This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

When Rudolf Bahro left East Germany in 1979, two years after publication of The Alternative in Eastern Europe, very little was known about the background to this imposing study of the structures and suppressed potential of 'actually existing socialism'. In this series of interviews organized by New Left Review, he systematically discusses his childhood years in Nazi Germany, his political and intellectual development as a loyal - though never unthinking - supporter of the Ulbricht regime, the emergence of his critique of the Soviet Union, and his close identification with the Prague Spring. The invasion of Czechoslovakia had a profound effect on Bahro, who immediately set to work on the massive project that would occupy nearly a decade of his life. A central section of the book addresses the intellectual influences and personal circumstances surrounding its accomplishment, before going on to the significance of his arrest in 1977. Released from prison under a general amnesty, then forced into exile, Bahro has since enthusiastically embraced the Green Party and ecology movement in West Germany, becoming its most forceful advocate of 'industrial disarmament'. In the concluding interviews, he analyses his own response to this new opposition in West Germany, situating it in relation to the new cold war and tensions within the Social Democratic Party on the one hand, and to the traditional perspectives of historical materialism on the other. The fruitful and wide-ranging exchange of ideas in From Red to Green will be of interest to everyone concerned with the pressing social and political problems of the late twentieth century.

As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated in the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to American universities to promote higher enrollments, studies of foreign languages and cultures, and, especially, scientific research. In Cold War University, Matthew Levin traces the paradox that developed: higher education became increasingly enmeshed in the Cold War struggle even as university campuses became centers of opposition to Cold War policies. The partnerships between the federal government and major research universities sparked a campus backlash that provided the foundation, Levin argues, for much of the student dissent that followed. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of the hubs of student political activism in the 1950s and 1960s, the protests reached their flashpoint with the 1967 demonstrations against campus recruiters from Dow Chemical, the manufacturers of napalm. Levin documents the development of student political organizations in Madison in the 1950s and the emergence of a mass movement in the decade that followed, adding texture to the history of national youth protests of the time. He shows how the University of Wisconsin tolerated political dissent even at the height of McCarthyism, an era named for Wisconsin's own virulently anti-Communist senator, and charts the emergence of an intellectual community of students and professors that encouraged new directions in radical politics. Some of the events in Madison—especially the 1966 draft protests, the 1967 sit-in against Dow Chemical, and the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing—have become part of the fabric of "The Sixties," touchstones in an era that continues to resonate in contemporary culture and politics.

Maxwell uncovers both black literature's debt to Communism and Communism's debt to black literature, reciprocal obligations first incurred during the Harlem Renaissance.

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.

In the late 1950s, Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams among others, came together as part of a promising new political formation, the New Left. The six years of the group's formal existence represents one of the richest and most exciting periods in the intellectual history of the left in Britain. This short period saw the beginning of many future theoretical developments in radical politics, and the founder members of the New Left are now associated with groundbreaking work in history, culture and politics.