Author : John Ehrenberg
Publisher :
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 20,8 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Political Science
ISBN :
Offers an analysis of Marx's controversial theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, arguing that it can no longer be displaced or ignored as the viable democratic centre of Marxist political thought. The book traces the development of the theory from the early work of Marx and Engels to 1924.
Author : David W. Lovell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 27,69 MB
Release : 2015-04-24
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1317497775
George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty Four that ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles.’ A century earlier Marx was unequivocal: the future belonged to the proletariat. Today such confidence might seem misplaced. The proletariat has not yet fulfilled Marx’s expectations, and seems unlikely ever to do so. How could Marx have entertained the notion that the proletariat would emancipate humanity from capitalism and from class rule itself? This book, first published in 1988, attempts an explanation by examining the sources and development of Marx’s concept of the proletariat. It contends that this was not only a crucial element in Marx’s theory but a significant departure in socialist thought. By examining this concept in detail the book uncovers a major contradiction in Marxian thought: although the proletariat is assigned a momentous task it is chiefly depicted as the class of suffering which is why, historically, it has preferred security to enterprise.
Author : Sabine Hake
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 45,52 MB
Release : 2017-09-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3110550202
The proletariat never existed—but it had a profound effect on modern German culture and society. As the most radicalized part of the industrial working class, the proletariat embodied the critique of capitalism and the promise of socialism. But as a collective imaginary, the proletariat also inspired the fantasies, desires, and attachments necessary for transforming the working class into a historical subject and an emotional community. This book reconstructs this complicated and contradictory process through the countless treatises, essays, memoirs, novels, poems, songs, plays, paintings, photographs, and films produced in the name of the proletariat. The Proletarian Dream reads these forgotten archives as part of an elusive collective imaginary that modeled what it meant—and even more important, how it felt—to claim the name "proletarian" with pride, hope, and conviction. By emphasizing the formative role of the aesthetic, the eighteen case studies offer a new perspective on working-class culture as a oppositional culture. Such a new perspective is bound to shed new light on the politics of emotion during the main years of working-class mobilizations and as part of more recent populist movements and cultures of resentment. Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures 2018
Author : Étienne Balibar
Publisher : Verso Trade
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 36,12 MB
Release : 1977
Category : Political Science
ISBN :
No Marketing Blurb
Author : John Lear
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 391 pages
File Size : 24,71 MB
Release : 2017-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1477311505
In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. Picturing the Proletariat examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. Showcasing forgotten works and neglected media, John Lear explores how artists and labor unions participated in a cycle of revolutionary transformation from 1908 through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Lear shows how middle-class artists, radicalized by the revolution and the Communist Party, fortified the legacy of the prerevolutionary print artisan José Guadalupe Posada by incorporating modernist, avant-garde, and nationalist elements in ways that supported and challenged unions and the state. By 1940, the state undermined the autonomy of radical artists and unions, while preserving the image of both as partners of the “institutionalized revolution.” This interdisciplinary book explores the gendered representations of workers; the interplay of prints, photographs, and murals in journals, in posters, and on walls; the role of labor leaders; and the discursive impact of the Spanish Civil War. It considers “los tres grandes”—Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco—while featuring lesser-known artists and their collectives, including Saturnino Herrán, Leopoldo Méndez, Santos Balmori, and the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR). The result is a new perspective on the art and politics of the revolution.
Author : David Webber
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 29,54 MB
Release : 2018-04-02
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0674972139
When Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd’s boardroom allies. In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway’s to shine a light on labor’s most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under constant assault in Washington, state houses, and the courts, worker organizations are beginning to exercise muscle through markets. Shareholder activism has been used to divest from anti-labor companies, gun makers, and tobacco; diversify corporate boards; support Occupy Wall Street; force global warming onto the corporate agenda; create jobs; and challenge outlandish CEO pay. Webber argues that workers have found in labor’s capital a potent strategy against their exploiters. He explains the tactic’s surmountable difficulties even as he cautions that corporate interests are already working to deny labor’s access to this powerful and underused tool. The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder is a rare good-news story for American workers, an opportunity hiding in plain sight. Combining legal rigor with inspiring narratives of labor victory, Webber shows how workers can wield their own capital to reclaim their strength.
Author : Clyde Barrow
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 20,10 MB
Release : 2020-10-19
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0472128086
Marx and Engels’ concept of the “lumpenproletariat,” or underclass (an anglicized, politically neutral term), appears in The Communist Manifesto and other writings. It refers to “the dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society,” whose lowly status made its residents potential tools of the capitalists against the working class. Surprisingly, no one has made a substantial study of the lumpenproletariat in Marxist thought until now. Clyde Barrow argues that recent discussions about the downward spiral of the American white working class (“its main problem is that it is not working”) have reactivated the concept of the lumpenproletariat, despite long held belief that it is a term so ill-defined as not to be theoretical. Using techniques from etymology, lexicology, and translation, Barrow brings analytical coherence to the concept of the lumpenproletariat, revealing it to be an inherent component of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the historical origins of capitalism. However, a proletariat that is destined to decay into an underclass may pose insurmountable obstacles to a theory of revolutionary agency in post-industrial capitalism. Barrow thus updates historical discussions of the lumpenproletariat in the context of contemporary American politics and suggests that all post-industrial capitalist societies now confront the choice between communism and dystopia.
Author : Ken C. Kawashima
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 44,34 MB
Release : 2009-04-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0822392291
Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism. Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean “minority,” he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how, when migrant workers did organize—as when they became involved in Rōsō (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyō (the Japanese communist labor union)—their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In The Proletarian Gamble, his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader rethinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.
Author : Gregory J. Massell
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 492 pages
File Size : 41,3 MB
Release : 2015-03-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1400870291
The attempted modernization of Central Asia by the central Soviet government in the 1920's was a dramatic confrontation between radical, determined, authoritarian communists and a cluster of traditional Moslem societies based on kinship, custom, and religion. The Soviet authorities were determined to undermine the traditional social order through the destruction of existing family structures and worked to achieve this aspect of revolution through the mobilization of women. Gregory J. Massell's study of the interaction between central power and local traditions concentrates on the development of female roles in revolutionary modernization. Women in Moslem societies were segregated, exploited, and degraded; they were, therefore, a structural weak point in the traditional order—a surrogate proletariat. Through this potentially subversive group, it was believed, intense conflicts could be generated within society which would lead to its disintegration and subsequent reconstitution. The first part of the book isolates the trends that made Central Asia vulnerable to outside intervention, and examines the factors that impelled the communist elites to turn to Moslem women as potential revolutionary allies. In the second part, Professor Massed analyzes Soviet perceptions of female inferiority and of the revolutionary potential of Moslem women. Part Three is an account of specific Soviet actions based on these assumptions. The fourth part of the book deals with the variety of responses these actions evoked. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author : Sunyoung Park
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 38,46 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Ideology and literature
ISBN : 9780674417175
From the 1910s to the 1940s, a wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the Korean cultural scene with differing agendas but shared demands for equality and social justice. Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture, focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression.
