Rudolf Bahro, Wolfgang Harich and Robert Havemann were probably the best-known critics of the DDR’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. Yet they saw themselves as Marxists, and their demands extended far beyond a democratisation of real socialism. When environmental issues became more important in the West in the 1970s, the Party treated it as an ideological manoeuvre of the class enemy. The three dissidents saw things differently: they combined socialism and ecology, adopting a utopian perspective frowned upon by the state. In doing so, they created political concepts that were unique for the Eastern Bloc. Alexander Amberger introduces them, relates them to each other, and poses the question of their relevance then and now.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The contemporary Marxist writer provides analyses of socialist theory, modern political struggle, and socialist societies in Eastern Europe.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

In 2010 Greece entered a period of extreme austerity measures, but also of intense struggles and protests. Social and political crisis led to tectonic shifts in the political landscape and the rise to power of SYRIZA. However, despite the impressive expression of resistance in the 2015 referendum, the EU-IMF-ECB ‘Troika’ managed to impose the continuation of the same politics of austerity, privatisations, and neoliberal reforms. This social and political sequence poses important theoretical and analytical questions regarding capitalist crisis, public debt, European integration, political crisis, the new forms of protest and social movements, and the rise of neo-fascist parties. It also brings forward all the open questions regarding radical left-wing strategy today. The contributions in this volume attempt from different perspectives to deal with some of these theoretical and strategic questions using the Greek experience as a case study. Contributors include: George Economakis, Stavros Mavroudeas, Ioannis Zisimopoulos, Alexios Anastasiadis, Maria Markaki, George Androulakis, Despina Paraskeva-Veloudogianni, Eirini Gaitanou, Alexandros Chrysis, Euclid Tsakalotos, Spyros Sakellaropoulos, Panagiotis Sotiris, Giannis Kouzis, Yiorgos Vassalos, Christos Laskos, Angelos Kontogiannis-Mandros.

No political parties of present-day Germany are separated by a wider gulf than the two parties of labor, one democratic and reformist, the other totalitarian and socialist-revolutionary. Social Democrats and Communists today face each other as bitter political enemies across the front lines of the Cold War; yet they share a common origin in the Social Democratic Party of Imperial Germany. How did they come to go separate ways? By what process did the old party break apart? How did the prewar party prepare the ground for the dissolution of the labor movement in World War I, and for the subsequent extension of Leninism into Germany? To answer these questions is the purpose of Carl Schorske's study.