Author : Josie McLellan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 13,86 MB
Release : 2011-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0521898919
This pioneering study explores the surprising extent and limits of the GDR's forgotten sexual revolution.
Author : Josie McLellan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 23,95 MB
Release : 2011-09-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521727617
In the aftermath of the reunification of Germany one former dissident recalled nostalgically that under the East German regime 'we had more sex and we had more to laugh about'. Love in the Time of Communism is a fascinating history of the GDR's forgotten sexual revolution and its limits. Josie McLellan shows that under communism divorce rates soared, abortion become commonplace and the rate of births outside marriage was amongst the highest in Europe. Nudism went from ban to state-sponsored boom, and erotica became common currency in both the official economy and the black market. Public discussion of sexuality was, however, tightly controlled and there were few opportunities to challenge traditional gender roles or sexual norms. Josie McLellan's pioneering account questions some of our basic assumptions about the relationship between sexuality, politics and society and is a major contribution to our understanding of the everyday emotional lives of postwar Europeans.
Author : Vivian Gornick
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 40,73 MB
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 178873551X
“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.
Author : Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Publisher : AK Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 39,27 MB
Release : 2020-12-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1849353921
Exploring the meanings and powers of love from ancient Greece to the present day, Richard Gilman-Opalsky argues that what is called “love” by the best thinkers who have approached the subject is in fact the beating heart of communism—understood as a way of living, not as a form of government. Along the way, he reveals with clarity that the capitalist way of assigning value to things is incapable of appreciating what humans value most. Capitalism cannot value the experiences and relationships that make our lives worth living and can only destroy love by turning it into a commodity. The Communism of Love follows the struggles of love in different contexts of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and shows how the aspiration for love is as close as we may get to a universal communist aspiration.
Author : Elizabeth McGuire
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 481 pages
File Size : 37,86 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0190640553
From a debut author, an intimate, multigenerational narrative of the Russian and Chinese revolutions through the eyes of the Chinese youth who traveled to the Soviet Union and the fate of their blended offspring
Author : Richard Pipes
Publisher : Modern Library
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 19,37 MB
Release : 2003-08-05
Category : History
ISBN : 0812968646
With astonishing authority and clarity, Richard Pipes has fused a lifetime’s scholarship into a single focused history of Communism, from its hopeful birth as a theory to its miserable death as a practice. At its heart, the book is a history of the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive reorganization of human society ever attempted by a nation-state. This is the story of how the agitation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two mid-nineteenth-century European thinkers and writers, led to a great and terrible world religion that brought down a mighty empire, consumed the world in conflict, and left in its wake a devastation whose full costs can only now be tabulated.
Author : Nicholas Ridout
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 33,54 MB
Release : 2013-10-14
Category : History
ISBN : 0472119079
A rich, historically grounded exploration of why theater and performance matter in the modern world
Author : Srećko Horvat
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 32,52 MB
Release : 2016-01-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 074569117X
What would happen if we could stroll through the revolutionary history of the 20th century and, without any fear of the possible responses, ask the main protagonists - from Lenin to Che Guevara, from Alexandra Kollontai to Ulrike Meinhof - seemingly naïve questions about love? Although all important political and social changes of the 20th century included heated debates on the role of love, it seems that in the 21st century of new technologies of the self (Grindr, Tinder, online dating, etc.) we are faced with a hyperinflation of sex, not love. By going back to the sexual revolution of the October Revolution and its subsequent repression, to Che's dilemma between love and revolutionary commitment and to the period of '68 (from communes to terrorism) and its commodification in late capitalism, the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat gives a possible answer to the question of why it is that the most radical revolutionaries like Lenin or Che were scared of the radicality of love. What is so radical about a seemingly conservative notion of love and why is it anything but conservative? This short book is a modest contribution to the current upheavals around the world - from Tahrir to Taksim, from Occupy Wall Street to Hong Kong, from Athens to Sarajevo - in which the question of love is curiously, surprisingly, absent.
Author : Saime Göksu
Publisher : C. HURST & CO. PUBLISHERS
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 15,6 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Communists
ISBN : 9781850653714
A biography of poet Nazim Hikmet, this text examines his life and his work, asserting that his creative vision combined a dialectical view of society with passionate personal relationships, all reflected in experimental poetic forms. Stalin's daughter described him as a romantic communist.
Author : Tariq Ali
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 16,63 MB
Release : 2016-11-29
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1784786942
The story of a family whose life mirrors the rise and fall of the Soviet Union With the fall of Communism, East German dissident Vlady Meyer’s life begins to fall apart. As the German nation unifies, his wife splits up with him. He loses his university job now that the times have turned against his Marxist views. He wants to tell his alienated son, Karl, what his family’s long and passionate involvement with communism really meant, but he can’t. Vlady’s story is interwoven with that of Ludwik, Kim Philby’s recruiter, and his four comrades, brilliant Galician secret agents working for the Fourth Department of the Red Army. Thoughtful and intimate, Fear of Mirrors unfolds an expansive plot that touches on the greatest political upheavals of the twentieth century. Its protagonist captures the hopes once roused by the Bolshevik Revolution and the hard realities that followed; Vlady Meyer is a mirror reflecting impeccably the intellectual milieu of an incomparable period.
