Joseph Stalin Archives - Public Seminar

If These Walls Could Talk

In a room at The New School, the revolutionaries are still arguing

May 14, 2026 • by Julia Foulkes

The public refuses TO SEE painting. They want TO HEAR painting. They don’t care for the show itself, they prefer TO LISTEN to the barker outside.— José Clemente Orozco, in Orozco “Explains” (1940) CAST IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Portrait of Joseph Stalin, revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union: "Struggle in the ...

Democracy

The Revolution Against Legitimacy

To the new revolutionary class, legitimacy itself is an unjust claim of power

August 26, 2025 • by Roger Berkowitz

“[Stalin] changed the old political and especially revolutionary belief expressed popularly in the proverb “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” into a veritable dogma: “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.”—Hannah Arendt We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today ...

Philosophy

Ideology After Marxism

From Karl Mannheim and Daniel Bell to Vaclav Havel

June 10, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

Among the many reckonings of [the twentieth century] was a reckoning, not merely with Marxism—but with the process of ideology-making itself....

Europe & Central Asia

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 26, 2022 • by James Carroll

Efforts to immediately erect guardrails around nuclear weapons, given the sorry history that followed upon their falling short, deserve to be lifted up and celebrated as examples of what can follow in the chastened aftermath of a disastrous war....

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Europe & Central Asia

Part 1: A Just War?

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 7, 2022 • by James Carroll

In nations bracketing the North Atlantic a great sigh of relief could almost be heard: how great to be free once more to demonize Moscow....

Europe & Central Asia

Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom

Russia’s imperial dreams and the tragedy of Central Europe

April 6, 2022 • by Karolina Koziura

Some in the West are amazed that Russia is losing this war so far. Others are surprised by the courageous ways in which Ukrainians are resisting attacks and defending themselves with determination. Yet the opposite has happened. Ukraine has never been further away from Russia and closer to Western Europe ...

Literature

Boris Pasternak in Spring

A translation of the poet’s very early work

March 18, 2022 • by Inessa Medzhibovskaya

Boris Pasternak, a Jew by birth, chose to remain in Soviet Russia when the rest of his family, his famous father, painter and portraitist Leonid Pasternak including, had left, never to return....

Social Research

Take Me Out with the Crowd

On loneliness and Hannah Arendt

February 16, 2022 • by Christian Sheppard

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism tells the true crime story of the twentieth century. Contrary to the basic requirements of human condition, Loneliness is one of the fundamental experiences of human life. ...

Social Research

Loneliness, The New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its latest issue

February 7, 2022 • by Social Research

time of social distancing: a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest issue of Social Research engages itself with a reconsideration of the ideas about loneliness in American Culture. The literature explores the concept of loneliness, as is present in a number of notable books: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd; ...

Loneliness, The New Issue of Social Research

Uncategorized

For Want of Wild Beasts

For many in Eastern Europe, prison was the hallmark of Communism. Today, the United States is experiencing its own carceral society. What can be learnt from this comparison and can we redefine the term “political prisoner”?

February 1, 2022 • by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Marci Shore

How do we understand both the uses and disadvantages of thinking across time and space? How do we negotiate the fact that in any biography or historical event, there are both elements that are unique, and elements that are universal? For me, these questions belonged to a larger question: namely, ...

Uncategorized

Climate Change and the New Synthesis

Is green the new red?

October 15, 2014 • by Zachary Sunderman

I completed my undergraduate studies at a small liberal arts college literally in the middle of a field somewhere between the bustling urban center of Cleveland and the depressed industrial ruins of my hometown, Youngstown. My alma mater was surrounded by acres of farmland, bodies of water, Amish communities, and ...

Uncategorized

Althusserians Anonymous (3)

October 13, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

This post has been revised here: https://publicseminar.org/2016/02/aa/ Let’s look at two famous Althusser essays from the period 1962-1963. Contradiction and Overdetermination’ builds on Althusser’s ‘On the Young Marx’ essay, in deciding against the various Hegelian readings of Marx. Althusser rejects the metaphors of ‘turning Hegel right side-up’, or ‘restoring the rational kernel of ...