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Creating Social Trust in Post-Socialist Transition (Political Evolution and Institutional Change)
cOne of the central characteristics of socialist states and societies has been the absence of trust--between the state and the citizens, and then among citizens themselves. The process of developing trust is thus a major issue facing post-Socialist countries, and this book brings together a group of leading scholars to examine barriers to and bulwarks of trust in theoretical, cross-national, and topical perspectives. From the distinctive paradox of illegal organizations--such as the Mafiya--relying on trust within but undermining it without, to the effects of transparency, the authors examine the bases of trust and the effects of its presence or absence. Throughout the analysis is grounded in the interaction of individuals and their social, political, and economic environments. .
Price: $55.99
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Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias: Socialist Register 2000
"The Socialist Register is compulsory reading for people who refuse to be resigned to the idea that there can be no alternative to our unacceptable society." --Daniel Singer, author of Whose Millennium? When mainstream commentators talk about the future, they tend to predict dire doomsday apocalypses or spin wild techno-fantasies. In spite of their radically hi-tech edge, these futuristic scenarios usually assume that current social structures will persist. Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias points toward a very different way of thinking about the future. While rejecting schematic blueprints, this book reasserts the need for a bold and revolutionary social imagination, one aimed at saner ways of living and more rational ways of organizing society. Taking up such vital topics as work and its structure, democracy and the state, localism and internationalism, relations between the sexes, and technology and its social uses, Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias makes the case that a socialist vision of the future remains not only realistic but necessary. More than one dozen internationally celebrated scholars, including Terry Eagleton, Frigga Haug, Johanna Brenner, Kate Soper, Carl Boggs, and Norman Geras, are contributors. .
Price: $31.99
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New Realism, New Barbarism: Socialist Theory in the Era of Globalization (Recasting Marxism)
In this radical and controversial overview of the post-communist world, Boris Kagarlitsky argues that the very success of neo-liberal capitalism has made traditional socialism all the more necessary and feasible. Kagarlitsky argues that leftists exaggerate the importance of the ‘objective’ aspects of the ‘new reality’ — globalisation — and the weakening of the state, while underestimating the importance of the hegemony of neo-liberalism. As long as neo-liberalism retains its ideological hegemony, despite its economic failure, the consequence is a ‘new barbarism’ — already a reality in Eastern Europe, and now also emerging in the West. Kagarlitsky challenges the political neurosis of the left and prevailing assumptions of Marxism to argue that Marx’s theories are now more timely than they were in the mid-twentieth century. He analyses theories of the ‘end of the proletariat’ and the ‘end of work’, and assesses the potential of the new technologies – such as the Internet – which create fresh challenges for capitalism and new arenas for struggle. .
Price: $25.87
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Socialist Realism without Shores (Post-Contemporary Interventions)
Socialist Realism Without Shores offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism - an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This expanded edition of a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly brings together scholars from various parts of the globe to discuss socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides - from the "center," Russia, to various points at the "periphery" - China, Germany, France, Poland, remote republics of the former USSR, and the United States. The contributors here argue that socialist realism has never been a monolithic art form. Essays demonstrate, among other things, that its literature could accommodate psychoanalytic criticism; that its art and architecture could affect the aesthetic dictates of Moscow that made "Soviet" art paradoxically heterogeneous; and that its aesthetics could accommodate both high art and crafted kitsch. Socialist Realism Without Shores also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism - Stalinist aesthetics; "anthropological" readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from sots art, the Soviet version of postmodernism..
Price: $21.42
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Civic Republicanism and the Properties of Democracy: A Case Study of Post-Socialist Political Theory
Taking the revival of civic republicanism as his point of departure, Erik Olsen examines the relationship between property, civic virtue, and democracy in post-socialist political thought. Steering a course between the crass materialism that post-socialists criticize and their own post-materialist perspective, Olsen outlines a theory of democratic stakeholding in which citizens have rights of inhabitation in their commonwealth..
Price: $6.98
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Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activists and Post-Socialist Ecology in Hungary (East European Monographs)
Wild Capitalism examines environmental issues in the "New Europe" of the twenty-first century Specifically, it looks at how the meanings of "civil society" and "environment" have changed as environmentalists encounter the political and ecological realities of life after state socialism. Although environmentalism is a global social movement, environmental politics is a grassroots process in which activists creatively translate environmental issues into cultural idioms and political processes. .
Price: $25.92
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Cities After Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies (Studies in Urban and Social Change)
Cities After Socialism is the first substantial and authoritative analysis of the role of cities in the transition to capitalism that is occurring in the former communist states of Easter Europe and the Soviet Union. It will be of equal value to urban specialists and to those who have a more general interest in the most dramatic socio-political event of the contemporary era - the collapse of state socialism. Written by an international group of leading experts in the field, Cities after socialism asks and answers some crucial questions about the nature of the emergent post-socialist urban system and the conflicts and inequalities which are being generated by the processes of change now occurring..
Price: $12.93
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Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment
Decades of Western Cold War propaganda were designed to depict socialism as inimical to genuine aesthetic acheivement. Now, in the wake of the Cold War, it is becoming possible to reassess the past and present cultural productions of artists with socialist inclinations. The essays in this volume begin such a reassessment, finding that socialist cultural production in the 20th century, both as the official culture of the socialist East and as an oppositional culture in the capitalist West, has been rich and varied. The volume focuses on socialist culture in the industrialized world, primarily Eastern Europe and the West. An introductory essay overviews socialist cultural productions of the 20th century, while the chapters that follow address a wide range of topics. These include Soviet socialist realist fiction and film musicals, the socialist drama of Bertolt Brecht, and British and American leftist fiction. The volume demonstrates that propagandistic Cold War depictions of socialism as a threat to artistic expression were inaccurate and misleading..
Price: $49.95
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