World Communism

In this brilliant book, Francis Wheen, the author of the most successful biography of Karl Marx, tells the story of Das Kapital and Marx's 20-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Born in a two-room flat in London's Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867 to muted praise. But after Marx's death, the book went on to influence thinkers, writers, and revolutionaries.

Surveillance State tells the gripping, startling, and detailed story of how China’s Communist Party is building a new kind of political control: shaping the will of the people through the sophisticated harnessing of data. It is a story born in Silicon Valley and America’s “War on Terror,” and now playing out in alarming ways on China’s remote Central Asian frontier. As a minority separatist movement strains against Party control, China’s leaders have built a dystopian police state that keeps millions under the constant gaze of security forces armed with AI.

Western interpretations of the Cold War--both realist and neoconservative--have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness, argues Vladislav Zubok. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the 20th century.

Anna Fifield reconstructs Kim's past and present with exclusive access to sources near him and brings her unique understanding to explain the dynastic mission of the Kim family in North Korea. The archaic notion of despotic family rule matches the almost medieval hardship the country has suffered under the Kims. Few people thought that a young, untested, unhealthy, Swiss-educated basketball fanatic could hold together a country that should have fallen apart years ago. But Kim Jong Un has not just survived, he has thrived.

In The Red Flag, Oxford professor David Priestland tells the epic story of a movement that has taken root in dozens of countries across 200 years, from its birth after the French Revolution to its ideological maturity in 19th-century Germany to its rise to dominance (and subsequent fall) in the 20th century.

After the Berlin Wall fell, a group of Christian colleges in the US seized the opportunity to begin strategic faculty and student exchanges with universities inside the Soviet Union. They could not have foreseen the doors that would open next. During a 1990 visit to Russia, John Bernbaum and his colleagues received a surprising invitation from a Russian government official: come help build a faith-based university in Moscow. Thus, after 70 years of fierce religious persecution under communism, the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) was born.

China's reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it - political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth - are unraveling.

At the end of World War I, Canada was poised on the brink of social revolution. At least that is what many Canadians, inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917, hoped - and others dreaded. Seeing Reds tells the story of this turbulent period in Canadian history during the winter of 1918-19, when a fearful government led by Prime Minister Robert Borden tried to suppress radical political activity by branding legitimate labour leaders as "Bolsheviks" and "Reds".

For more than six decades, Fidel Castro's words have echoed through the politics of Latin America. His towering political influence still looms over the region today. The swing to the Left in Latin America, known as the 'Pink Tide', was the most important political movement in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century. It involved some of the biggest, most colourful and most controversial characters in Latin America for decades, leaders who would leave an indelible mark on their nations and who were adored and reviled in equal measure.

The appearance of a hastily constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse.

In today’s political climate, more and more presidential candidates are espousing socialist - or democratic socialist - policies. Once associated with oppression, socialism is now a current topic of conversation with everyday Americans, including policies like taxing the rich and healthcare for all. But what exactly is socialism and why does it spark such an intense debate? Socialism 101 provides an easy-to-understand, unbiased overview to the nearly 300-year-old origins of this mode of government, its complex history, basic constructs, and modern-day interpretations....

The State and Revolution (1917), by Vladimir Lenin, describes the role of the State in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin began the composition of an early draft of State and Revolution while in exile in Switzerland in 1916, under the title "Marxism on the State". "Soviets", legislative bodies of workers and peasants were the de facto governments of Petrograd and many smaller cities.

The United States' approach to China since the Communist regime in Beijing that began the period of reform and opening in the 1980s was based on a promise that trade and engagement with China would result in a peaceful, democratic state. Forty years later, the hope of producing a benign People's Republic of China utterly failed. The Communist Party of China deceived the West into believing that its system and the Party-ruled People's Liberation Army were peaceful and posed no threat.

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

The Cultural Revolution, known in full as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, was launched by Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Communist Party of China, as a means of quashing capitalism in China. Over the course of a decade, from the summer of 1966 to 1976, Mao Zedong implemented a number of changes that have led him to be known as one of the most brutal tyrants of the modern age. If you want to discover the captivating history of the Cultural Revolution, purchase this book today.

This audiobook contains the original text of the Communist Manifesto as written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For any lover of economics or history, this book is a must-listen. Narrated by Mark Harrietha, you will not find a crisper performance of this classic.

The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin was published in 1917. Lenin's definition of the State is “a special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of a class." Quoting Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Lenin investigates theoretical questions about the role and functions of the State in society after the proletarian revolution. He addresses the arguments of anarchists, reformists and social democrats, claiming that a social democratic system cannot establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, most experts expected the WTO rules and procedures would liberalize China and make it "a responsible stakeholder in the liberal world order". But the experts made the wrong bet. China today is liberalizing neither economically nor politically but, if anything, becoming more authoritarian and mercantilist. In this book, renowned globalization and Asia expert Clyde Prestowitz describes the key challenges posed by China and the strategies America and the Free World must adopt to meet them.

Throughout this lively and concise historical account of Mao Zedong's life and thought, Rebecca E. Karl places the revolutionary leader's personal experiences, social visions and theory, military strategies, and developmental and foreign policies in a dynamic narrative of the Chinese revolution. She situates Mao and the revolution in a global setting informed by imperialism, decolonization, and third worldism, and discusses worldwide trends in politics, the economy, military power, and territorial sovereignty.

On January 1, 2017, Daniel Bell was appointed dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University—the first foreign dean of a political science faculty in mainland China’s history. In The Dean of Shandong, Bell chronicles his experiences as what he calls “a minor bureaucrat,” offering an inside account of the workings of Chinese academia and what they reveal about China’s political system.