the Party. 'Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia' provides an authoritative account of the Yugoslav communist leaders' national policy and attempts to deal with the challenges encountered by the communists in reconciling their aspiration to create a socialist Yugoslavia with the need to regulate national conflict within the federation.

Ideologies and National Identities
Ideologies and National Identities

Author: John R. Lampe

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2004-01-10

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 6155053855

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Twentieth-century Southeastern Europe endured three, separate decades of international and civil war, and was marred in forced migration and wrenching systematic changes. This book is the result of a year-long project by the Open Society Institute to examine and reappraise this tumultuous century. A cohort of young scholars with backgrounds in history, anthropology, political science, and comparative literature were brought together for this undertaking. The studies invite attention to fascism, socialism, and liberalism as well as nationalism and Communism. While most chapters deal with war and confrontation, they focus rather on the remembrance of such conflicts in shaping today's ideology and national identity.

Socialism as a Secular Creed
Socialism as a Secular Creed

Author: Andrei Znamenski

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1498557317

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Andrei Znamenski argues that socialism arose out of activities of secularized apocalyptic sects, the Enlightenment tradition, and dislocations produced by the Industrial Revolution. He examines how, by the 1850s, Marx and Engels made the socialist creed “scientific” by linking it to “history laws” and inventing the proletariat—the “chosen people” that were to redeem the world from oppression. Focusing on the fractions between social democracy and communism, Znamenski explores why, historically, socialism became associated with social engineering and centralized planning. He explains the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and its role in fostering the cultural left that came to privilege race and identity over class. Exploring the global retreat of the left in the 1980s–1990s and the “great neoliberalism scare,” Znamenski also analyzes the subsequent renaissance of socialism in wake of the 2007–2008 crisis.

The New Politics of Numbers
The New Politics of Numbers

Author: Andrea Mennicken

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-10-11

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 3030782018

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This open access book offers unique insight into how and where ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted, and how they have come to matter. Rather than asking what quantification is, New Politics of Numbers explores what quantification does, its manifold consequences in multiple domains. It scrutinizes the power of numbers in terms of the changing relations between numbers and democracy, the politics of evidence, and dreams and schemes of bettering society. The book engages Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, it provides a rich account of the plurality of possible ways in which numbers have come to govern, highlighting not only their disciplinary effects, but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer. This book will be invaluable reading for academics and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines, as well as policymakers interested in the opportunities and pitfalls of governance by numbers.

The Future of Capitalism
The Future of Capitalism

Author: Paul Collier

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0062748661

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Bill Gates's Five Books for Summer Reading 2019 From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.

Inventing Berlin
Inventing Berlin

Author: Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-09

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 3030297187

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This book comprehensively examines post-1989 changes to the symbolic landscape of Berlin – specifically, street names, architecture, urban planning and monuments – and links these changes to concepts of contested cultural memory and national identity in Berlin and Germany in the post-Wall period. The core of the book is made up of an analysis of built space changes in the eastern half of the city before and after the Berlin Wall, flanked by an introduction to the theoretical underpinnings of the topic and a wider interpretation of the events in Berlin in relation to other geographic and historical contexts. It furthermore offers an explanatory model for the phenomenon of the "symbolic foreigner" whereby former citizens of the GDR feel disenfranchised and excluded from today's German society. This book is a valuable resource for researchers, students, and also appeals to a wider, non-academic audience with an interest in both cultural memory and Berlin.