Books in series
#1
The Idea of Communism
2009
November 9, 2009 will mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the monumental event that signaled the beginning of the end of Communism in the former Soviet Union. Yet, why was this collapse of Communism considered final, but the many failures of capitalism are considered temporary and episodic? In The Idea of Communism, Tariq Ali addresses this very question.
The idea of Communism, argues Ali, was simple and noble. The Communist Manifesto, which advocated the creation of a society based on the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” rather than a system based on greed and profit, appealed to millions all over the globe. However, Ali argues that the vision of society adumbrated by the founders of Communism was a far cry from what became known as actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union and China. The Communist system that developed ignored Engels’s belief that a workers’ movement and its victory were inconceivable without freedom of the press and assembly. This freedom, Engels insisted, “is the air it needs to breathe.
Here, in a thought-provoking re-evaluation, Ali argues that a new form of socialism and global planning is vital to save the planet from capitalist and environmental degradation.
#2
The Cuban Drumbeat
2009
Reflecting on Cuba’s unique foreign policy—both its meaning and its legacy—and how Cuba has adjusted to a world dominated by the United States, Piero Gleijeses asserts in The Cuban Drumbeat that it has been a policy without equal in modern times. During the cold war, extra-continental military interventions were the preserve of the two superpowers, a few West European countries, and Cuba. Gleijeses documents how the rest of the world was regularly stunned by Cuba’s massive uses of force, including the 1975–76 dispatch of 36,000 Cuban soldiers to Angola to repel a South African invasion, the 12,000 Cuban soldiers sent to Ethiopia in 1978 to help defeat a Somali invasion, and the 55,000 Cuban soldiers present in Angola by 1988. Even the Soviet Union sent far fewer troops beyond its immediate borders in those years than did Cuba. The Cuban Drumbeat describes how the cold war framed three decades of Castro’s revolutionary zeal; but, Gleijeses argues, Castro’s vision was always larger than the cold war. For Castro, the battle against imperialism—his raison d ’ être—is more than the struggle against the United it is the war against despair and oppression in the Third World—a war that continues even though the future of Castro’s policies is uncertain.
#3
Back in the USSR
2009
Though it has been nearly two decades since the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union and the accompanying disintegration of the Soviet state, a strange aspect of the current cultural situation in Russia and in the other former republics of the USSR is that the people still identify themselves as post-Soviet. Yet, the difference between the Soviet past and a capitalist present is striking, which raises many Why are the new elites referring to the old times to legitimize themselves? Why do commercial advertisements stress that the products they offer are exactly the same as they used to be in Soviet times? And, why, year after year, does the government in Moscow organize impressive celebrations for Victory Day, inevitably drawing parallels to the old Soviet ceremonies?
Back in the USSR by Boris Kagarlitsky tackles these questions and more as it reflects on what happened in Russia after the collapse of the old regime and how this has affected social and cultural life, as well as the everyday lives of ordinary people. In this arresting work, Kagarlitsky also delves into what type of intelligentsia still exists in the former USSR and the cultural products that are being produced by these artists, including novels, films, and music.
#4
A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism
2009
A wry, cutting deconstruction of the Communist empire by one of Eastern Europe's exceptional authors.
Called "a perceptive and amusing social critic, with a wonderful eye for detail" by The Washington Post, Slavenka Drakulic-a native of Croatia-has emerged as one of the most popular and respected critics of Communism to come out of the former Eastern Bloc. In A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism, she offers a eight-part exploration of Communism by way of an unusual cast of narrators, each from a different country, who reflect on the fall of Communism. Together they constitute an Orwellian send-up of absurdities during the final years of European Communism that showcase this author's tremendous talent.
#5
Change
2010
In Change, Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in this novella disguised as autobiography—or vice-versa. Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of “people’s history,” a bottom-up rather than top-down view of a country in flux. By moving back and forth in time and focusing on small events and everyday people, Mo Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.
“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”— Nobel Committee for Literature
“If China has a Kafka, it may be Mo Yan. Like Kafka, Yan has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments.” — Publishers Weekly, on You'll Do Anything for a Laugh
#6
Bait
Four Stories
2010
Unlike most of Mahasweta Devi’s works, which focus on Bengali tribes and the rural dispossessed, the four stories collected in Bait are located in the urban and suburban criminal underworld, and form an unusual segment of Devi’s oeuvre. The first story, “Fisherman,” is about a man who recovers the bodies of young boys from the village pond so that the police can pass them off as victims of drowning. “Knife,” on the other hand, is a tongue-in-cheek account of the liminal cultural world of West Bengal, which borders Bangladesh. A young woman makes her own protest against an exploitative establishment as a result of abuse by a politician and his cohorts in “Body.” An unemployed middle-class youth discovers himself after his first “test” killing in the dark story “Killer.” This collection of fascinating and unsettling stories is anchored by an in-depth introductory essay by cultural historian Sumanta Banerjee who has firsthand familiarity with the settings and situations from his crime-reporting past. Banerjee contextualizes the stories within the development of the growing criminal underworld in Bengal today.
#7
Catastrophe in Indonesia
2010
In 1965 Indonesia had the largest communist movement in the world outside of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Indonesian President Sukarno supported the movement and was edging Indonesia towards socialism, when a mutiny coordinated by D. N. Aidit, chairperson of the Indonesian Communist Party, was launched on the last day of September 1965, and the backlash destroyed the movement. As Max Lane describes in Catastrophe in Indonesia, though this attempt to replace the anti-communist army leadership was organized without the knowledge of the communist party, the army launched a subsequent propaganda campaign against the communist movement. Consequently, the government collapsed, opening the way for an extremely violent uprising in which over one million people were killed and tens of thousands imprisoned. All left-wing ideas and activities were banned—and remain so today. In Catastrophe in Indonesia, Lane probes this massive and complicated collapse of communism, providing a thorough and knowledgeable explanation of how the movement’s leadership trapped itself in such a disastrous situation. As well, he brings the story up to the present, analyzing the overall impact on Indonesian politics and the re-emergence of a new Indonesian left today.
Authors
Max Lane
Author · 2 books
Max Lane is a writer and researcher and translator, editor and consultant with 36 years of experience in and with Indonesia, as well as with Singapore and the Philippines and with the East Timorese community in Australia.
Tariq Ali
Author · 34 books
Tariq Ali (Punjabi, Urdu: طارق علی) is a British-Pakistani historian, novelist, filmmaker, political campaigner, and commentator. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and regularly contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books. He is the author of several books, including Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (1991), Pirates Of The Caribbean: Axis Of Hope (2006), Conversations with Edward Said (2005), Bush in Babylon (2003), and Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002), A Banker for All Seasons (2007) and the recently published The Duel (2008).
Mo Yan
Author · 19 books
Modern Chinese author, in the western world most known for his novel Red Sorghum (which was turned into a movie by the same title). Often described as the Chinese Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. Mo Yan (莫言) is a pen name and means don't speak. His real name is Guan Moye (simplified Chinese: 管谟业; traditional Chinese: 管謨業; pinyin: Guǎn Móyè). He has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 for his work which "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary". Among the works highlighted by the Nobel judges were Red Sorghum (1987) and Big Breasts & Wide Hips (2004), as well as The Garlic Ballads. Chinese version: 莫言
