Anti Leftist Politics In Modern World History

Systemic and political hostility against the 'left', real and contrived, has been a key, yet under-recognized aspect of the history of the modern world for the past two hundred years. By the 1820s, the new, exploitative and destabilizing character of capitalist industrial production and its accompanying market liberalizations began creating necessities among the working classes and their allies for the new, self-protective politics of 'socialism'. But it is evident that, for the new economic system to sustain itself, such oppositional politics that it necessitated had to be undermined, if not destroyed, by whatever means necessary. Through the imperialism of the later 19th century, and with significant variations, this complex and often highly destructive dialectical syndrome expanded worldwide. Liberals, conservatives, extreme nationalists, fascists, racists, and others have all repeatedly come aggressively and violently into play against 'socialist' oppositions. In this book, Philip Minehan traces the patterns of such hostility and presents numerous crucial examples of it: from Britain, France, Germany and the United States; the British in India; European fascism, the United States and Britain as they operated in China and Indochina; from Kenya, Algeria and Iran; and from Central and South America during the Cold War. In the final chapters, Minehan addresses the post-Cold War, US-led triumphalist wars in the Middle East, the ensuing refugee crises, neo-fascism, and anti-environmentalist politics, to show the ways that the syndrome within which anti-leftist antagonism emerges, in its neoliberal phase since the 1970s, remains as self-destructive and dangerous as ever

Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism & revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. He offers an alternative interpretation for the denunciation of communism & Marxism by the French intellectual left in the late 1970s.

The “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters, “populism”, Putin, Facebook… anyone but themselves. They are suffering from Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome. Emerging from four years of interviews and debates on the popular global politics podcast Aufhebunga Bunga, The End of the End of History examines how the political consequences of the 2008 financial crisis have come home to roost. If Trump and Brexit shattered the liberal-democratic consensus in 2016, then the global pandemic of 2020 put a final end to the “End of History”. Politics is back, but it’s stranger than ever.

‘A landmark work giving a global panorama of Mao's ideology filled with historic events and enlivened by striking characters’ Jonathan Fenby, author of The Penguin History of China Since the 1980s, China seems to have abandoned the utopian turmoil of Mao’s revolution in favour of authoritarian capitalism. But Mao and his ideas remain central to the People’s Republic. With disagreements between China and the West on the rise, the need to understand the political legacy of Mao is urgent and growing. A crucial motor of the Cold War: Maoism shaped the course of the Vietnam War and brought to power the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; it aided anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa; it inspired terrorism in Germany and Italy, and wars and insurgencies in Peru, India and Nepal, some of which are still with us today. Starting with the birth of Mao’s revolution in northwest China in the 1930s and concluding with its violent afterlives in South Asia and resurgence in the People’s Republic today, Julia Lovell re-evaluates Maoism as both a Chinese and an international force, linking its evolution in China with its global legacy. 'Wonderful' Andrew Marr, New Statesman

Something that has been needed for decades: a leftist foreign policy with a clear moral basis Foreign policy, for leftists, used to be relatively simple. They were for the breakdown of capitalism and its replacement with a centrally planned economy. They were for the workers against the moneyed interests and for colonized peoples against imperial (Western) powers. But these easy substitutes for thought are becoming increasingly difficult. Neo-liberal capitalism is triumphant, and the workers’ movement is in radical decline. National liberation movements have produced new oppressions. A reflexive anti-imperialist politics can turn leftists into apologists for morally abhorrent groups. In Michael Walzer’s view, the left can no longer (in fact, could never) take automatic positions but must proceed from clearly articulated moral principles. In this book, adapted from essays published in Dissent, Walzer asks how leftists should think about the international scene—about humanitarian intervention and world government, about global inequality and religious extremism—in light of a coherent set of underlying political values.

Based on extensive use of primary sources, this book provides an analysis of Solidarity, from its ideological origins in the Polish "new left," through the dramatic revolutionary months of 1980-81, and up to the union?s remarkable resurgence in 1988-89, when it sat down with the government to negotiate Poland?s future. David Ost focuses on what Solidarity is trying to accomplish and why it is likely that the movement will succeed. He traces the conflict between the ruling Communist Party and the opposition, Solidarity?s response to it, and the resulting reforms. Noting that Poland is the one country in the world where "radicals of ?68" came to be in a position to negotiate with a government about the nature of the political system, Ost asks what Poland tells us about the possibility for realizing a "new left" theory of democracy in the modern world. As a Fulbright Fellow at Warsaw University and Polish correspondent for the weekly newspaper In These Times during the Solidarity uprising and a frequent visitor to Poland since then, David Ost has had access to a great deal of unpublished material on the labor movement. Without dwelling on the familiar history of August 1980, he offers some of the unfamiliar subtleties?such as the significance of the Szczecin as opposed to the Gdansk Accord?and shows how they shaped the budding union?s understanding of the conflicts ahead. Unique in its attention to the critical, formative period following August 1980, this study is the most current and comprehensive analysis of a movement that continues to transform the nature of East European society.

This study examines fully the role that the historic European left has played in developing and espousing anti-Semitic views.

In The Left Side of History Kristen Ghodsee tells the stories of partisans fighting behind the lines in Nazi-allied Bulgaria during World War II: British officer Frank Thompson, brother of the great historian E.P. Thompson, and fourteen-year-old Elena Lagadinova, the youngest female member of the armed anti-fascist resistance. But these people were not merely anti-fascist; they were pro-communist, idealists moved by their socialist principles to fight and sometimes die for a cause they believed to be right. Victory brought forty years of communist dictatorship followed by unbridled capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today in democratic Eastern Europe there is ever-increasing despair, disenchantment with the post-communist present, and growing nostalgia for the communist past. These phenomena are difficult to understand in the West, where “communism” is a dirty word that is quickly equated with Stalin and Soviet labor camps. By starting with the stories of people like Thompson and Lagadinova, Ghodsee provides a more nuanced understanding of how communist ideals could inspire ordinary people to make extraordinary sacrifices.