Results by title
107 books match the query 'Socialism' and 6 start with p
Partisan Ruptures
Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist YugoslaviaGal Kirn
Pluto Press, 2019
Platform Socialism
How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big TechJames Muldoon
Pluto Press, 2022
Powerful tech companies now own the digital infrastructure of twenty-first century social life. Masquerading as global community builders, these companies have developed sophisticated new techniques for extracting wealth from their users.
James Muldoon shows how grassroots communities and transnational social movements can take back control from Big Tech. He reframes the technology debate and proposes a host of new ideas, from the local to the international, for how we can reclaim the emancipatory possibilities of digital platforms. Drawing on sources from forgotten histories to contemporary prototypes, he proposes an alternative system and charts a roadmap for how we can get there.
Pleasures in Socialism
Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern BlocDavid Crowley
Northwestern University Press, 2012
Much has been written about the workings of communist governments in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, yet there is still a great deal to explore regarding their relationship to the everyday lives of the citizens living under them. This third volume builds on the editors’ Style and Socialism and Socialist Spaces, showing how the rise of consumer culture took a unique form in these countries.
Essays from top scholars address topics ranging from fashion and game shows to smoking and camping. The authors of the essays in this collection investigate the ways in which pleasurable activities, like many other facets of daily life, were both a space in which these communist governments tried to insinuate themselves and thereby further expand the reach of their authority,
and also an opportunity for people to assert their individuality.
Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality
The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914Joshua D. Zimmerman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Political Epistemics
The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German SocialismAndreas Glaeser
University of Chicago Press, 2011
What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence.
Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.
Portable Postsocialisms
New Cuban Mediascapes after the End of HistoryPaloma Duong
University of Texas Press, 2024
2025 Honorable Mention, Bryce Wood Book Award, Latin American Studies Association
A study of Cuban culture and media in the twenty-first century as both a global phenomenon and a local reality, at a time when the declared death of socialism coexists in tension with emerging anticapitalist movements worldwide.
Why does Cuban socialism endure as an object of international political desire, while images of capitalist markets consume Cuba’s national imagination? This bold new study argues that Cuba’s changing media cultures are key to our understanding of the global postsocialist condition and its competing political imaginaries.
Portable Postsocialisms calls on a vast multimedia archive to offer a groundbreaking cultural interpretation of Cuban postsocialism. Paloma Duong examines songs, artworks, advertisements, memes, literature, jokes, and networks that refuse exceptionalist and exoticizing visions of Cuba. Expanding postsocialist critical theory to read this complex mediascape, Duong argues that a materialist critique of Cuba’s revolutionary legacy must account for Cubans’ everyday demands for agency and self-representation. This long overdue reassessment of Cuba’s place in Latin American and post-Marxist studies shows Cuban postsocialism to be an urgent and indispensable referent for core debates on the politics of participatory cultures in new media studies. Portable Postsocialisms performs the crucial task of redefining how we envision imaginaries of social change in Latin America and the Caribbean.