The author believes, however, that the Rumanians will continue to pursue their independent course—one that could stimulate greater popular support and participation in the country's affairs, although it may not lead to a realization of Ceausescu's social nationalist goals.

Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

This Constitution is written with the future in mind. It is intended to set forth a basic model, and fundamental principles and guidelines, for the nature and functioning of a vastly different society and government than now exists: a socialist state which would embody, institutionalize and promote radically different relations and values among people; a socialist state whose fundamental aim, together with revolutionary struggle throughout the world, would be the emancipation of humanity as a whole. Original.

The story of the Jangalis, noncommunist revolutionaries who battled tsarist and British occupation forces in their homeland between 1915 and 1921, is critical to an understanding of twentieth-century Iran. Yet their struggle, commanded by the legendary Kuchek Khan, has been neglected, often deliberately falsified. The Pahlavi regime imposed a curtain of silence, Soviet historians attacked the movement's noncommunist leaders, and the British generally have accepted the Soviet interpretation. Now Cosroe Chaqueri brings fresh evidence, based on recently available documents from secret Soviet archives, that sheds dramatic new light on a brief but decisive moment in modern Iranian history. In reconstructing the record of the guerrilla movement that, with Soviet Russia's help, led to the establishment of the "first Soviet Socialist Republic" in the East, Chaqueri discredits the false versions of that episode and examines the internal and neocolonial external forces that precipitated its downfall. He blames foreign intervention but also locates the roots of Iran's failure to achieve independence in the socioeconomic and mental structures that have controlled the actions of Iranian leaders from ancient times until today's neo-Islamic regime.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, a revealing account of how today's Internet threatens democracy—and what can be done about it As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand one another. It's also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect. Welcome to the age of #Republic. In this revealing book, New York Times bestselling author Cass Sunstein shows how today’s Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism--and what can be done about it. He proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation, showing that #Republic need not be an ironic term. Rather, it can be a rallying cry for the kind of democracy that citizens of diverse societies need most.

Socialist Cosmopolitanism offers an innovative interpretation of literary works from the Mao era that reads Chinese socialist literature as world literature. As Nicolai Volland demonstrates, after 1949 China engaged with the world beyond its borders in a variety of ways and on many levels—politically, economically, and culturally. Far from rejecting the worldliness of earlier eras, the young People's Republic developed its own cosmopolitanism. Rather than a radical break with the past, Chinese socialist literature should be seen as an integral and important chapter in China's long search to find a place within world literature. Socialist Cosmopolitanism revisits a range of genres, from poetry and land reform novels to science fiction and children's literature, and shows how Chinese writers and readers alike saw their own literary production as part of a much larger literary universe. This literary space, reaching from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Moscow to Hanoi, allowed authors and texts to travel, reinventing the meaning of world literature. Chinese socialist literature was not driven solely by politics but by an ambitious—but ultimately doomed—attempt to redraw the literary world map.

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Law of the Sea analyzes Vietnam's policies on the law of the sea in relation to the country's overall foreign policy goals and its position at the center of the South China Sea geostrategic region. It examines Vietnam's claims in zones of maritime jurisdiction and its regulation of maritime activities in the context of the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and against the backdrop of Vietnam's security interests, economic development, and regional leadership goals. The author explores Vietnam's maritime boundary disputes with its Southeast Asian neighbors and China and assesses their impact on regional stability. This is the first comprehensive study to trace the evolution of Vietnamese policy and participation in law of the sea development from the 1958 First U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea to the present. The book provides the background essential to an understanding of Vietnam's current maritime relations and of the challenge to incorporate Vietnam into a stable regional order. Law of the sea specialists, Southeast Asia area specialists, and those interested in the development of Vietnam's hydrocarbon and fishery resources will find this a particularly valuable resource.

The Orders and Decorations of the "enemy" during the Vietnam War have remained shrouded in mystery for many years. References to them are scarce and interrogations of captives during the war often led to the proliferation of misinformation concerning them. To confuse the situation even more, these awards were bestowed by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), known then as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), and a myriad of political and local organizations. Covered ar those Orders and Decorations now considered official by the SRV, as well as many of the obsolete awards bestowed by the DRV and the NLF. It also discusses many of the commemorative, political and local awards. Includes value guide.

Drawing from Life explores revolutionary drawing and sketching in the early People’s Republic of China (1949–1965) in order to discover how artists created a national form of socialist realism. Tracing the development of seminal works by the major painters Xu Beihong, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Li Xiongcai, Dong Xiwen, and Fu Baoshi, author Christine I. Ho reconstructs how artists grappled with the representational politics of a nascent socialist art. The divergent approaches, styles, and genres presented in this study reveal an art world that is both heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. Through a history of artistic practices in pursuit of Maoist cultural ambitions—to forge new registers of experience, new structures of feeling, and new aesthetic communities—this original book argues that socialist Chinese art presents a critical, alternative vision for global modernism.

"Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, this book places the Soviet development of Central Asia, and the Soviet hope for communism's bringing prosperity to a supposedly backward area, in global context"--