Communism Archives - Page 4 of 7

Feature

Neither Normalization Nor Alarmism

Responding to Ivan Krastev

December 6, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Krastev is surely right that the current situation is distinctive (indeed all situations are distinctive), and simplistic analogies to 1930’s fascism or 1970’s communism are misleading. He is also right that “alarmism” is mistaken (after all, when is “alarmism,” as opposed to “sounding the alarm,” ever a good thing?), and that the defense of democracy ...

Feature

One Hundred Years of Communism

A look at Leninism

November 13, 2017 • by Vladimir Tismaneanu

On November 7, 1917 (October 25, old style), the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, took over power, and established their totalitarian rule (the first one-party system ever). Lenin called it "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Rule of law and traditional morality were discarded as "bourgeois hypocrisy." Political competition between parties ...

Feature

John Reed, Romantic Revolutionary

The persistent timeliness of the poet and activist

November 7, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

October 22, was the 130th anniversary of his birth. He only lived to the age of 33, but in those few years he accomplished the work of more than a single lifetime. For the next half century Ten Days would define how much of the world came to understand the ...

Feature

The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter

A Memoir

September 6, 2017 • by Jane Lazarre

My father was a Communist Party organizer, a fervent believer in the political philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, the intellectual foundation of what became a faith, ideas that had nurtured and inspired him since his adolescence in “the old country” of Kishinev, Romania. Or Russia -- he would always add -- Russia, Romania ...

Feature

Remembering Romanian Fascism; Worrying About America

Losing Our Moral Compass between Past and Future

September 3, 2017 • by Maria Bucur

Living under Ceausescu was in some ways like living with Donald Trump as president. There was a lot of nationalist swagger, posturing, and boasting about independence from the Soviets. When Ceausescu refused to send troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 as part of the Warsaw Pact crackdown on student protests, people ...

Feature

Once Upon a Time in 1989

How the West is now learning the hard lessons of the East

August 30, 2017 • by Slavenka Drakulić

In the first of a series of articles from the landmark 50th edition of Transit (to be published in September), author Slavenka Drakulić casts a rueful glance over the expectations -- some fulfilled, many frustrated -- of the generations that have lived through the changes since 1989. I imagine a cosy ...

Education

Our Dark Times

Setting the Intellectual and Political Context for the Investigation of Media, The New Authoritarianism and Its Alternatives

July 7, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This seminar has a long history, predating the Democracy and Diversity Institute, and born as an oppositionist activity in the good old bad days of previously existing socialism. Adam Michnik first imagined it, after he received an honorary doctorate from The New School in a clandestine award ceremony in 1984 in ...

Feature

Review of Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party

On Collectives, Communicative Capitalism, and Suspension of the Individual Ego

March 23, 2017 • by Luke Mergner

Nowhere was this sense more palatable than in Zucotti Park, where the #OccupyWallStreet protesters set up camp. It was a moment when, especially for the Left, the world paused as if the railroad switch of history might suddenly direct the country on a new, more equitable track. Six years later, even ...

Uncategorized

Perón in the White House

The Perils of Ethnocentric Solipsism

March 19, 2017 • by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Jordan Luber

Recently 45 was asked about rising anti-Semitic incidents in our country. The reporter made explicit this question was not an allegation against 45. He was asking what 45 would do to combat these incidents. The orange mountebank responded that he is “the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in ...

Feature

Totalitarianism

Historical Regime or Bio-Power Intimate Vocation?

February 28, 2017 • by Simona Forti

Coined in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola -- a strong opponent of Mussolini’s fascism -- the term has had a very interesting history. I retraced the genealogy of the concept, from Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinki[1] in the first half of the 1950s, to Norman Davies[2] at the end of the ...

Feature

McCarthyism

An American Analog to Trumpism

February 23, 2017 • by Barbara Falk

Without denying the relevance of the European experience, however, I want to suggest there is plenty in U.S. history powerfully instructive to the present moment. When the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798, and again following World Wars I and II during the first and second “Red Scares,” ...

Feature

Compromising with Trump

Democracy Lessons from Havel and Michnik

February 1, 2017 • by Joshua Cherniss

Some critics of Trump have called for intransigent resistance; others have counseled openness to compromise in the hopes of taming or co-opting the administration. Even those who doubt that President Trump will prove to be the pragmatic problem-solver he and some supporters have promised must recognize the hunger to believe such promises. President ...