In the past two decades, environmental pollution and natural resource shortages have evoked increasing concern in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The emerging ecological crisis has challenged many common assumptions in the Soviet bloc, as in the West. This book provides, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the ecology debate in the USSR and its highly industrialized ally, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on a thorough examination of the Soviet and GDR sources, Dr. DeBardeleben explores the authorities' attempts to explain the problem to their populations. She also examines the viewpoints of scientists, writers, and scholars, with special attention to economic dimensions of the ecology debate. The study reveals the increasing sophistication of specialists in influencing public policy by adapting official values to support their positions. Through comparison of the Soviet and East German cases, the study clarifies the impact of natural resource endowment and legitimacy dilemmas on treatment of the ecology issue. The book demonstrates that Marxist-Leninist values subtly affect Soviet and GDR responses, but at the same time the environmental crisis is forcing a reevaluation of some aspects of Marxist-Leninist theory and ideology itself.

One of the pre-eminent scholars in the history and theory of European socialism, John Kautsky in this volume develops the argument that Marxism and Leninism are two quite different ideologies. He counterposes this view with the commonly accepted one of Leninism as simply one form that Marxism took in the course of its evolution. The easy identification of Marxism and Leninism with each other has been responsible for great confusion in the realm of both scholarly and political discourse. Kautsky develops his position within the tradition of the sociology of knowledge, by the close examination of the different meanings of the Marxist vocabulary as it was used by Marxists and Leninists. His frame of reference turns on the position of labor in turn-of-the-century industrial Europe and the role of modernizing intellectuals in underdeveloped countries. While the vocabulary used was often common to Marx and Lenin, Marxism was explicitly concerned with appeals to workers in industrial nations such as Germany and Austria, whereas Leninism appeals to revolutionaries in underdeveloped nations such as Russia and China. Whatever be the current assessment of the future of socialism and communism, Kautsky holds that it is important to study the core structure of both Marxism and Leninism, since they were major phenomena that powerfully affected the world in the twentieth century. Beyond that, in dealing with how different ideologies can be ensconced within the same rhetoric, the book offers an outstanding entrance into the sociology of knowledge as a tool for political analysis. This is a unique work in the function of language no less than the nature of ideology. The work is divided into five parts: Two environments, two ideologies, one terminology. The evolution of Marxism, its appeals in the German Empire. The evolution of Leninism, its appeals to strata involved in making modernizing revolutions. The differential outcomes of Marxism in the East and Leninism in the West. And finally, an examination of why Marxism and Leninism have been seen as a single ideology. In a new essay prepared for this new edition, Kautsky provides important autobiographical as well as historical reflections on how this book fits into the overall pattern of the author's work.

Essays that address the question: how can people and class agency change this destructive course of history? Capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels is heating our planet at a pace and scale never before experienced. Extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels and accelerating feedback loops are a commonplace feature of our lives. The number of environmental refugees is increasing and several island states and low-lying countries are becoming vulnerable. Corporate-induced climate change has set us on an ecocidal path of species extinction. Governments and their international platforms such as the Paris Climate Agreement deliver too little, too late. Most states, including South Africa, continue on their carbon-intensive energy paths, with devastating results. Political leaders across the world are failing to provide systemic solutions to the climate crisis. This is the context in which we must ask ourselves: how can people and class agency change this destructive course of history? Volume three in the Democratic Marxism series, The Climate Crisis investigates eco-socialist alternatives that are emerging. It presents the thinking of leading climate justice activists, campaigners and social movements advancing systemic alternatives and developing bottom-up, just transitions to sustain life. Through a combination of theoretical and empirical work, the authors collectively examine the challenges and opportunities inherent in the current moment. This volume builds on the class-struggle focus of Volume 2 by placing ecological issues at the centre of democratic Marxism. Most importantly, it explores ways to renew historical socialism with democratic, eco-socialist alternatives to meet current challenges in South Africa and the world.

The collapse of communism was one of the most defining moments of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction examines the history behind the political, economic, and social structures of communism as an ideology.

What does the COVID 19 tell us about the climate breakdown, and what should we do about it? The economic and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been unprecedented. Governments have spoken of being at war and find themselves forced to seek new powers in order to maintain social order and prevent the spread of the virus. This is often exercised with the notion that we will return to normal as soon as we can. What if that is not possible? Secondly, if the state can mobilize itself in the face of an invisible foe like this pandemic, it should also be able to confront visible dangers such as climate destruction with equal force. In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm demands that this war-footing state should be applied on a permanent basis to the ongoing climate front line. He offers proposals on how the climate movement should use this present emergency to make that case. There can be no excuse for inaction any longer.

"Delving into Karl Marx's central works as well as his natural scientific notebooks, published only recently and still being translated, [the author] argues that Karl Marx actually saw the environment crisis embedded in captialism. [The book] shows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx's critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world."--Page [4] of cover.

In Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, by means of a careful textual and contextual analysis of the writings of Lenin and his Marxist contemporaries, Alan Shandro traces the contours of the ‘(anti-) metaphysical event’ identified by Gramsci in Lenin’s political practice and theory, the emergence of the ‘philosophical fact’ of hegemony. In so doing, he effectively disputes conventional caricatures of Lenin’s role as a political actor and thinker and unearths the underlying parameters of the concept of hegemony in the class struggle. He thereby clarifies the conceptual status of this pervasive but now increasingly elusive notion and the logic of theory and practice at work in it.