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Author: Heather Gumbert Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472120026 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating. Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period. A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.
Author: Heather Gumbert Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472120026 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating. Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period. A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.
Author: Prabhat Patnaik Publisher: Tulika Books ISBN: 9788189487966 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
The papers in this volume are informed by a perception that can be summarized as follows. A capitalist economy is a self-driven or 'spontaneous' system. State intervention in its functioning, driven by political compulsions, tends to make it dysfunctional. This necessitates either further interventions, leading to a transcendence of the system itself, or a progressive slide-back to the pre-intervention state. To say this is not to suggest that capitalism does not need the state. It does, not only for the maintenance of capitalist property relations and for providing it with the external, precapitalist surroundings that are necessary for its functioning; but also for accelerating, through its intervention, its immanent tendencies. But state intervention that is contrary to its immanent tendencies makes capitalism dysfunctional, setting up a dialectics either of subversion of or subservience to the logic of capital. It follows that all the shibboleths of capitalism, namely freedom, democracy and individual subjectivity, are actually unachievable under capitalism. They can be realized only if the spontaneity of the economic terrain is broken through the coming into being of socialism, where the nature of property relations is such that people can shape their economic lives through collective political intervention. The case for socialism arises precisely because capitalism is not a malleable but a spontaneous system.
Author: Heather Gumbert Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472900951 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating. Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period. A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.
Author: Erik Olin Wright Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1789601452 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 536
Book Description
Rising inequality of income and power, along with recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet few are attempting this task-most analysts argue that any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations is utopian. Erik Olin Wright's major new work is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. A systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors, Envisioning Real Utopias lays the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.
Author: Mark A. Allison Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192896490 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
Socialism names a form of collective life that has never been fully realized; consequently, it is best understood as a goal to be imagined. So this study argues, and thereby uncovers an aesthetic impulse that animates some of the most consequential socialist writing, thought, and practice of the long nineteenth century. Imagining Socialism explores this tradition of radical activism, investigating the diverse ways that British socialists--from Robert Owen to the mid-century Christian Socialists to William Morris--marshalled the resources of the aesthetic in their efforts to surmount politics and develop non-governmental forms of collective life. Their ambitious attempts at social regeneration led some socialists to explore the liberatory possibilities afforded by cooperative labor, women's emancipation, political violence, and the power of the arts themselves. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that, far from being confined to the socialist revival of the fin de siècle, important socialist experiments with the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic in Britain may be found throughout the period it calls the socialist century--and may still inspire us today.
Author: Hyman Frankel Publisher: Arena books ISBN: 1906791570 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
It is aimed at those, especially young people, who have just become involved politically, as well as those engaged in single issue movements, having come across the word 'socialism' and want to know more about it. It is not a detailed text book on the subject. The author was a full-time trade union official most of his working life (he is now retired) and was also involved politically on the left, so is able to write with some experience and knowledge on the subject. The book opens with an attempt to described capitalism as it is now, then deals with the basic ideas of socialism. It then takes the reader more deeply into the politics and economics of socialism from a Marxist standpoint. The remaining chapters deal with various social problems of today, including the growing gap between rich and poor and between rich and poor nations, feminism, racism, democracy, freedom and liberty under socialism, etc. It considers the road to socialism in the light of past attempts to set up socialist regimes, e.g. the Paris Commune of 1870-71 and the Russian Revolution from 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989-91. It has a chapter on the history of the idea of socialism-communism in Britain and Europe. It also deals with the present and the future of the several new Latin American left-wing regimes and concludes with a discussion of the situation in Britain today in the light of the 'New' Labour government's swing to the right. It arrives at a conclusion that the future of socialism in Britain - if it has a future at all - lies with ordinary people and their battle for political and economic democracy, peace, liberty and justice.
Author: Prabhat Patnaik Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231519214 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
Why is money more valuable than the paper on which it is printed? Monetarists link the value of money to its supply and demand, believing the latter depends on the total value of the commodities it circulates. According to Prabhat Patnaik, this logic is flawed. In his view, in any nonbarter economy, the value we assign to money is determined independently of its supply and demand. Through an original and provocative critique of monetarism, Patnaik advances a revolutionary understanding of macroeconomics that highlights the "propertyist" position of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Unlike the usual division between "classical" economists (e.g., David Ricardo and Marx) and the "marginalists" (e.g., Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras), Patnaik places "monetarists," including Ricardo, on one side, while grouping propertyist writers like Marx, Keynes, and Rosa Luxemburg on the other. This second group subscribes to the idea that the value of money is given from outside the realm of supply and demand, therefore making money a form in which wealth is held. The fact that money is held as wealth in turn gives rise to the possibility of deficiency of aggregate demand under capitalism. It is no accident that this possibility was highlighted by Marx and Keynes while going largely unrecognized by Ricardo and contemporary monetarists. At the same time, Patnaik points to a weakness in the Marx-Keynes tradition namely, its lack of any satisfactory explanation of why the value of money, determined from outside the realm of supply and demand, remains relatively stable over long stretches of time. The answer to this question lies in the fact that capitalism is not a self-contained system but is born from a precapitalist setting with which it interacts and where it creates massive labor reserves that, in turn, impart stability to the value of money. Patnaik's theory of money, then, is also a theory of imperialism, and he concludes with a discussion of the contemporary international monetary system, which he terms the "oil-dollar" standard.
Author: Peter Plate Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com ISBN: 1458780775 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
We live in a world of poverty, war, and environmental devastation. A world where living standards for working people plummet while an elite few enjoy lives of unbelievable wealth and power. Something differentan alternative to capitalismis desperately needed. But what should replace it? This book proposes socialism. A society built from the bottom up through the struggles of ordinary people against exploitation, oppression, and injusticeone in which people come before profit. A society based on the principles of equality, democracy, and freedom. ""This is a vivid, fluent, and rare book about socialism for those uninterested in tracts and excited by new prospects"" John Pilger, author of Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire ""Is socialism an impossible, discredited dream or the only realistic path for human survival? If you're not sure of the answer, or are just curious about what the left really believes in, you need to read Maass. He's the Tom Paine of the contemporary American left.
Author: Heather Gumbert
Author: Heather Gumbert
Author: Prabhat Patnaik
Author: Heather Gumbert
Author: Erik Olin Wright
Author: Mark A. Allison
Author: Prabhat Patnaik
Author: Gary J. Dorrien
Author: Hyman Frankel
Author: Prabhat Patnaik
Author: Peter Plate