The Conquest of Bread, also known colloquially as The Bread Book, is an 1892 book by the Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin. Originally written in French, it first appeared as a series of articles in the anarchist journal Le Révolté. It was first published in Paris with a preface by Élisée Reclus, who also suggested the title. Between 1892 and 1894, it was serialized in part in the London journal Freedom, of which Kropotkin was a co-founder.
New class is used as a polemic term by critics of countries that followed the Soviet-type Communism to describe the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist party functionaries which arose in these states. Generally, the group known in the Soviet Union as the nomenklatura conforms to the theory of the new class. The term was earlier applied to other emerging strata of the society. Milovan Đilas' new-class theory was also used extensively by anti-communist commentators in the Western world in their criticism of the Communist states during the Cold War.
Raveendra Nath "Ravi" Batra is an Indian-American economist, author, and professor at Southern Methodist University. Batra is the author of six bestselling books, two of which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list, with one reaching No. 1 in late 1987. His books center on his idea that financial capitalism breeds excessive inequality and political corruption, which inevitably succumbs to financial crisis and economic depression. In his works, Batra proposes an equitable distribution system known as Progressive Utilization Theory (PROUT) as a means to not only ensure material welfare but also to secure the ability of all to develop a full personality.
There were people and organizations who predicted that the USSR would dissolve before the eventual dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Michel Garder was a Russian-born French author and military man known for his writings about the Soviet Union. He notably predicted in his 1965 book L'Agonie du Régime en Russie Soviétique that the USSR would collapse by 1970.
Criticism of Marxism has come from various political ideologies and academic disciplines. This includes general intellectual criticism about dogmatism, a lack of internal consistency, criticism related to materialism, arguments that Marxism is a type of historical determinism or that it necessitates a suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price signals and reduced incentives. In addition, empirical and epistemological problems are frequently identified.
Franz Borkenau was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis. Borkenau is known as one of the pioneers of the totalitarianism theory.
Communism is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange—allocating products to everyone in the society. It also involves the absence of social classes, money, and the state. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance, but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state followed by Friedrich Engels' withering away of the state.
Martin Edward Malia was an American historian specializing in Russian history. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1958 to 1991.
Holy See–Soviet Union relations were marked by long-standing ideological disagreements between the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union. The Holy See attempted to enter in a pragmatic dialogue with Soviet leaders during the papacies of John XXIII and Paul VI. In the 1990s, Pope John Paul II's diplomatic policies were cited as one of the principal factors that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Great Depression of 1990 is a book by Ravi Batra in the field of economic history and future evolution, originally published in 1985. The book's original title was Regular Cycles of Money, Inflation, Regulation and Depressions. MIT Economics Professor Lester Thurow wrote a favorable introduction for the book with its original title. Retitled, the book entered the New York Times Best Seller list in early 1987 and reached #1 later that year. The book and its sequel, Surviving the Great Depression of 1990, made Batra "one of the best selling economists of all time."
After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action is a 2012 book by United States author Dada Maheshvarananda, an activist, yoga monk and writer. The book argues that global capitalism is terminally ill because it suffers from four fatal flaws: growing inequity and concentration of wealth, addiction to speculation instead of production, rising unsustainable debt and its tendency to exploit the natural environment. The author proposes a grassroots movement for economic democracy with cooperatives and local economies based on the Progressive Utilization Theory or Prout, a post-capitalist model conceptualized by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar of India. The book includes a conversation with Noam Chomsky and essays by Frei Betto, Johan Galtung, Leonardo Boff, Sohail Inayatullah, Marcos Arruda, Ravi Batra and others.
The third camp, also known as third camp socialism or third camp Trotskyism, is a branch of socialism that aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism by supporting the organised working class as a "third camp".
The Coming Collapse of China is a book by Gordon G. Chang, published in 2001, in which he argued for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to be the root cause of many of the China's problems and would cause the country's collapse in the near future. His book also made specific forecasts on the year that the party would collapse since Chang insisted that it would occur by 2011. When 2011 was almost over, Chang admitted that his prediction was wrong but said it was off by only a year. On 29 December 2011, Chang asserted in the Foreign Policy magazine, "Instead of 2011, the mighty Communist Party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it." Consequently he made the magazine's "10 worst predictions of the year" twice when his prediction proved wrong again.
In Trotskyist political theory, a degenerated workers' state is a dictatorship of the proletariat in which the working class' democratic control over the state has given way to control by a bureaucratic clique. The term was developed by Leon Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed and in other works.
A socialist state, socialist republic, or socialist country, sometimes referred to as a workers' state or workers' republic, is a sovereign state constitutionally dedicated to the establishment of socialism. The term communist state is often used synonymously in the West specifically when referring to one-party socialist states governed by Marxist–Leninist Communist parties, despite these countries being officially socialist states in the process of building socialism. These countries never describe themselves as communist nor as having implemented a communist society. Additionally, a number of countries that are multi-party capitalist states make references to socialism in their constitutions, in most cases alluding to the building of a socialist society, naming socialism, claiming to be a socialist state, or including the term people's republic or socialist republic in their country's full name, although this does not necessarily reflect the structure and development paths of these countries' political and economic systems. Currently, these countries include Algeria, Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements.
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all communist revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that capitalism is a world-system and therefore the working classes of all nations must act in concert if they are to replace it with communism.
World communism, also known as global communism, is a form of communism which has an international scope. The long-term goal of world communism is a worldwide communist society that is stateless, which may be achieved through an intermediate-term goal of either a voluntary association of sovereign states or a world government. A series of internationals have worked toward world communism and they have included the First International, the Second International, the Third International, the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the World Socialist Movement, and variant offshoots. These are a quite heterogeneous group despite their common ultimate goal of a stateless and global communist society.
