The introduction outlines the main issues tackled in the volume and presents urban collectivization during the Great Leap Forward as a case study for the search of a socialist everyday, different from and alternative to the capitalist one. It highlights how this search embodied a specific understanding of the political economy, and how it highlighted contradictions within the Maoist project of revolution. Finally, it describes the sources and methodology adopted in the book.

Ginsberg was not just a primary figure in the literary and countercultural movements of the decades following World War II. As this chapter details, he also provides a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between these postwar movements and the Old Left ideals and communities of the 1930s and early 1940s. Touching on the numerous moments in Ginsberg’s poetry and biography where he recalls a youth shaped by his parents’ communist and socialist commitments, including their support for labor unions, this essay explains briefly why those commitments needed to be reformulated as Ginsberg began his poetic career in the mid 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War.

Though focusing chiefly on Weimar Germany, this chapter broadens its argument to Europe overall. Weimar culture’s vitality contained multidimensional antagonisms between secularizing reforms and their Christian-nationalist opposition. Complicating that enmity were the consequences of commercial entertainment cultures, which troubled socialists as much as conservative, Christian, and other rightwing critics. Such commentaries clustered around the political symbolics of the New Woman. If the latter’s proponents saw an ideal of happy personhood and emancipated living, the rightist enemies railed against change in the name of an imagined past of orderly families and settled gender inscriptions, often in idioms of angry, masculinist misogyny. Across interwar Europe during the 1920s, from Spengler, Huizinga, and Eliot through Ortega y Gasset to the Conservative Revolution, Schmitt, and Heidegger, conservative intellectuals fashioned a declensionist, deeply reactionary critique of the evolving present.

Chapter 3 INTELLIGENCE SOCIALISM opposes two radically different views about the relation between skills and intelligence—elitism and socialism. Elitism—pervasive in popular culture as well as in psychometrics—is the view that only a particular class of skill—‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’ or ‘embodied’ skills—manifests intelligence. I single out the best case for the stronger socialist claim that no principled difference in intelligence can be found between theoretical, or intellectual, skills, and practical, or embodied skills.

Under the extremes of Indian socialism, the financial system was a handmaiden for state control of the economy, directing resources according to the wishes of the government. State control was achieved through government ownership. A great deal has changed, with a first (1947–1992) and second (1992–2016) phase of central planning where there were conflicting themes of liberalization and enhanced state control. In many areas, private financial firms are now important. The full ecosystem of modern finance, with information processing and risk taking by private persons, blossomed in the equity market. For two decades there was a remarkable policy process that yielded gains in fields such as the equity market, pension reforms, bankruptcy code and so on. But alongside this there was the expansion of the ‘administrative state’ in the form of financial regulators. Regulators engage in micro-management of products and processes. While there is isomorphic mimicry with many things that look like a financial system, officials retain substantial control over how finance works. In a functional perspective, Indian finance today resembles the environment of the 1980s more than meets the eye.

This chapter provides an analytic account of the evolution of India’s industrial sector in the context of the overall performance of the economy in the post-independence era. Since trade policy has had a determining impact on overall growth as well as on the structure of the industry, special attention is paid to it. The chapter first reviews the performance of the industry as a whole during the seventy years from 1951/1952 to 2019/2020, dividing it into four distinct phases. It argues that the pursuit of self-sufficiency, specialization in heavy industry and a heavy hand of socialism were at the heart of growth below 4% during the first four decades after independence. Subsequently, liberalizing reforms did accelerate growth, but the slow pace of the removal of multilayered regulation of the early decades remained in the way of East Asian-style rapid transformation of the economy from a rural and agricultural structure to an urban and industrial one.

Part I examines the birth of neo-socialism and the 1933 “neo-socialist schism” within the SFIO. The extant historiography of this schism tends to interpret it as the joint product of a doctrinal revision introduced by the neo-socialists and a separate tactical challenge by the party’s reformist wing pushing for a policy of socialist ministerial participation within bourgeois governments. The problem with this interpretation is that it treats neo-socialism as a coherent and ready-made doctrinal alternative to socialist orthodoxy, whereas the neo-socialists themselves initially conceived of their project as a “tactical,” and not “doctrinal,” challenge to the party leadership. Neo-socialism was not the driving force of the 1933 schism but emerged as a distinct doctrinal identity through the schismatic dynamic of the factional conflict over ministerial participation.

This chapter examines the founding doctrine of the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) and heterodox challenges to socialist orthodoxy within the party. Though “doctrine” was an important guarantor of party unity and identity, heterodox challenges to this doctrine were not in themselves enough to provoke a schism within the SFIO. The more determinant factor behind the 1933 “neo-socialist schism” was the practical question of socialist ministerial participation in bourgeois governments. The doctrinal status of ministerial participation was, however, ambiguous according to the founding texts of the SFIO, raising the question of how the factional debate over ministerial participation was transmuted from a “tactical” debate into a question of “doctrine” and thus of the boundaries of legitimate socialist identity.

