 | |
| Author | Raphael Samuel |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Verso Books |
Publication date | 2006 |
| Pages | 244 |
| ISBN | 9781844671038 |
| OCLC | 71239437 |
The Lost World of British Communism is a book by Raphael Samuel first published, posthumously, in 2006 by Verso Books.
| | |
| Author | Raphael Samuel |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Verso Books |
Publication date | 2006 |
| Pages | 244 |
| ISBN | 9781844671038 |
| OCLC | 71239437 |
The Lost World of British Communism is a book by Raphael Samuel first published, posthumously, in 2006 by Verso Books.
The book is composed of a series of essays that were collected together to mark the ten year anniversary of Samuel's death in 1996. They describe the development of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1940s and the experience of being a member of it from the vantage point of the 1980s. [1] All of the three essays in the work were published by the New Left Review between 1984 and 1987. [2] [3] [4]
The book engages with a number of different aspects of Communism in Britain, for example the way in which the party was organised on a top-down basis that was founded upon direction by the Comintern and that had elements of the Leninist idea of a 'vanguard party' centred on a small group of professional revolutionaries.
The book also examines the state of left-wing politics in the UK in the challenging environment of the Thatcherite 1980s and, in the case of the British Communist party of the time, the way in which it was divided between an 'old guard' faction and the younger forces aligned around Marxism Today at the time. [5] Samuel himself had left the organisation thirty years earlier. One of his overall assessments of the movement was that it embodied a "doomed, flawed but noble faith". [6]
A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state that is administered and governed by a communist party guided by Marxism–Leninism. Marxism–Leninism was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, the Comintern after Bolshevisation and the communist states within the Comecon, the Eastern Bloc, and the Warsaw Pact. Marxism–Leninism currently still remains the ideology of a few parties around the world. After its peak when many communist states were established, the Revolutions of 1989 brought down most of the communist states, however, it is still the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and to a lesser extent, North Korea. During most of the 20th century, before the Revolutions of 1989, around one-third of the world's population lived under communist states.
James Burnham was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931). Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. He later rejected Marxism and became an even more influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, speculated on the future of capitalism. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics. He rejected containment of the Soviet Union and called for the rollback of communism worldwide.
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Raphael Elkan Samuel was a British Marxist historian, described by Stuart Hall as "one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation". He was professor of history at the University of East London at the time of his death and also taught at Ruskin College from 1962 until his death.
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Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.
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