Week 8 on Communism and Revolutionary Socialism

Revolutionary Socialist Graffiti (probably not Communist)

Graffiti on the streets of downtown Buenos Aires, January 2016 (click to enlarge)

Week 8. (1) Varieties of Socialism: Leninist Communism: Liberalism's Modernist and Statist Adversary. (2) Anarchism: Anti-statist Opponent of

Liberalism.

Carl Cohen, “Communism,” Four Systems (Random House, 1982): 183-235

Andrew Heywood, “Anarchism,” Political Ideologies, pp. 175-202

PAPER PROPOSAL DUE!

So you'd like to see 21st-century Communist outlooks...

Check out position pieces of the Communist Party USA; the newspaper Proletarian (revolutionary Leninist); Mundo Obrero, newspaper of the Communist Party of Spain; a discussion of "The Ideas of Communism" among Alex Callinicos (Trotskyist), John Holloway (autonomist), and Slavoj Zizek (Leninist), or the book The Idea of Communism 2, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Verso 2012).

Leninist Communist organizations...

International Socialist Tendency (perhaps the most ideologically active of the several current Trotskyist internationals), International Coordination of Revolutionary Parties and Organizations (an umbrella congress for Leninist organizations), Revolutionary Communist Party (USA) (Maoist)

Communist organizations that, while still Marxist, have effectively disavowed their Leninism and moved toward a compromise with democratic socialism...

Communist Party USA, French Communist Party (whose candidate, profiled in this news video, won 12% of the vote in the 2012 French presidential elections)

So you'd like to know what it was like to be a member of the Communist Party of the USA in the 1930s-1950s

Check out "Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists," dir. Julia Reichert and James Klein (1983)

So you'd like to see what life was like in 2009 in Communist-ish Cuba...

Check out the BBC documentary "Inside Cuba" (2010)

So you'd like to see what life was like in the Leninist Communist regimes of the Soviet empire...

Check out the documentary "The Lost World of Communism," dir. Lucy Hetherington (2009)