Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
The Blanqui Reader
Download The Blanqui Reader full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online The Blanqui Reader ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis The Blanqui Reader by : Louis Auguste Blanqui
Download or read book The Blanqui Reader written by Louis Auguste Blanqui and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First English-language collection of writings by the legendary nineteenth-century insurrectionist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was one of the most important and controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life—the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and 1870–71. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no insurrection can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass support. At odds with followers of Proudhon on the one hand and of Marx on the other, Blanqui commanded unrivalled authority in French revolutionary circles during parts of his own lifetime but was quickly forgotten (if not derided) after his death. This is the first collection of Blanqui’s writings ever published in English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best-known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising and Eternity by the Stars. With material drawn from all his most important publications and speeches, as well as from the full sweep of his voluminous manuscripts and correspondence, this wide-ranging anthology will enable anglophone readers and political activists to arrive at their own critical assessment of Blanqui’s thought and legacy for the first time.
Book Synopsis Communist Insurgent by : Doug Enaa Greene
Download or read book Communist Insurgent written by Doug Enaa Greene and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the revolutionary tradition, the name of Louis Blanqui is either remembered with derision or as a noble failure. Yet during his lifetime, Blanqui was a towering figure of revolutionary courage and commitment as he organized nearly a half-dozen failed revolutionary conspiracies and spent half of his life in jail. This is Blanqui's story.
Book Synopsis Eternity by the Stars by : Louis-Auguste Blanqui
Download or read book Eternity by the Stars written by Louis-Auguste Blanqui and published by . This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that lies at the heart of every modern soul. This first critical edition of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui with more than two millennia of European culture.
Book Synopsis How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century by : Erik Olin Wright
Download or read book How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century written by Erik Olin Wright and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values—equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity—can provide both the basis for a critique of capitalism and help to guide us toward a socialist and democratic society. Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible. Included is an afterword by the author’s close friend and collaborator Michael Burawoy.
Book Synopsis Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment by : Philippe Le Goff
Download or read book Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment written by Philippe Le Goff and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few individuals made such an impact on nineteenth-century French politics as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Political organiser, leader, propagandist and prisoner, Blanqui was arguably the foremost proponent of popular power to emerge after the French Revolution. Practical engagement in all the major uprisings that spanned the course of his life – 1830, 1848, 1870-71 – was accompanied by theoretical reflections on a broad range of issues, from free will and fatalism to public education and individual development. Since his death, however, Blanqui has not been simply overlooked or neglected; his name has widely become synonymous with theoretical misconception and practical misadventure. Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment offers a major re-evaluation of one the most controversial figures in the history of revolutionary politics. The book draws extensively on Blanqui's manuscripts and published works, as well as writings only recently translated into English for the first time. Through a detailed reconstruction and critical analysis of Blanqui's political thought, it challenges the prevailing image of an unthinking insurrectionist and rediscovers a forceful and compelling theory of collective political action and radical social change. It suggests that some of Blanqui's fundamental assumptions – from the insistence on the primacy of subjective determination to the rejection of historical necessity – are still relevant to politics today.
Book Synopsis Revolutionary Affinities by : Michael Löwy
Download or read book Revolutionary Affinities written by Michael Löwy and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of revolutionary struggle and unbreakable alliances, Revolutionary Affinities takes readers from the Paris Commune to the Occupy movement, and through the heart of bloody fratricidal struggles to paint a vivid picture of the greatest anarchist and Marxist figures who dared to join forces, from Louise Michel to Subcomandante Marcos, from Emma Goldman to Walter Benjamin. With the urgent need for a unified front against the far right, there has never been a better time for this inspiring story. Authors Olivier Besancenot and Michael Löwy, two of the foremost voices in the French anti-authoritarian radical left, explore the promises—and challenges—of developing a fully sustainable, libertarian Marxist society by examining questions of political organization, economic policy, radical ecology, and more. Strikingly accessible, brilliantly illuminating, Besancenot and Löwy have given readers more than a history book, they’ve created a road map for the future.
Book Synopsis Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy by : Duy Lap Nguyen
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy written by Duy Lap Nguyen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the connections between Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and a Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen analyses Benjamin's early writings and their development into a distinct understanding of historical materialism. Benjamin's historically materialist conception of history is shown to be characterised by a focus on the religion of capitalism, the mythology of the state, and messianic time. Revealing these factors, Nguyen joins up Benjamin's philosophical critique of the Kantian conception of history, alongside the historical trajectory of capitalism he subscribed to. Influenced by the theory of fascism outlined by German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, we see how Benjamin's own theory of revolution and redemption in capitalist society developed into a sophisticated critique. Essential to Benjamin's materialist critique was a recognition of the fallibility of the Enlightenment notion of progress, as well as the need to overturn the political and economic catastrophes which enable capitalism and fascism to thrive. In mapping the exact course of Benjamin's critical historical materialism, Nguyen fully explicates the unique contribution he made to western Marxism.
