Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

Remington profiles the Bolshevik project of social transformation and political centralization known as War Communism. He argues that the effort to institute a centrally planned and administered economy shaped the ideology of the regime, the relations between the regime and the working class, and the character of state power.

How to build a movement to confront climate change The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.

A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide. In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced TanzaniaÕs approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model. Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

Harnecker offers a useful overview of the changing political map in Latin America, examining the trajectories of several progressive Latin American governments as they work to develop alternative models to capitalism.--Provided by publisher.

Building Socialism reveals how East German writers' engagement with the rapidly changing built environment from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s constitutes an untold story about the emergence of literary experimentation in the post-War period. It breaks new ground by exploring the centrality of architecture to a mid-century modernist literature in dialogue with multiple literary and left-wing theoretical traditions and in tune with international assessments of modernist architecture and urban planning. Design and construction were a central part of politics and everyday life in East Germany during this time as buildings old and new were asked to bear heavy ideological and social burdens. In their novels, stories, and plays, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Günter Kunert, Volker Braun, Günter de Bruyn, and Brigitte Reimann responded to enormous new factory complexes, experimental new towns, the demolition of Berlin's tenements, and the propagation of a pared-down modernist aesthetic in interior design. Writers' representation of the design, construction, and use of architecture formed part of a turn to modernist literary devices, including montage, metaphor, and shifting narrative perspectives. East Germany's literary architecture also represents a sophisticated theoretical reflection on the intractable problems of East Germany's socialist modernity, including the alliance between state socialism and technological modernization, competing commitments to working-class self-organization and the power of specialist planners and designers, and the attempt to create an alternative to fascism.

Placing Stalinism in its international context, The Stalinist Era explains the origins and consequences of Soviet state intervention and violence.

This essay collection presents a compelling and insightful analysis of the Palestinian freedom movement from a socialist perspective. In Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, contributors examine a number of key aspects in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. These essays contextualize the situation in today’s polarized world and offer a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won. Through an internationalist, anti-imperialist lens, this book explores the links between the struggle for freedom in the United States and that in Palestine, and beyond. Contributors examine both the historical and contemporary trajectory of the Palestine solidarity movement in order to glean lessons for today’s organizers. They argue that, in order to achieve justice in Palestine, the movement must take up the question of socialism regionally and internationally. Contributors include: Jehad Abusalim, Shireen Akram-Boshar, Omar Barghouti, Nada Elia, Toufic Haddad, Remi Kanazi, Annie Levin, Mostafa Omar, Khury Petersen-Smith, and Daphna Thier.

This volume examines the issue of identity within the context of the first decade of the Romanian Communist regime, using a series of concepts and theories belonging to the disciplines of Western cultural, media and gender studies, as well as those relating to colonialism and imperialism. Of particular interest is the use of the press as an essential instrument for Romanian propaganda in terms of spreading, as well as controlling, the new set of politically-established identity patterns.

The Turkestano-Siberian Railroad, or Turksib, was one of the great construction projects of the Soviet Union's First Five-Year Plan. As the major icon to ending the economic "backwardness" of the USSR's minority republics, it stood apart from similar efforts as one of the most potent metaphors for the creation of a unified socialist nation.Built between December 1926 and January 1931 by nearly 50,000 workers and at a cost of more 161 million rubles, Turksib embodied the Bolsheviks' commitment to end ethnic inequality and promote cultural revolution in one the far-flung corners of the old Tsarist Empire, Kazakhstan. Trumpeted as the "forge of the Kazakh proletariat," the railroad was to create a native working class, bringing not only trains to the steppes, but also the Revolution.In the first in-depth study of this grand project, Matthew Payne explores the transformation of its builders in Turksib's crucible of class war, race riots, state purges, and the brutal struggle of everyday life. In the battle for the souls of the nation's engineers, as well as the racial and ethnic conflicts that swirled, far from Moscow, around Stalin's vast campaign of industrialization, he finds a microcosm of the early Soviet Union.