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Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon
Work, Power and Political Strategy
Aaron Jaffe
Pluto Press, 2020
How do we integrate the theoretical underpinnings of social reproduction theory (SRT) into our understanding of the social harms inflicted upon us? How can we use it to inform our struggles and affect societal change under capitalism? Integrating our understanding of productive and reproductive spheres and exploring the connection between identity-based oppression and class exploitation, SRT has emerged as a powerful Marxist frame for social analysis and political practice. In this book, Aaron Jaffe extracts SRT's radical potential, relying on recent struggles, including the International Women's Strike and the teachers' strikes, showing how we can use SRT to motivate socialist politics and strategy. Using social reproduction theory to appreciate distinct forms of social domination, this unique and necessary book will have vital strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists, LGBT activists, disability activists and feminists.
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Socialism
An Analysis of its Past and Future
Erzsébet Szalai
Central European University Press, 2005
In this short, but rich piece of work, Erzsébet Szalai offers a neo-socialist alternative to socialism (i.e. communist ruled state-socialism) and neo-capitalism. Drawing upon the fertile tradition of left-wing Hungarian Social Sciences, she offers her own theory of transitional society, suggesting that socialism was not an independent formation, but instead a society in transition. She relocates soviet-type societies on the semi-periphery of the capitalist world system. In addition she offers a critique of capitalism that pivots on the two connected issues of over production and ecological crisis. She makes the distinction between an anti-globalism critique and a globalization critique, locating herself in the latter. This work offers readers the opportunity to engage in a critique of capitalism that is organized along a new understanding of socialism itself.
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Socialism and Modernity
Peter Beilharz
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

This first collection of Peter Beilharz's highly influential thought traces the themes and problems, manifestations, and trajectories of socialism and modernity as they connect and shift over a twenty-year period. Woven throughout Beilharz's analysis is the urgent question of modern utopia: how do we imagine freedom and equality in modernity?

The essays in this volume explore the relationship between socialism and modernity across the United States, Europe, and Australia from the mid-1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century, a time that witnessed the global triumph of capitalism and the dramatic turn away from Marxism and socialism to modernity as the dominant perspective. According to Beilharz, we have seen the expansion of a kind of Weberian Marxism, with the concept of revolution giving way to the idea of pluralized forms of power and the idea of rupture giving way to the postmodern sense of difference. These changes come together with the discourse of modernism, both aesthetic and technological.

Socialism and modernity, Beilharz argues, are fundamentally interrelated. In correcting the conflation of Marxism, Bolshevism, and socialism that occludes contemporary political thinking, he reopens a space for discussion of what socialist politics might look like now-in the postcommunist-postcolonial-postmodern moment.

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Socialism and War
Essays, Documents, Reviews
F. A. Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Throughout the twentieth century socialism and war were intimately connected. The unprecedented upheavals wrought by the two world wars and the Great Depression provided both opportunity and impetus for a variety of socialist experiments. This volume in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek documents the evolution of Hayek's thought on socialism and war during the dark decades of the 1930s and 1940s.

Opening with Hayek's arguments against market socialism, the volume continues with his writings on the economics of war, many in response to the proposals made in John Maynard Keynes's famous pamphlet, How to Pay for the War. The last section presents articles that anticipated The Road to Serfdom, Hayek's classic meditation on the dangers of collectivism. An appendix contains a number of topical book reviews written by Hayek during this crucial period, and a masterful introduction by the volume editor, Bruce Caldwell, sets Hayek's work in context.

Socialism and War will interest not just fans of The Road to Serfdom, but anyone concerned with the ongoing debates over the propriety of government intervention in the economy.

"When he wrote The Road to Serfdom, [Hayek's] was a voice in the wilderness. Now the fight [has] been taken up by people all over the world, by institutions and movements, and the ideas that seemed so strange to many in 1944 can be found from scholarly journals to television programs."—Thomas Sowell, Forbes

"Intellectually [Hayek] towers like a giant oak in a forest of saplings."—Chicago Tribune

"Each new addition to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, the University of Chicago's painstaking series of reissues and collections, is a gem."—Liberty on Volume IX of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek
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Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives
Area Studies and Global Theories
Edited by Peter J. S. Duncan and Elisabeth Schimpfössl
University College London, 2019
In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discredited the idea of socialism for generations to come. It was seen as representing the final and irreversible victory of capitalism. This triumphant dominance was barely challenged until the 2008 financial crisis threw the Western world into a state of turmoil. 

