Exploring the meanings and powers of love from ancient Greece to the present day, Richard Gilman-Opalsky argues that what is called “love” by the best thinkers who have approached the subject is in fact the beating heart of communism—understood as a way of living, not as a form of government. Along the way, he reveals with clarity that the capitalist way of assigning value to things is incapable of appreciating what humans value most. Capitalism cannot value the experiences and relationships that make our lives worth living and can only destroy love by turning it into a commodity. The Communism of Love follows the struggles of love in different contexts of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and shows how the aspiration for love is as close as we may get to a universal communist aspiration.

This pioneering study explores the surprising extent and limits of the GDR's forgotten sexual revolution.

A young naval officer takes on the task of understanding the spread of Communism. He starts with the seminal work of Marx, the Communist Manifesto, and continues reading and analyzing world history in the twentieth century. The lives of Lenin and Stalin are gone into, followed by the struggle on the part of the Communists and the Fascists over Spain during its civil war, 1936-1939. In China, the conflict between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek is explained. It ends with Mao victorious and Chiang moving to Taiwan with his army. On the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping returns to the scene and steers China away from Communism toward a form of market economy. In our hemisphere, four movements are analyzed, that of Castro in Cuba, Ortega in Nicaragua, Chavez in Venezuela and Allende in Chile. With the exception of Castro's stated intention of forming a Communistic government, Ortega, Chavez and Allende can be thought of mixing Communism with Socialism in creating their governments. The young naval officer does not escape romantic entanglements. He experiences the attractions of several women before finding a woman who is interested in him for marriage and starting a family.

'What I remember most about the communists is their passion... ' For more than seventy years, idealists and rebels of all stripes saw in the Communist Party the best hope for a world remade. Who were the people who dedicated themselves to that beautiful dream? How did they experience its shimmering promise - and cope with its shattering collapse? This is the story of Guido Baracchi, the playboy and dilettante who experienced communism at its best - and its very worst. His love affair with Marxism took him from his father's astronomical observatory to the rough halls of the legendary Wobblies. He debated Bob Menzies at the University of Melbourne; he wooed novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard on a luxury ocean liner; he belonged to illegal organisations in two world wars. The Sun dubbed him 'Melbourne's Lenin', and ASIO classified him 'a person of bad moral character and violent and unstable political views'. From Weimar Germany to Stalin's Russia, from Melbourne's Pentridge gaol to the bohemian colony of Montsalvat, Baracchi entwined political intrigue with a series of tempestuous romances with poets, artists and playwrights. Yet communism remained his real love and communism broke his heart - in a betrayal that still resonates in the political choices available today.

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.

A rich, historically grounded exploration of why theater and performance matter in the modern world

From a debut author, an intimate, multigenerational narrative of the Russian and Chinese revolutions through the eyes of the Chinese youth who traveled to the Soviet Union and the fate of their blended offspring