Tag: Communism

And Cuba Shall Lead Them

In an era when, history textbooks contend, the United States lurched to the right, Gus Newport presided over an unapologetically leftist government in the San Francisco Bay Area. If the region has a ...

Legacies of Italian Marxism

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” What was left of this seemingly ominous prospect a century after the publication of Karl Marx and ...

The Devil Wears Pravda

In the mid-1930s, amid the Second World War and the Great Depression, competing forms of internationalism—the Communist International, Black Internationalism, the League of Nations—defined the ...

The Mortal Marx

In the mid-1860s, as an anxious and ailing Karl Marx worked on the 30-page essay that would billow into Das Kapital, his daughter Eleanor—“Tussy”—would play under his desk. With her dolls, kittens ...

Cuba’s Next Chapter

In April 2016, Cuba’s Communist Party (PCC) convened its Seventh Party Congress. Sprinkled throughout the published proceedings were a few attempts at levity by the otherwise laconic Raúl Castro. One ...

The Politics of Networking a Nation

In 1981, one year before his death, the Soviet cybernetician and computer pioneer Victor Glushkov published the book What Is the OGAS? OGAS was the Russian acronym for All-State Automated System for ...

On Accelerationism

At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.

Sex and Socialism

Three recent books tell the stories of four women whose lives both absorbed and propelled the vast, multifaceted socialist movement in Britain from 1870 to 1920: Lizzie Burns, Nellie Dowell, Muriel ...

Perestroika Blues

Now nearing the end of its fourth season, The Americans is a confounding success. It’s hard to figure out which of its triumphs is the most unlikely: that it has millions of Americans rooting for KGB ...

Totalitarian Sprawl

Was the Soviet Union a totalitarian state, ruled by a highly centralized power and demanding absolute subservience from its citizens? Or was it instead a more complex polity, one that only projected ...

Famine Fiction

Betraying friends. Trading sex for food. Devouring human flesh. All of these occurred during the famine that followed China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), and all of them ...