Debates at world Communism’s 1921 congress reveal Lenin’s International at a moment of crisis. A policy of confrontational initiatives by a resolute minority contends with the perspective of winning majority working-class support on the road to the revolutionary conquest of power. A frank debate among many currents concludes with a classic formulation of Communist strategy and tactics. Thirty-two appendices, many never before published in any language, portray delegates’ behind-the-scenes exchanges. This newly translated treasure of 1,000 pages of source material, available for the first time in English, is supplemented by an analytic introduction, detailed footnotes, a glossary with 430 biographical entries, a chronology, and an index. The final instalment of a 4,500-page series on Communist congresses in Lenin’s time.

The Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers—including Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Brontë—whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period. Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London's sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventions of literary realism to the emergence of urban sociology, the rise of new scientific theories of instinct, and the techniques of colonial administration developed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By bringing to light disgust's role as a public passion, The Masses Are Revolting reveals significant new connections among these apparently disconnected forms of social control, knowledge production, and infrastructural development.

"In Science for the Masses, James T. Andrews presents a comprehensive history of the early Bolshevik popularization of science in Russia and the former Soviet Union."--Jacket.

Nietzsche and Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with Nietzsche calling the religion a "Platonism for the masses" and faulting Paul the apostle for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. Integrating this debate with the philosophies of difference espoused by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ward Blanton argues that genealogical interventions into the political economies of Western cultural memory do not go far enough in relation to the imagined founder of Christianity. Blanton challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control. He unearths in Pauline legacies otherwise repressed resources for new materialist spiritualities and new forms of radical political solidarity, liberating "religion" from inherited interpretive assumptions so philosophical thought can manifest in risky, radical freedom.

This book offers, for the first time in English, the proceedings and decisions of the last congress of the Communist International held in Lenin’s lifetime. With an analytic introduction, detailed footnotes, 500 biographic notes, glossary, chronology, and index.

The development of public transit is an integral part of both business and urban history in late nineteenth-century America. The author begins this study in 1880, when public transportation in large American cities was provided by numerous, competing horse-car companies with little or no public control of operation. By 1912, when the study concludes, a monopoly in each city operated a coordinated network of electric-powered streetcars and, in the largest cities, subways, which were regulated by city and state agencies. The history of transit development reflects two dominant themes: the constant pressure of rapid growth in city population and area and the requirements of the technology developed to service that growth. The case studies here include three of the four cites that had rapid transit during this period. Each case study examines, first, the mechanization of surface lines and, second, the implementation of rapid transit. New York requires an additional chapter on steam-powered, elevated railroads, for early population growth there required rapid transit before the invention of electric technology. Urban transit enterprise is viewed within a clear and familiar pattern of evolution--the pattern of the last half of the nineteenth century, when industries with expanding markets and complex, costly processes of production and distribution adopted new strategy and structure, administered by a new class of professional managers.

The Psychology of the Masses is about how and why people are so groupish. Nearly all of us seem to believe that our ideas and habits are freely chosen, not the result of the accidents of our environment; however, most of us tend to believe and do what the people around us believe and do. We fall easily under the spell of what has authority or prestige. These facts are so well-established that propagandists like Edward Bernays could use them to sell everything from wars to consumer goods. We barely feel the pressures of our groups so long as we don''t depart from them, but when we do, the coercive nature of social life immediately reveals itself to us. But nevertheless, if we weren''t like this social life would be impossible. As social animals, we feel distraught when separated from our herds; this is why rejection is so painful. I view crowd psychology as the central science of the social sciences the way chemistry is the central science of the natural sciences. It can be used in combination with neighboring fields to explain almost everything about social life. It can explain everything from stock bubbles to religious cults to individual beliefs and habits. It provides the best explanation I know of for how memes--bits and combinations of cultural information--spread. My theoretical assumptions are different from meme theory''s assumptions and I avoid using the term "meme" in order not to confuse people, but anyone with an interest in the subject will probably want to read this book. Edward Bernays co-founded the public relations profession with his knowledge of crowd psychology. He and the influential journalist Walter Lippmann used it when they and the others on the Creel Committee got the United States into World War I. So this isn''t hot air but has been practically applied to good effect.This book is broad in scope, but a few simple ideas serve as unifying themes throughout it, so I don''t think it''s too ambitious; it''s cohesive. In addition to the things mentioned above, I also talk about elite theory--or why we''ll never be entirely equal, or independent of authority--along with evolutionary theory, media studies, economics, management theory, military strategy, political philosophy, creativity, mental illness, and the arts, and about the formation of ideas and habits, and about what crowd psychology has to say about modern technologies like social media and search engines. I''m attempting to construct a complete theory of human nature, and I dedicate my last chapter entirely to my plan for that. I am aware of modern research in the behavioral and social sciences, and talk a bit about it, but many of the authors I discuss wrote their books a century or longer ago. What is newer is not always better; no one, as far as I know, has treated the subjects I talk about as thoroughly and with as much rigor as the classic authors. Among the older authors I cite, along with the two mentioned above, are crowd psychologists Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, and Gabriel Tarde, along with the founder of American psychology, William James, and the Italian elitist school of sociology, which includes Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto. I do talk about modern controversies, like the one between supporters of kin selection (like Richard Dawkins) and group selection (like E.O. Wilson) in evolutionary biology. Wilfred Trotter has a unique theory which may provide a solution to the problems of altruism; more specifically, he uses the herd instinct--the tendency of the members of a group to believe and behave in the same ways--instead of altruism to explain most social behavior. Modern theorists assume that group behavior must be facilitated by altruism somehow, even if it''s only so that an organism can spread its genes. Trotter argues that altruism is a byproduct of the herd instinct, and when the two conflict herd instinct has precedence; or in other words, nonconforming altruists are punished along with selfish "cheaters."