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In this dramatic, month-by-month chronicle of a tumultuous period, Boris Kagarlitsky bears witness to the eruption of open political discussion in the Soviet Union during the 'hot summer' of 1988

Since the appearance of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's first essays in the 1950s, his work has provided an incisive and eloquent commentary on the progress not only of Germany, but of western societies as a whole. Political Crumbs shows Enzensberger at his best, popularizing intellectual debate with a sharp wit and a willingness to make links between apparently disparate subjects and approaches. From reflections on the delusions of intellectuals, the unpredictability of the political process, the creativity of everyday life, the mysteries of German politics and the anarchy of the normal, two major themes emerge: the consequences for left politics of the breakdown of dogmatism, and the 'ungovernability' of complex institutions.

Epic new biography of Karl Marx for the 200th anniversary of his birthIn this essential new biographythe first to give equal weight to both the work and life of Karl MarxSven-Eric Liedman expertly navigates the imposing, complex personality of his subject through the turbulent passages of global history. A World to Win follows Marx through childhood and student days, a difficult and sometimes tragic family life, his far-sighted journalism, and his enduring friendship and intellectual partnership with Friedrich Engels.Building on the work of previous biographers, Liedman employs a commanding knowledge of the nineteenth century to create a definitive portrait of Marx and his vast contribution to the way the world understands itself. He shines a light on Marx's influences, explains his political and intellectual interventions, and builds on the legacy of his thought. Liedman shows how Marx's masterpiece, Capital, illuminates the essential logic of a system that drives dizzying wealth, grinding poverty, and awesome technological innovation to this day.Compulsively readable and meticulously researched, A World to Win demonstrates that, two centuries after Marx's birth, his work remains the bedrock for any true understanding of our political and economic condition.

This work studies television reporting of the US at war since World War II, including detailed coverage of television's role in the Gulf. Cumings offers insights into the everyday operations of the media and assesses the possibilities of mobilizing them for political purposes.

This reference combines commentary and explanation with a detailed chronology to illuminate the period of 1987 to 1993 in Central America. It offers a succinct overview of pacification and democracy in the region, including criticism of the structuralist approaches like those of Chomsky and Petras.

Sets out to diagnose and explain all the major - old and new - "problems of philosophy". The book includes a synoptic account of the development of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to poststructuralism. It is designed to be both an introductory work and a resource for scholars.

The photographer Raymond Depardon and the writer Jean-Claude Guillebaud both covered the Vietnam War. After 20 years, they decided to go back. Travelling by slow train, Russian car and bicycle, they travelled from South to North. This book is an account of these travels.

In a system of basic income, as elaborated by Philippe van Paijs, all citizens are given a monthly stipend sufficiently high to provide them with a no-frills, but adequate standard of living.

Both a diary of a radical's working life and a chronicle of the recent political past. His reflections are mixed with letters from Graham Greene, an interview with Noam Chomsky, personal friends and irate readers. Alexander Cockburn is the co-author, with Susanna Hecht, of "Corruptions of Empire".

Historian Carlo Ginzburg here draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in the late-20th century political show trial of Italian communists, Continua, Sofri, Bompressi and Piotresetafani.

Argues that, since the collapse of the USSR, the US government has been trying to bring about a unipolar world in which the United States can control and shape the pattern of economic and political change in all regions of the globe.

The period between 1930 and 1960 in particular saw a dramatic upsurge in Latin American modern architecture as the various governments strove to make public their modernising intentions. After 1960, however, the year in which Brasilia was inaugurated, economic growth in the region slowed and the modernist project faltered. The English-speaking world, which had previously admired Latin American buildings, began to write them out of the history of twentieth-century architecture. Building the New World attempts to redress the balance. It surveys the most important examples of state-funded modernism in Latin America during a period of almost unimaginable optimism, when politicians and architects such as Pani, Costa, Reidy and Niemeyer sought ways, literally, to build their societies out of underdevelopment.

This text rages against the move toward conservative, assimilationist politics promoted by some gay men and lesbians (homocons), embraced by a liberal medial all too eager to erase the progressive roots of the gay liberation movement.

Kathy Acker was one of the original, subversive and influential writers of the late 20th century. This is a collection of essays on Acker's work, including Peter Wollen's primer, and Avital Ronell's meditation on friendship and mourning. It reveals his project, and the ways in which fiction can penetrate the heart of political and cultural life.

