Proletarian Science?
Proletarian Science?

Author: Dominique Lecourt

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2017-11-10

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1788732049

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who died in 1976, symbolizes one of the most notorious yet obscure episodes in the history of the Soviet Union. Emerging from provincial shadows in the Ukraine during the twenties, Lysenko achieved a meteoric career under Stalin's dictatorship, when ever greater claims were officially made for his 'environmentalism'. Overlord and autocrat of all Soviet biology after the Second World War, Lysenko's doctrines were promulgated throughout the international communist movement - from Britain to Japan - as a specifically 'proletarian' science, as opposed to mere bourgeois science. After Stalin's death, Lysenko soon plunged into discredit - although his agricultural recipes were to be approved again by Khruschev. Dominique Lecourt - author of the highly successful study Marxism and Epistemology - poses the question: what was the historical meaning of Lysenko? Was Lysenko no more than a brutal charlatan? Or did his ideas correspond - not to any canon of science - but to wider social forces at work in the USSR? Lecourt's sardonic and perceptive study provides a definitive critique of the follies of 'anti-Mendelian' biology, and a materialist account of the reasons for its triumph in Russia during the rule of Stalin. An important afterword traces the original idea of a proletarian science to its source in Bogdanov. In a major introductory essay, Louis Althusser poses the acute political problems which the history of Lysenko still represents for Communists everywhere, and for the first time directly indicts political repression in the USSR today.

Rebuilding the Left
Rebuilding the Left

Author: Marta Harnecker

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1848137621

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What future is there for the left, faced with the challenges of the twenty-first century? Based on a lifetime's experience in politics, Marta Harnecker addresses the crisis facing the left today. At its heart, this book is a critique of social democratic realpolitik. Harnecker reminds us that, contrary to today's orthodoxy, politics is not the art of the possible but the art of making the impossible possible by building a social and political force capable of changing reality. She believes that the social experiments being carried out in Latin America today hold out hope that an alternative to capitalism is possible; they are essentially socialist, democratic projects in which the people are the driving force. To create a real alternative to capitalism, though, the left must change. Rebuilding the Left offers real hope to those who still believe that we can create a different world.

The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology and of Opportunism
The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology and of Opportunism

Author: Stefan Engel

Publisher: Verlag Neuer Weg

Published: 2022-07-18

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 3880216185

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The second part of the book series, The Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology, and the Doctrine of the Mode of Thinking, deals with the essential variants of bourgeois ideology since the reorganization of international capitalist production in the 1990s. In view of the growing capitalist crisis chaos and a widespread ideological disorientation, the emphasis in this second part is on the critique of the most important opportunist currents of the present day. Opportunism seeks to dissuade the working-class and people's movements from class struggle and scientific socialism. It exerts a harmful influence on parts of the international revolutionary and working-class movement. Every politically thinking, responsibly acting person must ask themselves today where they stand in regard to the globe-spanning capitalist system. Along with absurd wealth, it produces misery for millions and puts the basis of human life at risk. Does one howl with the wolves then and bury the dream of a liberated society for good, only because socialism had to accept a temporary defeat due to the revisionist betrayal in the Soviet Union or in China? Or does one help the gigantic progress of scientific knowledge and practical achievements in social production to break through against the maelstrom of pragmatism and opportunism, and join in the necessary revolutionary transformation of society?

Introduction to Non-Marxism
Introduction to Non-Marxism

Author: François Laruelle

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1937561461

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Following the collapse of the communist states it was assumed that Marxist philosophy had collapsed with it. In Introduction to Non-Marxism, François Laruelle aims to recover Marxism along with its failure by asking the question “What is to be done with Marxism itself?” To answer, Laruelle resists the temptation to make Marxism more palatable after the death of metaphysics by transforming Marxism into a mere social science or by simply embracing with evangelical fervor the idea of communism. Instead Laruelle proposes a heretical science of Marxism that will investigate Marxism in both its failure and power so as to fashion new theoretical tools. In the course of engaging with the material of Marxism, Laruelle takes on the philosophy of Marx along with important philosophers who have extended that philosophy including Althusser, Balibar, Negri as well as the attempt at a phenomenological Marxism found in the work of Michel Henry. Through this engagement Laruelle develops with great precision the history and function of his concept of determination-in-the-last-instance. In the midst of the assumed failure of Marxism and the defections and resentment that followed, Laruelle’s non-Marxism responds with the bold declaration: “Do not give up on theory!”

Hearings
Hearings

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities

Publisher:

Published: 1946

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK