It S Revolution Actively

John McGreal's three new books – It’s Reproduction, Contently, It’s Revolution, Actively and It’s Transformation, Contently – continue the ‘It’ Series published by Matador since 2010.

The recent revival of interest in the Muslim world has generated numerous studies of modern Islam, most of them focusing on the Sunni majority. Shi'ism, an often stigmatized minority branch of Islam, has been discussed mainly in connection with Iran. Yet Shi'i movements have been extraordinarily effective in creating political strategies that have

By analysing the experience of Finland, Risto Alapuro shows how upheavals in powerful countries shape the internal politics of smaller countries. This linkage, a highly topical subject in the twenty-first century world, is concretely studied by putting the abortive Finnish revolution of 1917-18 into a long historical and a broad comparative perspective.

The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn’t he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century? Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an extraordinary moment in history. Everything is here, from Lenin-the-ingenious-revolutionary-strategist to Lenin-of-the-enacted-utopia. To use Kierkegaard’s phrase, what we can glimpse in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet Lenin-the-Soviet-institution, but Lenin thrown into an open, contingent situation. In Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj Žižek locates the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his afterword tackles the key question of whether Lenin can be reinvented in our era of “cultural capitalism.” Žižek is convinced that, whatever the discussion—the forthcoming crisis of capitalism, the possibility of a redemptive violence, the falsity of liberal tolerance—Lenin’s time has come again.

By tracing the complex relationship between the Sandinista government and the Nicaraguan business elite, this book examines the shifting mix of alliances and oppositions that shaped the Sandinista revolution. Rose Spalding takes issue with models of the business sector that assume a high degree of class cohesion. Drawing on carefully structured interviews with ninety-one private-sector leaders at the end of the Sandinista era, Spalding documents responses to the Sandinista government that range from extreme ideological hostility to enthusiastic support. To explain this variation, Spalding explores such factors as the prerevolutionary social and economic characteristics of the elite, their organizational networks, and their experiences with expropriation and government subsidies. She is one of the first scholars to look at the ways in which these groups have evolved in the postrevolutionary era under the Chamorro government. In addition, Spalding provides a valuable analysis of four other cases of attempted structural change, thereby drawing broader, cross-national comparisons and developing theoretical insights about the political character of the 'bourgeoisie.' Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Moving past the conflation of state socialism with all socialist projects, this book opens up avenues for addressing socialist projects rooted in decolonial and antiracist politics. To that end, this anthology brings together scholarship across regions that engages postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist– socialist dynamic to present day politics. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, “postsocialism” can function to create space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present. Looking at the Middle East, Scandanavia, Korea, Romania, China, and the US, the chapters in this book assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate- based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War. The majority of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Social Identities.

Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls “U.S. Third World Leftists,” activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the “long 1960s.” Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements that originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color. She shows how these transnational influences were then used to forge alliances, create new vocabularies and aesthetic forms, and describe race, class, and gender oppression in the United States in compelling terms. Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis’s writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers’ 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.