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-- Douglas Kellner, University of Texas, Austin
If the Soviet Union did not have a socialist society, then how should its nature be understood? The present book presents the first comprehensive appraisal of the debates on this problem, which was so central to twentieth-century Marxism.
In Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism Levant and Oittinen provide a window into the subterranean tradition of ‘creative’ Soviet Marxism, which developed on the margins of the Soviet academe and remains largely outside the orbit of contemporary theory in the West. With his ‘activity approach’, E.V. Ilyenkov, its principal figure in the post-Stalin period, makes a substantial contribution toward an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of the subject, which should be of interest to contemporary theorists who seek to avoid economic and cultural reductionism as well as the malaise of postmodern relativism. This volume features Levant’s translation of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal (2009), which remained unpublished until thirty years after the author’s tragic suicide in 1979. Contributors include: Evald Ilyenkov, Tarja Knuuttila, Alex Levant, Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen, Paula Rauhala, and Birger Siebert.
Stephen Hanson traces the influence of the Marxist conception of time in Soviet politics from Lenin to Gorbachev. He argues that the history of Marxism and Leninism reveals an unsuccessful revolutionary effort to reorder the human relationship with time and that this reorganization had a direct impact on the design of the central political, socioeconomic, and cultural institutions of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. According to Hanson, westerners tend to envision time as both rational and inexorable. In a system in which 'time is money,' the clock dominates workers. Marx, however, believed that communist workers would be freed of the artificial distinction between leisure time and work time. As a result, they would be able to surpass capitalist production levels and ultimately control time itself. Hanson reveals the distinctive imprint of this philosophy on the formation and development of Soviet institutions, arguing that the breakdown of Gorbachev's perestroika and the resulting collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrate the failure of the idea.
Spanish Marxism Versus Soviet Communism is the first historical study of the P.O.U.M. to appear in English. Drawing from his multi-volume work on the subject, which was published in Spanish and Catalan, Victor Alba has collaborated with Stephen Schwartz to produce a condensed and amplified study that is far more than a translation. Outside Spain, the political movement known as the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxist or P.O.U.M.) is chiefly known as the revolutionary group with which George Orwell fought during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. The events in which the P.O.U.M. found itself at the center of conflict between Iberian revolutionaries and Soviet interests remain a controversial topic for historians and other writers. This book presents a detailed picture of the organization and its main antecedent, the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc, in the context of a stimulating working class political culture. Those interested in Catalan history as well as historians of Western European Marxism and the Spanish Civil War will find this book useful. It will also be of interest to those concerned with Orwell and his experience in Spain. A fitting tribute to the P.O.U.M.'s great struggle against Stalinism, Spanish Marxism Versus Soviet Communism will surely stand out among the array of books that have been published on the Spanish Civil War period as a definitive study.
The theories of Karl Marx and the practical existence of the Soviet Union are inseparable in the public imagination, but for all the wrong reasons. This book provides detailed analyses of both Marx’s theory of history and the course of Russian and Soviet development and delivers a new and insightful approach to the relationship between the two. Most analyses of the Soviet Union, from any perspective, focus on trying to explain the failure to establish socialism, giving too much weight to the political pronouncements of the regime. But, for Marx, this approach to historical explanation is back-to-front, it's the political tail wagging the economic dog. When we move our focus from the stated aims of building socialism, and look at what actually happened in Russia from emancipation in the 1860s, through the Soviet era to the 1990s, we can clearly see the patterns which Marx identified as the essential features of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. As such, the Soviet experiment forms an important part of Russia’s transition from feudalism to capitalism and provides an excellent example of the underlying forces at play in the course of historical development. Unlearning Marx will surprise Marx’s admirers and his detractors alike, and not only shed new light on Marxism's relationship with the Soviet Union, but on his ongoing relationship with our world.
"The focus here is on Soviet Marxist philosophy of natural science, as it developed in its first phase, from 1917 to 1932." -- Preface.
Alexander Yakovlev, a major architect of perestroika and a leading sponsor of glasnost, was a senior Soviet official who worked at the highest echelon of government side by side with Mikhail Gorbachev. In this powerful book, Yakovlev acknowledges the decay of his country and reveals his painful intellectual and political odyssey as he progressed from stalwart Party ideologist and propagandist to disillusioned critic of Marxism and Communism. Yakovlev vividly describes the ways that Marxism has proven to be not only wrong but ruinous to Russia, as it demolished civil society and ruthlessly replaced it with immorality and state-supported atheism. He discusses the pervasive, historical roots of the Russian authoritarian consciousness that helps explain why Russian society was so susceptible to the totalitarian implications of Marxism. He describes the triumvirate structure of power in the USSR before and during perestroika, the political reforms that were initiated, the ways that Soviet attitudes toward glasnost and perestroika evolved in both the reformist and conservative wings of the Party, and the reasons for the seemingly final swift collapse of the old ruling structures--the crushing defeat of the Party--in August 1991. Assessing the situation in Russia now that Marx's teachings and the Communist Party have been rejected, Yakovlev warns that if the economic situation worsens further, Russian society will be prepared to sacrifice democracy for even modest economic growth. He urges the restructuring of Soviet society on a new basis of democracy, morality, common sense, and economic efficiency. The book includes as appendixes five speeches given by Yakovlev in the West between November 1991 and January 1992 that provide further insight into his thinking after the collapse of the Communist Party.
This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.