Book Synopsis The Midnight Kingdom by : Jared Yates Sexton
Download or read book The Midnight Kingdom written by Jared Yates Sexton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of American Rule and the host of The Muckrake Podcast, an ambitious account of how white supremacist lies, religious mythologies, and poisonous conspiracy theories built the modern world and threaten to plunge us into an authoritarian nightmare. To fully understand these strange and dangerous times, Jared Yates Sexton takes a hard look at our nation’s history: namely, the abuses committed by those in power and the comforting stories that shaped the way the West has viewed itself up to the present. As reactionaries and authoritarians cling to myths about “Western civilization,” The Midnight Kingdom exposes how political power, religious indoctrination, and economic dominance have been repeatedly weaponized to oppress and exploit, sounding an alarm for what lies ahead as the current order frays. Beginning with the Roman Empire and racing through centuries of colonization, war, genocide, and the recurring clashes of progress and regression, Sexton finds our modern world at a crossroads. In an echo of past crises, we have arrived at a time of historic inequality and a fading trust in our institutions. Meanwhile, authoritarianism is gaining momentum and the progress of the twentieth century is being rolled back at dizzying speed. This catastrophic moment holds terrible potential for a return to a totalitarian past or, potentially, a better, realer, more human future. The difference depends on a true reckoning with our history and the larger forces at play or hiding behind this disastrous fantasy of Western superiority. Bracing and compulsively readable, The Midnight Kingdom takes a critical look at the forces that have shaped human civilization for centuries—and invites us to seek a radically different future.
Download or read book Revolutions written by Michael Löwy and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The photographs collected in this unique book provide a startling visual documentation of seminal revolutionary events, from the Paris Commune of 1871 through to a series of “Unfinished Revolutions”, from May 1968 in France to the Zapatista uprsing in ther mid-1990s. The immediacy of the images tells the story of these struggles in a way that texts rarely can, with revolutions appearing as complex and messy events driven by the actions of real, breathing humans who make their own history. Commentary on the images is provided by leading historians Gilbert Achcar, Enzo Traverso, Janette Habel, and Pierre Rousset, and Michael Löwy. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism by : Hannah Dawson
Download or read book Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism written by Hannah Dawson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflects on histories of freedom and republicanism through a major new reappraisal of Quentin Skinner's Liberty before Liberalism.
Book Synopsis The Democratic Sublime by : Jason Frank
Download or read book The Democratic Sublime written by Jason Frank and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a series of articles written for the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850, later published by Friedrich Engels as The Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx looked back on the failed French revolution of 1848 and attempted to explain how the democratic aspirations that inspired the February assault on the July Monarchy-and promised to fulfill the dashed hopes of 1789, 1792, and 1830-also led to its termination in the reactionary popular dictatorship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular sovereignty, which had so often defined the emancipatory visions of two generations of radical activists and thinkers was now not only an obstacle to genuine emancipation, but a plebiscitary source of power for newly emergent forms of political domination. Bonapartism became, for Marx, an important way of understanding the complex internal dynamics of popular-and later "populist"-authoritarianism. It is an analysis that continues to resonate powerfully today. The national enthusiasm that propelled the revolution forward, and which overturned the hated regime of Louis Phillippe in three glorious days, had successfully established for the first time in history a parliamentary republic based in universal male suffrage. The Second Republic's provisional government was immediately thrown into a legitimation crisis, however, by the underlying sectional, parliamentary, and class conflicts lurking beneath its illusory foundation in the people's unitary will. When the popular classes of Paris returned to the barricades in June to protest the conservative government's closure of the National Workshops-and to convert the political revolution into a social revolution based in the "right to work"-they were abandoned by their fellow citizens and thousands were massacred in the streets by Cavaignac's National Guard. The "fantastic republic" built around the pretensions of national unity, Marx proclaimed, quickly "dissolved in powder and smoke." Tocqueville described the June days as a "slave's war," and in its aftermath the Party of Order quickly consolidated its power against any furthering of revolutionary aspiration"--
Book Synopsis Marx, Revolution, and Social Democracy by : Philip J. Kain
Download or read book Marx, Revolution, and Social Democracy written by Philip J. Kain and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Many think Marx a totalitarian and Soviet Marxism the predictable outcome of his thought. How might one combat this completely mistaken image? What if one could demonstrate that Western European social democracy represents Marx's thought far more than did Soviet Marxism? What if one shows that Marx and social democracy are quite compatible? What if one shows that Marx actually supported social democratic parties? If social democracy is closer to being the true face of Marxism after Marx, then all claims of totalitarianism evaporate. There is nothing remotely totalitarian about social democracy. And from the start, social democrats were highly critical of the undemocratic tactics of Soviet Marxism. To demonstrate the relationship between Marx and social democracy it will be necessary to show that for Marx socialist society is compatible with a market economy-as long as markets are controlled to eliminate alienation. It will also be necessary to show that markets can be controlled democratically, that Marx was very much a democrat, and that he and Engels worked quite actively with democratic parties. It will also be necessary to show that Marx developed a theory of revolution compatible with a democratic electoral movement engaged in by a social democratic party. It will also be necessary to show that Marx and Engels, from the late 1860s on, worked extensively with and supported the Social Democratic Party of Germany-which eventually became the largest party in Germany and the largest socialist party in the world"--
Book Synopsis Capitalism and its Critics by : Gerard Delanty
Download or read book Capitalism and its Critics written by Gerard Delanty and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-22 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capitalism and its Critics offers an accessible account of major theories of capitalism from the industrial revolution to the present day. The book provides a comprehensive account of the economic and social thought of key theorists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to David Harvey and Thomas Piketty. Capitalism has long been the subject of passionate debate, and today such contestations are perhaps more timely than ever. For its advocates, capitalism brings democracy and freedom and is the cornerstone of modernity and of progress. For its critics, capitalism is based on the exploitation of labour and is responsible for the destruction of the environment as well as colonialism. Whether capitalism survives the century, or whether an alternative social system emerges, may very well determine the fate of humanity. Capitalism and its Critics gives a comprehensive critical analysis of the most important theorists of capitalism, including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, F.A. Hayek, J.M. Keynes, David Harvey, and Thomas Piketty. The book discusses some of the main debates about capitalism and considers alternatives in the twenty-first century. The 12 chapters are loosely chronologically organised around the main approaches and historical phases in the history of capitalism. Central themes of the book are the ideas of capitalist crisis and of tensions between democracy and capitalism in the making of modernity. A highly readable, informative and engaging text, Capitalism and its Critics is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding capitalism and its alternatives.