This chapter traces the factional conflict over ministerial participation in the SFIO from 1925 to 1933, focusing on how the distinction between “doctrine” and “tactics” was discursively mobilized within this conflict in relation to the changing balance of forces between the factions. Although initially both sides of the conflict agreed that it pertained to a “tactical” and not “doctrinal” question, as the minority favoring socialist ministerial participation grew in strength, their factional rivals began to reinterpret the conflict as a “doctrinal” one in order to delegitimate the minority. While the participationist minority at first rejected this interpretation of the conflict, as a schism came to appear inevitable, they embraced the label of doctrinal heretic that had been imposed upon them. It was thus through the schismatic dynamic itself that “neo-socialism” emerged as a distinct doctrine differentiated from the socialism of the SFIO.

This chapter explores works by two contemporary London-based Black British playwrights who also direct, produce, and perform: debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo. Examining plays produced and performed between 2005 and 2019, the chapter suggests that both women create distinctive work that combines singular dramaturgy with transformative politics, shifting the framing of spectatorial perspective. They are also known for making innovative, experimental, and poetical work at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The chapter traces the Blochian utopian possibility of ‘something’s missing’ (etwas fehlt) in tucker green’s dramaturgy of refusal. In her plays, the chapter suggests, we can identify what Herbert Marcuse’s called ‘the Great Refusal’, which develops a utopian sensibility via negation. Frequently working class, Black, and female, tucker green’s belligerent characters reveal to audiences what is missing in their difficult lives, how everything should be different in Britain. In Adebayo’s work, forged in the community-led Black Mime Theatre in the 1990s, utopian possibility forms part of the affective spectatorial encounter with her theatre. Whilst Adebayo’s plays are less abrasive, they similarly highlight what is missing. The transformative energy of her dramaturgy can be seen in utopian foretastes of alternative lives, in which Black, queer, and de-colonial modes of intersubjectivity become possible.

The new nationalism of the Xi Jinping era, which has brought together political nationalism and cultural nationalism – two largely opposing streams between 1919 and 1989 – has redefined the CPC and the PRC. On paper, the party is a class organization while the PRC is a class dictatorship that sanctions class sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. Since 2001, the party has been represented as a national party as well as a class organization. Representing the nation entails the promotion of national culture, and a major component of the Chinese Dream is cultural revival. Consequently, the CPC and the PRC are nationalized in a shift from Marxist classism to synthesized Chinese nationalism. Their class identities appear to be at odds with their national identities, but the tension is minimized as the party turns Marxism into an empty signifier and sinicizes it out of existence.

This chapter explores the historical and conceptual connection between the social sciences, the idea of civil society and the ‘socialist’ natural law of Samuel Pufendorf.

This chapter explores the poetry of G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959) as a medium for expressing political ideas, highlighting his dual identity as a socialist intellectual and poet. While Cole is best remembered for promoting guild socialism and contributing to economic history and the Fabian Society, he also published poetry, which he saw as part of his political life. His early and middle-age works, including New Beginnings (1914) and The Crooked World (1933), reflect a serious literary approach, aspiring to integrate historical verse forms within socialist thought. Cole’s poetic output also embraced satire, with The Bolo Book (1921) parodying hymns and popular songs to critique political figures and issues humorously. This blend of literary and satirical genres allowed him to engage readers in socialist discourse through varied tones and forms. By examining both the poetry itself and its cultural reception, this chapter illuminates how Cole’s verse contributed to and reflected British socialist culture in the early twentieth century, offering insight into how poetry served as a vehicle for political engagement in his era.

The emergence of British punk in the mid-1970s led to a reimagining of the fanzine, home-made magazines self-published and self-distributed to fellow ‘fans’ within a particular cultural milieu. Where fanzines had previously been carefully collated and geared towards disseminating information, punk’s fanzines were produced speedily and irreverently. In line with the cultural critique inherent to punk, fanzines such as Sniffin’ Glue and London’s Outrage began to develop literary and visual discourses locating ‘the new wave’ within a wider socio-cultural and political context. Expositions on punk’s meaning and the media-generated moral panic that ensued following the Sex Pistols’ infamously foul-mouthed television appearance in December 1976 soon led to formative political analyses on everything from racism and commodification to anarchy and gender relations. By the early 1980s, anarchist punkzines engaged with a variety of political causes (e.g. CND) and recognisably feminist and socialist analyses found space between record and gig reviews. This chapter examines a selection of punk-related fanzines to argue that the medium provided space for young people (overwhelmingly teenagers) to test and cultivate political ideas and, in the process, develop a distinct genre of writing informed by punk’s impulse to simultaneously destroy and create.

This chapter analyses Karl Marx’s concept of use-value and explores the viability of a post-market economy based on the exchange of use-values.

This chapter explores the interactions of high-level Chinese and North Korean leaders. It argues that the actions of Chinese and North Korean leaders – especially Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung – were critical to building political order in the PRC and the DPRK. It shows how the utterances and actions of these leaders were particularly influential in shaping popular emotions and establishing the legitimacy of the PRC and DPRK.