The True Believer PDF Download

Author: Eric Hoffer
Publisher: Time Life Medical
ISBN: 9780809436026
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Lars T. Lih
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004131205
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 888

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This commentary to Lenin's landmark "What is to be Done?" (1902) provides hitherto unavailable contextual information about Lenin's outlook and aims that undermines previous interpretations. It challenges established views about Marxism, 'revolutionary Social Democracy' and Bolshevism.

Author: V. I. Lenin
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178663189X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
One hundred years after the Russian Revolution, Žižek shows why Lenin’s thought is still important today V. I. Lenin’s originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, in this new study and collection of Lenin’s original texts, Slavoj Žižek argues that his true greatness can be better grasped in the last two years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as the one at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated. As the anticipated world revolution receded into the distance, new paths had to be charted if the Soviet state was to survive. With his characteristic brio and provocative insight, Žižek suggests that Lenin’s courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat unflinchingly. In today’s world, characterized by political turbulence, economic crises and geopolitical tensions, we should revisit Lenin’s combination of sober lucidity and revolutionary determination.

Author: James Ryan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135114595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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This book explores the development of Lenin’s thinking on violence throughout his career, from the last years of the Tsarist regime in Russia through to the 1920s and the New Economic Policy, and provides an important assessment of the significance of ideological factors for understanding Soviet state violence as directed by the Bolshevik leadership during its first years in power. It highlights the impact of the First World War, in particular its place in Bolshevik discourse as a source of legitimating Soviet state violence after 1917, and explains the evolution of Bolshevik dictatorship over the half decade during which Lenin led the revolutionary state. It examines the militant nature of the Leninist worldview, Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary state, the evolution of his understanding of "dictatorship of the proletariat", and his version of "just war". The book argues that ideology can be considered primarily important for understanding the violent and dictatorial nature of the early Soviet state, at least when focused on the party elite, but it is also clear that ideology cannot be understood in a contextual vacuum. The oppressive nature of Tsarist rule, the bloodiness of the First World War, and the vulnerability of the early Soviet state as it struggled to survive against foreign and domestic opponents were of crucial significance. The book sets Lenin’s thinking on violence within the wider context of a violent world.

Author: August H. Nimtz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137389966
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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This book explores the time in which Lenin initiated his use of the electorate, beginning with the Marxist roots of his politics, from his leadership of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the First and Second State Dumas to Russia's first experiment in representative democracy from 1906 to 1907.

Author: Wilson W. S. Au
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1681237458
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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This book is unique in its utilization of the natural sciences to explain and illustrate key concepts of communist philosophy. In its recapitulation of the spirit of Engels’s unfinished manuscript, The Dialectics of Nature, it relies on the physical sciences developed since Engels’s time to reaffirm the validity of materialist dialectics, a point which is more easily made in the context of natural phenomena than it is in social phenomena. The basic philosophical tenets underlying Communist ideology are all supported by the natural sciences. The book is situated within the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tradition. Its overarching theme is the need to reclaim our most fundamental weapon of that tradition—it’s methodology or philosophy—which has been vitiated or even scrapped by well-intentioned revolutionaries throughout the 20th century. In particular, some of Mao’s philosophical formulations are found to be erroneous and in opposition to his practice. With the rapidly accelerating deterioration of the global capitalist order in progress since 2007, the urgency of this reclamation cannot be over-emphasized.

Author: Christopher Read
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134624719
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
From a highly distinguished author on the subject, this biography is an excellent scholarly introduction to one of the key figures of the Russian Revolution and post-Tsarist Russia. Not only does it make use of archive material made newly available in the glasnost and post-Soviet eras, it re-examines traditional sources as well, providing an original interpretation of Lenin's life and historical importance. Focal points of this study are: Lenin's revolutionary ascetic personality how he exploited culture, education and propaganda his relationship to Marxism his changing class analysis of Russia his 'populist' instincts. A prominent figure at the forefront of debates on the Russina revolution, Read makes sure that Lenin remains in his place as a highly influential and significant figure of the recent past.

Author: J. Lorand Matory
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002433
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.

Author: V.I. Lenin
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844677141
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn’t he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century? Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an extraordinary moment in history. Everything is here, from Lenin-the-ingenious-revolutionary-strategist to Lenin-of-the-enacted-utopia. To use Kierkegaard’s phrase, what we can glimpse in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet Lenin-the-Soviet-institution, but Lenin thrown into an open, contingent situation. In Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj Žižek locates the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his afterword tackles the key question of whether Lenin can be reinvented in our era of “cultural capitalism.” Žižek is convinced that, whatever the discussion—the forthcoming crisis of capitalism, the possibility of a redemptive violence, the falsity of liberal tolerance—Lenin’s time has come again.

Author: August H. Nimtz
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642590916
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
Nimtz uncovers in one that attempts to chart a course between plain opportunism and anarchist rejections of the electoral arena. Instead, electoral campaigns are seen as crucial for developing political education and organisation, and as a key way to measure your forces and communicate with the wider population. As radical left reformist projects, exemplified by Sanders and Corbyn, once again become a political force and the left has to think about what it means to run for office in a capitalist state, it's a good time to look back at how the left has historically conducted such debates.