Book Synopsis The SAGE Handbook of Marxism by : Beverley Skeggs
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Marxism written by Beverley Skeggs and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2021-11-17 with total page 1684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Marxism both within and without the academy. Marxian frameworks, concepts and categories continue to be narratively relevant to the features and events of contemporary capitalism. Most crucially, an attention to shifting cultural conditions has lead contemporary researchers to re-confront some classical and essential Marxist concepts, as well as elaborating new critical frameworks for the analysis of capitalism today. The SAGE Handbook of Marxism showcases this cutting-edge of today’s Marxism. It advances the debate with essays that rigorously map and renew the concepts that have provided the groundwork and main currents for Marxist theory, and showcases interventions that set the agenda for Marxist research in the 21st century. A rigorous and challenging collection of scholarship, this book contains a stunning range of contributions from contemporary academics, writers and theorists from around the world and across disciplines, invaluable to scholars and graduate students alike. Part 1: Reworking the critique of political economy Part 2: Forms of domination, subjects of struggle Part 3: Political perspectives Part 4: Philosophical dimensions Part 5: Land and existence Part 6: Domains Part 7: Inquiries and debates
Book Synopsis The Virtues of Violence by : Kevin Duong
Download or read book The Virtues of Violence written by Kevin Duong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If democracy liberates individuals from their inherited bonds, what can reunite them into a sovereign people? In The Virtues of Violence, Kevin Duong argues that one particular answer captivated modern French thinkers: popular violence as social regeneration. In this tradition of political theory, the people's violence was not a sign of anarchy or disorder. Instead, it manifested a redemptive power capable of binding and repairing a society on the cusp of social disintegration. This was not a fringe view of French democracy at the time, but central to its momentous development. Duong analyzes the recurring role of the people's redemptive violence across four historical moments: the French Revolution, the imperial conquest of Algeria, the Paris Commune, and the years leading up to World War I. Bringing together democratic theory and intellectual history, he reveals how political thinkers across the spectrum proclaimed that violence by the people could repair the social fabric, even as they experienced democratization as social disintegration. The path from an anarchic multitude to an organized democratic society required the virtuous expression of violence by the people--not its prohibition. Duong's book urges us to reject accounts that view redemptive violence as an antidemocratic pathology. It challenges the long-held view that popular violence is a sign of anarchy or disorder. As shocking and unsettling as redemptive violence could be, it appealed to thinkers across the spectrum, because it answered a fundamental dilemma of political modernity: how to replace the severed bonds of the old regime with a superior democratic social bond. The Virtues of Violence argues we do not properly understand modern democracy unless we can understand why popular redemptive violence could be invoked on its behalf.
Download or read book Revolution written by Enzo Traverso and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it’s hard to know how we did without it." –China Miéville, author of October A cultural and intellectual balance-sheet of the twentieth century's age of revolutions This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of "dialectical images": Marx's "locomotives of history," Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals--from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South--as outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.
Book Synopsis Fire in the Minds of Men by : James H. Billington
Download or read book Fire in the Minds of Men written by James H. Billington and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Billington is interested in revolutionaries--the innovative creators of a new tradition. His historical frame extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century. The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage was the journalistic offices within great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were shaped as much by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany as the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The conversion of social theory to political practice was essentially the work of three Russian revolutions: in 1905, March 1917, and November 1917. Events in the outer rim of the European world brought discussions about revolution out of the school rooms and press rooms of Paris and Berlin into the halls of power. Despite his hard realism about the adverse practical consequences of revolutionary dogma, Billington appreciates the identity of its best sponsors, people who preached social justice transcending traditional national, ethnic, and gender boundaries. When this book originally appeared The New Republic hailed it as "remarkable, learned and lively," while The New Yorker noted that Billington "pays great attention to the lives and emotions of individuals and this makes his book absorbing." It is an invaluable work of history and contribution to our understanding of political life.