A war that has killed over a million Iraqis was a ';humanitarian intervention', the US army is a force for liberation, and the main threat to world peace is posed by Islam.Those are the arguments of a host of liberal commentators, ranging from Christopher Hitchens to Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, and Bernard-Henri Levy. In this critical intervention, Richard Seymour unearths the history of liberal justifications for empire, showing how savage policies of conquestincluding genocide and slaveryhave been retailed as charitable missions.From the Cold War to the War on Terror, Seymour argues that the colonial tropes of ';civilization' and ';progress' still shape liberal pro-war discourse, and still conceal the same bloody realities.

The essays collected in this volume develop the theoretical perspective initiated in Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in three main directions. First, by exploring the specificity of social antagonisms and answering the question ';What is an antagonistic relation?', an issue which has become increasingly crucial in our globalized world, where the proliferation of conflicts and points of rupture is eroding their links to the social subjects postulated by classical social analysis. This leads the author to a second line of questioning: what is the ontological terrain that allows us to conceive the nature of social relations in our heterogeneous world, a task that he addresses with theoretical instruments coming from analytical philosophy and from the phenomenological and structuralist traditions. Finally, central to the argument of the book is the basic role attributed to rhetorical movements metaphor, metonymy, catachresis in shaping the ';non-foundational' grounds of society.

For Alain Badiou, theatreunlike cinemais the place for the staging of a truly emancipatory collective subject. In this sense theatre is, of all the arts, the one strictly homologous to politics: both theatre and politics depend on a limited set of texts or statements, collectively enacted by a group of actors or militants, which put a limit on the excessive power of the state. This explains why the history of theatre has always been inseparable from a history of state repression and censorship.This definitive collection includes not only Badious pamphlet Rhapsody for the Theatre but also essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, on the political destiny of contemporary theatre, and on Badious own work as a playwright, as author of the Ahmed Tetralogy.

Revolutionary novelist, historian, anarchist, Bolshevik and dissidentVictor Serge is one of the most compelling figures of Soviet history. Set against some of the momentous events of the twentieth century, Victor Serge reveals dauntless vigor of a man whose views often reflect the struggles of our own time.

Marc Perelman pulls no punches in this succinct and searing broadside, assailing the ';recent form of barbarism' that is the global sporting event. Forget the Olympics and consider, under Perelman's guidance, the ledger of inequities maintained by such supposedly harmless games.They have provided a smokescreen for the forcible removal of ';undesirables'; aided governments in the pursuit of racist agendas; affirmed the hypocrisy of drug-testing in an industry where doping is more an imperative than an aberration; and developed the pornographic hybrid that Perelman dubs ';sporn', a further twist in our corrupt obsession with the body.Drawing examples from the modern history of the international sporting event, Perelman argues that today's colosseums, upheld as examples of ';health', have become the steamroller for a decadent age fixated on competition, fame and elitism.

The Conspiracy is the last and most acclaimed novel by French writer and activist Paul Nizan, who died two years after its publication fighting the Germans at the Battle of Dunkirk. Hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as Nizan's masterpiece, the book centers upon the figure of Bertrand Rosenthal, a misguided philosophy student studying in pre-war Paris. Eager to foment a revolution and having little grasp of his own motives, Rosenthal draws a small group of disciples into a conspiracy both fatuous and deadly. Simultaneously, he plunges into a forbiddenand ultimately tragiclove affair as the intertwined plots move inexorably toward their twin destinations of betrayal and death.The Conspiracy won the coveted Prix Interalli in 1938. This new edition includes Walter Benjamin's critique of the book, available here for the first time in English.

Mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece,Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agendatoraise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalistmovements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatorydemocracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensiveinterviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela,Argentina, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is anexpansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, andorganizational forms championed by the new movements, as wellas an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy fromancient Athens to Zuccotti Park. The new movements put forwardthe idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

A comprehensive analysis of the philosophy of the dialectic by the doyen of cultural criticism.

This illustrated guide to the changing architecture of London argues that new developments are a deliberate distraction from the city's economic and political problems.

Leading commentators examine the Afghan debacle and its parallels with previous British and Soviet occupations