Through analysis of post-Socialist Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of the United Kingdom, China, and the United States, Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives confronts the difficulty we face in articulating alternatives to capitalism, socialism, and threatening populist regimes. Beginning with accounts of the impact of capitalism on countries left behind by the planned economies, the book moves on to consider how China has become a beacon of dynamic economic growth, aggressively expanding its global influence. The final section of the book poses alternatives to the ideological dominance of neoliberalism in the West.
 
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Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation
Leszek Balcerowicz
Central European University Press, 1995
This volume gathers together essays on the theme of economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe, written by the former Polish Minister of Finance.  In it, the author summarizes the research on institutions, institutional change and human behaviour that he has undertaken since the late 1970s.  He addresses such issues as the socialist market economy, reformability of the Soviet-type economic system, democratization and market-orientated reform in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Polish model of economic reform.
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Socialism
Past and Future
Michael Harrington
Pluto Press, 1993

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Socialism
What Went Wrong
Irwin Silber
Pluto Press, 1994

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A Socialist History of the French Revolution
Jean Jaurés
Pluto Press, 2021
One of the most influential accounts of the French Revolution ever published, now available for the first time in paperback.

Jean Jaurès was the celebrated French Socialist Party leader, assassinated in 1914 for trying to use diplomacy and industrial action to prevent the outbreak of war. Published just a few years before his death, his magisterial A Socialist History of the French Revolution has endured for over a century.

Written in the midst of his activities as leader of the Socialist Party and editor of its newspaper, L'Humanite, Jaurès intended the book to serve as both a guide and an inspiration to political activity; even now it can serve to do just that.

Jaurès's verve, originality, and willingness to criticize all players in this epic drama make this a truly moving addition to the shelf of great books on the French Revolution. Mitchell Abidor's abridged translation of Jaurès's original six volumes makes this exceptional work truly accessible to an Anglophone audience.
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The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia
Transformation in Buryatia
Melissa Chakars
Central European University Press, 2014
The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century. The book challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.
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The Strange Death of Marxism
The European Left in the New Millennium
Paul Edward Gottrfied
University of Missouri Press, 2005
The Strange Death of Marxism seeks to refute certain misconceptions about the current European Left and its relation to Marxist and Marxist-Leninist parties that existed in the recent past. Among the misconceptions that the book treats critically and in detail is that the Post-Marxist Left (a term the book uses to describe this phenomenon) springs from a distinctly Marxist tradition of thought and that it represents an unqualified rejection of American capitalist values and practices.
            Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the emphasis on the specifically American roots of the European Left. Gottfried examines the multicultural orientation of this Left and concludes that it has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. It does, however, owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Europe.           
            American culture and American political reform have foreshadowed related developments in Europe by years or even whole decades. Contrary to the impression that the United States has taken antibourgeois attitudes from Europeans, the author argues exactly the opposite. Since the end of World War II, Europe has lived in the shadow of an American empire that has affected the Old World, including its self-described anti-Americans. Gottfried believes that this influence goes back to who reads or watches whom more than to economic and military disparities. It is the awareness of American cultural as well as material dominance that fuels the anti-Americanism that is particularly strong on the European Left. That part of the European spectrum has, however, reproduced in a more extreme form what began as an American leap into multiculturalism. Hostility toward America, however, can be transformed quickly into extreme affection for the United States, which occurred during the Clinton administration and during the international efforts to bring a multicultural society to the Balkans.
            Clearly written and well conceived, The Strange Death of Marxism will be of special interest to political scientists, historians of contemporary Europe, and those critical of multicultural trends, particularly among Euro-American conservatives.
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Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy
Constructing the Political Subject
Massimo Modonesi
Pluto Press, 2013

In this bold and innovative book, Massimo Modonesi weaves together theory and political practice by relating the concepts of subalternity, antagonism and autonomy to contemporary movements in Latin America and elsewhere.

In a sophisticated account, Modonesi reconstructs the debates between Marxist authors and schools of thought in order to sketch out informed strategies of resistance. He reviews the works of Gramsci, Negri, Castoriadis and Lefort, and engages with the arguments made by E. P. Thompson, Spivak, Laclau and Mouffe.

Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy firmly roots key theoretical arguments from a range of critical thinkers within specific political movements in order to recover these concepts as analytical instruments which can help to guide contemporary struggles.

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