The Socialist Imperative

Author : Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1583675485
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Socialist Imperative written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a little more than a decade, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written several major works about the transition from socialism to capitalism: Beyond Capital(winner of the Deutscher Prize), Build It Now, The Socialist Alternative, and The Contradictions of “Real Socialism.” Here, he develops and deepens the analysis contained in those pathbreaking works by tracing major issues in socialist thought from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first. Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society’s goods and services, we also “produce” something else: namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three parts: social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.

Author : Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789350023914
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Socialist Imperative written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1583674942
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Socialist Alternative written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A good society,“ Michael Lebowitz tells us, “is one that permits the full development of human potential.” In this slim, lucid, and insightful book, he argues persuasively that such a society is possible. That capitalism fails his definition of a good society is evident from even a cursory examination of its main features. What comes first in capitalism is not human development but privately accumulated profits by a tiny minority of the population. When there is a conflict between profits and human development, profits take precedence. Just ask the unemployed, those toiling at dead-end jobs, the sick and infirm, the poor, and the imprisoned. But if not capitalism, what? Lebowitz is also critical of those societies that have proclaimed their socialism, such as the former Soviet Union and China. While their systems were not capitalist and were capable of achieving some of what is necessary for the “development of human potential,” they were not “good societies.” A good society as Lebowitz defines it must be marked by three characteristics: social ownership of the means of production, social production controlled by workers, and satisfaction of communal needs and purposes. Lebowitz shows how these characteristics interact with and reinforce one another, and asks how they can be developed to the point where they occur more or less automatically—that is, become both a society’s premises and outcomes. He also offers fascinating insights into matters such as the nature of wealth, the illegitimacy of profits, the inadequacies of worker-controlled enterprises, the division of labor, and much more.

Author : Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1583671463
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Build It Now written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006-08 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Build it Now' provides a compelling set of arguments for socialism, showing both the new catastrophes being prepared by capitalism and the concrete steps being taken to initiate a transition from capitalism to a form of socialism fitted for the 21st century.

Author : Ana Miljacki
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315460114
Total Pages : 343 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968 written by Ana Miljacki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Optimum Imperative examines architecture’s multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia’s entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops’ occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzík and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal. Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects’ optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.

Author : Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher : Monthly Review Press
ISBN 13 : 1583678875
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Between Capitalism and Community written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connects the Marxist construct of capitalism to systems of community In this book, Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning, Beyond Capital. Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment. It is the endless accumulation of capital, its causes and consequences that are central to Marx’s analysis. In taking this approach, Marx tended to obscure not only the centrality of capital’s “immanent drive” and “constant tendency” to divide the working class but also the political economy of the working class (“social production controlled by social foresight”). In Between Capitalism and Community, Lebowitz demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community. Whereas Marx’s intellectual construct of capitalism treats it as an organic system that reproduces its premises of capital and wage-labor (including a working class that looks upon the requirements of capital “as self-evident natural laws”), Lebowitz argues that the struggle of workers in common and activities based upon solidarity point in the direction of the organic system of community, an alternative system that produces its own premises, communality, and recognition of the needs of others. If we are to escape the ultimate barbarism portended by the existing crisis of the earth system, the subordination of the system of capitalism by that of community is essential. Since the interregnum in which capitalism and community coexist is marked by the interpenetration and mutual deformation of both sides within this whole, however, the path to community cannot emerge spontaneously but requires a revolutionary party that stresses the development of the capacities of people through their protagonism.

Author : Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1583672567
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Contradictions of "Real Socialism" written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-08 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was “real socialism”—the term which originated in twentieth-century socialist societies for the purpose of distinguishing them from abstract, theoretical socialism? In this volume, Michael A. Lebowitz considers the nature, tendencies, and contradictions of those societies. Beginning with the constant presence of shortages within “real socialism,” Lebowitz searches for the inner relations which generate these patterns. He finds these, in particular, in what he calls “vanguard relations of production,” a relation which takes the apparent form of a social contract where workers obtain benefits not available to their counterparts in capitalism but lack the power to decide within the workplace and society. While these societies were able to claim major achievements in areas from health care to education to popular culture, the separation of thinking and doing prevented workers from developing their capacities as fully developed human beings. The relationship within “real socialism” between the vanguard as conductor and a conducted working class, however, did not only lead to the deformation of workers and those elements necessary for the building of socialism; it also created the conditions in which enterprise managers emerged as an incipient capitalist class, which was an immediate source of the crises of “real socialism.” As he argued in The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, Lebowitz stresses the necessity to go beyond the hierarchy inherent in the relation of conductor and conducted (and beyond the “vanguard Marxism” which supports this) to create the conditions in which people can transform themselves through their conscious cooperation and practice—i.e., a society of free and associated producers.

Author : Bhaskar Sunkara
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1786636921
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Socialist Manifesto written by Bhaskar Sunkara and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The success of Jeremy Corbyn's left-led Labour Party and Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign revived a political idea many had thought dead. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system look like today? In The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin magazine, argues that socialism offers the means to achieve economic equality, and also to fight other forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. The book both explores socialism's history and presents a realistic vision for its future. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.

Author : Harry Van der Linden
Publisher : Hackett Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780872200272
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kantian Ethics and Socialism written by Harry Van der Linden and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded the 1985 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy.

Author : Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1583675477
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Socialist Imperative written by Michael A. Lebowitz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a little more than a decade, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written several major works about the transition from socialism to capitalism: Beyond Capital(winner of the Deutscher Prize), Build It Now, The Socialist Alternative, and The Contradictions of “Real Socialism.” Here, he develops and deepens the analysis contained in those pathbreaking works by tracing major issues in socialist thought from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first. Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society’s goods and services, we also “produce” something else: namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three parts: social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.