LITMIR.BIZ

Essays on judaism in the modern world, from philosophy and history to art and politics In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with calmness and clear-sightedness; as a historian he writes without anger but with compassion; as a non-Jewish Jew he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding. As a philosopher he writes first of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the ‘remnants of a race’ after Hitler; of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel, of the war of June 1967, and of the perils ahead.

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Steven Lukes confronts liberal thought with its own limitations. The essays in this collection focus on the perennial but newly urgent questions of how the tension between relativism and the moral universalism current in contemporary politics can be resolved within the framework of liberalism. How is liberal society to interpret the diversity of morals? Is pluralism the appropriate response? How does pluralism differ from the widely condemned relativism – more specifically, the double bind of ethnocentric universalism, or 'liberalism for the Liberals, cannibalism for the cannibals.' Taking as his starting point Robert Frost's accusation that a liberal is someone who can't take his own side in an argument, Steven Lukes confronts liberal thought with its own limitations. While recognizing the dangers of moral imperialism, Lukes argues that a relativist position based on identifying clearly distinct cultural and moral communities is incoherent. Drawing on work in anthropology and philosophy, he examines the nature of social justice, the politics of identity and human rights theory, as well as discussing how ideas drawn from the work of Isaiah Berlin can shed light on these debates.

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A magisterial history of the artists and writers who left Weimar when the Nazis came to power In 1933 thousands of intellectuals, artists, writers, militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime fled Germany. They were, in the words of Heinrich Mann,”the best of Germany,” refusing to remain citizens in this new state that legalized terror and brutality. Exiled across the world, they expressed the fight against Nazism in prose, poetry, painting, architecture, film and theater. Weimar in Exile follows these lives, from the rise of national socialism to the return to their ruined homeland, retracing their stories, struggles, setbacks and rare victories. The dignity in exile of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Doblin, Hans Eisler, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and many others provides counterpoint to the story of Germany under the Nazis.

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A new beautiful edition of the Communist Manifesto, combined with Lenin’s key revolutionary tract “A spectre is haunting Europe…” The Communist Manifesto is the most influential political book ever written – few others have fundamentally changed the world. After the Russian Revolution it became the key text for radicals the world over. Now, in the wake of a punishing financial crisis and on the centenary of the Revolution that it helped to spark, the book remains both an essential guide to the transformations wrought by capitalism and presents the solution to its inequalities and exploitation. There have been many editions of the Manifesto before, but this is a beautifully presented hardback edition and with one key addition – as this book was instrumental in the Russian Revolution it has been coupled with Lenin’s April Theses as an attractive ‘flip’ book (i.e. turn the book upside down and you have another). Lenin presented his ten directives after his return from exile in 1917, and they are the key program for the revolution that was carried out that year. This landmark edition includes a new introduction by Tariq Ali, showing how the Russian Revolution changed the world and the horizon of political change, and why its ambition is still relevant today.

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Slim, accessible, inexpensive, irreverent introduction to socialism by the writers of Jacobin magazine The remarkable run of self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders for president of the United States has prompted—for the first time in decades and to the shock of many—a national conversation about socialism. A New York Times poll in late November found that a majority of Democrats had a favorable view of socialism, and in New Hampshire in February, more than half of Democratic voters under 35 told the Boston Globe they call themselves socialists. It’s unclear exactly what socialism means to this generation, but couple with the ascendancy of longtime leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in the UK, it’s clear there’s a historic, generational shift underway. This book steps into this moment to offer a clear, accessible, informative, and irreverent guide to socialism for the uninitiated. Written by young writers from the dynamic magazine Jacobin, alongside several distinguished scholars, The ABCs of Socialism answers basic questions, including ones that many want to know but might be afraid to ask (“Doesn’t socialism always end up in dictatorship?”, “Will socialists take my Kenny Loggins records?”). Disarming and pitched to a general readership without sacrificing intellectual depth, this will be the best introduction an idea whose time seems to have come again. Contributors include Nicole Aschoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Jonah Birch, Vivek Chibber, Danny Katch, Chris Maisano, Nivedita Majumdar, Michael A. McCarthy, Joseph M. Schwartz, Bhaskar Sunkara, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Adaner Usmani and Erik Olin Wright.

