The First Socialist Schism chronicles the conflicts in the International Working Men's Association (First International, 1864-1877), which represents an important milestone in the history of political ideas and socialist theory. This can be seen as a decisive moment in the history of political ideas: the split between centralist party politics and the federalist grassroots movement. The separate movements in the International - which would later develop into social democracy, communism and anarchism - found their greatest advocates in Bakunin and Marx.

The First Socialist Schism chronicles the conflicts in the International Working Men’s Association (the First International, 1864–1877), which represents an important milestone in the history of political ideas and socialist theory. In defending their autonomy, federations in the International became aware of what separated them from the social democratic movement that relied on the establishment of national labor parties and the conquest of political power. This can be seen as a decisive moment in the history of political ideas: the split between centralist party politics and the federalist grassroots movement. The separate movements in the International—which would later develop into social democracy, communism, and anarchism—found their greatest advocates in Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx. However, the significance of this alleged clash of titans is largely a modern invention. It was not the rivalry between two arch-enemies or a personal vendetta based on mutual resentment that made the conflict between Bakunin and Marx so important but rather that it heralded the first socialist schism between parliamentary party politics aiming to conquer political power and social-revolutionary concepts. Instead of focusing exclusively on what Marx and Bakunin said, many other contributions to this debate are examined, making this the first reconstruction of a dispute that gripped the entire organization. This book also provides the first detailed account of the International’s Congress of The Hague (September, 1872); including the background, the sequence of events, and international reaction. The book sets new standards when it comes to source material, taking into account documents from numerous archives and libraries that have previously gone unnoticed or were completely unknown.

No political parties of present-day Germany are separated by a wider gulf than the two parties of labor, one democratic and reformist, the other totalitarian and socialist-revolutionary. Social Democrats and Communists today face each other as bitter political enemies across the front lines of the Cold War; yet they share a common origin in the Social Democratic Party of Imperial Germany. How did they come to go separate ways? By what process did the old party break apart? How did the prewar party prepare the ground for the dissolution of the labor movement in World War I, and for the subsequent extension of Leninism into Germany? To answer these questions is the purpose of Carl Schorske's study.

Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles and books advancing the cause of the labor movement. From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers’ organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers’ rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein’s descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market. For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal’s readable translation makes Weinstein’s Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration.

The commanding study of Marxism, now in one masterful volume with a new preface and epilogue by the author.

Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from the socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory. What Remains traces the effects of these artifacts, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts.

The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman's Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution. When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition. Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China, many no longer accessible to researchers, this book examines how China sought to mobilize Asia, Africa, and Latin America to seize the revolutionary mantle from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union adapted to win it back, transforming the nature of socialist revolution in the process. This groundbreaking book is the first to explore the significance of this second Cold War that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the capitalist-communist clash.

This book, by a leading sociologist, examines the sociology of Durkheim, Marx, and some of their more distinguished followers. Lockwood shows that, underlying obvious and well-known differences, there are remarkably similar sets of assumptions about the structure of social action and specifically about how social order is created, maintained, and, under certain conditions, disrupted. These assumptions raise problems that have never been adequately addressed by either Durkheimians or Marxists. Lockwood's important study is a contribution toward identifying where and why new conceptual thinking is required.

The outbreak of World War I precipitated a schism in the international socialist movement that endures today. Heeding calls for "rational defense," the leading European socialist democratic parties abandoned their vision of peace and internationalism as an integral part of the struggle for social justice and set aside their view of interstate war as the clearest example of the irrational essence of competitive capitalism. Only the Zimmerwald Left, led by Lenin, continued to speak out for internationalism. R. Craig Nation utilizes sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Swedish to provide the first comprehensive history of the Zimmerwald Left as an international political tendency.