Proletarian Science?
Proletarian Science?

Author: Dominique Lecourt

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2017-11-10

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1788732049

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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.

The Proletarian Dream
The Proletarian Dream

Author: Sabine Hake

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 3110550202

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The proletariat never existed—but it had a profound effect on modern German culture and society. As the most radicalized part of the industrial working class, the proletariat embodied the critique of capitalism and the promise of socialism. But as a collective imaginary, the proletariat also inspired the fantasies, desires, and attachments necessary for transforming the working class into a historical subject and an emotional community. This book reconstructs this complicated and contradictory process through the countless treatises, essays, memoirs, novels, poems, songs, plays, paintings, photographs, and films produced in the name of the proletariat. The Proletarian Dream reads these forgotten archives as part of an elusive collective imaginary that modeled what it meant—and even more important, how it felt—to claim the name "proletarian" with pride, hope, and conviction. By emphasizing the formative role of the aesthetic, the eighteen case studies offer a new perspective on working-class culture as a oppositional culture. Such a new perspective is bound to shed new light on the politics of emotion during the main years of working-class mobilizations and as part of more recent populist movements and cultures of resentment. Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures 2018

A Martian Stranded on Earth
A Martian Stranded on Earth

Author: Nikolai Krementsov

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-07-05

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0226454142

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Much like Vladimir Lenin, his onetime rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party during its formative years, Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) was a visionary. In two science fiction novels set on Mars, Bogdanov imagined a future in which the workers of the world, liberated from capitalist exploitation, create a “physiological collective” that rejuvenates and unites its members through regular blood exchanges. But Bogdanov was not merely a dreamer. He worked tirelessly to popularize and realize his vision, founding the first research institute devoted to the science of blood transfusion. In A Martian Stranded on Earth, the first broad-based book on Bogdanov in English, Nikolai Krementsov examines Bogdanov’s roles as revolutionary, novelist, and scientist, presenting his protagonist as a coherent thinker who pursued his ideas in a wide range of venues. Through the lens of Bogdanov’s involvement with blood studies on one hand, and of his fictional and philosophical writings on the other, Krementsov offers a nuanced analysis of the interactions between scientific ideas and societal values.

Reconstructing Lenin
Reconstructing Lenin

Author: Tamás Krausz

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-02-27

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 1583674616

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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is among the most enigmatic and influential figures of the twentieth century. While his life and work are crucial to any understanding of modern history and the socialist movement, generations of writers on the left and the right have seen fit to embalm him endlessly with superficial analysis or dreary dogma. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union and “actually-existing” socialism, it is possible to consider Lenin afresh, with sober senses trained on his historical context and how it shaped his theoretical and political contributions. Reconstructing Lenin, four decades in the making and now available in English for the first time, is an attempt to do just that. Tamás Krausz, an esteemed Hungarian scholar writing in the tradition of György Lukács, Ferenc Tokei, and István Mészáros, makes a major contribution to a growing field of contemporary Lenin studies. This rich and penetrating account reveals Lenin busy at the work of revolution, his thought shaped by immediate political events but never straying far from a coherent theoretical perspective. Krausz balances detailed descriptions of Lenin’s time and place with lucid explications of his intellectual development, covering a range of topics like war and revolution, dictatorship and democracy, socialism and utopianism.Reconstructing Lenin will change the way you look at a man and a movement; it will also introduce the English-speaking world to a profound radical scholar.

The Proletarian Gamble
The Proletarian Gamble

Author: Ken C. Kawashima

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-04-17

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0822392291

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Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism. Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean “minority,” he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how, when migrant workers did organize—as when they became involved in Rōsō (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyō (the Japanese communist labor union)—their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In The Proletarian Gamble, his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader rethinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.

Revolution of the Mind
Revolution of the Mind

Author: Michael David-Fox

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780801431289

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Content Description #Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

The Dangerous Class
The Dangerous Class

Author: Clyde Barrow

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2020-10-19

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0472128086

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Marx and Engels’ concept of the “lumpenproletariat,” or underclass (an anglicized, politically neutral term), appears in The Communist Manifesto and other writings. It refers to “the dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society,” whose lowly status made its residents potential tools of the capitalists against the working class. Surprisingly, no one has made a substantial study of the lumpenproletariat in Marxist thought until now. Clyde Barrow argues that recent discussions about the downward spiral of the American white working class (“its main problem is that it is not working”) have reactivated the concept of the lumpenproletariat, despite long held belief that it is a term so ill-defined as not to be theoretical. Using techniques from etymology, lexicology, and translation, Barrow brings analytical coherence to the concept of the lumpenproletariat, revealing it to be an inherent component of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the historical origins of capitalism. However, a proletariat that is destined to decay into an underclass may pose insurmountable obstacles to a theory of revolutionary agency in post-industrial capitalism. Barrow thus updates historical discussions of the lumpenproletariat in the context of contemporary American politics and suggests that all post-industrial capitalist societies now confront the choice between communism and dystopia.

The Lysenko Affair
The Lysenko Affair

Author: David Joravsky

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-12-15

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0226410323

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The Lysenko affair was perhaps the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science. For thirty years, until 1965, Soviet genetics was dominated by a fanatical agronomist who achieved dictatorial power over genetics and plant science as well as agronomy. "A standard source both for Soviet specialists and for sociologists of science."—American Journal of Sociology "Joravsky has produced . . . the most detailed and authoritative treatment of Lysenko and his view on genetics."—New York Times Book Review

A Companion to the Russian Revolution
A Companion to the Russian Revolution

Author: Daniel Orlovsky

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-10-19

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 1118620895

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A compendium of original essays and contemporary viewpoints on the 1917 Revolution The Russian revolution of 1917 reverberated throughout an empire that covered one-sixth of the world. It altered the geo-political landscape of not only Eurasia, but of the entire globe. The impact of this immense event is still felt in the present day. The historiography of the last two decades has challenged conceptions of the 1917 revolution as a monolithic entity— the causes and meanings of revolution are many, as is reflected in contemporary scholarship on the subject. A Companion to the Russian Revolution offers more than thirty original essays, written by a team of respected scholars and historians of 20th century Russian history. Presenting a wide range of contemporary perspectives, the Companion discusses topics including the dynamics of violence in war and revolution, Russian political parties, the transformation of the Orthodox church, Bolshevism, Liberalism, and more. Although primarily focused on 1917 itself, and the singular Revolutionary experience in that year, this book also explores time-periods such as the First Russian Revolution, early Soviet government, the Civil War period, and even into the 1920’s. Presents a wide range of original essays that discuss Brings together in-depth coverage of political history, party history, cultural history, and new social approaches Explores the long-range causes, influence on early Soviet culture, and global after-life of the Russian Revolution Offers broadly-conceived, contemporary views of the revolution largely based on the author’s original research Links Russian revolutions to Russian Civil Wars as concepts A Companion to the Russian Revolution is an important addition to modern scholarship on the subject, and a valuable resource for those interested in Russian, Late Imperial, or Soviet history as well as anyone interested in Revolution as a global phenomenon.