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A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first time Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx’s project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the École normale supérieure ran a seminar on Capital, re-examining its arguments, strengths and weaknesses in detail, and it was out of those discussions that this book was born. Previously only available in English in highly abridged form, this edition, appearing fifty years after its original publication in France, restores chapters by Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière. It includes a major new introduction by Étienne Balibar.

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Award-winning poet Joshua Clover theorizes the riot as the form of the coming insurrection Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century. It returned to prominence in the 1970s, profoundly changed along with the coordinates of race and class. From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued through occupations and blockades, Clover connects these protests to the upheavals of a sclerotic economy in a state of moral collapse. Historical events such as the global economic crisis of 1973 and the decline of organized labor, viewed from the perspective of vast social transformations, are the proper context for understanding these eruptions of discontent. As social unrest against an unsustainable order continues to grow, this valuable history will help guide future antagonists in their struggles toward a revolutionary horizon.

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Electrifying investigation of White House lies about the assassination of Osama bin Laden In 2011, an elite group of US Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden, the man the United States had begun chasing before the devastating attacks of 9/11. The news did much to boost President Obama’s first term and played a major part in his reelection victory of the following year. But much of the story of that night, as presented to the world, was incomplete, or a lie. The evidence of what actually went on remains hidden. At the same time, the full story of the United States’ involvement in the Syrian civil war has been kept behind a diplomatic curtain, concealed by doublespeak. It is a policy of obfuscation that has compelled the White House to turn a blind eye to Turkey’s involvement in supporting ISIS and its predecessors in Syria. This investigation, which began as a series of essays in the London Review of Books, has ignited a firestorm of controversy in the world media. In his introduction, Hersh asks what will be the legacy of Obama’s time in office. Was it an era of “change we can believe in” or a season of lies and compromises that continued George W. Bush’s misconceived War on Terror? How did he lose the confidence of the general in charge of America’s forces who acted in direct contradiction to the White House? What else do we not know?.

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The definitive study of the mutation of a political movement. Following the locust years of the neo-liberal revolution, social democracy was the great victor at the fin-de-siècle elections. Today, parties descended from the Second International hold office throughout the European Union, while the Right appears widely disorientated by the dramatic “modernisation” of a political tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. The focal point of Gerassimos Moschonas’s study is the emergent “new social democracy” of the twenty-first century. As Moschonas demonstrates, change has been a constant of social-democratic history: the core dominant reformist tendency of working-class politic notwithstanding, capitalism has transformed social democracy more than it has succeeded in transforming capitalism. Now, in the “great transformation” of recent years, a process of “de-social-democratization” has been set in train, affecting every aspect of the social-democratic phenomenon, from ideology and programs to organization and electorates. Analytically incisive and empirically meticulous, In the Name of Social Democracy will establish itself as the standard reference work on the logic and dynamics of a major mutation in European politics.

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A serious and measured exposition of the terms on which arguments for socialist strategy currently move. This first modern study provides an original and balanced perspective of a theorist whom Lenin referred to as both ‘master of Marxism’ and ‘renegade’. Examining Kautsky’s political thought over a period stretching from the Paris Commune to the Second World War, the author argues for the consistency with which Kautsky developed his positions on socialism, democracy, political parties and the role of the proletariat. While Salvadori’s analysis is grounded in the debates within the Communist International and the German labour movement, Kautsky emerges as a distinctly modern thinker who produced a Marxist theory of the state, and originated critique of the USSR as a ‘state capitalist’ system. At this level, it provides a serious and measured exposition of the terms on which arguments for socialist strategy currently move.

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