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Communism aims at putting working people in charge of their lives. A multiplicity of Councils, rather than a big state bureaucracy is needed to empower working people and to focus control over society. Mattick develops a theory of a council communism through his survey of the history of the left in Germany and Russia. He challenges Bolshevik politics: especially their perspectives on questions of Party and Class, and the role of Trade Unions. Mattick argues that a The revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China, were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to the a association of free and equal producersa, but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism. Marxism served here as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist systems, which were no longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of the authoritarian state. Based on the peasantry, but designed with accelerated industrialisation to create an industrial proletariat, they were ready to abolish the traditional bourgeoisie but not capital as a social relationship.This type of capitalism had not been foreseen by Marx and the early Marxists, even though they advocated the capture of state-power to overthrow the bourgeoisie a but only in order to abolish the state itself.a

Provides a summary of the history of New Left Review and its political development starting from 1962. This book traces NLR's attempts to develop socialist politics, through the old Labour of Harold Wilson, through heady days in 1968, through new Marxist theory, through the Cold War years and into the era of contemporary capitalist globalisation.

There was a general rejoicing when the regime of Tsar Nicholas II fell in February 1917, a new era of liberty dawned. But what would come next?

Have we now reached 'the end of history' with the triumph of capitalist liberal democracy? Is socialism an enemy of democracy? Or could socialism develop, expand and enhance democracy?

This book aims to challenge and change unhelpful attitudes to those who suffer traumatic reactions, to show that they are not signs of weakness or a personality disorder and that there is understanding and help available for those who suffer.

What is the meaning of revolution in the twenty-first century? One hundred years ago 'October 1917' was a unique event inspiring socialists and oppressed peoples and became an inevitable point of reference for 20th century politics. Today the left needs both come to terms with this legacy and to transcend it, through a critical reappraisal of its

Britain in 1946 witnessed extraordinary episodes of direct action. Tens of thousands of families walked into empty army camps and took them over as places to live. A nationwide squatters' movement was born and it was the first challenge to the 1945 Labour government to come 'from below'.

2015 was a year in which the limits of what could be achieved within the European Union's neoliberal architecture and current balance of forces were tested, as never before.

This book brings together an extraordinary wealth of experience and will be an eye-opener for many readers. It seeks to provide an introduction to the history of major social movements - including Occupy and the Global Justice Movement, major green campaigns, peace and anti-war resistance and feminist and LGBT struggles - over the last 70 years.

This study presents and probes the political motivations and interests of EP Thompson (1924-1993). Thompson began his political life, as a member of the Communist Party, when the Party was making its greatest electoral impact. After the events in Hungary in 1956 he came into conflict with others in the New Left over issues of theory, orthodoxy an

'Ginge', an NCO in military intelligence, saw too much - and then he saw nothing...

George Julian Harney was one of the half-dozen most important leaders of Chartism. This selection from the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle is the first book to reprint any of his journalism. Harney is a key figure in the history of English radicalism.

How is the class being transformed in the Global South? How are working people organising in the workplace and in the community? What are the forces shaping and reshaping workers' lives? Four essays focus on change amongst American workers.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was widely believed that Marxists would be all but extinct by the year 2000. Humanity, wrote Francis Fukuyama, had come to the "end of history." All thoughts of finding an alternative to capitalism could be forgotten. Such thinking was wide of the mark.

This book explores some of the main channels and bye-ways in the history of Chartism; it considers: The place of Chartism within the wider framework of Victorian politics The Chartist Land Plan The impact of Canada's 1837-8 rebellions on Chartism Chartism's endurance in Wales beyond the 1839 Rising The role of children in Chartist

In 1946, after a series of stormy strikes and a mass occupation at Ford Motor Company's plant in Dagenham, Essex, thousands of workers came together in a new branch of the Transport and General Workers Union. Later, in the early 1980s, a band of dedicated workplace activists brought branch 1/1107 to explosive life with support for a number working-class causes, from equal opportunities to the stunningly effective boycott of parts for South Africa. "Notoriously Militant," which takes as its title a tabloid journalist's verdict on the branch, covers the history of Ford's Dagenham plant--and its roots in Henry Ford's early U.S. activities--from 20th-century shop-floor struggles to the 21st-century fight against plant closure. Based on original research and oral history, this study offers a primer for activists and analysts on the confrontation between worker militancy and the rigors of "Fordism." This book is a lively look at working-class history as made daily by so-called "ordinary" workers, the links between basic workplace struggles and revolutionary conflict, the pressures toward "cooperation" between union and management, and the interweaving of gender and ethnicity issues with the class-based structures of a major industrial workplace.

Globalisation opens up many new choices for employers, both to relocate work and to tap into a flexible labour pool through the use of migrant workers. There is a complex interplay between the movement of jobs to people (offshore outsourcing) and the movement of people to jobs (migration). As well as examining the spatial dynamics of offshore outsourcing, this collection explores some of the ways that both jobs and workers are becoming more mobile, and looks not only at the implications of this for the careers and conditions of workers in footloose employment but also what it means for the workers who are left behind when global forces snatch away their more geographically rooted jobs. Drawing on research carried out in Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America and Asia, this collection brings together a diverse range of studies, in the process providing important new insights into both the barriers to and the enablers of employers' access to a global reserve army of labour. It also demonstrates that global spatial restructuring is not necessarily a single one-off process but typically involves complex mutual adaptation at a local level.

A generation ago, they wrote Beyond the Fragments. Inspired by the activism of the 1970s and facing the imminent triumph of the Right under Margaret Thatcher, they sought to apply our experiences as feminists to creating stronger bonds of solidarity in a new kind of Left movement.

First published in 1979, Vida is Marge Piercys classic bookend to the sixties. Vida is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters and victories of an extraordinary band of people. At the centre of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the 60s she was a political star of the exuberant ...

The growing polarization between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless, the yawning social and developmental divide and the multidimensional systemic crisis of capitalism have given rise to a fundamental problem of our times: barbarism or socialism? Will we continue on the path of capitalist barbarism or move to a more just socialist ...

The Greek Marxist political sociologist, Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979) is one of the most influential of post-war European left thinkers. His works were: Political Power and Social Classes; Fascism and Dictatorship; Classes in Contemporary Capitalism; The Crisis of the Dictatorships, and State, Power, Socialism